ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Hank Price remembers witnessing 9/11 live on TV, the sound of a dial-up modem, and the taste of a Northgate Mall Cinnabon caramel pecan roll.
The Gum Wall in Seattle's Pike Place Market is a popular tourist destination. People from all around the world chew gum, stick it to the wall, and then go on with their lives. What some don't know is that it has to be power-washed every few years lest the sugar in the gum damage the bricks. What follows next, is what happened once when a sculptor ran out of clay, and decided to use gum as the medium for his art instead...
Clive Kendall’s wrings his hands tightly as he weaves his way through the crowd in Pike Place Market, on an overcast early evening in late August. It's the end of the month, the time when money makes its way out of his grasp. Clive’s meager paychecks from his two part-time jobs are divided threefold between his landlord, his cocaine dealer and his ex-girlfriend. His weird roommate handles the food. This month, Clive has no money leftover for sculpting clay.
The streets of Pike Place Market are busy and the tourists are packed together like sardines. Clive stumbles slightly over the uneven, bumpy red bricks, paces slower on the wet tile floors, watches his footing on the downward-curved steps, worn down by millions of footfalls which erode them year after year. His rough, empty hands, clasp each other tightly like two halves of a clam. They yearn to squeeze and mold but only manage to grasp at each other.
Clive takes nervous glances at peoples' hands as he walks through the market. Some people hold their phones and take selfies in front of the guys who throw the fish, some have their hands in their pockets, some move their hands this way and that, gesticulating as they tell stories to their friends, faces glowing with smiles.
A cold shudder of embarrassment ripples through Clive’s chest, out to his shoulders then down to his fingertips. He has a self-conscious revelation: out of all these people, he’s the lone unhappy one wringing his hands in distress. His hands find their way into the pockets of his jeans, bumping into his belongings. Clive wants to run away, but has to keep pace with the people walking through the market. He trudges, begrudgingly.
He finds rest in an outdoor dining area. Clive stares into the distance, taking his hands out of his pockets, back to wringing them together. Dozens of people around him take seats, eat meals, chat with each other, and leave. Others soon take their empty seats and eat their own meals. Nobody bothers Clive or even notices him. He feels alone in a world set to be numb to his problems. The sun hides behind the clouds. The grand Ferris wheel by the waterfront slowly turns.
Clive's stomach rumbles. He'd spent a whole hour agonizing over his impoverishment, alone within the recesses of his mind. Enough, already! Clive takes a sharp breath and decides he'll find a way. He could move somewhere else, cut back on his meals, or find a third job, or finally tell his ex that he can't help her out anymore. (Quitting cocaine, the solution most obvious to some, is out of the question for Clive.) The Market is closing and Clive had mentally chewed upon his bitter misery to the point that it became bland and flavorless.
As he walks through the emptying hallways of the Market -- once packed shoulder-to-shoulder with tourists, now practically a ghost town -- he hears a sound off in the distance, like the hissing of a mechanical snake. Clive rubs his chin curiously and walks toward the sound.
Clive sees a city worker with a high-visibility vest blasting a jet of water upon a brick wall.
The hissing sound Clive had heard before is the neon-vested worker's power-washing hose, blasting Pike Place Market's world-famous tourist destination, the Gum Wall. Well, Clive thinks, it's not the Gum Wall anymore, just The Wall. Pink Floyd would have a word with these folks! The hissing blasts of high-pressure water fling hunks of chewing gum from The Wall which fall to the ground in a soggy mess. The wet, shiny burgundy brick walls are a strange sight for Clive to behold.
Another worker pushes a wide, stiff-bristled broom against the ground and shovels the gum into a black trash bag. There's enough gum in there to form a man. Clive can't let this opportunity slip through his fingers! Though his stomach rumbles incessantly, Clive waits and watches the workers.
When they are nearly done blasting away all the gum, Clive makes his move. He dashes at the worker with the trash bag, snatches it from their hands, and carries it over his back like a bank robber with a sack of money. His shirt drips wet with sludgy water and clings to his back, but he gives no fucks whatsoever. He's got stuff for sculpting!
