Excited Delirium Chapter 70: Aftershocks (Get Garamond)
Author’s Note: The following is Chapter 70 of the my online book “Excited Delirium”. Please post comments. Please tell your friends about this story. If you’ve missed a chapter, please click here for Chapter 1 (Prelude) or here for the full index.
“I have something to tell you,” Diana said to Kite once she pulled him aside.
“Go for it. I don’t think anything can surprise me any more,” Kite responded frankly.
“I’m surprised you haven’t wondered at my connections and my desire to explore and expose the OMNINet, have you?” she queried.
“I did. For a nanosecond. Most of the people that hire me don’t want me to ask questions about who they are or what they do. They just want me to do what they ask. And they don’t want me to ask anything of them after we’ve agreed on rates.”
“Fair enough,” Diana answered thoughtfully. “But I think it’s about time that you discovered what my motive is with this.”
“OK. If you really want me to know. I mean, we’re not playing Halloween anymore. No masks. So we might as well have no lies.”
“Well, it all starts with someone that I was dating once,” she started.
Kite had to work very hard not to roll his eyes. The stories always went like this and they never changed: she’s bitter about someone with OMNINet, she hates them, she destroys the company by proxy, thereby destroying everything the company dude stands for. Sub in ‘golden fleece’ or “Troy’ for ‘company’ and the story has been repeated for the last six or seven thousand years.
“Sure. It usually does,” he tried to say as seriously as possible. He couldn’t help being a smart ass. It was a defensive play that came to him naturally to protect him from the history of verbal and more often, physical abuse he’d received as a quasi-nerd.
“Anyways, I uh … I used to date this guy who works for OMNINet today. Actually, I was made to. He was brutal and cruel and I felt had to stomach the relationship because my father wanted me to date him. I tolerated this stupidity because I was young and insecure. I was not an attractive girl when I was a teen and I felt like it was something that I should abide by.”
“Wow. Harsh.” Kite was starting to see something of himself in Diana. He was starting understand that he wasn’t alone with having a shitty youth and wasn’t the only person growing up who was surrounded by know-it-all jock bullies.
“Anyways, my father decided that his actions constituted their own version of divine intervention and he believed that our child would be the Chosen One or the second coming of the Messiah.”
“Jesus Christ!” Kite yelled out loud, not picking up on the irony of his exclamation. “Talk about delusions of grandeur!”
Diana couldn’t help but crack a grin. “I pulled you aside because I finally felt comfortable telling you this, although I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out earlier. Really: if you pulled to a distance in what’s been happening, you should have seen it coming for miles,” she offered, giving him a chance to digest what she was getting at.
“Holy shit!” He blurted out. “You’re Garamond’s daughter!” Kite concluded after a few moments pause.
“Yeah. Unfortunately. Sometimes, I feel like I’m the daughter of the most evil man on the planet. He does everything in the name of religion and takes and takes and takes. Rarely does he give, unless it translates to a good PR opportunity.”
“Man, I’ve gotta let this brew for a few minutes. I honestly had no idea. I thought you were just some pissed off employee or girlfriend of a dude who put in too much time on the desk with his hot co-worker. I had no idea you were … connected.”
“Well, OK, but let’s not dwell on it for too long,” Diana said, somewhat impatiently, realizing that they had a lot of work to do.
“But what about the dude? Who was that?”
“Take a wild guess.”
“It wasn’t Eddie was it?”
“Are you kidding? I’d get more pregnant humping a post in the winter-time that I would if I were to hook up with Manchester.”
Kite chuckled. “Yeah … you’ve got him nailed.”
“Well, technically, not,” she said, smirking back.
“OK. This could go on all night. Who’s. The. Dude?” Kite said, putting a staccato punch on each word.
“Hadlock. Simon Hadlock. He was supposed to be my husband and ‘divine intervener’. Luckily, he was far from it and we never had a child. I left him and I haven’t spoken to my father since.”
“And here I am right in the middle of a Greek tragedy,” Kite joked as he started to understand the full consequences of his employer’s wishes.
[Author’s Note: I conceived of this plot component in 2006 and wrote most of these chapters into the story of ‘Excited Delirium’ during the course of 2007. I was stunned like the rest of the world when a tragic earthquake struck the province of Sichuan on May 12, 2008. Please believe me that I do not want to ‘profit’ from the suffering that the hundreds of thousands in this quake experienced. I remind all readers that this is a work of fiction and that my goals are to speak to the symbolic reference that’s used in the numerology along with the viewpoint of one fictional cult concerning the fate of the Chinese.]
(Note: “Excited Delirium” is a work of fiction. Any person, place or thing depicted in this work of fiction is also a work of fiction. Any relation of these subjects or characters to real locations, people or things are an unintentional coincidence.)
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Excited Delirium by Liam Young is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License .
Based on a work at www.exciteddelirium.ca .