Joe ran.
He had been driving for a while -- many hours, probably, as he had apparently gotten to New York City somehow, though they'd felt like only a moment -- but driving was too disconnected, too distant, too sheltering. Running was primal. Running gave this matter the weight it deserved. No, only a fraction of it. It needed more. He lifted both legs simultaneously, slamming his face into the blackened sidewalk, and began clawing at his fancy Armani jacket.
He had killed, and he needed it to sink in before it was too late. The faces of the ones whose lives he had written away flew before his eyes -- they had to, as he could only kill those whose faces he knew. As impersonal as he wished it was, the personal aspect was unavoidable.
In those brief moments where he allowed himself to take the focus off himself, his thoughts turned to the others -- as far as Shigao knew, or was willing to disclose, there were at least two other notebooks out there in human possession right now, both in Japan -- that was probably what Hillary was going to talk about.
If these people were indeed the mysterious serial killers he had heard about in a recent press conference, why did they kill the people they had? Murderers, rapists, child molesters, other (presumably less noble) serial killers -- all of them despicable people, to be sure, but why only them? Why not the dictators, the terrorists, the slavemasters, the corrupt CEOs? Joe had to admit that he still wasn't sure how to get Arabic names to work in the book, after trying over a dozen times to kill Bin Laden over the last week, but surely these two were much more skilled with it; if nothing else, they had had nearly two years of experience with it by now, and probably more polite Death Gods.
Why... were they thinking so small?
Yes. That was it.
Was he really thinking it? But it came so naturally. He asked himself whether it could be true, but he knew in his heart that such questions were only delaying what he already knew.
And why had he so feared it? After all, he had been a politician for more years than he cared to remember. Who had known better than him what it was like to end lives with the stroke of a pen, all for the greater good? This... this was natural.
A maelstrom of conflicting thoughts still battling -- perhaps futilely -- in his mind, he picked himself up off the pavement, a few drops of his own blood having mingled with the various globs of discarded gum and vomited tobacco. He brushed himself off, put his hair back into its normal, now almost comical state, and hailed a cab, then watched himself step inside, where he heard a muffled "La Guardia" escape his lips, then float up to the ceiling. And suddenly, that very ceiling lit up in orange and green squares.
"Hey! You're in the Cash Cab!"
TO BE CONTINUED?!?