The worker with the power-washing hose turns to his recently robbed co-worker and says, "Should we report this to the boss?"
The other worker turns and says, "Report it? Guy just saved us a trip to the dump." He shrugs his shoulders and says, "What's he gonna do with all that gum anyway?"
The workers share a laugh. That bag’s filled with nothing but chewed-up flavorless lumps and germs! They can't wait to tell their families about this weird incident.
Clive carries the bag of wet, chewed gum past several indifferent people, down four streets and up three flights of stairs, his body running on the fumes of theft-fueled adrenaline. He finds himself in front of his apartment once again, with wide-open, ecstatic eyes, exhilarated like the first time he snorted a line. He fumbles for his keys, opens the door with the right one, drops the bag next to the doorway, locks and shuts his door, then crawls over to his couch to take a nap.
Clive awakens a few hours later, in the middle of the night. He turns on a light.
There are dozens of clay sculptures in Clive's apartment. Each one began as a featureless gray rectangle, but through his hands they came to life. Some were faces with ranges of emotions -- grimaces, smiles, thoughtful contemplation -- and others were human figures -- sitting, resting, dancing. As a doctor slaps the breath of life into stillborn babes, so too did Clive's hands awaken the clay. But Clive's art was not forceful; there was a slowness to it which calmed him. There was a 24/7 news cycle filled with scandals and outrage, the constant noise of social media and bills upon bills that ate away at Clive's savings. But, when he was with the clay, none of that mattered. There was just the molding of the cold, gray, somewhat stretchy stuff and Clive's hands subtly squeezing, pinching, and lubricating. It was Clive's talent, his raison d'etre.
Clive prepares a workspace for his new sculpture. He lays down a blue tarp, then tears the black garbage bag open and spills the ABC gum all over the tarp. He goes into his closet and grabs a spool of wire. This will be his largest, grandest sculpture. He sees it in his mind’s eye; all he has to do is craft it.
The ABC gum is a speckled, disorganized, multicolored mass. Clive considers buying several bags of Big League Chew (his favorite brand of chewing gum since he was a small child) and creating a uniform pink skin for his soon to be formed masterpiece. He decides against it, for it would ruin the artistic integrity of the sculpture. It would be — must be — a chaos of colors, like the splattering of paint upon a vaguely humanoid form.
Clive puts his smartphone into a small Faraday cage — a shiny bag, really, which blocks radio signals — that he keeps in the corner of his apartment for when he does not want to be taken out of the zone. Within the cage, all texts, calls and FaceTime requests are blocked.
Day after day, sleeplessly in Seattle, Clive puts pieces of gum onto the mannequin-like wire sculpture, only taking breaks to eat meager meals of bread and salt. What really moves him is the coffee.
Two days into the construction of his sculpture, there is a knocking at his door. A quiet rapping at first, followed by a banging, followed by a shout.
Clive forgets to ask who it is before opening. There is a part of him filled with dread. He opens the door.
It is his ex-girlfriend, Eve Saunders. Her eyes stare fixedly into Clive’s chest as if they were Superman’s Heat Vision and do not blink. Her mouth is curled downward and her cheeks are slightly puffed out. He looks down at the top of her head; she refuses to raise her chin to make eye contact.
She asks, voice dripping with acid, “Faraday cage?” He nods. “Working on your latest,” she pauses to make sarcastic air quotes with her fingers, “‘masterpiece’?” He nods. Her head turns upward and her face softens slightly, eyes seeming concerned. “And you haven’t been sleeping, have you?”
Clive tenses up and clenches his jaw.
Only half-listening, Clive nods then says through gritted teeth, “Good to see you too, Eve.” He mentally braces himself for a rant of hers which he knows will last anywhere from seven to fifteen minutes (depending on how mad she is). He keeps track of time inside his head. He nods several times, pretends to agree with her, and goes back to actually listening when the rant ends with…
“…And THIS is why I dumped you, Clive!” Nine minutes this time; she is only moderately angry.
