The Last Horizon Read Free Page A

wheezing; unsteadily opens the door to discover tiny feet sticking out of a snowbank; yanking unceremoniously on the limbs he extracts the terrified child, who in red-faced fear leaps from him into the arms of her mother.
     
    This is the beast I have become. Once sinew and the cat paw of death, now the soiled and malodorous sloth of number 1650, Route #28 in the little hamlet of North River. Were it not for my cat Damn it, who refuses to acknowledge me anyways, no one needs me, remembers me, or sends an awful fruitcake at Christmas.
     
    The one thing that I have done besides remove my tumorous self from the body of society, the one thing I can say I’ve accomplished in my forty-six years on the planet, is pull an eleven year old from the snow.
     
    My money, my position and rank in the military, and my love for Mozart and appreciation of Degas in the overall scheme of things will mean nothing. When death comes to call, I’ll end and that’s it. I’ll become protein; eaten like a shark eats a walrus. No soundtrack. No chorus of angels, last rites, or ceremony. Gone.
     
    “Here lies Fenton Scott--goddamn he was a drunk.” Perhaps there’s some dignity in it that way. How bad can it be to almost instantly be transformed into food? Enter the ecosystem in the fast lane.
     
    I staggered by a room upstairs that I like to call my library. Inside on a desk, the computer light of the monitor blinks and the cruel process of apathy and neglect take over in my mind.
     
    A question forms: “Do I bother answering the call?” It’s by computer that I receive and accept my contracts. Long years have gone since I’ve accepted a contract to kill anyone. Long years since I was in any shape to do so.
     
    Since no one has seen me in ages, and since I don’t go out or attend anything like a social function, no one knows I’m an enormous turd. So the calls come, usually months apart, but they are something I get with regularity.
     
    Anyway, they come without a ribbon or bow, they come without warning through a scrambled network disguised as a news site called “The Daily”, but they always come with money. Lots of money.
     
    Waking up in my chair downstairs is not an occurrence that is rare or in the least bit foreign to me, and I know by the pinch in my bladder that I’ve been here a while. Getting up to take a leak, I stumble, reel, and I put my socked foot into a bowl of wet cat food.
     
    “Damn it! Fugg...grrr...damn it!”
     
    The cat flattens herself with gleaming eyes, then blasts-off the couch and bolts upstairs to hide. She knows it’s not her, and I never mess with her, but the noise has set her into rocketship mode.
     
    After pissing, I navigate the stairs to look for my pet and see the blinking light of the computer set to a constant green. That’s funny, I don’t remember answering it. But I’ve answered it though, or it wouldn’t be solid green. Had I ignored the message, it would either go on blinking red or disappear after a while. A short while. But it’s not. It’s green. Solid. Staring at me with one cycloptic eye, it draws me into the library.
     
    Oh boy. No really...oh boy! I think I’m in some trouble. You just don’t answer a call like that and not follow through, and following through is not my specialty lately. For a year and a half I’ve been in the woods; I invited and allowed the fates to take a great big dump on me...a billowy, blustering, steaming pile of poo on my life. Now I’ve done something to alter being a bystander. What the hell do I do now?
     
    Okay, okay, okay. First thing’s first. Check the message. Remain calm and read it. I sat down at the desk and slowly hit the Enter key on the board and a blue dossier screen popped up with instructions after I typed in my password.
     
    The profile was a bald, heavy-set man that resided on a planet called Nexus. Robert Charon, age 54. Suspected of heading a slavery and prostitution ring, he was also mixed up with the