NationStates Jolt Archive

(IC, CLOSED, MT, WWTBTSOOMC. Or, for the unaware - in-character, closed, modern-tech, who wants to blow the shit out of my country. And what do you mean that title's taken? >_>)

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"Look, all I'm saying is that one would need better eyesight than God Himself to detect a dab of foie gras on a Jackson Pollock," fumed the besuited man at the table, for whom the wine had clearly done nothing to improve his mood. "I refuse to pay in excess of five figures for a poxy restoration I could do with a handkerchief and some spit!"

"Martin," began his friend, who, wearing just a pair of beaten-up jeans and a Wolverines hockey jersey, was clearly not the public face of the operation. "I haven't had nearly enough to drink to care about your crap. Pour me another."

"Those are our profits you're drinking, you know."

"If you're going to whine on about a painter I neither know nor care about, you can suffer through me having another glass. Pour me another."

"Fine," groused the abashed Martin, reaching for the opened bottle. "The Karshkovians do make a good red, don't they?"

"Eh?" "replied" his friend, not paying any particular attention. "Karshkovian is the lowest common denominator of wines, nobody with the money to buy a good something would buy Karshkovian." Martin cleared his throat significantly, prompting him to continue "Except you, of course."

"Thank you."

"But that's my point, I don't get it. Why buy Karshkovian?"

Martin shrugged, rather ineloquently. "Fuck knows. I just like the taste."

His friend contemplated this for a moment, looking deep into the dark red liquid swishing around his glass. "Sure," he said, pausing to down the full glass in one swallow, "that works. Another."

"No. You've had four already." The logic behind that was nothing if not simple - regardless of what the government thought, humans didn't have complete power over their own bodies and alcohol could still inebriate a person with scary efficiency. And considering that anybody believed to be drunk without a medical card stating they were suffering from multiple sclerosis or some derivation was shot in their kneecaps, tortured into revealing their sources and executed once they were of no further use...you get the picture.

"We're sitting on at least three million's worth of illegal booze, and most of it will be sold by the end of this month. You think I care about getting fired?"

"So, if we get raided and the cops find you here, singing showtunes and dancing on the table, how do you plan on explaining that to them? That you contracted a dose of reverse flu?"

His friend just looked repulsed. "Showtunes? Fuck you."

"You see my point, right?"

Scratching himself idly, the friend rolled off the couch and lurched towards the doorway. "Aye, I get it. And if I can't have another drink, I'm going to bed now."

"Night," called Martin, not interested in anything other than finding the open bottle. It wasn't easy, considering the room was pitch black and his inner ear had gone all funny, and all he accomplished was first knocking off the bottle he was looking for...and second, accidentally turning on the stereo. If you've ever been drunk and then suddenly exposed to a loud noise, you should know just how disorienting it is (and in case it needed saying, "Flesh Is Burning" - the debut hit from infamous thrash metal band Shoguns and Neuroses - is incredibly loud). Thanks mostly to just how drunk he was, Martin decided the best course of action was just to stand stock still for at least ten seconds before flailing in the vague direction of the noise, looking for the switch – a good businessman he might have been, but common sense was not his style. There were a few moments of blessed relief, during which his friend’s snoring came through loudly and clearly, before there came a knock at the door.

“Fuck.”

Martin knew perfectly well who it was, but he was holding out a tiny, tiny shred of hope that it was just one of the neighbours…a shred that fizzled out when the knocker started hammering on the door as if he were trying to beat it in. Now in the throes of full-blown panic, Martin looked around the room in desperation – unfortunately, the gods were occupied elsewhere, at the moment, and the cases of wine were still stacked neatly up against the walls. “Fuck!” he shouted again, praying that whoever it was at the door wouldn’t pay too much attention to the wallpaper in the hall; the secret room had been an idea he’d picked up from an old book he remembered neither the name nor the author of, but in it, a group of refugees had hidden successfully from the secret police by hiding in a room whose door was disguised as just another part of the wall. Uttering a single, silent prayer, Martin opened the door.

“Evening, sir,” drawled the smiling police officer standing outside. It was a sickening smile, the smile of someone who already knew he was going to get to hurt someone else, and the tableau wasn’t helped any by the fact his stone-faced colleague’s baton was already fizzing with electricity. Deciding to attempt to brazen it out, Martin did his best to look as though he’d just been woken up and had, for some reason, slept in his suit.

“Can I help you, officers?” he slurred, rubbing his eyes with one hand. “Sorry for looking such a mess, but you just woke me up.”

The smiling officer nodded indulgently, fiddling with something in his pocket. “You certainly can help us, we were patrolling the neighbourhood,” he gestured out at the pitch-dark street, “and heard a noise. Sounded like music. You wouldn’t happen to know about that, would you?”

“Afraid so,” chuckled Martin, now almost at the point of losing all control over his bladder. “I’d just gone to get a glass of water and I must have stood on the stereo remote.”

The smiler nodded again, stepping to the side a little to let his companion take point. Without a word, the other officer simply rammed the tip of his nightstick into Martin’s gut; Martin, unsurprisingly, collapsed. His bladder gave way in a most unpleasant fashion, turning the front of his pants into a wreck, but that was the least of his worries at this point.

“If you were so asleep,” laughed the smiler mockingly, delighting in Martin’s misery, “why do you stink of wine?” Turning to his still-silent partner, he pointed at the wall. “Take a look.”