Clive yawns. It was Karl Marx who said that history happens first as tragedy, then repeats itself as farce. This was about the seventh time Clive had heard this rant from Eve, and the Father of Communism himself would scratch his head at what to call it. Habit, perhaps.
A bad habit. Clive's eyes narrow. Eve gasps; a well-deserved tongue-lashing usually results in a meek and submissive Clive. His mouth trembles for a moment, then opens slowly. Through gritted teeth, he whispers, “If you’re here to hit me up for money and/or pity sex, you can fuck..."
His teeth move apart as he speaks: "Right."
He shouts: "Off!"
The two stand and share a moment of mutual stunned silence. Both parties wonder where Clive's audacious attitude came from.
He says, "I’m busy.”
Eve’s eyes widen and her jaw drops. Clive was supposed to be tearful and exhausted, using the last of his energy to go to an ATM to get Eve some cash and/or the corner store to get some condoms, beg and plead with her for a bit until Eve's had enough, then the two of them do some coke, and then... Well, in any case, it's never been like this!
Clive slams the door in her face.
He turns around, carefully slides a couple of lines of cocaine onto his glass coffee table with a razor blade, snorts them, jumps around the room, then goes back to work.
He is possessed.
He doesn't even charge his phone.
The next person to snap Clive from his trance is Balthazar Juan-Pedro Diego Hernandez, Clive’s roommate. Balthazar wears glasses with rims both thick & dark and claims to be the reincarnation of King Solomon. (Why didn't anyone ever claim to be the reincarnation of someone boring?) Balthazar always wears a cape despite it being the year 2022 and walks with a wooden cane he doesn't need, claiming it to be an artifact both ancient and powerful, which he happened to buy from Value Village. He is the sort of person who peaked in middle school and only gets by on pity.
"Salutations, my servant Clive. Constructing another glorious wonder?" A normal person would inquire into Clive's crude ABC gum sculpture with a hint of sarcasm. Balthazar is a person incapable of any form of dishonesty, much less irony.
"Yeah. You like it?"
"'Tis crude, but its many colors put the legendary coat worn by my ancestor Joseph to shame!"
"Thanks. Eve didn't like it."
"Pshaw! Disregard all that arid wench's opines! A harem of one thousand maidens I once had!" Balthazar waves his cane. "When they begin to bleed each moon, they no longer satisfy. And your would-be wife was far past her time of flowering. Nay, never was there a matron more sour than she! Long ago I predicted that thee and thine's union would divide."
"You’re just salty Eve didn't hit you up for a break-up revenge bang."
Balthazar makes a sweeping gesture, then pulls his cape around his body. "Never would I have accepted that foul, diminutive ogress' offers of love-making!"
We both know that's bullshit, Clive thinks to himself.
"So, how were the Aztec ruins you visited? You going to start that cult you keep talking about?"
Balthazar sneers. "The leylines were quite powerful..." Balthazar tilts his head and dramatically poses, holding a spread hand over one side of his face. "I'll return one day with an army of magical servants to lay claim to them!" Balthazar chuckles to himself. "For now, I must steal away here. My travels have left me quite..." Balthazar pauses.
Then, Balthazar and Clive both say, the former with pep and the latter while rolling his eyes, "weary."
Balthazar goes to his bedroom and sleeps. Clive passes out on the couch.
The gum sculpture towers above the many clay sculptures. It is larger than the average man who claims to be 5' 11" on Tinder when most of Clive's creations are the size of a Gordito's baby-sized burrito. In fact, it is too large to fit through the doorway of Clive and Balthazar's apartment, much less the windows.
A few hours later, Balthazar’s voice booms: "Zounds, servant! Behold! My creation moves!"
Clive wakes up and rubs his eyes. He thinks, What does he mean, ‘my creation’?
