The Ilium Obligation (A Matt Savage Adventure) Chapter 18

[seymoure]

Continuing

 

“There is only one day left, always starting over:

it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
-Jean-Paul Sartre

 

We gathered in the ruination of our offices.

They had been so new, so streamlined. They were the kind of place that took us from being gumshoes of the Noir School to high tech investigators that could have worked for U.N.C.L.E.

I am normally not attached to things. That much of a hippie was understandable to me.

When all of my personal belongings were destroyed so recently, it was not a devastating part of that adventure. I felt bad that books had been burned, but that was because it is always sad when possible knowledge is lost. But you could have torched every article of clothing I had ever owned and no tear would have found its way to my eye. Clothes, shoes, furniture, none of these are something I find myself attached to. That might change if something had some kind of historic, sentimental connection for me. If it was the table my Grandmother had used to can her homemade apple butter, I might find it hard to lose. But I doubt it. The thought filled any hole that might present itself.

But here was our move forward.

That was what was gone, and that was saddening.

Not that every bit of it wasn’t insured. (It is amazing how people who can afford insurance are often the people who could afford to lose things anyway) My agent said they could replace everything within the next four months, if the building was inspected and deemed solid enough for habitation.

Rayleen and Hugo were digging through bullet-ridden cabinets to retrieve files.

I was staring out the windows. So many shattered panes of glass.

I smiled when I realized that all the interior glass was blown inward, while the exterior windows were exploded outward.

Then there was a sound I didn’t know. You always find it disconcerting when unfamiliar sounds follow you into places where you should know all the sounds present.

Rayleen jumped up and found the jerry-rigged phone system and answered it.

A short, staccato conversation was ended when she hung up and said to me, “The police are still trying to get someone over here. There was a spate of bomb threats starting about 15 minutes before our attack.”

“Diversion,” I said.

“One at the Sheriff’s Office, another at The American Royal offices and one at the Union Station,” she said. “Then, a couple of minutes later, they blew up a car in the University Library Parking lot.”

“So they had to take them all seriously,” Hugo mused.

“All the threats were delivered the same way and in the same handwriting,” she told us.

“Where are these people from?” I asked.

A piece of glass shattered as it fell to the floor.

We were in well over our heads.

© C. Wayne Owens
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