Get Blank (Fill in the Blank) Read online

  GET BLANK

  JUSTIN ROBINSON

  FILL IN THE _______ SERIES:

  Mr Blank

  Get Blank

  OTHER CANDLEMARK & GLEAM BOOKS BY JUSTIN ROBINSON:

  City of Devils

  First edition published 2014.

  Copyright © 2014 by Justin Robinson

  All rights reserved.

  Your purchase of this eBook license entitles you to read it for your own enjoyment. If you’d like to share with a friend, please purchase a copy for them!

  Respect the author’s rights — don’t pirate!

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, via digital transfer, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Published in the United States by Candlemark & Gleam LLC, Bennington, Vermont.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Or maybe that’s just what they want you to think.

  ISBN: 978-1-936460-57-1

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-936460-58-8

  Cover art and design by Kate Sullivan

  Book design and composition by Kate Sullivan

  Print edition typeface: Droid Serif

  Editor: Kate Sullivan

  www.candlemarkandgleam.com

  For Lauri.

  you are pot roast

  Table Of Contents

  [1]

  [2]

  [3]

  [4]

  [5]

  [6]

  [7]

  [8]

  [9]

  [10]

  [11]

  [12]

  [13]

  [14]

  [15]

  [16]

  [17]

  [18]

  [19]

  [20]

  [21]

  [22]

  [23]

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  [1]

  I’M RETIRED.

  Not sure how many times I have to say that. And it’s not like I’m saying it to anyone else. Who would even believe me? At my age, there’s no way I’m rich enough to retire unless I’m some kind of internet billionaire. I’m not. I’ve checked. And there’s the fact that I still have a job, actually, just not the completely insane plethora of jobs I used to have. Only a few people know about that, and they know all about the retirement thing, too. So really, I shouldn’t have to keep saying it. But there it is, all part of the internal monologue, delivered in a weary fisherman’s cadence like so much Morgan Freeman narration. It plays in my mind every time something weird comes a-knocking at my door.

  So, pretty much every other day.

  I always thought my old life was all my fault. Like if I’d never answered that ad on Craigslist asking for security guards, I might have a normal life. I wouldn’t know all the things I know or have seen all the things I’ve seen. I’d live one of those lives of quiet desperation I’ve heard such good things about. I’d be married to a hot woman who hated me, I’d have two kids who hated me, and I’d have a dog who… well, he wouldn’t hate me, but he’d suspect, somewhere in the back of his canine cranium, that he could do a little better. I’d work in an office, I’d have high cholesterol, and I could die in a workplace shooting. You know, the American Dream.

  Nope. Turns out I have a giant “kick me” sign on my back only legible to the homicidal, desperate, and whatever Cosmic Tricksters are manifesting themselves these days as digital deities. They can read it—hell, they can sniff it out for miles and miles—and they come to me like I’m the only Maglite blazing in an endless field of moths.

  Oh, god. Why did I have to say moths? Okay, I’ll get to that, too.

  I left town. Took to the roads. Pulled up stakes and cut all ties. I got the fuck out while the getting was more or less good. And it hasn’t helped. It’s like anyone who has an insurance scam on their minds, lost a piece of Templar treasure, or just had a good old-fashioned dimensional rift manifest in their backyard somehow finds me and wants to hire me to be a fall guy/track down the gold falcon/ask those tentacled abominations to keep it down because some people have work in the morning. It’s like the Collective Unconscious knows—and yeah, not only is that a real thing, it’s one of the more powerful Communist groups out there—where I am, what I’m doing, and I’m the only one who can help.

  When I made a break for it, I thought the groups I’d stabbed in the back most dramatically would come looking for some payback. I could at least plan for a revenge scenario. I knew my Rogue’s Gallery. I had their numbers. I was more or less ready for one of them to say howdy. But no, it couldn’t possibly be something that straightforward. There were entirely new faces trying to draw me into some byzantine plot that no one really understands.

  But it’s like I said. I’m retired.

  You misplaced the Koh-i-Noor Diamond? That’s your problem, and I will not find it for ten percent of the market price or its equivalent in lead. You need someone to ambush your husband on his way home from work and make it look like an accident? I don’t care how that anklet looks on you, find a different patsy. Oh, your insurance pays double if you get eaten by an orca while on fire? I will not help you make that happen. You got a rogue Merovingian who needs drying out? I’ve got an ass that needs kissing.

  It’s like I’m the Make a Wish Foundation for sociopaths.

  That’s why I moved away, goddamn it. That’s my I left my city behind. Get a little peace and quiet. Stop dealing with the insanity of the true masters of the world. Unplug from the Information Underground. Stop with the errands, stop being an accessory to terrible things, stop helping horrible people run the world from the shadows. Live a life I could live with.