"With my extensive research into the occult and arcane, I re-discovered the art that my previous incarnation had mastered."
Clive snickers. "Hooking up with a thousand under-aged broads? I hope you’ve got a spell that’ll give you Protection from FBI or something."
"Nay! The art..." Balthazar pauses for a moment, waiting for Clive to try and speak.
What the fuck is it going to be this time? Clive wonders to himself.
"Wha--"
"OF GOLEM-MANCY!!"
Clive looks up and sees his sculpture's head slowly bend downward to meet his gaze. Its squiggly, multicolored eyebrows furrow, and its face, originally mirthful, now has an anguished expression. Clive's jaw drops. "Did my dealer mix in some shrooms again?"
“Your mystic tinctures have not caused your senses to deceive you! My creation moves!”
Clive says, “It needs a name… It is called, The Chewed One!”
Balthazar shouts, “It has a name already, foolish minion! I wrote, in Hebrew, ‘truth’ upon the small slip of paper I placed within its mouth. That is its name!" Balthazar, who forgot what he'd written, looks it up in an online dictionary, then incorrectly pronounces, "Emet!”
“Balthazar," Clive says with a smug voice, "there’s an art to naming things. What you name a piece helps you find your audience. I’m aiming to get this in an art gallery or a museum, not the private collection of some Bible-thumper. Don't those guys just want bloody corpses nailed to crosses anyway? Only a true patron would appreciate this masterwork!”
Clive daydreamed of selling The Chewed One for a senator’s intern’s ransom. With the cash-filled suitcase, Clive would then buy a mountain of cocaine. Clive imagines lying on top of this cocaine mountain, his face painted white with the drug like a geisha's mask, his lungs ragged from constant, repeated inhalations, his mouth drooling in an infantile stupor.
Balthazar grips his cane tightly and strikes the floor with it. The rapping sound snaps Clive from his ridiculous daydream. He protests, “You’d dare peddle away my creation!?”
“Excuse me, YOUR creation?! I made it!”
“'Twas I who cast the spell that awakened it!”
Please… Stop shouting…
The two men, who were heated almost to the point of exchanging blows, suddenly hear a voice within their minds.
“Ok.”
“'Tis a request most reasonable.”
Each had thought the other had requested the moment’s peace. When they realized that it wasn't the other, they said,
“Servant..”
“Did… You say that?”
“Nay, 'twas your request.”
Clive blatantly lies, "I don’t back down first, ever.”
The two men turn to the sculpture. It moved earlier… Could it also speak?
“I command thee, Emet! Inform your master of how you commune in modern tongue without the use of speech!”
“Balthazar, who cares how it works? I’ll give you a ten percent cut. Let’s get this thing into the Guggenheim, or hell, since it can speak, Area 51! Take the money and run!”
The chewing… The slobber… The snapping… My body… Make it stop…
Both men stand and stare. They didn’t expect a work of art to have feelings, much less sad ones.
The pain won’t stop… I am worthless…
“Cheer up! You’ll make so many people happy once you’re in a museum!”
“Your existence is miraculous! I’ll summon an army of you! We’ll conquer the Aztec ruins and make Mexico pay for it!”
I can hardly believe it... The ones who summoned me are greedy... And even more disgusting than I…
“You made him sad! Damn you, Balthazar! This was gonna be my meal ticket! I was going to make hundreds of them, and get a new girlfriend, and stick it in Eve’s face!”
“How would you make even one more golem without my wizardry?!”
“You probably figured out how to do it from some stupid video! I’ve seen the weird occult shit you watch when you’re not gooning it to furry porn!”
Balthazar gasps. He shouts, “This insult shall not go unpunished!” He crosses a line he never crossed before: he hits Clive in the chest with his cane.
Please… Stop fighting… Tears run down The Chewed One’s face.
“Now you made him cry! Now I’m crying!” Clive’s hand hits Balthazar’s face so hard that it leaves a red mark.
