The Stickmen Read Online Free PDF Page B

tentacles happily encircled Garrett’s neck on a daily
basis. He had no choice but to simply live with it—just as a
ditch-digger lived with calluses and a street prostitute lived with
subjugation—because it was part of Garrett’s turf, and nobody was
putting a gun to his head to walk on it. He walked it because he
chose to, because he chose to pursue the truth behind the Big Lie.
The shammers were just mosquitoes on a hot, humid day. Garrett
didn’t like them, but he swatted them off just the same.
    Garrett’s mother had died when he was
ten—spinal meningitis. It took Garrett five years to get over
it…and then, when he was fifteen, his father had died—heart attack
tumor. Just like that, that fast. Good quality middle-class life in
Wheaton, Maryland, good schools, good upbringing, never wanted for
anything—then poof! It was all gone.
    And it had all happened so fast, the young
Garrett didn’t know which end of the world was up. His father’s
only brother had taken him in for the high school years, and
Garrett’s constant honor-roll status had gotten him a scholarship.
Four more years of close to a 4.0 average had set Garrett up
right—or should have. He’d done everything right, in spite of
losing his parents. Since his parents had died, he’d always felt a
deepening hole in his heart, but then he looked around and saw the
schizos on the street picking cigarette butts out of gutter cracks,
all the people in motorized wheelchairs who drooled uncontrollably
and couldn’t even hold their heads up straight, and the typical
“bums” who sat in alleys like piles of human rot.
    All Garret had to do was look at those poor,
destitute people to realize that his life, in spite of its traumas,
was too bad at all. Sure, his mother and died and his father had
died, but some force of fate or God or luck had kept him whole and
sane and walking. Garrett felt like the luckiest guy on earth when
he saw what life had bestowed upon certain others. Earthquakes
wiped out tens of thousands in a single minute. Genocidal wars
claimed millions in months. Weighed against all of those
brutal truths, Garrett knew that he’d been dealt some damn good
cards.
    In college, he’d hung in there and made it. Hard work, focus, studying when everyone else was
slamming beers at the Student Union (Garrett had only slammed them
on weekends). His major in computer engineering opened an influx of
doors. But then Garrett had done the least logical thing.
    He’d enlisted.
    He’d joined the Air Force.
    He needed more experience. He needed more life. For him, the standard pattern of high school, college,
and solid mainstream job didn’t make it. There’d always been
something missing. He didn’t know what but he just knew.
    And that’s when he’d started hacking into
encrypted databases…
    That’s what had put the match to the fuse of
his current plight, and made him what he was today…
    It was just that some days were better than
others.
    He left his sour grapes at the bookstore
window, and now, in jeans, and a crumpled black t-shirt that read
SYSTEMS BRANCH: USAF, paused on Connecticut Avenue to light a
cigarette, frowning at its stale taste. With the feds raising
tobacco taxes every other month, Garrett was forced to buy generics
made with tobacco from Indonesia. Twenty-five bucks a carton for
this crap, he sputtered to himself. Pretty soon I won’t even
able to afford to light a match. But at least he knew his taxes
were going to a good cause: J-STAR targeting satellites and the B-3
Bomber.
    The downtown lunch-hour rush packed the
sidewalks and streets. Well-dressed men and women hustled through
the crowds for their power lunches. Car horns from slogged traffic
brayed like irate mechanical beasts. At the corner Garrett passed
an x-rated movie house and at the same time could see the Lincoln
Memorial in the distance. Skin flicks and politics all wrapped up
in the same charming city. He wondered if Abe was ever tempted to
get off his