by barronblack
Sticky, black. Likely a night-craze, the sort that twitched the skin and woke you wondering. Perhaps it really was the phone clanging after midnight. It could be hard to tell.
Brain like tarred sandpaper, the accountant found the phone and answered it, croaking with fatigue. A gush of charred light on the wall, then darkness again.
“I need a transfer.”
He sat for a while, but the line did not idle. “Excuse me?”
The thick voice did not repeat itself.
“I am an accountant, and it’s well past my business hours. Why don’t you wire?”
“It is a bill that cannot be paid through wire.”
The carpet was rough on his feet. It needed to be cleaned, the discarded staples pulled free. Such was his work. Palm wet, the phone slipped. He propped it up again.
“I don’t do that. This isn’t Moscow.”
Condemning silence.
“Okay.” The number blinking from the pad was familiar, one of the extensions at the office. “I’ll get there. Someone will owe me.”
The line went dead.
———————-
He collected bills with a gun. Or he had. The sort with a cylindrical attachment and a muffled voice. When he entered the office—his office, damn the man—he carried one.
Everything was lit up. He wasn’t expecting that. High-wattage light stung his eyes.
“You have come well.” The man from the call stood at a window, hands clasped behind his back. “Never I expect that your kind will come.”
It was hard to see, but he pivoted the barrel around to point at the suited back.
“What bill.”
A chuckle. “You know which. You fled us, moved here. Land that is safe, no?”
“I am an accountant.” It sounded dead even to him. Burning vellum.
“That is what they call it here?” The man turned and walked assuredly to a point almost shoulder-to-shoulder. “The organization wishes that you deliver another bill. For old time’s sake.”
Why wasn’t the man afraid of the gun now pointed at his head? It would be so easy to slip, to wipe out this living spot marring his perfectly structured existence. He’d worked so hard to eliminate his accent and history, so very hard.
His hand had gone numb and dropped the gun before he noted the tiny syringe. The stranger tossed the empty vessel in a waste basket, face impassive.
“It will not kill. I am not, what do you say? Not “accountant.” Please remember our request.”
Something like liquid death started to tear him apart. The worn carpet pressed against his face and he wondered just what the man had emptied into his wrist. Black leather. Those were the shoes that moved away from him and paused at the door. The lights went out.
Not long before the death was everywhere he was. Everything. Screaming madness. A bill to pay.
He groped for the gun.
This work by Barron Black is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.