Make it stop… MAKE IT STOP
Golems throughout the unrecorded history of magic have been summoned to Earth for many tasks. The construction of ancient wonders, the conquest of enemies. They were kept obedient by skillful magicians who’d had their wisdom passed down through the ages. Under the tutelage of a master, each magician started off with small golems the size of weasels, slowly advancing in size and only being permitted to summon the greater after learning to control the lesser.
The golem that Clive and Balthazar had made was not created with the supervision of the wise magic-users of yore. Creating it was like giving a machine gun to a pair of mangy, hungry, flea-bitten stray mutts, one which they could somehow operate without the use of thumbs.
Except this machine gun had a mind of its own. A mind sensitive, filled with constant pain and incapable of comprehending its own strength.
The Chewed One swings a fist downward upon Clive, tearing his too, too solid flesh, splintering his bones as easily as a wrecking ball could crunch a sapling. It grabs at Balthazar, then snaps his spine like a frustrated teenager struggling with a standardized test might snap a Number Two Pencil.
It lifts their sundered bodies into its mouth, and chews.
Clive and Balthazar had been born into the world some forty-odd years ago. As newborn babes, they were small and weak, covered in blood, with heads crushed by their mothers' birth canals, skull fragments overlapping so their tiny, baby heads could enter the world of the living and take their first breath. A long, agonizing process which nearly brought their mothers to the point of death. Birth is a miracle.
Their deaths are a cruel, accursed inversion of birth. Movement after grinding movement of The Chewed One's gaping maw reduces both men to a chunky blood-clot, bone-splinter, torn-muscle slurry. Their bodies are torn, crunched and swallowed with the relative effort that a human would use to crush some Chex Mix.
Clive and Balthazar's warm blood mixes together and runs down The Chewed One's cold multicolored jaw, staining its face and neck a deep crimson. At first the gum golem feels nothing, not even satisfaction. After a moment, the pain of its two murdered humans seeps into its body.
The two men’s souls, separated from their bodies in the agonizing slaughter-maw of The Chewed One, cling to each other with ephemeral, wisplike tendrils which they imagined to be arms. Their spirits pine for their flesh like a shivering person caught in the downpour of a passing squall wants a sweater.
They are in a world of blinding bright light which casts no shadows anywhere. An endless void of infinite light. There are no scents or textures. The only sound they hear is the innocent laughter of small children.
Balthazar whispers, “Clive… I think we’re dead.”
“Balthazar, you can speak normally!”
Balthazar smiles slightly. “I always could…”
The two men gaze into each other’s naked souls in a way beings bound to flesh never can. They see upon each others’ hearts the other’s deepest psychic wounds.
Clive sees Balthazar's strict upbringing. The slapping of his palms with a ruler by a sadistic nun. A household filled with violence and shouting. Plates tossed at walls, by his mother at his father, by his father at his mother. Screaming. The smell of cheap beer. The doubts that tore at young Balthazar’s heart – If we really are God’s chosen people, like the church and my family says, why does life seem like a living Hell?
Balthazar renounces his Christian faith in his late teenage years and is kicked out of his childhood home. Good riddance, he thinks, but he is moved through life like a flighty tumbleweed, his frail form protected not by a system of roots, but by sheer prickliness.
Though he is weak in body, mind and spirit, he believes himself to be an unassailable fortress of darkness…
Balthazar sees, through Clive’s eyes, how his delusions of grandeur looked to others.
A weak man’s sad obsession with the occult.
He sees what he thought was his mission taken in opposition against the world as others saw it: Feeble thoughts of revenge mixed with an inability to enact it. An inertness in his soul. A mental shell of invulnerability in order to cope with his powerlessness.
After seeing all that, Clive says, “You had a hard life, Balthazar. I wish I could have been nicer to you.”
“I wouldn’t have felt your kindness, Clive. I was a real numbskull. You were a good friend…”
Balthazar looks upon Clive’s soul and sees the severe, uncaring face of Clive's strict father.
All through Clive’s life, the echoes of his father’s words haunted him.
