Fiction

As my date laughed, the crow's feet by her eyes widened from lines to full crevasses, like a river having carved out little ravines. Certainly, by the look of her forty-two years, she had been born in a prior geologic age. But then, so had I.

She had just uttered some quip about a college internship, which I missed because my attention had been diverted by a young waitress, with a very tight figure, performing the bee dance with her ass. The waitress waddled along provocatively to some other table holding several full plates in one hand, but my date's eyes had slow-blinked in laughter at just that moment. I don't think she noticed.

So that's how they got Litvinenko.

It was a bit thicker than a thread of hair; no longer than a BB pellet; dead black, with little spindly appendages wiggling and grasping about upwards. He rolled the device between his thumb and forefinger until it was but a thin reddish smear.

I survived! This time. Miniature bots. Nanobots. They can be bugs, parasites watching and listening to every second of your life. Or killers, filled with Polonium 239. Tiny things designed to attach and listen until they're told to exercise extreme prejudice. That's how they kill these days. Christ I need a cigarette.

SLiGO pub, what a shithole. Situated on a dead end street between a dilapidated triple-decker and a refuse filled empty lot, it's a one story windowless box slathered in grimy stucco veneer. In front, blowing trash and empty liquor bottles litter a crumbling cement sidewalk and pothole filled asphalt road. Interspersed along the street, the empty metal frames of several decayed cars lay torn asunder, like bones picked clean by vultures - scattered debris, deteriorating in the elements. At the entrance, the pub's only sign is a warning that reads 21 and Over; regulars learn the name as if by osmosis.