Star City Stories: Enter Sandman

He just nodded.

I'm Dalton Woods. Denton is my twin brother. You could never tell it by looking at us. Although we share some facial features, we're nothing alike. My brother is smaller and has finer features. Throughout our lives, starting at a very young age, Denton studied and excelled academically. I excelled physically. As we grew up, we helped each other. Initially, he helped me with my homework and my assignments, while I helped him to be less inept socially.

I used to bring home girls for us to double date with. Den's not a bad guy, so once most of those girls got to know him, he did okay. They may have come over to our house in hopes of getting a chance at the athlete, but none of them ever left disappointed or felt like they'd been slighted after spending any time with my brother.

Then the world flipped its axis and most women no longer care how many pounds I can bench press. They're much more interested in IQ points nowadays. Society has always found the things, like strength, that seem to predict survivability, sexy. That's why men are hardwired towards women with narrow waists, wider hips and larger breasts. Something inside of us says this woman could carry and feed healthy infants.

But now, women simply don't care about how big your arms are or how fast you can run. No matter how strong you are or how fast you are, you can't lift or outrun that asteroid. It's intelligence and brainpower that will enable humanity to survive and women everywhere have quickly picked up on it.

One of the things that no one considered in our situation is mental instability. Humans have a sense of self preservation; well most of us do any way.

But in a case similar to the baby boomers in the last century, who grew up knowing that because of nuclear weapons the world could end at any moment, the baby boomers had the highest rate of suicides and mental disorders of any generation before them.

Our situation is worse. With the baby boomers, the threat of annihilation was POSSIBLE. The threat from Shiva 2100 is DEFINITE. There is no doubt that the world as we know it, will end. We know exactly what will happen and exactly when. This has made people all over the world change the way they look at things. There's no sense of permanence. How must a teenager feel in our time? There's no need to salt away money for your retirement when there's a better chance of you dying than retiring to Florida. Kids, grandkids, what's the point of bringing any more life to a planet that probably won't be here.

People all over the planet have just developed a, "What the fuck" attitude. Anything and everything goes. Crime has quintupled and is only getting worse. The only rays of hope are in the places where the ships are being built. Most of or all of them are walled off to prevent them from being overrun by people who want to get in.

Even the rich are terrified, because being rich is simply not enough. Even being super-rich is not enough. One of the failed attempts at putting together a group to build a ship was done by a consortium of billionaires. It failed. Part of the reason it failed was that all of the billionaires involved wanted to be in charge and they also tried to hold onto money. Most of them gave incredible amounts of cash but they needed to hold enough in reserve to remain billionaires and when the project started to run low on funds they all blamed each other and pulled out.

Most of the successful projects are created by groups of countries and have almost unlimited funds. But even inside of these groups, the pressure and responsibility of trying to save the entire human species is staggering. Quite a few of the people involved can't take the pressure and crack up.

They fall into two groups, the external group is made up of people who go nuts and either become a danger to the project or others. The internal group is made of people, who simply can't cope and are either suicidal or dangerous because they preach or talk about how pointless it all is.

All of these poor misguided individuals are our responsibility. I'm a Sandman. It's my job to put these poor misguided souls out of their misery. Sometimes they actually ask for it. In many of the cases, the individual targeted, simply doesn't want to go on any more, yet they lack the courage to do away with themselves. They can go online and we handle it from there. Our job is not only to give the target a quick, pain free death, it's to make sure that people around them don't suffer.

What good would it do for scientist A to blow his fucking brains out after telling everyone he knows that the project won't succeed and we're all going to die? That could set off a chain reaction among his peers and coworkers and become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the Sandmen are called in.

We don't just do scientists. We take care of anyone whose mental state is a danger to Star City. So even if you're as chipper as a fucking blue jay, if you've been convicted of too many crimes, you can get the sand.

