End man, p.1
End Man, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Alex Austin
Cursed Dragon Ship Publishing, LLC
6046 FM 2920, #231, Spring, TX 77379
captwyvern@curseddragonship.com
Cover © 2022 by Stefanie Saw
Developmental Edit by Kelly Lynn Colby
Copy Edit by S.G. George
ISBN 978-1-951445-34-8
ISBN 978-1-951445-33-1 (ebook)
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This books is a work of fiction fresh from the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons or places is mere coincidence.
End Man is dedicated to all the rockers and writers who shaped my life, and the readers whose feedback shaped this novel, with a special thanks to my son Alex.
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
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CHAPTER
ONE
Death was a good place to hide. Ninety-nine percent of the reported dead stayed dead, but occasionally someone played possum. At the Norval Department of Marketing Necrology (NDMN), Raphael’s job was to find the possum’s pulse, no matter how faint.
Raphael glanced away from Professor Jason Klaes’s obituary, having read it for the fifth time, each read more frustrating than the one before. The details he needed weren’t there, but Maglio, the big boss, didn’t want excuses. Nail Klaes.
On the ultra-high-def screens protruding from the department’s wall, a plain woman in a plain smock ironed a sheet. Vapor rose from the sleek device in her hand. She drew the iron back and forth with a dreamy smile, unchanged as she set it upright, adjusted the linen, and then continued her labor in an endless loop. This mindfulness video with its soothing predictability was meant to relax, but it made Raphael uneasy. He couldn’t say why.
Above the screens, the Norval logo—a thick N with stubby wings like cupid—glowed. The name of the division appeared in neat silver letters followed by its charge: To Preserve and Protect the Online Remains of the Dead.
Corporate speak decoded, it meant hoarding every bit of personal data the deceased left behind and restricting it to Norval Portals. To those online portals came loved ones and scandalmongers, biographers and extortionists, seekers of juicy details and the merely curious—consumers all, valuable targets of the advertisers Norval solicited.
The PA system screeched.
“Stage Three Event. Repeat. Stage Three Event. Category: mass shooting. Location: Durham, North Carolina. Estimated deaths: fifty. Override status. All Necrology Department employees return to their desks.”
On the screens, the ironing woman faded to black. Multi-colored zigzag patterns filled the screens, resolving into police cars and ambulances, lights flashing on the exterior of a university quadrangle. Students streamed from the doorways of a white stone building and ran across the quad. Blanched faces filled the screen, then vanished. Trailing those fleeing, the injured—many bleeding—stumbled, limped, and crawled toward the police line.
A weight fell on Raphael’s shoulder. He glanced up at Mike Dreemont, his supervisor, a thickset man with a heavy jaw, wide mouth, and sickly-sweet cologne.
“You know the routine, Team Leader,” said Dreemont. “Take as many End Men as you want from Cancer, Stroke, Alzheimer’s, Overdose, Suicide, and Pneumonia. Let me know if you need more.” Releasing Raphael’s shoulder, Dreemont stood on his toes and called out to the office. “Let’s get busy, End Men!” Keyboards clicked furiously. Nodding, Dreemont dropped to his heels with a thump and glanced hard at Raphael. “But when you’re done—”
“Yeah, Mike. Back to Klaes.”
“Oh, better check on your new necrologist. It’s her first mass casualty event, so I gave her a heads-up. She didn’t take it well.”
Raphael found Jensy seated and bent over her desk, her slender, white cane within arm’s reach. Her long black hair hung forward, parting over pale-green frames containing thick, black lenses, but otherwise masking her face. She’d tucked her hands between her legs, and her headphones lay on her stippled keyboard. Jensy was a petite woman. When Raphael spoke to her, he always hunched over, and then his long hair covered his face. Two faceless people talking.
“It’s all right, Jensy.”
She lifted her head an inch. “All right? All those people dead. All right?”
“No, I meant …” What did he mean?
He lowered his hand but stopped short of touching her. Curiously, the visually impaired usually took longer to adjust to the work, if ever.
In a soft voice, Raphael said to Jensy, “I started at Norval on the day a tanker carrying chlorine gas ruptured within fifty yards of a county fair. Four hundred people—”
“Four hundred? How awful.”
“Yes, so many. Dreemont gave us new End Men ten minutes to get our act together and then compile. He was all business—emotionless. I ran right into his office and complained that their bodies weren’t even cold yet. We were talking about them like meat. He said, ‘Not meat, kid. Data. They’re dead but not less valuable. That’s our business. Get moving.’ Man, I wanted to hit him. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. I went back to my desk, my work.”
