<\/p>\n
He woke up on 15th Street, naked. He didn\u2019t remember how that happened. He took clothes off of the frozen pedestrians and dressed himself, then stumbled back to the Oval Office.<\/p>\n
There his old friend sat, the phone pressed against his ear.<\/p>\n
\u201cHad a bit of a bender.\u201d<\/p>\n
The President stared back glassy-eyed.<\/p>\n
\u201cFell off the wagon, I guess.\u201d<\/p>\n
The President watched him.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome fucking advice would be welcome right now, buddy.\u201d<\/p>\n
The President had nothing.<\/p>\n
\u201cRight, I get it. I\u2019m my own man. I have to make my own way.\u201d He stood and shook his fist in the President\u2019s face, \u201cI fucking get it!\u201d<\/p>\n
He paced for a while. \u201cWhat to do?\u201d He repeated that to himself over and over, a comforting mantra.<\/p>\n
Then he stopped and cocked his head towards the President. \u201cWhat?\u201d<\/p>\n
The President finally had some advice.<\/p>\n
\u201cHah!\u201d He said, wagging a finger, \u201cLike I haven\u2019t thought of that. That\u2019s what I\u2019ve been doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The President expounded on his idea.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou think that will work?\u201d<\/p>\n
The President was sure.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, okay.\u201d He shrugged. \u201cYou are the leader of the free world. I\u2019ll try your idea. What do I have to lose, eh?\u201d<\/p>\n
The President\u2019s plan was simple. Go back to the office. Sit in his tattered chair. That\u2019s what the Shadow wanted.<\/p>\n
He hiked back down to the APA building, then up to the sixth floor and his office. He sat in his chair and spun around. The two screens of his computer were frozen in place with his last act. On one screen, the one monitored by his supervisors, the Communications Database was frozen on Barbara Smith\u2019s personal file. The author of a self-help children\u2019s book. Smith was a perennial thorn in his side. The most mean-spirited author out there. He had first made her acquaintance over the phone on 9\/11. As the second plane flew into the towers, and the Pentagon burned, she had harangued him on the phone for being distracted during her book order call. When he told her the news, she said that was no excuse and he should complete her order. Such cold-hearted, simple-minded brutishness was beyond him.<\/p>\n
Though, to be fair, he couldn\u2019t remember why he had called up her information again. Had he been on the phone with her? He couldn\u2019t remember too much about the day he froze the world forever.<\/p>\n
Well, not forever. He could release the world anytime he wanted.<\/p>\n
The second screen was frozen on a game of Bejeweled Blitz. Almost tempting enough to make him unfreeze the world for a minute.<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay, Shadow!\u201d he called out. \u201cI\u2019m here. The President says you\u2019re trying to communicate\u2026so stop fucking wasting my time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ah, time. He giggled. He had lots of time.<\/p>\n
Then he farted, and grunted, and felt a pain in his side. Actually, not as much time as he thought. He was getting old. The devil\u2019s in the details. He should have added \u201cnever aging\u201d to his wish. But wouldn\u2019t immortality be just as troublesome as age? And, after all, that\u2019s what got him in this position. Entropy increases. The world falls apart. You\u2019re always losing out, in the big picture.<\/p>\n
He sat for a while, mulling this over, when the Shadow returned.<\/p>\n
\u201cAh-ha, you bastard!\u201d he shouted, pointed at the wavering thing on the floor. \u201cNow talk!\u201d<\/p>\n
Instead, it bounced and bopped and moved slowly out onto the floor, back towards the glass doors and the main hallway. He followed, eyes down and fixed on the Shadow\u2019s sexless shape on the floor. It led him out into the hall and towards the stairwell once again, and he followed it up the stairs to the 12th floor. To the roof.<\/p>\n
The stairs opened directly onto the roof \u2013 a wide plaza with a stunning view of the Capitol over the top of the Government Printing Office, the Bureau of Labor Standards, and the old Post Office building. Union Station loomed to his left as he watched the Shadow play across the chairs and tables set up across the patio. It lingered between two tables, close to the hip-high guard rail that stood between him and a 12-storey fall.<\/p>\n
He grinned. \u201cOh, no.\u201d He whispered. \u201cIt\u2019s not that easy.\u201d<\/p>\n
What would the President do if he knew the Shadow was out for blood?<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to talk to me, first.\u201d He strode towards the Shadow. \u201cYou can\u2019t be a coward about this. If you want me to jump, you have<\/em> to say why!\u201d<\/p>\n The Shadow wavered, then went over the edge. And he ran after it, screaming. But he stopped before he canted over the edge and wheeled backwards, laughing. He sat on a table, chuckling to himself, and then he thought \u2013 well and why not? He was an old man, now. He could never release the world. What place would he have? Everything and everyone around him hadn\u2019t aged a second since he last saw them.<\/p>\n And he thought of her. He thought that, maybe, there was something else out there to be had. Something else left to do. He had frozen the world and achieved nothing. His life had become a quarter century of meaningless wandering.