Story code: ST-001914
Part 2: Severance
Arthur kept his knees planted firmly in the damp grass, his hands raised in perfect compliance. The spotlight pinned him like a specimen on a slide. He blinked through the blinding glare as the heavy thud of boots rushed him. A rough hand gripped his shoulder, shoving him face-first into the frost-crisped lawn.
“Hands behind your back! Do it now!”
Arthur complied smoothly, ignoring the freezing wetness seeping through his fleece robe and pajama shirt. The cold steel of handcuffs ratcheted tightly around his wrists, pinching the skin. “Officer,” Arthur said, his voice measured and calm, projecting the authority of a senior regional director. “The weapon is secured on the grass to my left. The intruder advanced rapidly in the dark. I feared for my life.”
“Shut up,” the officer snapped, dragging Arthur to a kneeling position.
Arthur felt a flutter of irritation. This was not how the interaction was supposed to go. He had followed the protocol. He was the victim here.
Past the blinding halo of the cruisers’ spotlights, chaos erupted. The woman who had thrown herself from the rogue sedan was screaming, a raw, ragged sound that tore through the suburban quiet. She scrambled past a younger officer who tried to intercept her, slipping on the wet asphalt and landing hard on her knees near the rear tire of the idling delivery van.
“David! Oh my god, David!”
Arthur turned his head slightly. The officers had illuminated the space behind the van with their flashlights. The pooling black fluid Arthur had noticed earlier was now stark, bright crimson under the LED beams. The dark shape was a man in a navy blue jacket. A jacket with a familiar embroidered logo on the chest.
Arthur’s breath caught in his throat. It was the logistics company logo. His company.
“Ma’am, you need to step back!” an officer yelled, trying to pull the woman away from the body.
“He wasn’t answering his phone!” she shrieked, fighting against the officer’s grip. “I tracked his route! He’s just doing his route!”
Arthur frowned, his fingers twitching in the cuffs as if trying to pull down a screen to refresh. A route. At four in the morning? It wasn’t standard operating procedure. Unless corporate had implemented the new predawn expedited delivery pilot program-the one Arthur had explicitly recommended against in his Q3 projections. He needed to check his email. He needed to see if they had authorized this without his approval.
“He advanced on me,” Arthur stated loudly, making sure the dashboard cameras recorded his unshakeable narrative. “He held a dark, heavy object. A weapon. I deployed lethal force to neutralize the threat.”
“A weapon?” The woman spun around, her face streaked with mascara and tears, illuminated by the flashing red and blue lights. “He had a package, you psycho!”
A second officer near the body stood up, holding a shattered plastic device in a latex-gloved hand. “Looks like a routing tablet and a barcode scanner, Sarge. Smashed up.”
“It was dark,” Arthur repeated, though a cold dread began to pool in his stomach, distinct from the chill of the morning air. “He was trespassing.”
“He was delivering your mail!” The woman broke free from the officer for a fraction of a second, lunging toward Arthur before being tackled back to the pavement. “You know who he is! He told me about you! He said the regional director went insane!”
Arthur’s posture stiffened. “I am the senior regional director. I have not gone anywhere.”
“You were fired!” she screamed, her voice cracking as the officers dragged her toward a cruiser. “David told me! He showed me the logs! The IT logs! You’ve been locked out for weeks but you keep sending messages to the depot! You’ve been sitting in your house for three weeks writing manifestos on the dispatch boards!”
“That is a gross mischaracterization of internal communications,” Arthur snapped, twisting in the officer’s grip. His heart hammered against his ribs. The server error. The spinning wheel. Cannot connect to server. Please contact your IT administrator. It wasn’t an outage. It was a lockout.
The woman clawed at her coat pocket, producing a glowing smartphone. She waved it frantically at the police sergeant. “Look at it! David took screenshots! He sent them to me because he was scared to deliver to this address! This guy thought corporate was sending assassins to steal his client lists! Read the logs!”
The sergeant took the phone from her trembling hand, his eyes scanning the bright screen. His expression hardened as he read. He looked up, his gaze locking onto Arthur with a mixture of disgust and extreme caution.
“I was auditing the regional dispatch protocols,” Arthur said, his rehearsed defense fracturing as the reality of the company logo on the bleeding man’s jacket burned into his retinas. “I noticed discrepancies. The drivers were being monitored.”
“You shot my husband because of a server error!” the widow wailed, collapsing against the side of the police car. “He was just dropping off your severance paperwork! They sent him with the certified mail!”
Severance paperwork. Arthur’s mind raced. He pictured the heavy, dark object the man had raised. A certified mail scanner and a thick, rigid cardboard envelope.
“Get him in the car,” the sergeant ordered quietly, gesturing to Arthur.
“Wait,” Arthur said, his voice losing its authoritative timber. “I need my phone. My phone is in my pocket. I need to check my email. The Q3 reports are due. If they authorized predawn deliveries, I need to see the authorization.”
“You have the right to remain silent,” the officer behind him said, hauling Arthur roughly to his feet.
“You don’t understand, the Castle Doctrine protects me. He was an intruder.” Arthur’s eyes darted frantically between the bleeding delivery driver, the shattered scanner on the asphalt, and the widow sobbing against the cruiser.
The sergeant stepped closer to Arthur, holding up the widow’s phone. On the screen was a screenshot of a company forum, filled with paragraphs of Arthur’s frantic, paranoid typing. Passages about defending his territory, about how corporate would have to pry the regional data from his cold, dead hands.
“Did you write this, Mr. Pendelton?” the sergeant asked, his voice low and dangerous.
Arthur stared at the digital log of his own descent, the indisputable proof of his fractured reality staring back at him. The spinning wheel in his mind finally stopped, replaced by a terrifying, unresolvable error. He opened his mouth to reaffirm his self-defense, to demand his phone, but before he could speak, the officer shoved him toward the back of the cruiser, the heavy door opening to swallow him into the dark.