Da Vinci on the Lam
(By B.D. Booker)
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| Author | B.D. Booker |
Chapter One
Artis Quinn picked up a bullet, pinching it between his index finger and thumb. It was small in his scarred, weathered hand and the brass casing glinted under the harsh fluorescent light. Lifting his revolver, Quinn slid the bullet into a chamber, locked the cylinder in place, then slapped it. Mesmerized, he watched the cylinder spin round before clicking to a stop.
Quinn set the revolver on the dining table and reached for a kettle spewing steam. He didn’t have to get out of his seat—in his small trailer everything sat within arm’s reach. He poured the instacafe into a chipped and faded mug. The coffee almost smelled real, reminiscent of the brew his parents used to make. Real coffee, could you imagine? He drank. It tasted like coffee but muted.
Sagging into the tattered foam bench, Quinn picked up a paper-thin reading tablet and paged through a news site. A food riot had broken out in Guatemala, over a thousand dead. A new strain of flu plagued India with doctors projecting a three percent case fatality rate. Japan offered free housing to anyone who’d move there, but who cared? Only food mattered and Japan had no more than anywhere else. Quinn’s stomach grumbled so he took another sip of coffee.
He continued flipping through pages until a headline caught his eye: the annual suicide rate had reached fifty-three people per ten thousand. In his parents’ day, that rate would have never topped two. Since then, suicide had emerged as the fourth leading cause of death, trailing only respiratory diseases, malnutrition, and cancer.
Quinn picked up his revolver, put the cold steel to his temple, and pulled the trigger.”