Actually, my brother is responsible for getting me the job. I'm not exactly scientist material, but trust it to Denton to find a way to make me useful. I really don't mind my job. There are actually sometimes when I enjoy it. One man's definition of murder is the same as another's definition of surgical euthanasia for the betterment of society. So don't call me a murderer and I won't kill you.

As I left the office after turning in my stuff, I made my way to the garage. I smiled as soon as I saw it, but there was nothing unusual about that. Yep, I still drove myself everywhere. In my line of work, I can't afford to wait for the monorail or the subway and I sometimes need to make it to places that are off the tracks. I also don't need to have a taxi driver able to document or testify to my movements.

My car is a classic. It's a thirty five year old 2013 Shelby GT 500 Mustang. The car harkens back to a time when horsepower meant something. My baby can still keep up with those electronic pieces of shit they drive now. And I have a lot fewer problems. The only major problem I have is that I have to go to the few places around town that stock petroleum fuel for commercial construction machines. A few of them still use "gas," as we call it, too.

Denton keeps telling me that when he gets the chance he's going to convert my car's engine so it can run on synth fuel. He also claims that my car won't make that hellacious noise anymore either. Sometimes Denton is simply too smart for his own good. I've tried explaining to him that the hellacious noise is a part of her charm and my car is supposed to sound like that.

My car has all of the design cues from classic Mustangs from every era. The car looks like it's moving even when it's standing still. She just looks angry. Everything on the car is black. The body paint is glass black. There are two flat black racing stripes down the center that are highlighted with red pinstripes so they pop and stand out from the glossier black. The rims, brake calipers and even my rotors are black. All of my lights, markers, signals and indicators have black lenses as well.

As I start the car up, everyone in the parking lot looks my way. Some of them smile in appreciation. Others smile nervously in fear.

I barely chirp the tires as I rocket away. I really can't afford a long smoking peel out. These tires are impossible to find nowadays.

Some of the people in the parking lot, mostly the fearful ones, weren't all afraid of my car. Some of them recognized the fact that the last letter of my license plate is an "S" and what it means. Even the police stay away from the sandmen.

* * * * * *

Denton

I got back on the monorail and rode it around the city. As I looked out the windows at the gleaming spires and domes of Star City, I knew what projects were located in the different areas because I'd visited most of them from time to time. I saw where they were building the launch pad for the rockets we'd start launching in a few years.

I guess it would be more truthful to say that I saw them but I didn't see them. My mind worked feverishly, but it wasn't trying to solve any problems outside of my own personal ones right now. I thought the same word over and over again. "Why?"

"Why would Beth do that to me? She and our son Donnie were all that mattered to me. I mean, I know that every man says he loves his wife. But I LOVE Beth. She's always been the air that I breathe, the wind beneath my wings and all of that other corny bullshit. And I took it for granted that she felt the same way about me

When I'd walked into our home and saw her...saw them, it had nearly ripped the heart still beating from my chest. I'd been too shocked to think about what to do or how to handle it. Exactly what is the correct thing to do in that situation? I know what my brother would have done. He'd have killed the guy and probably Beth too. Dalton always thought there was something fishy about Beth. It's only been recently that he's backed off on her. It's been the past seven years. That isn't really recent. What changed his mind about her or at least got him to back off was Donnie's birth. And, of course, the fact that from birth Donnie looked like my clone. Hospitals now automatically do a DNA test and there was no doubt at all that Donnie is my son. I think that was enough to convince Dalton that my marriage was okay.

I wonder what my brother would say now? At any rate, I hadn't gone tearing in there and opened up a can of whoop ass on anyone. Even if it turned out not to be my ass that got whooped, what would it have proven? Is there some little known fact of science that says if you kick the other guy's ass, it opens up a pocket hole in the universe that takes us back in time to a point before she cheated on you so you could stop it from happening?

Or perhaps I should have just taken my clothes off, found a vacant hole and joined in. Or maybe it was supposed to be one of those sophisticated things where we, as adults, all sat down and drank fucking tea while sticking our little fingers out and calmly discussing what had happened.