She faced him, her dark, smudged glasses slipping down the bridge of her nose. Her sightless eyes glistened. “Those people are just data? College students. Teachers.” Jensy lowered her head and pushed her glasses into place. “All those people, all at once.”
“We do sad work, Jensy. You can’t let it get to you.” He searched for something profound but came up with a cliché. “You can’t take it personally.” Dreemont had hammered that into him, and now he was the one who could shrug off a mass casualty event. Just like Dreemont. Jesus, had he come that far?
Jensy raised her head again and seemed to peer into his eyes. “You can let it go?”
“It took time.”
“Yes.” She pushed her fists at the corners of her eyes. “Time.”
“It sounds cold, but that’s necrology.”
She nodded and wiped her cheeks. “I must look awful.”
“Hardly.”
He instructed her to continue with the task he’d assigned her the day before: culling the Natural Blanks—the dead who had been too old or too young for an online presence—from the Weekly Nevada Traffic Crash Fatalities List. “Have you found many yet?”
“Krill Larkov, a four-year-old boy; Polina Zatonsky, a female infant; and two 109-year-old women, Nancy and Sharon Blunt. Twins.”
“The names aren’t necessary.”
“Oh.”
“Good work,” he said softly, unmodulated by the twinge of melancholy he always felt when considering the Natural Blanks, especially the children. He wasn’t Dreemont yet.
Jensy nodded, put on her earphones, and spread her fingers over her braille keyboard. She smiled, froze, and smiled again, probably unsure of what to feel, like Dorothy touching her foot to the first brick of the yellow road, like all End Men on the first day they fully realized what kind of work they did.
As Stage Three Team Leader, Raphael spent the morning managing the preliminary event research, gliding from End Man to End Man—a name derived from the pronunciation of its acronym, NDMN, and adopted by the unit’s employees regardless of gender, though necrologist, keeper of lists of the dead, was their formal title—advising, encouraging, and channeling their efforts to gain and confirm the names of the dead.
By 1:00 p.m. the names of thirty-eight dead students and seven faculty members had made the list, plus the shooter. Now began the meticulous aggregation of the dead’s online remains, the opening of a new Norval Portal for each departed (offline in Norval-speak), and the linkage of the remains to the patented Norval Portal navigation system. Next came the delicate negotiations for portal rights, but this was handled by Contracts. Raphael’s team leader responsibilities were over. From the PA came a few bars of an ancient song, one of dozens comprising Norval’s looped background music, the favorite tunes of its CEO, who carried the songs from his youth.
“Fun, Fun, Fun” by the … Beach Boys.
On the Cumulative Clock, the hundreds digit flashed a nine. Fun? No. But—
Come next month, Raphael would have sp
But sleuthing was a small part of the company’s mission. Norval harvested the data of the dead, and despite his bravado with Jensy, he would sometimes imagine that long line of the deceased, constantly refreshed, plodding toward him, led by a figure with a bewildered face, as if emerging from the fog to view an unfamiliar location.
Let it go.
CHAPTER
TWO
Thursday’s mass casualty event in the rearview mirror, Raphael began Friday morning intent on nailing Professor Klaes. The professor had died on January 10, but beyond that blunt fact lay little else. All the County Medical Examiner-Coroner would disclose was place of death (Klaes’s home in Pasadena) and a generic cause (unnatural) which could have been anything from a slip in the bathtub to carbon monoxide poisoning to, well, the sky was the limit. That said, Raphael had no evidence to support either foul play or suicide at this point.
Earlier in the week, he had made the standard calls to Klaes’s colleagues and a few distant relatives and gently prodding law enforcement. He got zip. On Wednesday, he turned to Dr. Klaes’s internet history over the months preceding his reported death. He spent hours mapping online activity, but the usual alarms weren’t sounding: no darknet sites, no search queries about disappearing from society, no underage girlfriends or boyfriends, no cryptocurrency plays or big insurance policies.
The only unusual transaction on Klaes’s debit card was a truck rental on January 8, two days before his death, but it didn’t appear promising. Even award-winning physicists had to haul their old junk. Klaes had no obvious motives for faking his death. But Raphael found nothing so far that explained the oddities marking Professor Klaes as undeclared and prompting CEO Geovanni Maglio to assign the physicist to Raphael.
“Knock, knock.”
