Post by Edward Cheever on Apr 1, 2010 14:22:34 GMT -6
I went ahead and submitted a clean version of this story to the 2010 contest. The other story I was writing for the contest will be posted later.
Dourney's Deed
The elderly man watched a small flock of butterflies flutter over a hill and around a tree. His worn face sagged in a sullen indifference. He sat on a hard, cold metal chair underneath bright lights hanging from the white ceiling. The room was clean, simple and sterile, furnished only by two chairs and a table.
He reached out and flicked a finger across the surface of the table. Reacting as if to a harsh wind, the butterflies swirled and danced away from his touch, scattering in all directions. His expression remained unchanging.
The door behind him opened and a middle-aged man with a dark suit coat and a briefcase walked in. The door closed firmly behind him. He walked around the older man and the table, past the one-way mirror, and sat in the other chair.
The elderly man looked him over as he settled his briefcase on the floor. He noticed, as he had when they first met, the man’s weak chin, small nose and deep-set eyes. He was slightly clumsy as he thumbed open the clasp for the case and slipped out a card. He pushed the card at a slot in the side of the table, and finally got it in on the second try.
The table’s surface, a bright scenic panorama of a beautiful park, faded away and in its place was a black void, in which floated a number of folders with moving pictures on their covers. The man quickly organized the floating folders. His fingers dragged the images across the table into neat rows at his left.
When he finally settled he turned his attention across the table, “Mr. Dourney, I know we’ve gone over this a number of times already, but I would just like to go over this with you once more.”
The elderly man waited silently with his cuffed hands in his lap.
“Is that all right with you Mr. Dourney?”
“Why?” Dourney asked. “It’s not like you haven’t heard everything already.”
The man gestured at the mirror.
“What, new guests?” He turned his head slightly for a glance. He looked at his reflection for a moment before turning back to the man across from him. He reached up and scrubbed his white bristled cheek.
“Alright” He said finally.
“Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Dourney.”
“That’s what I do. I help people.”
The man gave him an exasperated look from under his eyebrows as he leaned over the table and drug a folder from the top left corner of his neat row. He pulled the folder to the center of the table and using two fingers at the folders corners, enlarged it. Then, with a sharp tap, he opened the folder, revealing a number of legal documents. Dourney’s employment records among them.
“So why were you working at Birth Building Labs, Mr. Dourney?”
“I had rent to pay.”
“There are any number of jobs you could have taken. Why take this one?”
“They were the first to answer my application.”
“But Mr. Dourney, you hate BB Labs.”
“Yeah.”
“So why did you take the job?”
“In other words, you want to know if this was some sort of premeditated plot or something.”
“We just want to understand your motivations, Mr. Dourney.”
The old man rolled his eyes. “It’s honest truth. Look, yeah I hate those guys and their ‘business.’ Sure. But they’ve got halls to sweep like anybody else. Dirty bathrooms. It’s a steady job and it pays well enough for my needs. And yes, they were the first to respond to my application. I sent the d**ned things out to every business within walking distance.”
“So you had no criminal intentions?”
“Criminal? Hell no. Well, maybe in the back of my mind I was planning some closet raiding. You know the sort.” He snorted humorously. “I could always use free toilet paper.“
“You weren’t planning to get paid by anyone?”
Dourney smirked, “By the BB Labs.”
“I mean outside of the company.”
“I never talk to anybody.”
“You were never once propositioned by another source?”
“You know I never owned a computer. Hell, I don’t even own a telephone.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“I wanted to save him, that’s why.”
“And you didn’t plan it out beforehand?”
“Well, when I finally settled down to do it, I did, yeah. But not before I took the job.”
“Mr. Dourney I find that hard to believe.”
“That’s the problem with stuff that’s real. When you run into them, they hurt.”
“Fine. You didn’t plan anything ahead. Nobody paid you to do it. Why would you do something like that?”
“Told you. I wanted to save him.”
“You stole a two week old fetus from BB Labs and the fetus’ parents, to save it?”
“Yeah.”
The man shook his head. “I know I ask this every time we talk, Mr. Dourney. Please help me make sense of it this time. What do you mean when you say you wanted to ‘save’ the fetus?”
“You got a dictionary?”
The man groaned.
“’cause, if you don’t know the meaning of a word you just got to look it up.”
“Mr. Dourney…”
“Can’t remember off the top of my head, but I believe it means something like, ‘to protect from harm’ or something similar.”
“Mr. Dourney, please.”
Dourney raise a bushy white eyebrow at him.