And I hadn't done any of that, I'd just turned tail and walked out of there. The buzzing in my pocket let me know that someone was trying to call me. I was sure it wasn't the lab so I didn't bother to even look at it. I almost wished it had been the lab because then I'd have a reason to go there among the things I knew and understood, to hide.

Hoping against hope, I looked at the screen of my phone and saw that as I'd expected, it was Beth. Before I realized what I was doing, I answered the phone.

"I'm going to pick Donnie up, so I can spend some time with him," I said coldly. "That should give you plenty of time to pack your things and leave."

"Denton," she said, between sobs. "Where would I go? And why would I go anywhere? We need to talk, Honey."

"Beth, there's nothing to discuss," I told her. "This isn't medieval times. We don't need a church, if there was still such a thing to let us separate..." She had a sharp intake of air that should have told me something. "We don't need to see a judge to divorce..." there it was again, not as sharp as the first but still there. She couldn't hide anything from me; or so I thought.

I guess that meant or at least I drew from it that this wasn't something that she thought we needed to divorce over. The problem was that I wasn't sure that I agreed with her.

"I have to go, Beth," I said. "I just don't feel like talking right now."

As luck would have it, the monorail was in Dalton's neighborhood at that moment. As we pulled into the station that was only a few block from his apartment, I got off. My brother and I had always been very close, so perhaps that was where I'd intended to go anyway.

I walked up to his door and knocked on it. The screen on the door lit up and I got his "away from home" message. I started to leave him a message that I'd dropped by, when his face filled the screen. "Hey little brother," he said. He looked at me seriously then and asked, "What's wrong?"

"I'm okay," I said. "I just dropped by to..." Before I could finish, he'd remotely unlocked the door for me.

"I was on my way home anyway," he said. "I'll be there in five minutes. Wait for me."

I went in and sat down. I looked through all of Dalton's stuff. He had all kinds of mementos left over from childhood. He had pictures and trophies from when he used to play football. If the NFL hadn't folded, he'd probably be playing for a living now.

Sometimes it surprised even me that the two of us were twins. We were like opposite sides of the same coin. As I stared at a picture of us in our late teens, the door opened and there he was. Dalton was as big as a fucking house and smiling like a Cheshire cat until he saw the look on my face. Then his face got very serious in less than a second.

"Denton what's wrong?" he asked. I'd never been able to hide anything from him so it came out.

"That fucking bitch," he sneered. "Denton, throw that whore out of town. The only reason she's here is because she's married to you. Throw her out. Let her try living in a regular city for a while. Let her see what it's like to come home every day to a place that's been robbed because with the world ending, nobody gives a fuck any more. Let her live in a place where a woman who looks like her gets raped often. Usually, just because some loser out there just decides that he may as well fuck her because laws don't matter anymore."

"I'm not doing any of that," I said. "Actually, I don't know what I'm going to do." He looked at me as if I'd just laid an egg.

"So who was the guy?" he asked. "Was it someone you know?"

I pulled out my phone and showed him the picture. "Big guy," he said. "You were probably right not to jump on him." As he looked at the picture, he pressed a couple of icons on my screen. He handed me my phone back and we talked about other things until I had to go and pick Donnie up from school.

Dalton drove me and I accepted the ride. I loved being in his car, but I could never own anything like that. That car was brutal. Everything on it was manual, even the gear shifter and transmission. And the car rode like a race car. You could feel every dip and bump in the road. What I loved most about the car was the way that it pressed you back in the seat every time he hit the gas.

He dropped me off at Donnie's school and waved at us he drove off. Donnie had been waiting for me outside of the school.

I didn't even have to ask him why he'd been outside already.

"They were doing numbers," he said. "So the teacher let me leave early."

"Donnie, you need as much math as you can get," I said.

"Dad, we're seven," he said. "I'm in the second grade. I don't go to classes with my homeroom class. They're learning numbers and basic adding and subtracting. They don't even know about division and multiplication yet. That's not math it's just numbers. I'm in AP calculus. What would I do with them?"

