Nothing Good Happens After Midnight: A Suspense Magazine Anthology

Cell Phone Intolerant Kevin O’Brien

Ed McKinnon was pee-shy. No help was the fact that, at age fifty-nine, his prostate was about the size of a bowling ball. He hated using public restrooms. But sometimes it became necessary — as it did on that December evening, in the middle of Christmas shopping at the downtown Seattle Nordstrom.

Usually, he took care of these things before leaving the house. But the shopping expedition dragged on longer than he’d anticipated — what with the endless lines and cashiers who didn’t know how to send gifts. Most of Ed’s purchases were going to his brother’s family in Phoenix, and he always sent his ex-wife Fran something, too. She lived in San Francisco. One of the cashiers had mentioned that he might find it easier to shop and send gifts online. Ed had told the woman that he wanted to support the brick and mortar stores. But considering how much his send-purchases seemed to piss off the clerks — as well as the customers waiting behind him — he figured he’d shop online next year. Then he wouldn’t have to deal with all the obnoxious shoppers — like the ones who stood side by side on the escalators, blithely blocking everyone in back of them; or the idiots who decided to stop and text someone at the top or bottom of the escalators, creating more blockage; or the moron who thought bringing her dog (on a ten foot leash, no less) into Nordstrom during the Christmas rush was a brilliant idea. No one had “situational awareness” these days; most people were totally oblivious to everything and everyone else around them.

Ed lived alone in a three-bedroom house in Seattle’s trendy Capitol Hill neighborhood. It had been his home for over two decades. The house was currently decked out for Christmas, very tastefully, too. He took pride in the place, and kept it immaculate inside and out. He led an orderly life. A dripping faucet was cause for alarm. But he easily repaired things like that. Ed was mechanically inclined. He worked for thirty-two years in the Union Pacific Railroad car repair shop, and took an early retirement last year. He kept active with bi-weekly visits to the gym, and spent hours every night in his basement “lab” tinkering with various inventions. He held thirteen different patents, but nothing he’d invented had taken off yet. He’d come really close with his idea for a touch-activated faucet, but somebody beat him to the punch.

One of his ex’s major gripes was that he’d spent too much time down in their basement with his “mad scientist’s projects.” Fran also claimed he was kind of a control freak. Ed knew he was guilty on both counts. He certainly liked to be in control of things.

He just wished he had a bit more control of his bladder right now. And he wished every other man in Nordstrom hadn’t suddenly decided to use the restroom the same time as him. Both stalls were occupied with two customers waiting; and both urinals were in use — with a guy and his toddler son in line ahead of him. It was a pee-shy sufferer’s nightmare.

Ed would have preferred a stall. But things naturally moved faster at the two urinals. The dad and son didn’t waste any time. So, reluctantly, Ed took one of the urinals.

At least he didn’t have to pee standing next to anyone. But he felt pressured to hurry up and go while he was still there alone. He played a mind game that sometimes helped him get started, reciting in his head: “You’re a two, you’re a four, you’re a six, urinate...” But it didn’t work. He heard all this activity behind him as toilets flushed and the guys waiting for the stalls took their turns. The two other guys washed their hands and left. There was a hush. Then, by some Christmas miracle, Ed started to pee.

“I’m serious, I’ve been invited to five Christmas parties this weekend!” someone announced as he breezed into the men’s room. The guy was right behind Ed when he spoke.

Ed was so startled, he stopped peeing in mid-stream.

The man stepped up to the urinal beside Ed’s. He spoke so loud, his voice seemed to echo off the bathroom tiles. “The way I figure, I’ll just Uber the whole night, because I’ll be so wasted by the last party...”

Ed stole a glance at the man. He wondered who the hell this clown was talking to. Was there someone in back of them?

No. The guy was on his goddamn phone.

This is why I hate people, thought Ed. He still needed to pee, but he’d temporarily gone bone dry.