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve gone mad, haven\u2019t I?\u201d he asked the patio, the chairs, the tables, the buildings around him. \u201cI\u2019ve really lost it, haven\u2019t I?\u201d<\/p>\n Maybe he was ready for the next step. Perhaps that\u2019s what the Shadow was telling him.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a theory \u2013 he wasn\u2019t long for the world. Who knows what was going to happen. A drunk was going to take him out while he was crossing the street, or a fucking cinderblock would fall on him, or he\u2019d fall in the shower. Whatever. Some stupid little thing that would snuff him out like a light. Maybe, when he froze the world, he cheated death. Like the President\u2019s phone call. Maybe it was about a missile strike and he was to be snuffed out in some atomic freakout.<\/p>\n So the Shadow was death cheated.<\/p>\n No! That was part of the madness. He had years left. He had the time. He wasn\u2019t going to die on the roof of his fucking office building. How pathetic was that. And suicide, no less. All of this, and he ends chasing shadows. No way.<\/p>\n He stood up and ranted in the direction the Shadow had taken, though it was long gone from his sight. He shook his fist and screamed every curse word he knew \u2013 except one.<\/p>\n Then he turned and headed back for the stairs.<\/p>\n The Shadow was there. Blocking his way.<\/p>\n He stomped the concrete, as if trying to scare off an animal. He stomped again, and growled, \u201cFuck off.\u201d<\/p>\n The Shadow didn\u2019t move. Then it lunged towards him, drawing back almost immediately. As if it were also trying to scare off an animal.<\/p>\n He went to walk around it, and it shifted so it was still in his path. Then it lunged and, somehow, without any sense of being touched, he found himself flat on his ass.<\/p>\n It all came to him in a rush. Fucking the First Lady in the ass, and the countless traffic accidents he had set up across the nation in his travels. The women he had molested and the people he had tortured, though they hadn\u2019t felt a thing. The Shadow knew. It knew everything bad he had done. It had been after him his whole life. He heaved one of the deck chairs at it, and it easily danced out of the way. He leapt, then came down hard on top of it, only to have it dissolve around him and coalesce again right next to him. His knees and spine, jarred from the jump, almost failed him. It didn\u2019t take much for the Shadow to knock him over again.<\/p>\n He crawled away from it, laughing hoarsely under his breath. He started to turn and curse it, but found himself out of breath. He moved to the far end of the roof, Union Station behind him, and First Street far below forever frozen with lunchtime traffic.<\/p>\n \u201cYou want me to free the world, right?\u201d he hissed at the Shadow as it danced and weaved towards him. \u201cYou want me to let it go, right?\u201d<\/p>\n The Shadow stopped just in front of him, and he felt the guardrail dig into the backs of his legs as he stood up to face it.<\/p>\n \u201cYou won\u2019t get it.\u201d<\/p>\n The Shadow caressed him, and he flinched away. Then it seemed to build up on itself and lunged for him again, aiming to send him falling to his death. He dove to the side, scrambling against the concrete and twisted his leg, then rolled away from the guardrail. The Shadow teetered on the edge of the guardrail, as if caught by surprise. It seemed to be a victim of its own momentum and he watched it fall, listened as it emit an eerie scream.<\/p>\n He realized it was the first sound he had heard in 25 years and he clamped his hands over his ears and cried out against it. Then he rose and limped towards the stairwell, moving from a limp into a weird hobbled run, suddenly panicked. He hit the stairwell and took them two at a time, breathlessly laughing. He shouted over his shoulder, \u201cI got you, you asshole! I got you!\u201d His laughter rose into peels of manic, hyena-like guffaws, tears rolling down his eyes, and he lunged around the turn from one flight to another. At the sixth floor landing, he put his weight on his arm as he spun and then put his twisted leg down hard. It didn\u2019t take his weight. He was getting old. Entropy increases. It folded under him and he tumbled.<\/p>\n His last moments were a confused blur, replaced by a white-hot starburst as he cracked his skull and his collarbone shattered. He lay twisted on the landing just below the sixth floor, gasping for breath, feeling the world slipping away from him.<\/p>\n There was something he should say. Something he had to do before he died. What was it? He had a responsibility\u2026 He pressed his hands against the concrete, he tried to say the word that would unfreeze the world, but all that came out was a weird, broken sound. Like a wounded crow. Then his arms failed him and he fell flat again, beyond pain, beyond thought. The white-hot starburst turning dark and cold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[254,405],"class_list":["post-595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-serials","tag-frozen","tag-serials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=595"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1270,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595\/revisions\/1270"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}