The man rubbed his face. “What ‘harm’ do you mean to say would have befallen the fetus?”
“De-humanization.” Dourney said seriously. “He would have had his free-will, his choice, ripped from him. Ripped from the very building blocks of his being. That’s what ‘harm.’”
“But it’s nothing of the sort.” The man said. He double tapped the open folder to close it, then pulled over and opened another. Numerous pictures and video clips spilled out and floated around the table. The man shuffled through them before finding the right images. He pushed them in front of Dourney.
“You see this gene here?” He said, pointing at the image. “It’s a computer generated close-up of the gene sequence. It shares many similarities with the MAO gene.”
Dourney grimaced. “The so-called ‘criminal’ gene.”
“That’s its popular name, yes.”
Dourney placed one cuffed hand on the image and leaned over the table slightly. “No such thing.” He flicked his wrist and the image skittered back across the table.
“Perhaps not in the common misconception, no. It doesn’t ‘make’ anyone go out and steal, or become violent. Obviously. But it does provide the temptation. The drive.”
“Don’t B.S. me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Dourney.” He shuffled a number of other images and video clips across the table. “Each of these are independent, privately funded researchers from the 2020s. Each one identified this distorted gene and its effects separately.”
“Anyone can claim to be an ‘expert’ if they’re rich enough to go to the right schools.” Dourney said, flicking the images back.
“Don’t be such a hard case, Mr. Dourney. You’re not as suspicious of education as you make yourself out to be.”
“That as may be, I still don’t believe it. Genes don’t work that way.”
“Look here,” the man said, enlarging a video clip before sliding it over. He tapped a square in the bottom right corner of the table and sound came to match the image of a doctor speaking in an interview.
“…It’s really quite extraordinary,” She said, “The gene acts in such a way that we might compare to brain-damage, only on a fundamental level. When the brain develops in a fetus, the gene interferes with normal brain development, causing signal misfires when the individual is fully developed. These misfires can trigger pleasure instead of pain, or pain instead of pleasure, thus causing a sort of reverse of the epistemic, or classical conditioning effect, in which the individual is rewarded for bad behavior and punished for good behavior. Naturally this would incline such an inflicted individual to act out in socially unacceptable manners. It doesn’t necessarily make criminals, as Dr. Suchang suggested. That idea died out in the late 20th Century. But rather it is the ultimate enabler of such behavior.”
The clip ended and Dourney flicked it back across the tabletop.
“So?” The man asked.
“So what? It’s rubbish.”
The man sighed.
Dourney leaned across the table further, his eyes lighting up with his first real emotion since the conversation began, “It strips a person of their individuality. It takes their natural humanity and tears it away.”
“It’s fixing a problem.”
“It’s brainwashing.”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Dourney. It’s no different from preventing paralysis or other diseases at the genetic level.”
“No! You, ‘come now.’ You’re content to just sit there and let corporations swindle naïve parents into paying the devil to take their children’s souls!”
“Calm down, Mr. Dourney.”
Dourney leaned back in his chair and put his hands back in his lap. His eyes were still burning, though. “I don’t care what idiot scientists said what in 2020, and I don’t care what you say now. It’s wrong.”
“It’s also perfectly legal.” The man said wearily.
“Mores the shame.”
“Shame or not, what you’ve done is a criminal offense.”
“If a man goes out looking for a mugger to take his money, who is the criminal?”
“BB Labs wasn’t asking you to steal from them, and neither was that fetus’ parents.”
“I wasn’t talking about them. I was talking about our d**ned government. Looking for ways to let corporations steal America’s soul.”
The man stared at Dourney for a moment in silence. Finally he said, “You really believe what you did was right.”
“Absolutely.”
“Even though the fetus died after you stole it?”
“Better that than the alternative.”
“Mr. Dourney, you don’t look like the murdering type to me.”
“I’m not.”
“You knew it couldn’t survive long outside the lab, and yet you stole it.”
Dourney grimaced.
“You killed that fetus.”
“I saved it.”
“You stole valuable property from a respectable health and sciences facility.”
“I saved him.”
The man shook his head. “You’re not an idiot, Mr. Dourney. Somehow you managed to slip a fetus out of a highly secure facility and avoid suspicion and capture for nearly a week.”
“It’s just timing.”
“Still. It shows you’re not an idiot. Yet there you are, sitting across a table covered in evidence to the contrary, denying reality.”
“Took the words right out of my mouth.”
“Don’t be childish, Mr. Dourney.”
Dourney shrugged.