  I tried. I really did. But the universe wasn’t done with me. Take last Tuesday. Please. (Sorry, but Tuesday really was a lousy day.) The funny—not funny ha ha, more funny uh oh, as the man said—thing about it, was I could pick almost any day. Every other day I was getting propositioned. I was like a hooker whose only clientele consisted of the criminally insane. I was at the local train station—all right, yeah, first mistake, you don’t hang out in a train station unless you want to get involved in a shootout, a fatal misunderstanding, or some light espionage. But there’s this taco stand right outside, and they do their carne asada Baja style, by which I mean it tastes like everything has been soaked in lime, and if I don’t eat there once a week, I begin to question the entire purpose of my existence. So I’m sitting on one of the benches in this tiled Spanish station, eating tacos, and listening to the tap-tap-tapping of the juice falling into the butcher paper on my lap and thinking that this was the sort of situation when someone would proclaim, “This is the life.”

  Which, of course, is right when the man with the drooping eye and slouching fedora slid onto the bench next to me. He was dressed like a colorized photo of Jay Gatsby’s creepy uncle. The pencil-thin mustache alone would have prevented him from coming within a hundred yards of a school. The suit looked brand new, even though it hadn’t been in style since booze was illegal. He dropped a broken-in paper sack, really more wrinkle than bag at that point, the kind that has never once contained something wholesome, onto the bench beside us.

  “Deliver it to the Pea Soup Anderson’s in Solvang. Payment is...”

  “Nope,” I said.


  “Huh?”

  “You clearly think I’m going to take that bag to someone. Why? Did you hear that your contact would be wearing black Chuck Taylors and dripping taco juice all over the place?”

  “Um... well...”

  “Yeah, right. Not me. Now fuck off.”

  “Look here, friend, I’ve...”

  “...got a gun? That’s adorable. I’m betting whoever needs what’s in that bag—and notice how I’ve not asked what’s in there, thus demonstrating the depths of my not-giving-a-fuck?—really wants it. Enough to hire a guy who looks like he molested Al Capone to deliver it to a train station on the last stop before the Central Coast. Well, if you give it to me, I’m caught in a whole mistaken identity plot, I’ll find your body with a bullet to the head right at the end of the second act—you know, to show me how deep I’m in it—and I’ll have to come up with some kind of eleventh-hour save that puts the bad guys in prison and keeps my blood on the inside of my skin. Well, I’m not interested. Sounds like fun and all, but no thanks. I’m going to eat my taco, and then I’m getting back to work.”

  “Are you...”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.” I took a bite of taco. “Also, there’s a guy at the other side of the terminal who kind of looks like me if you squint really hard and maybe suffer from fetal alcohol syndrome. And he’s waving at you.”

  I pointed. The other guy held out his arms with a semi-panicked, “What the hell, man?” look on his face. The guy with the mustache picked up the bag.

  “If you tell anyone about this...”

  “You think I want it getting out that I look like that guy?”

  Pencil-Thin Mustache left me alone after that, and I went back to work, and tried not to think about whatever illicit rendezvous had gone down at lunch.

  Or take the very next day when I was trying close up shop, when a woman—the kind who might as well be wearing a t-shirt proclaiming GENTLEMEN LOCK UP YOUR PENISES—slithered into my store with the kind of skill it usually takes several years of training in a monastery with a ninja master to accomplish. I swear to god, she got through a closed door. She was some kind of rockabilly goddess, with a halter top showing off an uneasy detente between cleavage and tattoos. She smelled like cinnamon, and wanted me to be damn sure of that fact as she leaned to tickle my ears with her breath.

  “Do you know about the Hentai Am?” she whispered.

  Of course I did. The pornographic anime in which the chief animator supposedly attained perfect enlightenment halfway through and now had the habit of reducing unsuspecting masturbators to gibbering madness.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s in town... and all I need is... help obtaining it.” She somehow discovered a way to close even more distance with me. If she got any closer, we were going to discover some new kind of fusion bomb fueled entirely by hormonal flesh and whispered entendres.

  “You’ve got the wrong guy, lady. I’m closed.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Yeah, I’m getting that, and the last person who touched me like that was testing for a hernia.”

  She blinked. “What?”

  “Shop’s closed, sister. Now get the hell out before I have you busted for trespassing.”

  She slapped me, but I don’t think her heart was really in it.

  Two days later, right before the Cosmic Trickster decided to really wind up and punt my crotch into orbit, I had another one. It was a Friday evening and I was getting ready for my girlfriend to arrive. I was at the local market trying to decide on wines, which mostly consisted of me squinting at the labels and pretending I knew what they meant. “The Safety Dance” echoed over the PA while outside the rain clattered off cars and pavement. Now, I’ve got nothing against Men Without Hats and I’ve worked for their one-world agenda in the past, but it did cut into the ambience of the rainstorm.

  Anyway, I reached into a gap between bottles, positive I was going to bring out something with a label that said, “Perfect Romantic Wine; Not Too Heavy or Pretentious; And Tell Me All About Your Day.” Instead I got a dusty bottle in one of those woven casks with a melted candle cork. It looked like the kind of thing Kiefer Sutherland would have given me to drink in an abandoned hotel while mulleted vampires girlishly skipped around me. While I was staring at it and wondering how the thing had found its way into a Vons, a grinding sound came from the shelves and they retracted to reveal a staircase down.