After graduation: 'Do something great with your talents, Clive, or don’t show your face around here again.'
After his 25th birthday: ‘How are you going to make your first million making these shitty-ass sculptures?’
After losing his first true love to a vehicular murder-suicide, with a jealous person he thought was his best friend: 'Get a new girlfriend yesterday. Get married no matter what -- you can always tame the bitch later'.
After that had happened, Clive never spoke with the rotten bastard again.
Clive felt he was never even a real person to begin with -- just a vessel for his father's ambitions. His art was how he averted his eyes from this harsh, wounding truth.
“Clive, I had no idea that this was why you kept making those statues…”
“I couldn’t make something of myself… But maybe I could have made something else great.”
“You did…”
After that, neither spirit speaks.
The moment of infinite silence is interrupted by a whooshing noise ushered by living shadow, a skeleton cloaked in a black hood, holding a scythe. He fidgets impatiently.
Death says, “You two know who I am, right?”
Balthazar says, “Your reputation precedes you.”
Clive is ecstatic. He says, “I saw you in that one anime! You're a shin-a-gammy. Gonna give us that magic notebook and let us run loose?”
Death laughs. "Heavens, no. You're no Light Yagami. You're not even a Light Turner.”
All three of them remember that awful Netflix adaptation of Death Note and shudder.
Death says, “You’re in Limbo. You can't leave until you let go of all your regrets. That's the rule. Unless you want to become an evil spirit...”
Clive and Balthazar look at each other. Regrets? They’d had a few, but then again, too few to mention. And they’d already gone through them…
Clive says, “I've none left, yet I'm still here.”
Death shakes his cracked, bony head. “It's truly sad when a person is numb to their own feelings even when they’re dead.” He points his scythe at Balthazar.
Balthazar says, “I'll say it for you, brother in spirit.” He cups his wispy hands together, then shouts: “Eve! I'm sorry I was a shitty boyfriend! Live! Live long, be strong, find love!”
Balthazar dissipates into the light.
Clive says, “Thanks...” then also disappears.
The two spirits depart from the world together. Only Death remains.
"Easier than killing all of Egypt's firstborns.”
The Chewed One stands alone, the blood of its creators dripping from its mouth.
Two streaks of translucent fluid run from The Chewed One's eyes. There is blood on its hands and mouth. It bends over and sobs silently.
It had heard the echo of its creators' final words from the world beyond that of the flesh.
Live long, be strong, find love...
Beautiful, well-wishing words meant for a beloved human.
Not a murderous monster.
The Chewed One smashes its solid gummy fists upon the dozens of sculptures made by Clive. The bone-white clay crumbles into powdery dust and clings to the clotted blood of The Chewed One's former masters which runs down its face and sticks to its hands. But it is not done destroying.
The Chewed One swings an arm at the solid brick wall of Clive's apartment and punches through it as if it were made of interlocking plastic toy pieces. It leaps down three stories and smashes a car. It feels nothing but bloodlust and rage. But it is not done destroying.
Live long, be strong, find love...
The Chewed One knows it is not long for this world. It lashes out with a weak spirit, lashing out in blind hatred. It trails two streaks of blood as it marches towards Pike Place Market.
The Chewed One finds the place of its conceiving -- the Gum Wall -- and smashes into it. It has the strength of all the jaws which had collectively chewed it into existence, yet it cannot put even one scratch upon the Gum Wall.
Each blow The Chewed One tries to land upon the Gum Wall is slower and slower. If it could breathe, it would be winded. The magic which binds The Chewed One to this world slowly dissipates. The pieces of gum slide off of its wireframe skeleton like beads on a severed string. The wire, once stiff, falls slack like a snapped kite-string, as the wind-catcher it was once attached to floats away.
The Chewed One moves no longer.
The blood, bone and sinew of its masters splatters to the ground in dark burgundy cluster-clots.
