Obligatory Warning:

Don’t read this warning message! It will only steal your time and annoy you. There is no important message, no valid information, no funny joke at the end, or anything that will make sense. If you have read this far, you are close to realizing that you wasted your time. Life is short and now it just got shorter. If you believe in reincarnation, please consider this a lesson you can bring into your next life.

NaNo?

It's NaNo worst curse. I want to write anything BUT NaNo.

So.

An Original Ficlet

WARNING FOR SWEAR WORDS AND VIOLENCE! RATED T / PG-13!!

Unedited, sorry.

--T minus five minutes, thirty seconds

Carrie screamed her head off to the loud blare of her music, banging her hands on her steering wheel and bobbing her head as she wove through traffic. Cars kept jumping in front of her on the crowded highway, but Carrie simply flipped them off and continued her screeched singing, uncaring about the fact that she’d cut them off first. She had all sorts of issues that day and the singing and controllable driving was helping.

She never heard her phone ring – it would have been nearly impossible with the steady thrum of her moded sound system – but she felt the vibrations against her thigh. Wrinkling her nose for a moment, she finally decided to answer. Twisting the sound down to nonexistence, she grabbed her phone and pressed it to her ear.

“What?” she demanded.

“If you hang up, you’ll die.”

Carrie blinked at the phone, her forehead wrinkling. “What the hell?” she said. The voice was modified and crackled, sounding like a strange male-female combination. “Who the fuck are you?”

The voice chuckled. “I’m the one who put a bomb in your car.”

“Shit, right.” Carrie laughed and shook her head. “Who is this? Dale? This isn’t at all funny-“

“Check your back seat.”

She scowled at being interrupted, but swiveled her head around and glanced backwards. The floor of her backseat was piled high with small boxes labeled ‘C4 explosives’. Wires jumbled from box to box, centered on a metal box with a blinking red light.

Twisting back forwards, she swore violently, no longer doubting the mysterious caller’s words but not understanding what was going on. “Shit. What the hell do you want?”

“I want you to live.” There was a crackling pause on the phone. “Do you want to live?”

“Fuck yes.”

“Then I suggest you not hang up on me. The bomb will automatically detonate if we loose contact.” There was another odd-sounding chuckle. “If you do exactly as I say, you’ll survive this little endeavor. Deviate, even for a moment, and you’ll die a fiery death.”

The fingers on Carrie’s free hand clenched tightly around her steering wheel. “What do you want me to do?”

“Drive. Normally – more normally than you usually do, Carrie.”

She shuddered violently when the voice said her name. Suddenly, the voice had taken on a slimy tone and it made her feel dirty to have her name be said.

“If you get stopped by the police, you’ll die instantly. If you attract attention, you’ll be dead. Don’t make me detonate the bomb, Carrie. I want you to live. But it’s your choice.”

Swear words tumbled from her mouth as she slowed down slightly and stopped her eccentric weaving. Her hands trembled a little, trying to figure out what to do. Turn on her emergency flashers? Drive to a police station?

Every plan she came up with, she threw back out. If the person on the phone found out, she’d be blown to pieces.

“You’re coming up on the Rice Street exit. Take it and take a right towards downtown St. Paul.”

She flinched at the sudden return of the voice. “Downtown?” she repeated even as she put on her blinker to take the exit. “What’s there?”

“The Judicial Center.”

“You’re going to fucking blow up the Judicial Center?” her voice rose with every word.

“We’re going to blow it up, dear Carrie, and we’re both going to survive through it, correct?”

Her head bobbed slightly, not paying any attention to the fact that the voice couldn’t see her nod. Her heart was racing and she was struggling to catch her breath when she took the exit and pulled up the stoplight, the voice said, “You’re doing good, Carrie. Remember – turn right.”

“How do you know where I am?” she asked, waiting for the light to turn green with a sort of dread.

“There’s a GPS unit in your vehicle.” Carrie flipped her head around to look for it, caught by the blinking red light. “The light is green.”

The lunch-hour traffic honked and beeped as she carefully edged her way onto Rice Street and drove, white-knuckled, down the busy road. “I don’t want to do this,” she whispered. The carefree attitude of only a minute ago was long gone and barely a memory.

“I’m aware. Right on University, then right on Cedar. I’m sure you know the way, you used to work there.”

Carrie flinched a little. “How do you know that?” she demanded.

