FOURTH NIGHT

Read TUCK 1 here

Read TUCK 2 here

Round 3 Challenge: Incorporate the death of a dog into your next passage. It should be no more than 400 words long.

If the dead doberman Frank found a week later on his doorstep next to the Washington Times delivery was an attempt to scare him off the case, it backfired. Standing in his bathrobe, a mug of black coffee in hand, Frank scanned the empty street. A note was pinned to the hound’s flank. He bent down to read it:

Love, Blackjack5555

The letters had been individually cut out and glued from a newspaper. By the font he could tell it was from the New York Times. Frank chortled. It didn’t go wasted on him that the would-be assassins were trying to scare Frank off by sending him kindergarten messages made out of the same liberal rag that had spent all of last year creaming itself over Obama as the next messiah and all of this year making up excuses for him.

Frank sipped his coffee and contemplated the note. Most death threats were like spam to him: everyday nuisances to be promptly chucked in the trash. But this one intrigued him. In part it was the early delivery. That the terrorists had already found him out meant they had breached intelligence security. But mostly it was the message: Love, Blackjack5555.

A lesser agent would have interpreted the signoff as a signature. But Frank Braun wasn’t top dog for nothing. “Jack” also meant ‘to hunt by jacklight.’ Sandwich that between “Black” and “5555” – or May 5, 1955, the day that West Germany became a sovereign state, in the same year that opened with the assassination of the president of Panama – and the reference became a veiled allusion to the coming assassination of America’s first negro president by violent non-state actors.

But the most devious part of the signoff was the word “Love.” It was a devil’s wink. Whoever composed this note knew full well Frank would decipher it. It wasn’t a death threat, after all. It was a declaration of war. Frank Braun was up against one twisted motherfucker.

He swallowed the last of his coffee then shoved the corpse with his foot off the porch. He’d dispose of it after breakfast. There was no point in calling in the CSI team. The results would just send them on a useless goose chase.

As he went back inside, he made a mental note that the grass needed mowing.

Read TUCK 1 here

ROUND 2: Write the opening paragraph of your novella. It should be no more than 300 words, not including your opening sentence, and should be about interactions that take place over the web.

Frank knew the last thing headquarters needed was an attempt on the president. Intelligence was desperate for some good publicity. Their reputation was on the line. The liberal media was again fussing over Gary Mckinnon’s hacks into the US military’s computer systems, using the extradition hearings as a smokescreen for editorials about the vulnerabilities of American security. Meanwhile, instead of locking McKinnon up for life, the Brits had made him into a national hero. Still sour about their lost empire, they found malicious comfort in the subversive acts and anti-American rantings of a conspiracist nutjob who claimed the U.S. was hiding UFO evidence and colluding with oil companies to suppress “free” energy. If Frank were in charge, they’d take out McKinnon and save themselves the extradition headaches. But instead “rule of law” was the administration’s refrain. The top dog was a socialist peacenik with a racial chip on his shoulder who, amidst a recession, was trying to force his Soviet Big Brother health care spending spree down the throats of the American people while posing as a Bud Light drinking good old boy. A shrewd Chicago player who won thanks to all the sexually repressed housewives and interracial porn watching college sluts who’d been handed a socially acceptable way of cheerleading for their ultimate black lover fantasy. But although Frank Braun would have liked to see the man now occupying the highest seat in the land sent back to Kenya, he was also a patriot who understood the words Country First. This was a time to set grievances aside, no matter how justifiable, and unite against Islamofascists, who in their infinite anger and impotent jealousy wanted to destroy the American way of life. So he swallowed his pride and assured the chief that he was the man for the job.

Round 1: Write the opening sentence of your novella

“Our top informant just delivered intelligence that leads us to believe there is a plot, likely al Qa’ida-based, to assassinate the president before the new year,” the bureau chief said to Frank Braun, “so what I need to know, Frank, is whether your private dislike of the Obama administration might in any way handicap your new assignment: to track down and, where necessary, eliminate the terrorist operatives.”

I’ve compiled all of the writing of the 12 contestants (minus Fyor, who hasn’t posted yet) from the first 10 days on the Fourth Fiction Twitter page. Each contestant was allowed to write up to four posts, known as ‘tweets,’ per 24-hour period. Because there are several hundred tweets in total, I’ve divided them into 10 pages (the links are at the bottom of the post below the “Similar Posts” links). To add color and context, I’ve also included some Fourth Fiction-related tweets from other writers on Twitter, especially when the contestants responded to them. Any writing by non-contestants is [italicized and enclosed within brackets]. Unlike Twitter, which displays the most recent tweets first, I have listed these chronologically from oldest to most recent.
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