Razor Burn

by O. J. Anderson

Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 3
appear in this issue.

Chapter 2

Eight miles. Every morning.

VO2 Max? Beyond comprehension. His lungs could ventilate a Garden City high rise. His T-shirt reads: FEEL THE BURN!

In each hand he carries a fifty-pound dumb bell. While running, he does biceps curls the first two miles. Switches to lateral raises for miles three and four, working the delts, hard. He pounds his way through miles five and six with overhead presses. Finishes up miles seven and eight shadow boxing. And even though he runs at an amazing pace for a man of his size lifting weights, he isn’t breathing very hard.

This is nothing really.

He might even make a detour through the Wilton Heights section of town. Where the drugs are cheap, and life even cheaper. Stop and kick some ass if the opportunity presents itself. It usually does.

He recalls the mound of paperwork awaiting him at the Cube. Maybe tomorrow.

The small incline at the south end of Locke Street leads to a modest brick home with an unusually large black truck parked in the driveway. Razor stops running, checks his watch. Good time, as always. He cuts across the yard.

Inside, he drops the dumbbells on the kitchen table, where there are more dumbbells. From the refrigerator he takes a large bottle of purified water with hint of lemon.

Razor peels off his shirt and walks into what most people would consider to be the living room. But this is Razor’s main lifting room. The walls are mirrored, of course. One rack of iron plates in each corner. There are a couple thousand pounds in here, and this is only the main lifting area. There are others.

The room is filled with mostly free-weight benches: preacher, flat, incline, decline, a squat rack, but also a few machines for detail work. Precision slicing.

Razor cycles through a few poses to check his shape. The Hulk. Discus thrower. Thinking man. He’s good to go from all angles. Magnificent.

His pectorals looks like two giant slabs of beef tied together and hung from his neck like boxing gloves. He can barely see the floor anymore without bending forward. Both his pectorals are hard as cast iron skillets, and on command he can flex them into mountains of striations resembling two rolls of tightly wound steel cable on the verge of bursting out from his taut, tan, leathery skin.

Beneath the bulging chest musculature lie six neatly-aligned muffins of muscle, each one distinguished by deep chasms etched there by hundreds upon hundreds of daily crunches, sit-ups, and leg lifts.

He clasps his hands behind his back and tilts forward slightly to energize the ab units. His stomach looks like an aerial photograph of an urban housing development. Releasing the tension momentarily, he fires the abs in pairs, from the bottom up, then down. Then he hits them individually, up one side and down the other. Now at random. Pop pop pop. Like the pistons of a high performance engine. The mastery he has over his abs is such that he can isolate and fire each fiber individually sending ripples throughout his abdominal section like a kiddie pool at the epicenter of an earthquake.

Slowly he raises his arms out to shoulder level and bends at the elbows, bringing his forearms in toward his head to inspect the cantaloupe-sized biceps. Nice, very nice: dense, round balls of perfectly symmetrical sinew nicely balanced by the massive horseshoe-shaped triceps hanging beneath them, themselves already swollen from the five hundred close-hand push-up pre-run warm-up routine.

Razor moves his fists outward and studies as the biceps elongate and the triceps contract, drooping beneath his arm like honeydew melons.

Turning to the side, he checks is obliques. They are so shredded he can hardly recognize them anymore, and his deltoids look like someone halved a coconut and stuck the two pieces onto his shoulders.

His entire body is a contour relief map of the Himalayas.

Razor strikes the Grape Ape pose, holding it until his frame shakes and his pores pop open to gasp out a heavy sheen of man brine. He becomes shiny, like a jewel, a sparkling gem-cut work of art.

With so many nooks and valleys coursing their way over his chassis he looks like he’s been fitted with irrigation channels, the sweat running a complicated and inefficient path through a complex grid of intersections, long arcs, and horizontal by-ways as it meanders from his neck down to the floor.

Now he’s so pumped and amped up that he feels he could crack open the earth with a smack of his hand and drink its molten core!

A brief rest. He’s got a nice little leg routine planned for this morning. The squat rack is loaded and he’s about to blast his calves until they’re so shredded they look like they’ve been julienned by a master chef, but the phone rings.

Razor picks up. “What?”

It’s Chief Conrad from the Cube. He says, “Go secure.”

Procedure. Razor punches a ten-digit alphanumeric code into the phone’s encryption keypad. The Douglas T-8500 PKR/2A-15 INTEL ComUnit will break up the voice transmission into a billion little bytes, scatter them into an electronic black hole, re-order the message into an encrypted outgoing data package, then fire and bounce the data package off the ionosphere in staggered bursts of one million wavelengths per second. Only another T-8500 with an internal ciphertext clock synchronized to one-one thousandth of a second can decipher the incoming data package.

The green light illuminates.

“Go,” Razor says.

Proceed to chapter 3...