"Don't get cocky, Donnie," I warned. "You can always learn something new. When you assume that you know everything, you don't learn anymore and when you stop learning, you may as well be dead."

"Was that Uncle Dalton?" he asked. I nodded my head. "We should have ridden home in his car. There are so many things I want to talk to him about."

"Like what?" I asked.

"Is the rumor true?" he asked. "Is Uncle Dalton really a Sandman? That has to be the coolest job ever."

"Well son, I doubt it," I said. "No one really knows exactly who the Sandmen are."

The rest of the trip home we talked as usual about a lot of different subjects. We talked about math and physics and why girls were so icky. We talked about the asteroid and the ship and how solar sails actually functioned, but also about why there weren't any sports anymore.

One of the things I loved about talking with my son was that he shared my curiosity about everything. There was also the fact that he understood most of what I talked about. That was rare even among adults. I really felt like I could be myself around him and not simply because he was my son.

The thirty minutes or so that I spent walking and talking with Donnie made me completely forget about the problem I had waiting for me at home. The good times ended though as soon as I saw her standing there in the doorway. It's funny to see how one of the most beautiful women on the planet can look like a whipped dog when guilt changes her features.

* * * * * *

Dalton

As soon as I drove away from my brother, I pulled out my phone. When my brother had shown me the photo of the man his cheating wife had screwed in his living room, I'd quickly e-mailed the photo to myself. Although my phone wasn't as advanced as my brother's iPhone 85S, it had some very specialized software that made my job simpler.

One of those software apps allowed me to submit photos to the facial recognition software that we had on the main computer at Sandman headquarters.

I uploaded the photo and within seconds had his I. D. His name was Robert Lynch and he worked in construction. After waiting for a few moments more, I even knew where he was. The computer tapped into security cameras all over Star City. Less than ten minutes ago, a camera outside of a bar on the southwest end of the main strip had captured him.

I was there in less than six minutes. He was leaning against the bar talking in a really loud voice about how stupid women are. I walked right up to the bar and bumped into him.

"Hey, watch it buddy," he said indignantly. Then he went back to his rant.

I ordered a beer and took a sip. Then I started.

"Wow," I said loudly. "I had no idea this was a gay bar."

Every head in the place snapped around and looked at me.

"What are you talking about?" he asked me loudly.

"Well, you're sitting here complaining about women. It sounds like you'd rather uhm...hang out with men." The guys at the table near the bar all backed up and moved their drinks.

"Not that there's anything wrong with being gay," I said. "You guys are okay in my book. You're just like everyone else."

"I'm not gay," he screamed.

"Oh, you're still in the closet?" I asked.

"I'm not gay," he screamed. "I like pussy."

"You've got a what?" I asked. "A pussy? That means you're not gay you're a trans..." before the word left my mouth, he balled up his fist and launched it at my jaw.

I easily caught the fist and punched him in the gut as hard as I could. He folded over my fist and I drew it back and punched him again in the same spot. This time, instead of just blowing out air, he emptied the contents of his stomach. I straightened him up and punched him right on the mouth. His head snapped backwards and he dropped like a rock.

The entire bar went silent. The security man ran over. He took one look at me and then told one of the other guys to call the police.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a badge. Unlike the ones carried by the police, my badge was jet black. The man with the phone dropped it onto a table. The other security man started to back away. I pulled out my phone and used it to scan the bar.

"I have all of your faces on the video I just shot," I said. "If anyone of you says a single thing to anyone about what just happened..." I let my words trail off.

I headed for the door, pausing as I got there. "You should know that I'm too lazy to try to figure out who the one that spoke was. So, every one of you would get a visit."

* * * * * *

Interlude

For a moment so long after the tall muscular man had left the bar that it seemed to stretch for hours, no one said a word. Most of the bar's patrons were afraid to say anything in fear that the man would return. Some of the men inwardly cursed their luck. For them, this was the first time that they'd ever been to this bar and it would for sure be the last.