The door to the room opened and another man in a nice suit beckoned from the doorway. Across the table the man stood up, “Excuse me for a moment Mr. Dourney.”
“Sure thing.”
The man left the room and the door shut with a clang.
Dourney stared down at the table’s surface. He avoided the images still floating about, and instead peered into the dark void beyond them. He kept looking, as if to spot something hidden there.
After a couple of minutes the door opened again, and his familiar questioner re-entered. For a moment the screen shifted over again to the rolling hills and butterflies. The man tapped a square in the corner and the void popped up again, the images floating abut lazily. He double tapped the folder and all the images rushed back inside and promptly closed. He shifted it back into his neat row and re-took his seat.
Folding his fingers together he set his elbows on the hard surface and leaned forward. His eyes watched Dourney’s for several moments. Finally he spoke, “The parents of the fetus want to press kidnapping and murder charges on you.”
The right side of Dourney’s mouth picked up in a sort of weak grin. “No good deed goes unpunished, huh?”
The man’s lips tightened.
Dourney waited a moment. “You said they want to.”
“Yes.”
There was silence again.
“They can’t. Can they.”
“No.” the man said with a small frown. “Under the Reed vs. Marbell decision of 2018, fetuses under six weeks old are not considered children, with the rights that status would entail.”
“So I’m free to go?”
The man gave a small unpleasant grin. “I’m sorry, but not entirely. You’re going to be tried in court, and I expect you’ll be hit with a pretty hefty fine for the theft of valuable Birth Building property and the loss of time sunk into that particular project, not to mention damages served to the fetus’ parents.”
“How much are we talking?”
“That’ll be up to a judge, no doubt.”
Dourney frowned. “Not even a ballpark estimate?”
“I’m not in the estimation business, Mr. Dourney.” He gestured at the window. The door opened and a police officer came in. “Please escort Mr. Dourney to a cell.”
The officer shook his head. “Nope. He’s going under house arrest for the moment.”
The man looked confused. “Why?”
“Elderly policy. Take it up with the chief.”
“I guess there’s some perks to being seventy-two.” Dourney grumbled.
The man sniffed. “Whatever.”
The policeman took Dourney by the arm, “Come on, sir. Officer Jackson’s going to bring the car around front.”
“Sure thing, officer.” Dourney said indifferently.
They all three walked to the front of the station in silence. When they exited into the front lobby a number of people glanced their way who were all milling about. One of the officers at the desk nodded to the officer escorting Dourney, and he nodded back.
They pushed out of the swinging door that separated the lobby from the workspace behind the desks.
The man stopped with a jerk as he recognized a couple who had just come in the front door. “What are they doing here?”
The woman spotted Dourney. “You!” She cried. “You killed my baby!”
Mr. Dourney threw up his hands to defend himself as the woman launched herself at him. The officer escorting Mr. Dourney grabbed the woman’s arms and tried to keep her at bay, but she struggled wildly. Her husband grabbed her around her waist and pulled her back. His eyes were locked hatefully onto Dourney.
“Why?” The woman cried. “Why’d you kill my baby?”
“I didn’t kill him!” Dourney protested. “I saved him!”
“You’re a monster.” The husband growled.
“I saved him. I saved him from the two of you.”
“Stop tormenting them, Mr. Dourney.” The man said in frustration. “You’ve hurt them enough, already.”
“They should be d**ned well grateful someone’s still got a little bit of sense around here.”
The officer turned, “Could you take him out of here?”
The man spluttered, “Me?”
“Just take him outside and make sure he doesn’t go anywhere. I’ll be right out after I settle these two down.”
The man looked at Dourney with a grimace. “Fine. Just hurry up, alright?”
The man and Dourney left the station and stepped out onto the wet pavement. The night was still lightly drizzling, and they each huddled in on themselves as they waited.
Dourney watched the man from the corner of his eyes for a minute. “They should be grateful.” He said.
The man remained silent.
“They should be happy.”
The drips from the rooftops of the city echoed around them. Dourney stared at the man for a moment longer and then stared up at the black sky and around at the shadowed streets.
“d**n well thank me, is what they should do.” He grumbled.
He glanced through the station’s window. The woman was sobbing into her husband’s chest. With red eyes he wearily stroked her hair while talking with the officer.
Dourney’s eyes darted back to the streets. Everywhere was darkness.
He shuffled his feet for a moment. He twisted around impatiently.
Finally he yelled out, “They should be grateful!”
Nothing answered.
“I saved him!” Drizzled rain dripped down Dourney’s cheeks. “I saved him!”