The second of NDMN’s three possum specialists, Matt Tucker, stood at the entrance to the cubicle, fist in the air as if he had tapped an actual door. In his other hand, he held a quadrant of glazed donut, which he popped in his mouth. At twenty-five, Matt—his best friend in the department—was a year younger than Raphael, though thinning hair and frown lines placed him at thirty. Conversely, he always smelled like milk and cookies.
“A little excitement around here yesterday, huh?” asked Matt, fidgeting with his beaded lapis bracelet. The way it clicked and clacked reminded Raphael of the mindfulness videos.
“Yeah, I guess,” Raphael replied coolly, having no desire to rehash the Stage Three Event. Nor, he believed, did his friend. Matt often did this, came in spouting something obvious only as a means of breaking the ice for what he actually wanted to discuss. Not disappointing, Matt leaned into the doorframe. “Belinda’s been ghosting me.”
“Bummer.”
“Bummer’s right. That leaves me with an extra ticket to the Arroyo Holobaloo Festival, though. Interested?”
For an instant, Raphael imagined the fields of people and scores of bands, the musical thunder and lightning. The Arroyo was north, which meant crossing La Brea, a half-mile east of Norval. He recalled the sheer sheet of ice rising before him when he last faced the boulevard. It was all in his head, of course, but knowing the source made it no less real or dreadful.
If he could … but no. Feeling hollow, he shook his head. “Hey, cool offer, Matt, but I’ve got plans.”
Matt pulled on his stretched earlobe, which, absent its gauge, hung like a carabiner. “Thought I’d ask. Well, have the best weekend you can.” His friend backed out of the cubicle, spun around, and slipped away, his bracelet clicking and clacking as he went.
A concert would have been cool. “Fuck.”
“Did you say something, Raphael?” called Akira over the cubicle wall.
“No. Coughed.”
“Oh, I hope you’re not getting sick.”
“Me too, Akira.”
Through the thin partition, Akira’s fingers raced over her keyboard. Elsewhere, someone sucked on a straw—draining a Frappuccino? A ghostly, whispered TGIF slipped in somewhere.
Klaes. Alive or dead? Maglio had said he wanted absolute certainty. Raphael returned to the death notice. … Passed unexpectedly on January 10 … graduate of MIT … the Boltzmann Medal … Lieben Prize. A celebration of Jason Klaes’s life will be held on February 3 at 2:00 p.m. in the King George Room of the Harvey Hotel in Hollywood.
Raphael had contacted the hotel, asking to speak to the event’s coordinator. The hotel informed him that the coordinator, Lily Faraday, wasn’t an employee of the hotel but a former colleague of Klaes who was staying at the Harvey for the duration of the event. She had given orders not to be disturbed in her room, but he could leave a message for her.
Does she have a work number?
Sorry, we aren’t authorized to provide those.
He left a message. As with most of his inquiries, he had received no response.
From outside Raphael’s cubicle, Dreemont’s voice boomed in a bright, infomercial style. “Eight thousand a day, and every day the number rises. We expect within three years every newly dead over three years old will have had a substantial online presence. Instagramming, tiktoking, and zooming from the cradle to the grave.”
“Amazing,” said a higher-pitched male voice.
Raphael glanced to the floor’s main aisle outside the doorway. Dreemont stood with a new intern, a fresh-faced grad in a blue skinny-suit. He had to be there for orientation.
“So, how much can you access?” the intern asked.
“Every mouse click, finger swipe, pressed key, sent message, selfie, posted photo, up or down vote, voice-activated-command, Tweeze, Ruffit, and Mayfly. Every search, every gaze, every intention.”
“Yeah,” said the intern, vigorously nodding.
“Here’s a little secret,” said Dreemont in a fake whisper. “Nothing really gets erased. Since quantum storage, once on the net, always on the net—if you know where to search.”
“Pretty cool,” said the intern.
“Now, this is Raphael,” noted the supervisor, peering into the cubicle as if Raphael were an animal in a zoo.
Raphael’s stomach turned at the attention.
“Raphael’s what we call a possum tracker. Only three of those among our fifty End Men, and he’s the best we ever had. He’s got the instincts of a Kentucky deer hunter. Just give him tracks, scat, and a bent twig. Pretty damn good for a city boy.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” said the intern.
Dreemont laughed. “You’ve heard the saying, ‘He’s playing possum.’ Well, possums are what we call people trying to pass themselves off as dead. Evading the law, a gambling debt, a spouse—you name it. Raphael determines if the undeclared—individuals whose reported deaths are questionable—are dead or alive. If alive, a true possum, they’re no good to us.” Dreemont lifted his elbows to span the doorway. “How’s Mr. Klaes coming?”
