On the whole, he would have preferred if his friends had left him at home, instead of bringing them on their moronic adventure and ultimately allowing him to die by being lowered into a shark pit.  The most embarrassing thing was there weren’t even any sharks.  There were trout with plastic fins taped to their backs.

He died by drowning, as do most people who have been tied, gagged, and left in the bottom of vicious trout-infested waters.

Oh well, at least he didn’t die unfulfilled.  They let him go in full ninja costume.

-------------------------

It was six-and-a-half hours prior to noon, or for the backwards minds, five-and-a-half hours after midnight when her clock alarm was activated.  She rolled over as the voice of Johnny Cash filled the room with thoughts of trains and salvation.  Sunday Morning Coming Down, she thought to herself, proud of her mastery of musical recognizance.

There needs to be more Cash played on the radio, she thought to herself.  His deep, soulful, almost mournful voice had a quality that denied any chances of anger.  It was soothing, without bringing about the sense of lethargy brought about by most other singers of his type.  Odd.

Still, she thought, pulling on a sweater and preparing for her morning, perhaps it is specifically his quality that brought the deficiency.  If it were indeed only through withdrawal that appreciation can stem, then playing a large amount of Johnny Cash would degrade him to less than the legendary status he so richly deserved.

Quickly a cry of, “Mommy!” from across the room diverted her ruminations.  Her daughter, four years old, was already awake.

Twenty minutes later, Jennifer had been coaxed back to blissful sleep and her mother was helping herself to a piping mug of tea.

She idly mapped out her day.  Her husband would be returning from business that evening, so she had to be ready at the airport for his flight’s arrival.  The morning she could sit down and read a good book, preferably Voltaire or Beckett, while Jennifer was at nursery school.  The afternoon would probably be spent devising the perfect soufflé.

It was an ongoing joke between she and her husband that she baked a soufflé when he returned from business.  He would always talk about going to find the perfect priceless artifact in South America, or wherever, and once commented that she should find something to which she could devote her own time and energy.  She promptly decided to pursue perfecting the one culinary art at which she never found proficiency, that of soufflés.  She never got it exactly right, but she had something to occupy the boredom when she and her husband were separated.

Last time, her attempt more closely resembled a cupcake than its intention.  It was a marked improvement, however; her first try turned out like a pancake.

Suddenly, she set fire to the house and ran off, cackling insanely as her daughter was immolated and died.  In a completely unwarranted self-satisfactory action, she hummed the opening lines to Ring of Fire.  When the police arrived, the lady from Silent Witness examined the molten minor, coming to the conclusion that she was delicious.

Carnivorous, cannibalistic coppers were one thing, but Susie Duncan could contain herself no longer.  Having already killed her own daughter, having the police force make a mockery of her machinations was infuriating.  From her hiding place on top of the garage, which had not caught fire on account of being soaked with kerosene and filled with a number of flammable gasses the day beforehand, she leapt down and tackled the first policeman she found, scratching off his ear and shouting evangelical slogans.

It’s things like these that make me weep for humanity.  Everyone knows the most efficient way to deal with police pursuit is to use robots and taunt them from across a convenient barrier usually procured by way of firebombing the street.  The problem is, our psychopathic friend Susie was a victim of mind control.

Yes, my beloved reader, mind control.  The police won’t realize it until the book nears its end, but there were aliens in orbit, controlling Susie’s every move like some sick video game.

I remember when those scumbags had my grandfather under their control.  I asked him for candy, and he sat me on his knee for a few minutes, totally motionless.  When I began to ask why he wanted me sitting there, he put me down, stood up, and jumped on my face.

It wouldn’t have been very uncommon in my family, and yes, eventually we did adjust to his ways, but he worked down in the coalmines and wore steel-toed boots.  At least by the end, we got him to take out his frustration on turtles we kept in a pen in the backyard.  Yes, we kept turtles in a pen.  It was a disposable Bic brand, though; don’t worry about the monetary cost.  The only price was our dignity.  And, you know, brain damage.

I am reminded at this juncture of the stories I heard of my great-grandmother, a technician at the Anomalous Materials lab in the Black Mesa compound.  She doesn’t have anything to do with the aliens, by the way, I just thought it was funny.  Back in her day, you see, it was uncommon to see women in any professions beside prostitution and playing ditzy characters on sitcoms.

But anyway, back to the story.  Police Chief Constable Junior Grade Murdoch, known to his friends as Grade, arrived at the scene with a half-smoked cigarette in his mouth.  Also the tongue of his Lieutenant, a heavy smoker who was, as the police car pulled up in the driveway, trying to fit a lit match between their lips.

Murdoch crouched down next to the burnt, half-eaten corpse of young Jennifer Duncan.  “Another open-and-shut case, boys.  The Crips pinned this on her mother because she could dance too well.”

None of his fellow officers had the heart to argue with the man.  He had puppy dog eyes, and they’d look at you with raised eyebrows and you’d have to be some sort of baby-eating hippy communist scum to disagree with anything he said.  That was how he got married, how he got on the force, and how he convinced God to reserve him box seats in heaven.

Consider the case of the man who feared everything.  The normal things, spiders, enclosed spaces, being brutally ripped to shreds in a bizarre combine harvester accident, were easy enough for him to ignore, but he went much further than that.  He feared being alone, and therefore surrounded himself with people. He feared people, however, so he took to spending time with a stuffed clown named Johannes, who never spoke and was also feared.  Silence and things that are frightening, by sheer coincidence, also frightened this man, so he committed himself to an asylum, where the noises of electro-convulsive machines danced upon his head to finally bring him blissful sleep, which was a large fear of his.

Eventually he took twenty-one different pills to comfort himself, and he ignored most of his fears, but, unfortunately, he feared inner peace and more than anything he feared having his fears assuaged.  Dejected and alone, he took up politics and precipitated World War III.

That war was what made Murdoch such a bizarre individual.  He saw terrible things in that war, frightening things, and he was unable to hold a steady job for long.  The fact that he held such a high position on the police force was a contrived bit of luck and probably the fault of communists.

Then a mad gunman shot Murdoch, and he had no chance to survive make his time.  He never cracked the case, and the book ended.