“Well, Lloyd’s is B-Y-O-B, but I’m not bringing anything. I won’t be there very long,” the guy said — over the loud drone of his stream hitting the plastic pad for the urinal cake. Obviously, he had no pee-shy issues. With his baseball cap on backwards, he looked like a cocky jerk. He was in his late thirties and had a slight resemblance to Jason Priestley — if someone had taken a bicycle pump to Jason Priestley and inflated him. Ed figured he was a jock gone to seed.

Ed heard a woman murmur something on the other end of the line.

He gave up trying to pee. He couldn’t take any more of this.

“Oh, yeah?” the guy said into his phone. “Well, three guesses how I feel about that.”

Ed zipped up and flushed. “SERIOUSLY?” he said loudly. “DOES THE WOMAN YOU’RE TALKING TO KNOW YOU’RE PISSING IN A PUBLIC RESTROOM RIGHT NOW?”

Rude Jason Priestley squinted at him. “What’s your problem, man?”

“You are! You’re my problem! I’m trying to take a pee here, and you’re carrying on a phone conversation! Could you be any ruder?” Ed swiveled around and saw some twenty-something guy had just stepped into the restroom. The young man stared at him as if he were completely insane.

“No, it’s nobody,” Rude Jason said into his phone. “Some crazy guy here in Nordstrom. No, I’m not in the restroom. I’m in Men’s Shoes...” He headed for the door.

“HE DIDN’T FLUSH AND HE DIDN’T WASH HIS HANDS AFTER HE PEED!” Ed announced loudly, so the guy’s girlfriend could hear.

With the phone to his ear, Jason flipped him off as he left the restroom.

Ed was livid. He still needed to pee, but knew he couldn’t. And both stalls were still occupied. Besides, he didn’t want to hang around the men’s room any longer than he had to. He hated confrontations. And nowadays, the least little conflict could end up in a mass shooting. Rude Jason could be lying in wait for him outside the restroom.

So Ed made a beeline from the men’s room to the exit doors.

All the way home on the light rail, he was seething. He couldn’t help notice how everyone around him was wrapped up in their mobile devices. It was a crowded car, and he found only two other people — a couple — who weren’t focused on their phones. But they had their phones in their hands. Before Ed got off at his stop on Capitol Hill, he saw those last two holdouts start to check their mobile devices, too.

Walking home, he realized practically everyone he passed on the street — couples, people walking alone, people in groups — they were all on their phones. Ed felt like he was in some kind of Orwellian nightmare. He was the only person in the vicinity not on a phone or wearing some kind of head-phone device. Most of these people seemed ready to walk right into him if he didn’t step aside. People with dogs were the worst. They were supposed to love their dogs, yet during the one time they did something for their pet, they were on the phone, ignoring the poor animal — and taking up the entire sidewalk, too.

He figured maybe this was a Seattle thing — especially in his neighborhood, populated with so many young tech types. Or was it like this everywhere?

As an inventor, he used to think cell phones were a modern age marvel. But when they first started to get popular in the nineties, Ed noticed the people who used them seemed like self-important assholes. Look at me, I have a cell phone, they seemed to say. He remembered the ones in his local video store, browsing the new releases and chatting loudly on their mobile devices — annoying everyone else in the store.

For a while, people on cell phones were like smokers. They were annoying, but they were a minority. Now everyone had a phone. There was no escaping them. Even when people weren’t supposed to use their phones — at the movies, while driving their cars, in locker rooms or bathrooms — they still used them anyway. It was like the rules didn’t apply to them.

As far as Ed was concerned, cell phones should have stayed something that people used only for emergencies. They shouldn’t have become a way of life.

He wished he could invent some device to discourage people from using their phones, at least in situations where it was inappropriate. Maybe he could come up with a remote control mechanism that would scramble the phone signal. But would that really stop all the rude, phone-obsessed people out there?

“Ed, you’re certifiable,” claimed his friend, George. Another divorced retiree from the railroads, George was one of those gray-haired ponytail guys. They’d been best friends for twenty years. George lived on a houseboat on Lake Union.

