Kill Order number 2791: Dan Lawson on Mailen Avenue.

My

name is Dan Lawson. I

make my residence on Mailen Avenue.

I now have five minutes to end my life. If I don’t, I will be placed in a coma, where my victims’ faces will forever shimmer in front of me so that I may better understand that what I did was morally wrong. Their faces, projected into my subconscious, will plead with me to spare their lives.

Here in the New Age of Reason, this is the punishment for anyone caught in the throes of murder. The grace period to kill yourself is meant as a way to assuage any persistent demons inside that might be apprehensive about a lifetime of seeing the innocent faces in front of you.

Of course they want me: not three hours ago I killed my son and my wife. Drove a knife straight into their hearts. Watched as their bandaged, scabbed faces somehow thanked me for ending their suffering at long last, when medicine had failed. Their paling countenances had been limned in yellow smears from the overhead lamps, the blood that pooled around my knife stropped to a razor’s edge by the gold light each time.

I knew the Kill Order was coming ever since I pressed their clammy eyelids shut once more, and now I slowly nod and drop the crisp sheet of paper.

Before I resign my life, there are two things that I must do to steel myself for what’s to come. An Order is never something to be taken lightly, never a joke in any sense. This New Age of Reason allows even murderers the satisfaction of ending their own lives on their own terms, although I don’t consider myself a murderer in any sense of the word.

I know all about what is expected of me. I wrote the first concept for the Kill Order.

The first thing I do is grab a drinking glass and a fresh bottle of wine from the rack. The kind is irrelevant, the taste meaningless. It’s about the act

of drinking it. An homage to Katelyn, my wife. To Kalin, my son. To my undying love for them.

The alcohol pools in the glass like blood-stained tides. Each bubble that pops enshrouds a bit of my fear and carries it away into oblivion.

The next thing I must do before ending my life is return to Kalin’s room, holding a holomodel of my wife and the filled wine glass, the former for memories and the latter for the last seconds of my existence.

At once I am assaulted by the sheer cluster

of his room. My son was a collector of expensive jewelry. Here, a dazzling emerald necklace beaded with ivory hearts. Alongside it, a silver pendant in the shape of Cupid hanging from a chain as thin as pencil lead. In between them all, rings of numerous sizes and colors.

On the bed, I switch on the holomodel and see Katelyn’s gorgeous figure appear as she did when I captured the image. It is blurry. All I can make out is her smile, and even that seems oddly muted, as though the smile was made to belie deep-laced pain.

I see Kalin’s face everywhere, but he is always frowning. He never smiled for any holomodels I took. They’re stupid, Dad

, he would complain. Why would you want to see my ugly face anyway

?

When he fell from the roof of our house while trying to save his mother, Kalin had plummeted over thirty feet before striking the ground. Katelyn, though cloaked in her son’s arms, had bounced against his body on impact, skidding several feet along the pavement. I never got to ask either of them what they were doing so close to the edge that day.

I take a sip of wine and toast the air to my wife and son, recently saved from suffering by my hand. Their faces and bodies were so traumatized that they were alive only by artificial means, their features forever lost. Sure, they could graft new skin on them, make them pretty. But not with my salary. I may be the founder of the Kill Order phenomenon, but my ideas expelled me long ago from that circle of the elite.

And now, from thin vents carved out like fish gills along the walls, the indigo fog comes gliding in.

I sip the rest of the wine, drop the glass and holomodel, and lay back on the bed. Kalin, in true adolescent fashion, had affixed to his ceiling vintage posters of women in immodest clothing. Their oily bodies and mechanical smiles greet the newfound sense of weightlessness I have.

They’ll process me, a day or two at most. Justice is swift here in the New Age of Reason. Within the week, they’ll have sentenced me and hooked me in with the other murderers. The faces of my victims will be implanted into my brain, so my dreams will never escape their features, their occasional cries for help.

Except I won’t be seeing victims. I’ll be seeing my wife and son, once more whole again and wondrous in their beauty. Their faces will shimmer; their eyes will glow, and I’ll know happiness again. What was once hopeless, destroyed bodies lying deserted in the hospital will now be my family, reunited once more.

I hope my sentence is life.

Impressum

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 07.07.2011

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