“No need,” spoke the silent partner for the first time, pointing at a tiny indentation in the wall. Clamming up again, he hooked his finger into it and pulled – the oiled hinges, not having a mind or sentience, did their job as normal and slid open with nary a squeak between them. Martin, who had begun to cough up blood, dimly heard one of the officers whistle and the other murmur “Oh, my,” but to his blessed relief, that was the last thing he heard. It wasn’t death, but unconsciousness was a good enough substitute for now.

While Martin was having an ulcer in his stomach inadvertently perforated by a pair of police officers, Janet was hastily concocting an escape plan.

Yes, you did read that correctly. Martin’s friend wearing the hockey jersey’s name was indeed Janet – the unfortunate man had had the gross misfortune to be born to parents that fit the “hippy” stereotype, something that had long since been extinct. In keeping with their beliefs, his mother had strictly refused to give birth in a hospital – or, as she had referred to it repeatedly over the years, “corporate hell-house” – and so Janet had been brought into the world in the middle of the Kissstock rock festival. Janet Sheen [McPsychovillian singer famous more for being executed when she decided the best way to protest the unilateral ban on recreational drugs was to toke up in front of City Hall] had been playing at the time and, in the somewhat-addled minds of the new parents, Janet was the perfect fit for their male bundle of joy. If nothing else, it had taught Janet the value of standing up for oneself, never, ever trusting anybody enough to let them make the first strike and the right places to hit a man when he makes fun of your name. It did not, however, teach him how to navigate down a trellis while pant-wettingly drunk.

Or how to fall when in said state of drunkenness.

And it definitely didn’t teach him that a two-hundred-pound man trying to use a wooden fence for support from two stories up is always going to end with gravity winning. The police found him by following the sound of the screaming with at least one broken bone and, rather than waste time taking him to the station, simply shot him in the forehead there and then. So ends the involvement of Janet in this story, sent to whatever lies beyond this world to possibly answer to a god or gods. As Martin wakes up in his cell, his time of reckoning is still somewhere in the future, but he clearly didn’t know that at this point. For that matter, he didn’t realise that things were just about to get worse for him.

“Good morning,” came the voice from one corner. It took him a few moments before Martin’s eyes properly adjusted to the near-total lack of light in the cell – no windows and a dim, dirty lightbulb does not a pleasant atmosphere make – but his ears were working well enough for him to deduce he’d been arrested by the officers that had stopped by. Unsurprisingly, it was the one he’d ludicrously thought of as “the nice one” doing the talking as he sipped from a plastic cup of something. “And I’d toast your health if it were worth it.” Casting a glance behind him, he noticed the other officer with a similar cup.

“You…” he began, wincing as his various cuts and bruises all woke up at once and began screaming at his brain. “…you took my wine?”

“What? No, of course not,” returned the nice officer. “I mean, there may be a few bottles missing when the full team arrives to collect evidence and destroy the unneeded contraband, but accidents happen. As a matter of fact,” he continued, kneeling and getting down to Martin’s level, “you gave us quite a scare yourself. You almost died from that ulcer of yours, but luckily we got you to the hospital in time.”

“Wouldn’t want you to miss your execution,” growled the other one, taking a surprisingly dainty sip from the cup as another one of Martin’s prayers went unanswered. He knew that alcohol dealers like himself never survived, but all the same he had hoped for leniency.

“I’m to be executed?” he croaked, in more pain than he’d first realised.

“Of course you are. You’re an alcohol dealer, why wouldn’t we kill you?” The “nicer” of the two straightened up, his smile flickering for the first time. “However…”

Martin actually laughed. It almost made him pass out again to do it, but the gods had thrown him a lifeline. “However what?”

“However, we’re still no closer to finding where all of this is coming from. If you’re a good boy, we might just be persuaded to put you out of your misery now. If not…” he tailed off, letting his partner cut in with “It’s a nice, public poisoning for you.” Martin considered it for not five seconds, it wasn’t a difficult choice at all. The promise of a painless execution was too great.

“What do you want to know?” The nice officer’s smile hopped up another couple of notches as he sat down for the first time.

"Like I said, who your suppliers are and where the hole in the border patrols is. You tell us that, and you get a clean death."

Martin almost cried. In his brutalised state, this offer was the kindest thing he could have been given, on par with Jesus feeding the starving and healing the lepers, and his few remaining misgivings broke down as he babbled "It's all Karshkovian, we've bribed a couple of guards to let us through without any fuss."

"Karshkovia?" The question had come from both officers at once, as it had been somewhat of a curveball. "Interesting," continued the nice one, scribbling a note on the pad that sat on the desk in front of him. "Do you have a name for us?"

"Leon Turek. He works in the government, a low position. He buys it up from a wholesaler, I don't know any more than that." Martin had completely broken down by this point, and had simply gone into the foetal position, weeping. Unsurprisingly, he didn't realise the officers were leaving the cell until the door had shut; it was a few minutes before the implications percolated down into what little of his mind still remained lucid. Outside, the two officers pounded fists, both wearing broad smiles.

"Steph, darling," interrupted the silent officer, cutting through the secretary's phone call. Her withering gaze did nothing against the completely impassive veteran's face - if ever there were a face made for radio, his was it - and she looked away first. "Let them known the prisoner's ready for his execution."