Number: 36

Title: Body Count

Type: Original fiction

Action


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Synopsis:
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A man is in an arguement with his wife while him, her, and their
extended family is on a Grand Camping Trip. She elects to talk with a
mutual friend for a while, and the husband goes back to their tent to
lie awake and wait patiently for her return.

He's up for three hours, ready to nibble his fingernails down to his
wrist, when a machete swipes through the tent, intending to take off his
head. This martial arts maniac of a husband grabs his staff (he brought
to practice and show-off to family) and battles this attacker throughout
the campground in Near-Total Darkness before emerging physically
unscathed, shocked to the core of his being, and utterly victorious.

Then someone with a stun-gun steps out of a nearby RV and Round Two
begins.

Some hours later, he stumbles into a bar in the middle of absolutely
nowhere. One of the patrons is immediately on a cell-phone. Like
clockwork, he's ordered to quietly slit the throat of the new arrival.
Things don't work out as smoothly as suggested, though, and the husband
winds up explaining the 'Dance of Death' to the barkeep at gunpoint.

It gets worse.

After a hair-rising, cloak and dagger chase through a dozen cities, the
infurated husband is finally captured by what may or may not be a
massive conspiracy. He's not made up his mind one way or the other--odd
occurances and observations that don't mesh up are this story's calling
card--but he does want to find out the Truth.

His wife and entire extended family, however, aren't in the running.
He's already confirmed they're dead.

Waking in a doctor's office in some anonymous location, bombshells get
dropped. The doctor calmly explains how the remote taser collar works.
From there he seugways into how he's uber-rich and managing some bizarre
SF-esque experiment (of which he gives precisely zero details). It's all
very convincing until the husband notes that the office's decor doesn't
mesh. Boldly proclaiming the error, he pops a filling out of his own
tooth and just before the good doctor realizes what the husband is up
to, drops it on the taser's prongs (stupid engineers... putting them
right next to each other).

Gleefully slaughtering the doctor and anything else that doesn't offer
up a handshake and a margarita without hesitation, the husband makes his
way through a strange (and except for security guards, abandoned)
complex. At the entrance another man greets him with a handshake and a
margarita, and explains that everything he just went through was a big
setup and he is being offered a special job...

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