  The aisle was empty. Just this yawning darkness, barely lit with guttering candles. Chanting sounds snaked up to me. The smells were just as culty, and I swear I could see cloaked and hooded figures moving through the firelight.

  I put the wine back and picked up a local merlot.

  Like I said, retired. I wasn’t going to get involved in a goddamn thing, no matter how much the universe seemed to want me to. I was going to hunker down and live a life I could describe to someone without a security clearance. But no. The Cosmic Trickster had other ideas.

  God, he’s a dick.

  It started the very next Tuesday, right as I was in the middle delivering of a civics lecture.

  “There are actually four branches of government,” I said from my position on the step stool where I was alphabetizing the witchcraft section of my bookstore. “The executive, the legislative, the judicial, and the prejudicial.”

  “Are you certain?” Khaali asked, her Somali accent making her sound so earnest.

  “Only four they’re going to test you on,” I said. “The legislative makes the laws, the executive enacts the laws, the judicial interprets the laws, and the prejudicial ignores the laws. It’s a delicate system.” I peered at the shelf. “Are we out of the De Vermis Mysteriis again?”

  Khaali leafed through her textbook. “I sold one to a man the other day.”

  Couldn’t keep that one on the shelves. If I didn’t know better, I’d think there was a whole coven of witches in the area, but that was silly. They were out near Bakersfield. Good thing, too, since my store had the largest occult, history, and occult history section in the continental United States, not including Alaska (thanks a lot, Books, Sects, and Secret Masters of Anchorage).

  “Prejudicial?” she asked again.

  “Arguably the most important branch.”

  Khaali looked up from her citizenship exam like I was the crazy one here. “I don’t think that’s right,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s no mention of a prejudicial branch anywhere.” She paged through her book as though to check one last time, just to be certain.

  “They’re not going to come right out and say it. Defeats the whole purpose.”

  She shook her head. “All right. What does the Constitution do?”

  “Uh... let’s see. Defines the government and our basic rights as Americans. Provides loopholes for the Secret Masters. Oh, and determines hit point bonus per level.”

  “That can’t be right.”

  “Trust me. Come on, give me another.”

  “How many Constitutional amendments are there?”

  “Sixty-five.”

  “It says twenty-seven here.”

  I laughed. It came out a little nasally what with the bandage over my nose. Don’t worry—I had been beaten up by a book. “Right. Pull the other one.”

  “Do you know anything about your country, Mr. Blank?”

  That’s what she thought my name was. Robert Blank. It might as well be, legally speaking. I have a driver’s license under that name. A birth certificate and a library card, too. A membership to the local Elk’s Lodge and a card that says if I eat three more subs at Gaetano’s, I get the next one free. Amazon, Netflix, and Hotmail all know me by that name. Yeah, I even have an email that goes right to me, and it’s pretty easy to guess the username once you realize that I’d have to add numbers to the back half since just about everything is taken at this point. Besides, if I didn’t have one, how would I know about all these exciting new ways to increase my sexual potency?

 
Is it the name I was born with? Oh, hell no. I can barely remember that, and it’s not like anyone else is using it. My mother doesn’t talk so well anymore and who the hell knows where my father is. But for all intents and purposes it’s mine, and it’s the only name I use these days. And honestly, the only thing that made it truly part of me was having someone important to call me by it.

  I used to have more names than anyone really needs. So many I lost track of them. Ask a Freemason and he’ll tell you I’m Colin Reznick. One of the ladies of V.E.N.U.S. would say Jonah Bailey. A Satanist would call me Sam Smiley, unless he’s the other kind of Satanist, in which case I’m Eli Simms. The ascetorexics over at the Anamadim Temple think I’m Ivan Cohen, and the Illuminati call me Daniel Isringhausen. They’re all real in that they each correspond to a flesh-and-blood person with a digital footprint and a paper spine. Each name has favorite haunts and Facebook accounts and a favorite video on YouTube of a puppy. They each have acquaintances, cronies, well-wishers, and contemporaries. They were as real as anyone else is in this world, and about a year ago they all died.

  It was an unceremonious death, and there were no bodies. They joined that terrifyingly large number of people in the world who just up and vanish. Probably around six months ago, people who knew them began to realize the poor bastards weren’t coming back.

  I left Los Angeles a year ago, leaving the names in a shallow grave. A figurative one, mind; the IDs were still as valid as they ever were. I didn’t update their various social networking pages, I stopped using their phones and their credit cards, and I abandoned the champion bar trivia team Hyperactive Crime Scene. I introduced myself as “Call me Bob,” and I cultivated a handshake that would make Roger Sterling proud.

  I stepped down from the ladder. “Way too goddamn much, Miss Barre.”