Dourney's Deed
The elderly man watched a small flock of butterflies flutter over a hill and around a tree. His worn face sagged in a sullen indifference. He sat on a hard, cold metal chair underneath bright lights hanging from the white ceiling. The room was clean, simple and sterile, furnished only by two chairs and a table.
He reached out and flicked a finger across the surface of the table. Reacting as if to a harsh wind, the butterflies swirled and danced away from his touch, scattering in all directions. His expression remained unchanging.
The door behind him opened and a middle-aged man with a dark suit coat and a briefcase walked in. The door closed firmly behind him. He walked around the older man and the table, past the one-way mirror, and sat in the other chair.
The elderly man looked him over as he settled his briefcase on the floor. He noticed, as he had when they first met, the man’s weak chin, small nose and deep-set eyes. He was slightly clumsy as he thumbed open the clasp for the case and slipped out a card. He pushed the card at a slot in the side of the table, and finally got it in on the second try.
The table’s surface, a bright scenic panorama of a beautiful park, faded away and in its place was a black void, in which floated a number of folders with moving pictures on their covers. The man quickly organized the floating folders. His fingers dragged the images across the table into neat rows at his left.
When he finally settled he turned his attention across the table, “Mr. Dourney, I know we’ve gone over this a number of times already, but I would just like to go over this with you once more.”
The elderly man waited silently with his cuffed hands in his lap.
“Is that all right with you Mr. Dourney?”
“Why?” Dourney asked. “It’s not like you haven’t heard everything already.”
The man gestured at the mirror.
“What, new guests?” He turned his head slightly for a glance. He looked at his reflection for a moment before turning back to the man across from him. He reached up and scrubbed his white bristled cheek.
“Alright” He said finally.
“Thanks for your cooperation, Mr. Dourney.”
“That’s what I do. I help people.”
The man gave him an exasperated look from under his eyebrows as he leaned over the table and drug a folder from the top left corner of his neat row. He pulled the folder to the center of the table and using two fingers at the folders corners, enlarged it. Then, with a sharp tap, he opened the folder, revealing a number of legal documents. Dourney’s employment records among them.
“So why were you working at Birth Building Labs, Mr. Dourney?”
“I had rent to pay.”
“There are any number of jobs you could have taken. Why take this one?”
“They were the first to answer my application.”
“But Mr. Dourney, you hate BB Labs.”
“Yeah.”
“So why did you take the job?”
“In other words, you want to know if this was some sort of premeditated plot or something.”
“We just want to understand your motivations, Mr. Dourney.”
The old man rolled his eyes. “It’s honest truth. Look, yeah I hate those guys and their ‘business.’ Sure. But they’ve got halls to sweep like anybody else. Dirty bathrooms. It’s a steady job and it pays well enough for my needs. And yes, they were the first to respond to my application. I sent the d**ned things out to every business within walking distance.”
“So you had no criminal intentions?”
“Criminal? Hell no. Well, maybe in the back of my mind I was planning some closet raiding. You know the sort.” He snorted humorously. “I could always use free toilet paper.“
“You weren’t planning to get paid by anyone?”
Dourney smirked, “By the BB Labs.”
“I mean outside of the company.”
“I never talk to anybody.”
“You were never once propositioned by another source?”
“You know I never owned a computer. Hell, I don’t even own a telephone.”
“Then why did you do it?”
“I wanted to save him, that’s why.”
“And you didn’t plan it out beforehand?”
“Well, when I finally settled down to do it, I did, yeah. But not before I took the job.”
“Mr. Dourney I find that hard to believe.”
“That’s the problem with stuff that’s real. When you run into them, they hurt.”
“Fine. You didn’t plan anything ahead. Nobody paid you to do it. Why would you do something like that?”
“Told you. I wanted to save him.”
“You stole a two week old fetus from BB Labs and the fetus’ parents, to save it?”
“Yeah.”
The man shook his head. “I know I ask this every time we talk, Mr. Dourney. Please help me make sense of it this time. What do you mean when you say you wanted to ‘save’ the fetus?”
“You got a dictionary?”
The man groaned.
“’cause, if you don’t know the meaning of a word you just got to look it up.”
“Mr. Dourney…”
“Can’t remember off the top of my head, but I believe it means something like, ‘to protect from harm’ or something similar.”
“Mr. Dourney, please.”
Dourney raise a bushy white eyebrow at him.
The man rubbed his face. “What ‘harm’ do you mean to say would have befallen the fetus?”