EPILOGUE
Captain Steven Stone is a veteran of the Department. His assistant, Lieutenant Scarlet Normgard, is fresh out of the academy. Stone can hardly stand to look at her; she reminds him too much of himself when he started out. It takes years of gruesome, strange, and rushed work to make a good detective. He wasn’t looking forward to training Normgard.
Lt. Scarlet Normgard, on the other hand, had nothing but the highest regard for the veteran Captain Stone. She imagined him to be a great genius detective, and under his tutelage, she would surely become one, too. The weight of reality had not crushed her spirit yet.
In the small, smoky office, the detectives review the details of a recent, strange, bloody event.
"Street camera footage shows this. I want your unvarnished opinion, Lieutenant."
On the tiny monitor that Captain Stone usually uses to play Solitaire, the two detectives watch grainy, low frame-rate black-and-white footage recorded on what the public is told are traffic cameras. The detectives watch The Chewed One burst through a brick wall, smash a car, and trail blood.
Captain Stone lights a cigarette indoors. Lt. Normgard knows that Captain Stone is technically violating a smoking ordinance, but has hand-waved this away by telling herself that the upper ranks are too hard-boiled to do everything by the book. It’s only her fourth day and she has already gotten used to averting her eyes from the Department’s excesses.
Lt. Normgard says, "Perhaps it's some kind of homemade exoskeleton being worn by a mad scientist. The shoddy pattern could be some kind of camouflage. The fluid trailing from the exoskeleton implies some kind of malfunction. The mad scientist, unable to remove the exoskeleton, decides to go on a rampage before their inevitable demise."
"That's what this grainy black-and-white footage could suggest, yes. What do you suppose that liquid trailing from it as it marches up Pine is?"
"Sir. My top three guesses are fuel, lubricant or blood."
"Do you see any kind of fuel tank on what you call an exoskeleton?"
"No, sir."
Stone chuckles and inhales deeply.
"I admire your attempt at containing your analysis of this incident to the world of science fiction." Stone opens a manila folder with colored photos taken by the coroner. "Now, what do you see here?”
Lt. Normgard looks at each one carefully.
"This can't be right... It's chewing gum. And wires." She flips through a couple more photos. "Bone fragments... Clotted blood... An eye?!"
She turns away from Captain Stone, doubles over and clutches at her torso and mouth, desperately trying not to vomit. Captain Stone rolls his eyes.
As Lt. Normgard stifles her retching, Captain Stone says, "The Department head wants something he can tell the chief in a couple hours, so that the chief can spin something to the press. Real open-and-shut case, huh?"
Lt. Normgard sweats a little. None of this made sense.
"Well... There's gum, blood, and wires. And it happened at the Gum Wall."
Stone puts his cigarette onto an ashtray filled with dozens of other cigarettes he's had in his office. Wispy tendrils reach from its red-hot tip up to the ceiling. "Could we spin it as a suicide bombing?"
"'Spin it!?' Detective, our job is to put together the straight facts."
Stone rubbed the back of his neck. He remembered when he was still green, and felt a duty to the Department to set this newbie straight. "If you want to sit behind this desk someday, you need to make your boss's job easier. The fact of the matter is, we've got two missing people, no suspect, no motive, and no murder weapon." The detective pauses to inhale his tobacco. "There was no explosion, no sound. And the bricks are undamaged. The only explanations left are outside the realm of natural science, and the department wants this case over with today."
As much as Lt. Normgard wanted to be Sherlock Holmes here, or hell, she’d even settle for Watson, the Department operated on much tighter deadlines than the legendary detective. "Could tell the public the bomb malfunctioned. Exploded inside the exoskeleton. And, uh… Some kind of shockwave made the gum fall off."
"Perfect! We'll tell the chief to leak some stuff to the press about a couple suspected pedophiles too. The media will lap it up. That way, this case won't even make the 11 o'clock news..."
Stone finishes the report in two hours.
Years later, Captain Normgard leaks the true story to the press, but it only gets picked up by the tabloids.
Genuinely so sick. Great read