Morning all. Let’s set those timers and see what jumps out of the brains today shall we? Timers set for fifteen minutes and off we go.
I like the character and I kind of like the set up. I’m not one for stories with a lot of explosions in them but I think this could be an interesting one to write as it mostly involves puzzling out who wants to blow him up and why. It would require some time to think the story through though. It isn’t one I know enough about to fly by the seat of my pants through. Considering I spent last week looking up poisons I might not want to spend a lot of time with incendiary devices right now. I really hope no one ever looks at my browser history… I do like the character though.
Thursday, September 10th: The beep was loud in the quiet room.
The beep was loud in the quiet room. He looked around. Where was it coming from. He waited and didn’t hear it again. He went back to his computer. The keys on his keyboard clicked as he continued writing up his report. He heard the beep again. He stopped. There was no sound. He checked his ear. Maybe it was this new hearing aid.
Sound enhancement device,’ he corrected, nearly rolling his eyes. His girlfriend thought hearing aid sounded so old so she latched onto the advertising verbiage this particular model came from and used the terms instead.
‘Maybe I can shorten it to SED,’ he thought. He twisted his head around and recalled the packaging and all it’s information in tiny lettering was still in the other room. Not wanting to hear the beep randomly all day he saved the file to the cloud and got up to go check to see if this particular device had a battery that made a beep when it needed to be charged. As he stood he heard a bunch of static.
‘Definitely checking the paperwork,’ he decided. As he moved the static got louder and then it faded.
‘Odd,’ he thought. His home office wasn’t large so he moved around checking. ‘Radio’s not on.’
Occasionally that caused older models to have issues. He found the place in the room where the static was loudest. He bent down until the white noise of the static was all he could here. There he found a small device hidden under his reading chair. He started to reach for it thought better and grabbed one of the wool gloves from the pocket of his winter coat.
He slipped on the glove and reached for the device. He saw a set of numbers on it. They were counting down.
He grabbed the device and moving on impulse raced to the back door. He opened the glass door and stepped onto his freezing patio. The back of his house faced the woods and down a short slope from his house was a small pond. He raced to the back of his yard and hurled the device like a discus towards the pond. It reached the edge of the water.
He could still see it at the edge of the lake. He pulled out his cell phone from his pocket and called the local police. He explained the situation and was told a unit would be dispatched to his residence immediately. As he waited he ran through the list of who had been in his home, his office in the last few weeks.
‘They told me this project was different from the others,’ he thought. Danger had been mentioned but it had been mentioned before. He worked with highly confidential materials on a routine basis. It was why he put everything on a remote server and only worked with backups of files. All originals were kept in a safe location. If someone did decide to go after him because of what he was working on then he wanted someone to be able to figure out who. There were fail safes to alert the authorities and give them the information.
Looking over the files he didn’t think this was that sort of dangerous. He still took precautions, but nothing in it seemed off. It wasn’t a high stakes account. The project was minor compared to the others he worked on. ‘And they didn’t try to do anything.’ He looked at the device now revealed, now hidden by the lapping water.
The bomb squad arrived. They took a picture from a distance and then started forward. Before they could get close, the timer ran out and exploded.
Ten til Midnight 