It was late February, and George sat on a step-stool in Ed’s paneled basement “lab.” After weeks of trial, error and experimentation, Ed was ready to test his cell phone “Intruder,” a small gadget he’d fashioned to look like a remote keyless device for a car. Ed made himself the Guinea pig. He had four different brands and models of phones on the table in front of him. On each one, he would call his home number (Ed still had a landline — with an answering machine from the nineties). And while Ed was on the phone, George would click the device at him. Then they’d see what happened.

“I don’t feel good about this,” George said, frowning at the gizmo in his hand. “When did you come up with this little gem? Three in the morning? Nothing good ever happens after midnight, my friend. You were probably half-asleep when you put this together. I know it’s just supposed to scramble the signal, but what if something goes wrong?”

“That’s why we’re doing this — to make sure nothing goes wrong when I actually use it,” Ed explained. He picked up the Samsung. “And I do my best work after midnight. Remember, you’re sworn to secrecy about this. I really appreciate it, buddy. Afterwards, I’ll take you out for pizza and beers — on me.”

“If you’re still alive,” George said. “Remember a few years ago, those cell phones caught on fire because of the lithium batteries? What if something like that happens? I could blow your goddamn hand off or something. Or I might be sending out some radioactive signals...”

“Nothing like that is going to happen,” Ed assured his friend — and himself. The truth was the scrambling signal might end up doing just about anything to the phone — and the person holding it. That was why he needed to be the Guinea pig with this experiment. He might have wanted to screw with some of the phone-obsessed jerks out there, but he didn’t want to hurt anybody.

Ed didn’t want to get hurt either. So, despite how he acted with George, he was skittish about this experiment and the unknown results.

He clutched the Samsung in his left hand and punched in his home number. He heard it ring upstairs. Extending his left arm, Ed held the phone as far away as possible. “Okay,” he said, wincing. “Go ahead.”

The machine answered. He could hear his recorded voice talking over the connection.

The Intruder device in his hand, George shook his head. “I can’t! What if I end up killing you?”

“For God’s sake, press the button!” Ed yelled. His hand was shaking. He wondered if this was the last time he’d have all his fingers. “Go ahead! Do it!”

His answering machine greeting was still going.

George grimaced. “Here goes...”

Nothing happened.

“Did you press the button?” Ed asked.

“Yeah...”

Ed went back to the drawing board.

A week later, he and George tried again. The experiment was another failure. Ed took him out for pizza anyway.

Five weeks and five pizzas later, Ed gave up. Not that he blamed George, but his friend had hardly been encouraging. He’d said again and again, it was a lousy idea that would end up getting him into trouble. And he was probably right.

Ed had no rational reason for taking the Intruder with him when he went shopping that Saturday afternoon in late April. The damn thing didn’t work, but he thought he’d engage in a bit of whimsy, pressing it whenever he saw a rude texter or someone texting and driving. Maybe pressing the Intruder button would be good therapy for him — like squeezing one of those stress-relief balls.

He ambled down Broadway, the main drag of Capitol Hill, with the Intruder in his pocket. He kept passing so many Intruder-worthy candidates — most of them texters not looking where they were going. With each idiot he passed, Ed pressed the button on the device, but of course, nothing happened. And it was no fun merely pretending to screw up their phones.

Just ahead of him, Ed spotted a skinny young woman with corkscrew black hair wandering across the street — against the light. She wore earphones and worked her thumbs over her phone screen. A car with the right of way screeched to a halt as she mindlessly stepped in front of it. The driver honked. The girl didn’t even look up or quicken her pace. She casually flipped off the driver and went back to texting.

It reminded Ed so much of Rude Jason, flipping him the bird. This woman probably gave people the finger all the time. Could she possibly be any more of a jerk? He wanted to yell at her, but of course, she wouldn’t hear him.

Instead, Ed took the Intruder out of his pocket, aimed it at her and pressed it three times in a row.

The girl suddenly stopped dead and shrieked. The phone flew out of her hand, sailing up over her head. With a clatter, it landed behind her in the middle of the street.

