Impunity

By DW Cook

Blaine Morrison's career and romantic life are in tatters when he finds something in the woods that gives him the power to possess whatever, and whoever, he wants, but not without consequences... (Approximately 21,000 words.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: DW Cook
• Release date: Nov 17, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463370100

DW Cook

I live in the Dallas Fort Worth Metroplex. I am a lawyer by day, but I enjoy writing both fiction and non-fiction. My hobbies include: dancing, target shooting, and learning about almost everything under the sun.

Book preview

Impunity

By D.W. Cook

© 2018, WD Cook

http://dwcookfiction.com/

I jerked up my .300 Win Mag, and peered through the scope, looking for it. Something was moving down at 5th Avenue and 31st Street. The high-powered scope on the rifle I had taken from a Marine base near Philadelphia made it seem like I was standing at the corner of the intersection instead of the outside observation deck of the Empire State Building.

No one should be in the city of New York. It was my city. Hadn’t I renamed it the township of Blainesville in large, spray paint letters on City Hall when I’d first arrived? Who dared to disturb my solitude?

It was a dog. Someone must have left their poodle to fend for itself during the hurried evacuation five days earlier -when the military had become reasonably sure that was where I was headed. Not that the evacuation was complete by the time I arrived in New York, excuse me, I mean Blainseville. There had been plenty of targets.

I once read on the Internet the city had close to 8 million people. I would have looked it up now, but the government had a policy of shutting down all of the cell towers, electricity, and other communications channels in the area I was in. They wanted to deny me any means of contacting others.

At any rate, there were still a lot of people scrambling to get out of New York as I’d jaunted down the Veranzo-Narrows Bridge. Some of them, rather than traveling north as the authorities had ordered, tried their luck going south, hoping to get west of me before I arrived. The massive throng of people on the bridge had seen me coming and had parted like the Red Sea. There was a stampede in the opposite direction, which killed more people than I did with my gun. Still more had drowned as they dove into the bay.

Even when I reached Manhattan-proper, there were plenty of targets to choose from. I shot all races, genders, religions, and sexual orientations. If there was one thing I wanted them to remember about the reign of Blaine Morrison, it was that I didn’t discriminate. I left a rainbow-colored swath of death and destruction wherever I went.

The gray-haired poodle in my riflescope was gnawing on the leg of a ten-year-old kid I’d shot through the lower-torso the day before. He and his dead mother next to him had also been the last human beings I’d seen. New York was empty. Garbage blew through the streets like tumbleweeds, rats roamed the streets without fear, and I was the first person in a hundred years to see the Milky Way in the skies of Manhattan.

I put my rifle down and gazed upward at the twilight sky. Watching a nuclear warhead descend from low-earth orbit is an interesting site to see. It starts out as just a white blob of light that could be mistaken for an airplane. As it continues to enter the atmosphere, it resolves into an orb with a long bright streak behind it that lingers in the air. It’s like watching a shooting star, but much bigger and slower.

I longed to see one of the military’s ICBM’s get within kill range of the city, but, of course, before that could happen, a Golem streaked up from the ground below, and intercepted the warhead. It diverted the weapon to far out over the Atlantic Ocean, and there was a blinding flash of bright light, followed by a mushroom cloud of vaporized salt water and whale guts.

I’d counted 6 attempted nuclear strikes so far. I suspected the military would give up on the idea soon enough, as it was completely ineffective. The good news was that all of the debris thrown into the Earth’s atmosphere would divert enough sunlight to solve our global warming problem.

So, I’ve got that going for me… I said aloud.

But, it wasn’t nice.

I could live as comfortably as I wanted, taking whatever I wanted, and I could have any woman I could catch, but I was an enemy of mankind. If I wasn’t hated by all, I was at least feared, by every last man, woman, and child on the planet.

The touch of Midas, I said.

I pulled out the notebook I’d picked up at a convenience store near Madison Square Park, and began to write:

Where do I start? I thought.

At the beginning, Mrs. Price, my eleventh grade English teacher, said in my mind.

###

I stared down the barrel of the .22. I saw the grey soft lead of the bullets in the chambers of the cylinder. If I had held the barrel under a light, maybe I could have seen the bullet with my name on it. It was cocked. All I needed to do was pull the trigger slightly. The hammer would fall on the rim of the cartridge, igniting the primer, thereby exploding the gunpowder, and sending a slug into my frontal cortex, permanently disrupting my body’s homeostatic equilibrium. But…I started to have my doubts about this course of action.

Was a .22 going to kill me or just leave me severely disabled? Was it going to hurt, and for how long? Although I didn’t explicitly believe anymore, I’d been raised Baptist. Part of me was also a little afraid of going to hell for committing suicide.

Holding a gun on myself was more difficult than I would have thought, so I put it down on the passenger seat of my car and gazed out at the forest of Georgia pines.

There was a full moon permitting me to see the outlines of the tall, shadowy trunks, reaching up into the starry sky above. The branches of the trees sat far above my car, swaying in the night breeze.

After Diane’s tearful confession, I had left the house and driven north on highway 90 for about an hour, and then down a couple of country roads until I had pulled into the parking lot of what looked like a State park. By that time, I was somewhere in south Georgia. I had grown up on