The Ever Ragged Veil
Daylight poured into the post office through the picture windows. A thin man, of average height, with shaggy brown hair and glasses stood at one of the cheap steel/particleboard mail counters, sorting his mail. "Hmmmm, seems I may already be a winner..." he thought to himself, humorously as he tossed the gaudy envelope into the trash hole of the counter. "I wonder how many other people are winners today?" he mused, still grinning at the thought. He strolled away from the counter, leaving behind a clump of junk mail, holding the two envelops that had any meaning; one from his daughter, the other from his software publisher.
This man, by name of Raymond Morris, was an interesting sort of fellow. I suppose this is why you're reading this now instead of playing with the dog, doing your chores, or watching the raindrops slide down the window. You see, Ray is a man of extraordinary luck and a fair amount of talent. As far as the talent goes, he's always been good with computers. While he was in school he found he had a knack for making them do things and while he should have been spending quality time with his books in his shoebox of a dorm room (so that he could become another fine, upstanding corporate drone in some cubicle, somewhere unimportant), he was writing a program that he thought made a lot of sense. Other people, oddly enough, also thought his program made a lot of sense and (the part where the luck comes in) one of those people was the son of a media mogul who had a problem this program would solve to a tee.
A flurry of deals, lawyers, contracts, and blah, blah, blah later he found that he would never have to work another day in his life if it was, so, his desire. Long story short, so that I can get back to telling this story, he's kept himself busy with his hobbies ever since. One of those things that had kept him occupied, though not really an occupation, was trying to unlock the source of a feeling he'd always had; a sense that something was wrong in the world. While, we all know that the world is not all smiles and sunshine, this was something more. An underlying "something" that gnawed at his soul and broke into his waking thoughts, on occasion, but was usually more of a sense about a place or person, passed on the street. Something he had begun to listen to more strongly since the night his wife, Kelly, was taken from him.
Kell was in law enforcement and her killer was a revolving door felon. His rap sheet could stretch around the precinct and he really didn't want to go back to jail for the burglary he was committing that night. Kell always wore her vest but the punk was aiming for her head, he missed and she got shot through the throat. While she choked on the warm life pouring out of her arteries, two of her hollow points found a new home in his shoulder and leg. That night Raymond had a feeling of dread in his heart and with good reason. Officer Morris left her husband and daughter, Alice, behind and her killer lived on for six more years of courtroom appeals until he slipped away, peacefully, by order of the state. Raymond, not being a cold man, mourned with his daughter for, what seemed like, an eternity. For almost a year he could barely do anything else. One day, near the anniversary of her death, he began to think about his premonition. The feeling had often returned to him, but he would push it out of his thoughts whenever it appeared. It dawned on him one morning that, maybe something was trying to tell him what he had suspected for years; that the world was truly not what it seemed. His search for the truth began there; now let's go back to the post office, he's just about to leave.
Raymond unlocked the door of his silver 2000 Mercury Cougar. He fired up the engine and flipped on the radio. With a familiar song in his ear, he drove; casually back to his new home on Highland Way. The neighborhood was clean and people kept their homes maintained. With many a Labrador in the manicured yards, it was a perfect picture of yuppie suburbia. He hit the button on his garage door and the motor began its labor saving duties. Walking through the house, he arrived at a heavy door, which, curiously enough had two dead bolts restricting its access. Quickly unlocking the door, he passed through the portal and shut the locks behind him. The room was bathed in the dull glow from a computer terminal situated in the center of a mass of materials. The very walls of the room were papered with newspaper articles, coded documents, and notes scrawled on scraps of paper. The Floor was piled with notebooks and documents of his research. Sitting now, at his computer, with Alice's' letter in his hand, he gingerly opened it and slid out an optical disk and a hand written note. "Here is the data, please be careful, Love Alice", was all that the note said; the disk said much more.