The driver of the car revved his engine and zoomed past her, running over the mobile device. Ed heard it crunch under the tire.

Screaming hysterically, the young woman gaped down at the flattened, broken phone on the pavement. She acted like someone had mowed down her dog. At the same time, she kept wringing her hand and massaging it. Passersby looked at her as if she were crazy. Others didn’t even notice her, because they wore earphones or they were too busy on their own phones.

She held up traffic again, crying and cursing at cars swerving around her as she frantically gathered up the pieces of her shattered phone. She set the shards in her claw-like left hand.

Ed knew it was horrible, but he couldn’t help smiling.

He wondered what exactly had happened to make her throw the phone in the air like that.

He found out that evening, in his backyard with George during a final “test run.”

Rolling his eyes, his friend wondered out loud why Ed had resurrected his lame-brained “Intruder” invention. “You and your After-Midnight Specials,” he complained. “Nothing good is going to come from this...”

Ed hadn’t told him about the incident with the jaywalking texter.

Once again, he was the Guinea pig. With his friend standing by the garden on the other side of the yard, Ed called his home line. He’d instructed George to wait for his cue and then press the button on the Intruder three times in rapid succession.

Ed heard his voice on the answering machine. He was about to brace himself and nod at his friend. But George jumped the gun.

“Here goes,” George called out. He jabbed the button three times.

Ed wasn’t ready for the jolt of electricity that surged through his hand — like a hundred fiery needles. He let out a howl and dropped the phone. Stunned, he rubbed his throbbing, tingling hand. He was so rattled that he could hardly get a breath.

“What happened?” George asked. “Did you get a shock?”

“Um, a... a little one,” Ed lied. His heart was still racing. “Just a little one...”

He started to get the feeling back in his hand. With trepidation, he reached down and touched his phone. He didn’t get another shock. He picked it up off the lawn and listened. The line was dead. He switched it on and off again, but nothing happened. The phone had short-circuited.

“Well, it looks like I screwed the pooch again,” Ed heard himself say.

But it was another lie. Actually, he considered the experiment a major success. He just didn’t want his friend to know, because George would only try to talk him out of ever using the Intruder again.

So, when they went out for pizza and beer afterwards, Ed talked about how he would abandon the project. But all the while, he thought of Rude Jason in Nordstrom’s bathroom — and all the others like him. Armed with the Intruder, Ed wouldn’t have to put up with them anymore.

The following day, when he walked down Broadway, Ed felt like Charles Bronson in Death Wish. He was just looking for trouble. The Intruder in his pocket gave him an intoxicating sense of power. Broadway was like Cell Phone Central. It stood to reason, that for every ten phone users, at least one was rude about it. So, with all the techies and millennials on Broadway, Ed figured he’d come across at least three Intruder-worthy candidates on every block.

He passed one person after another on their phones — texting, talking or scrolling while they walked. Hardly any of them bothered to look where they were going. After a while, Ed didn’t even need to conceal the Intruder, because no one noticed him. He was over fifty. He may as well have been invisible. His thumb hovered over the Intruder button. He could have pressed it at any time. He must have seen at least a dozen idiots who deserved to get zapped. But none of them seemed quite rude enough. So he took mercy on them.

Or maybe he was just scared to use the device now that he knew what it could do.

Giving up, Ed felt deflated as he wandered into the QFC for some groceries. The supermarket was lousy with people on their phones blocking the aisles. As always, at least two or three morons had brought their dogs into the store — despite the signs saying pets weren’t allowed.

Ed ignored them as he picked up stuff for dinner. Then he went to the checkout line. He didn’t use the U-scan, because he wanted to keep the checkers employed. He got behind some nicely-dressed, forty-something guy who didn’t bother to unload his handcart. He just set it on the conveyer belt and let the cashier unload the cart for him. He was too busy talking on his phone.

A couple of shoppers got in line behind Ed.

With fascination and mounting contempt, he watched the man carry on his phone conversation while the cashier rang up his groceries. “Do you have a QFC card?” the young woman asked him. “Sir?”

