Five Minute Fiction is an ongoing experiment. The goal: To write as much as I can in five minutes. Don’t think. Let the fingers do the work. Once done walk away then come back later to clean it up.
This story is a continuation from last week.
Enjoy?
The Dead Beat: Part II
Sam’s neck was huge. That’s the first thing I thought when they led him into the chamber. Glassed off in their own small world, Sam snarled something to the obvious juicer who was gripping his bicep at a painful pressure point, urging him along. Sam wore a crisp pair of black slacks and a neatly pressed blue shirt buttoned up to the top two buttons where the collar abruptly wrapped itself tightly around taut muscles of his veiny throat.
In the age of civility even monsters have to look presentable.
The chair I was sitting in was padded with fake brown leather that made an uncomfortable fart sound whenever you shifted your weight. To my right sat the perfectly coifed hair of Doug McCuin from Channel Five, and to my left was some nobody blogger who happened to pull the lucky lottery number to the viewing. And in front of us, strapped to a white cloth gurney, was what will soon be the ex-Mr. Samuel J. Carrero. Once nicknamed the “Tooth Fairy”, he terrorized the greater Spencer area eighteen years ago with a string of vicious murders that the police described as, “Brutal, bloody, and savage.” His calling card was to leave a bite mark on the cheek of his victims, but only after he sawed off their heads.
And staring straight at us with a leering smile that revealed his sharpened teeth, strapped to the six-point suppression gurney, was the man of the hour dressed in the clothes he was going to be buried in, and enjoying every waning second of his nefarious celebrity.
It was my job to be there. To write about every injection. Every last breath. Every final moment of the condemned. To record, to the best of my ability, the glint of the needles as they slipped into veins, the last words of the condemned as they strained against the cinched restraints, the slacking of the clenched fists as consciousness eventually faded, the coordinated final injections, and the slow decay of the rise and fall of the chest.
The doctors pronounced death. The victim’s families expressed feelings of closure. The news ran a three-minute segment at the top of the hour. The death certificates were notarized. And an awaiting gravesite was filled.
I did this job for ten years, and in that time the process had become procedural. Commonplace. Franchised. And as the years relented the less people seemed to care, and the more sickened I became at our system of justice. I wanted out.
I quit.
I interviewed with the Brief, the Courier, and even the Daily Star. When those panned out I tried getting work with the Redtown Press, the City Beat, and even attempted to get my foot into the Beaumont Free Press, but nobody was interested in hiring an aging writer whose claim to fame was the “Ghoul News Guy”.
My savings quickly disappeared, and I had begun to cash out my 401k early, watching that vanish at an even faster rate. I was looking everywhere I could for a job, but in these times not even the damned Chinese fortune cookie companies were hiring.
Near broke and unable to pay my bills I was forced to sell my home at a loss and move into a rented trailer in a forgotten, grimy corner of the city where every door had three locks and the cops took their time to respond to 911 calls.
One bleak, overcast day I heard a knock at my door. ”Who is it?” I yelled from my recliner as I laid a folded newspaper on my lap. Red ink furiously circled open employment positions for companies both well known and unheard of.
“Mr. Bryson?” the gravely voice mutedly said, “I represent the McMillon Publishing Company. We’d like to speak to you about a possible job opportunity.”
“What was that?” I asked, stunned, as I unlocked and the door and cracked it open as far as the engaged door chain would allow.
And that’s when I first laid eyes on the trained animal named Jones.