“De-humanization.” Dourney said seriously. “He would have had his free-will, his choice, ripped from him. Ripped from the very building blocks of his being. That’s what ‘harm.’”
“But it’s nothing of the sort.” The man said. He double tapped the open folder to close it, then pulled over and opened another. Numerous pictures and video clips spilled out and floated around the table. The man shuffled through them before finding the right images. He pushed them in front of Dourney.
“You see this gene here?” He said, pointing at the image. “It’s a computer generated close-up of the gene sequence. It shares many similarities with the MAO gene.”
Dourney grimaced. “The so-called ‘criminal’ gene.”
“That’s its popular name, yes.”
Dourney placed one cuffed hand on the image and leaned over the table slightly. “No such thing.” He flicked his wrist and the image skittered back across the table.
“Perhaps not in the common misconception, no. It doesn’t ‘make’ anyone go out and steal, or become violent. Obviously. But it does provide the temptation. The drive.”
“Don’t B.S. me.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it, Mr. Dourney.” He shuffled a number of other images and video clips across the table. “Each of these are independent, privately funded researchers from the 2020s. Each one identified this distorted gene and its effects separately.”
“Anyone can claim to be an ‘expert’ if they’re rich enough to go to the right schools.” Dourney said, flicking the images back.
“Don’t be such a hard case, Mr. Dourney. You’re not as suspicious of education as you make yourself out to be.”
“That as may be, I still don’t believe it. Genes don’t work that way.”
“Look here,” the man said, enlarging a video clip before sliding it over. He tapped a square in the bottom right corner of the table and sound came to match the image of a doctor speaking in an interview.
“…It’s really quite extraordinary,” She said, “The gene acts in such a way that we might compare to brain-damage, only on a fundamental level. When the brain develops in a fetus, the gene interferes with normal brain development, causing signal misfires when the individual is fully developed. These misfires can trigger pleasure instead of pain, or pain instead of pleasure, thus causing a sort of reverse of the epistemic, or classical conditioning effect, in which the individual is rewarded for bad behavior and punished for good behavior. Naturally this would incline such an inflicted individual to act out in socially unacceptable manners. It doesn’t necessarily make criminals, as Dr. Suchang suggested. That idea died out in the late 20th Century. But rather it is the ultimate enabler of such behavior.”
The clip ended and Dourney flicked it back across the tabletop.
“So?” The man asked.
“So what? It’s rubbish.”
The man sighed.
Dourney leaned across the table further, his eyes lighting up with his first real emotion since the conversation began, “It strips a person of their individuality. It takes their natural humanity and tears it away.”
“It’s fixing a problem.”
“It’s brainwashing.”
“Oh, come now, Mr. Dourney. It’s no different from preventing paralysis or other diseases at the genetic level.”
“No! You, ‘come now.’ You’re content to just sit there and let corporations swindle naïve parents into paying the devil to take their children’s souls!”
“Calm down, Mr. Dourney.”
Dourney leaned back in his chair and put his hands back in his lap. His eyes were still burning, though. “I don’t care what idiot scientists said what in 2020, and I don’t care what you say now. It’s wrong.”
“It’s also perfectly legal.” The man said wearily.
“Mores the shame.”
“Shame or not, what you’ve done is a criminal offense.”
“If a man goes out looking for a mugger to take his money, who is the criminal?”
“BB Labs wasn’t asking you to steal from them, and neither was that fetus’ parents.”
“I wasn’t talking about them. I was talking about our d**ned government. Looking for ways to let corporations steal America’s soul.”
The man stared at Dourney for a moment in silence. Finally he said, “You really believe what you did was right.”
“Absolutely.”
“Even though the fetus died after you stole it?”
“Better that than the alternative.”
“Mr. Dourney, you don’t look like the murdering type to me.”
“I’m not.”
“You knew it couldn’t survive long outside the lab, and yet you stole it.”
Dourney grimaced.
“You killed that fetus.”
“I saved it.”
“You stole valuable property from a respectable health and sciences facility.”
“I saved him.”
The man shook his head. “You’re not an idiot, Mr. Dourney. Somehow you managed to slip a fetus out of a highly secure facility and avoid suspicion and capture for nearly a week.”
“It’s just timing.”
“Still. It shows you’re not an idiot. Yet there you are, sitting across a table covered in evidence to the contrary, denying reality.”
“Took the words right out of my mouth.”
“Don’t be childish, Mr. Dourney.”
Dourney shrugged.