“I know a lot about you,” the voice laughed as she turned on University Avenue. “You were a file clerk for the DA. You had an affair with him, which led your job to be terminated and you found a new one at a McDonalds. It pays less, but the ‘benefits’ from your boss are still there. You wear a size twelve, you have a thing for blue underwear, and your dog died last night.”

“What the fuck?”

“You just brought your dog to the vet to be cremated and forgot to lock your car. Turn here.”

Carrie almost dropped her phone at that, barely remembering to turn onto Cedar Street. “You put a bomb in my car while I was burying my dog?”

“Yes.”

“Fucking bastard.”

“It’s ‘fucking bitch’ actually, but would you park your car in the open space you’re coming up to?”

She stopped her car when she saw the unlikely open spot right in the front of the court building. “How the hell…”

The voice seemed willing to talk, cutting her off and answering her half-asked question. “It’s a reserved space. The man who belongs in this spot had car trouble this morning and had to take a taxi. Park and don’t hit the other cars this time.”

Slowly maneuvering her way into the space, ignoring the shark honks and shouts from the people she was blocking. Parallel parking wasn’t high on her ‘good at’ list at a good time, much less when she was being threatened with death if she screwed up – especially since one had was being used to hold onto her phone. When she finally got the car in the right spot, Carrie sank back against her seat, staring at the steering wheel and the sweaty marks from her hand.

“Turn the car off and listen carefully.”

The car rattled to a stop almost without instantly.

“This is your last direction – if you do it correctly, you’ll walk away from this alive. When I’m done talking, you’ll leave your phone in your car and get out of here. I have a gun pointed at your head. If you even so much as breathe the word ‘bomb’ to anyone, I’ll stick a slug between your eyes. Leave the phone, stay quiet.”

Carrie nodded and said nothing.

“When I hang up, a thirty-second timer will automatically set on the bomb. I suggest you run, if you want to live.” There was a second of silence. “Thank you for helping.”

Her phone trilled, the sound of the connection being lost, and Carrie sat perfectly still for a moment. One last time, her brain was trying to convince her that this couldn’t be happening. Not to her. Not in Minnesota.

But then she was moving. She barely remembered to close the door as she raced down the street. Her feet hit the pavement and she shoved people out of the way, counting in her head. She raced past an older man, a woman carrying a child, a baby in a stroller, a pair kissing against a wall.

Tears were prickling at her eyes. She wanted to scream, to warn them, but she couldn’t open her mouth. She didn’t want to die – not today. Not on a fucking Monday.

When she hit thirty seconds with no boom, she slowed and glanced over her shoulder. Then came to slow stop, staring back at her car almost a block away and panting. Doubts started to creep into her thoughts as moments passed. Had it been a joke after all? Had she just been punked? Had the bomb simply failed to go off?

She was still wondering when the car exploded. A huge flash of light as the C4 – which had been packed under all the seats and filled the trunk – obliterated everything in its way. Carrie barely had time to flinch before a well-aimed dagger of glass slashed through the air and slammed into her throat.

She gurgled and collapsed to the ground, blood fountaining out of her. Clutching at her throat, she didn’t notice the second shard of glass until it was buried between her eyes.

--

--T plus five seconds

In a small room in one of the buildings across the street, a figure loaded another bit of glass into a strange-looking gun and sighted down the barrel. The prone, bloody Carrie didn’t move as the person debated the better-safe-than-sorry versus the overkill aspect. It wouldn’t do to have Carrie survive this escapade, but a third piece of glass strategically placed in one body would begin to tick even a dense coroner’s senses.

Finally the wave of debris and smoke masked Carrie’s body, and the figure straightened with a sigh. She turned to look at the destruction caused by her bomb, leaning out the shattered window to gaze down the street. Hundreds of heads were poking out of windows, staring down at the smoke-shrouded destruction.

She could almost hear the collective thoughts of the lemming-like workers. “What happened? Will it happen again? What should I do?” she imagined them shrieking in their minds. It caused a small smile to appear on her face.

Quietly beginning to dismantle her shrapnel gun and stowing it into her bag, the bomber hummed softly to herself. When it was all carefully packed, she let herself out of the room and down a flight of stairs. Before she stepped into the screaming masses of people on the street, she opened her phone.

“Turn on the news,” she told the person who answered, her voice blunt and distorted by the voice modulator. “I expect the money to be in my account by sunset.” Without waiting for a response, she closed the phone, wiped it on a rag, and tossed it into a nearby garbage can.

Ten seconds later, she was gone.

-Cori