Writer's Cramp 19/9/25

Prompt ▼

Write a story in which a researcher wants to gain fame, but they must do something they can never tell anyone about.

Redacted

“You sure that’s him—" Mace trailed off, squinting at the pale shape slumped over the desk.

“Looks like him,” Riviera said. “I think, hard to tell ya know—"

Riviera lifted a gloved hand and offered the laminated badge to his boss; the picture was barely visible through a smear of blood. The same blood, presumably, that also decorated the floor, ceiling and three of the office's walls.

“If you squint, maybe," Riviera mused, "shotgun, hell of a way to go. Plenty of DNA laying around though, lab'll get us a match.”

Mace scoffed and stepped closer to the body, barely sparing it a glance before turning his attention to the desk. "Note?" he wondered as he pushed a toppled mug aside with a borrowed Biro.

"Haven't found one," Riviera replied, "might be something on the laptop though, techies'll get back to us, even—"

"When," Mace interrupted, "funding and priorities allow, same shit, different day."

"Not my monkey," Riviera quipped, "not my circus, boss. Only other thing on the desk was this, think it's related?"

He held out a single sheet of almost entirely black paper to his boss. "Grant application. Weird though innit, someone really didn't want anyone to read this—"

Mace took the page and stared at the thick black bars that obscured every line, even when he angled it up to the light. "Fuck!" he exclaimed, "can't read a bloody word! Looks like they used a gallon of ink to redact this — guess we won't know what it says unless we can find a copy."

Riviera looked between his boss and the grant application. "Well," he joked, "he sure as fuck can't tell us about it now, can he boss!"