The door to the room opened and another man in a nice suit beckoned from the doorway. Across the table the man stood up, “Excuse me for a moment Mr. Dourney.”
“Sure thing.”
The man left the room and the door shut with a clang.
Dourney stared down at the table’s surface. He avoided the images still floating about, and instead peered into the dark void beyond them. He kept looking, as if to spot something hidden there.
After a couple of minutes the door opened again, and his familiar questioner re-entered. For a moment the screen shifted over again to the rolling hills and butterflies. The man tapped a square in the corner and the void popped up again, the images floating abut lazily. He double tapped the folder and all the images rushed back inside and promptly closed. He shifted it back into his neat row and re-took his seat.
Folding his fingers together he set his elbows on the hard surface and leaned forward. His eyes watched Dourney’s for several moments. Finally he spoke, “The parents of the fetus want to press kidnapping and murder charges on you.”
The right side of Dourney’s mouth picked up in a sort of weak grin. “No good deed goes unpunished, huh?”
The man’s lips tightened.
Dourney waited a moment. “You said they want to.”
“Yes.”
There was silence again.
“They can’t. Can they.”
“No.” the man said with a small frown. “Under the Reed vs. Marbell decision of 2018, fetuses under six weeks old are not considered children, with the rights that status would entail.”
“So I’m free to go?”
The man gave a small unpleasant grin. “I’m sorry, but not entirely. You’re going to be tried in court, and I expect you’ll be hit with a pretty hefty fine for the theft of valuable Birth Building property and the loss of time sunk into that particular project, not to mention damages served to the fetus’ parents.”
“How much are we talking?”
“That’ll be up to a judge, no doubt.”
Dourney frowned. “Not even a ballpark estimate?”
“I’m not in the estimation business, Mr. Dourney.” He gestured at the window. The door opened and a police officer came in. “Please escort Mr. Dourney to a cell.”
The officer shook his head. “Nope. He’s going under house arrest for the moment.”
The man looked confused. “Why?”
“Elderly policy. Take it up with the chief.”
“I guess there’s some perks to being seventy-two.” Dourney grumbled.
The man sniffed. “Whatever.”
The policeman took Dourney by the arm, “Come on, sir. Officer Jackson’s going to bring the car around front.”
“Sure thing, officer.” Dourney said indifferently.
They all three walked to the front of the station in silence. When they exited into the front lobby a number of people glanced their way who were all milling about. One of the officers at the desk nodded to the officer escorting Dourney, and he nodded back.
They pushed out of the swinging door that separated the lobby from the workspace behind the desks.
The man stopped with a jerk as he recognized a couple who had just come in the front door. “What are they doing here?”
The woman spotted Dourney. “You!” She cried. “You killed my baby!”
Mr. Dourney threw up his hands to defend himself as the woman launched herself at him. The officer escorting Mr. Dourney grabbed the woman’s arms and tried to keep her at bay, but she struggled wildly. Her husband grabbed her around her waist and pulled her back. His eyes were locked hatefully onto Dourney.
“Why?” The woman cried. “Why’d you kill my baby?”
“I didn’t kill him!” Dourney protested. “I saved him!”
“You’re a monster.” The husband growled.
“I saved him. I saved him from the two of you.”
“Stop tormenting them, Mr. Dourney.” The man said in frustration. “You’ve hurt them enough, already.”
“They should be d**ned well grateful someone’s still got a little bit of sense around here.”
The officer turned, “Could you take him out of here?”
The man spluttered, “Me?”
“Just take him outside and make sure he doesn’t go anywhere. I’ll be right out after I settle these two down.”
The man looked at Dourney with a grimace. “Fine. Just hurry up, alright?”
The man and Dourney left the station and stepped out onto the wet pavement. The night was still lightly drizzling, and they each huddled in on themselves as they waited.
Dourney watched the man from the corner of his eyes for a minute. “They should be grateful.” He said.
The man remained silent.
“They should be happy.”
The drips from the rooftops of the city echoed around them. Dourney stared at the man for a moment longer and then stared up at the black sky and around at the shadowed streets.
“d**n well thank me, is what they should do.” He grumbled.
He glanced through the station’s window. The woman was sobbing into her husband’s chest. With red eyes he wearily stroked her hair while talking with the officer.
Dourney’s eyes darted back to the streets. Everywhere was darkness.
He shuffled his feet for a moment. He twisted around impatiently.
Finally he yelled out, “They should be grateful!”
Nothing answered.
“I saved him!” Drizzled rain dripped down Dourney’s cheeks. “I saved him!”