He kept talking. Barely looking at her, he held up his index finger as if to indicate that he’d acknowledge her in a minute. She’d finished ringing up his items, but he hadn’t even reached for his wallet yet. Ed wondered what the guy was discussing on his phone that was so important. Did it really warrant holding up all the other customers in line behind him? Ed could see the cashier was getting exasperated with the guy. He wanted to tell him off. But he hated confrontations.

Then he remembered.

He had the Intruder.

Taking it out of his pocket, Ed pressed the button three times.

“Shit!” the guy bellowed, suddenly pitching his phone behind the counter. He shook his hand over and over as if he’d burned his fingers. “Goddamn it!”

The cashier thought he’d thrown his phone at her, and she laid into the guy: “Hey, what do you think you’re doing?”

He screamed back at her that his Smartphone had just given him a shock. He held up the checkout line even longer while he retrieved the phone and then threw a fit over the fact that it was now dead.

“That’s not my problem,” the cashier told him. “Are you going to pay for your items or what?”

The guy stormed out of the store without his groceries.

Ed couldn’t help smiling. It was a beautiful thing to see.

From then on, using the Intruder was easy — and so gratifying. It was like a triumph over rude, inconsiderate, self-important assholes everywhere.

It seemed the city was swarming with Intruder-worthy jerks. One of the sweetest victories for Ed was the encounter with a woman taking up the entire sidewalk with her Labrador retriever on a long leash. The dog crapped on the parkway. But the woman was too busy texting to stop and pick it up.

Ed even gave her a chance to redeem herself by politely inquiring: “Aren’t you going to clean up after your dog?”

She gave him a flutter of her hand as if to say “shoo,” and went back to texting.

Zapping her felt so good.

The phone seemed to leap from her grasp, and she let out a scream that sent her dog into a barking fit. Her phone landed in a pile of some other dog’s shit.

As Ed walked away, he heard her cursing furiously and the lab barking.

He also zapped four texters in a movie theater. The commotion he started was a lot more distracting than those glowing little screens in the darkened movie theater that always annoyed him. But in this case, the movie was only so-so; and it was utterly satisfying to watch each zapper-victim react. They jumped up from their seats. Drinks were spilled. Popcorn flew in the air.

Ed didn’t feel a bit sorry for them. They’d been told before the movie — during the previews — to turn off their cell phones. But did they pay attention? No.

The gym was a goldmine of Intruder-worthy self-involved creeps, especially those guys who remained on the weight machines like squatters, taking five or ten minute breaks while they texted or scrolled between reps. Ed really enjoyed zapping them. He got five people in a row — all lazily sitting or laying on the mats, focused on their phones. None of them had been stretching or exercising. Meanwhile, people like him were waiting for space to do their sit-ups. He zapped three more in the locker room — two texters and one fully-dressed clown who stood by his locker, talking on his phone, spitting distance from the sign that showed a cell phone inside a circle with a slash through it. They all had it coming. No one dared to shower at his gym anymore because of these cell phone jerks and guys taking selfies in the locker room. Ed felt like a freak every time he undressed to take a shower.

He returned to the gym two days later, and zapped sixteen more people.

Two days after that, on his next trip to the gym, Ed noticed someone on the staff had posted a hand-written sign at the check-in desk:

But people didn’t pay attention to signs anymore. So there were still plenty of phone abusers in the gym — and two more in the locker room. Ed zapped them all.

The next time he went to the gym, the sign was printed up and laminated. The guy at the check-in desk was collecting phones, then tagging and bagging them. Too many gym members had complained or threatened to sue.

Ed noticed a similar sign posted at his neighborhood QFC — right by the one saying that pets weren’t allowed. He hadn’t realized just how many people he’d zapped in the supermarket, but apparently the number was significant. He noticed less people using their phones while shopping. People in the checkout lines were actually talking to each other — or to the cashiers.

After a while, at the gym, he found he didn’t have to wait to use the machines or the exercise mats.

Now he didn’t hesitate to zap the phone-abusers he encountered on the sidewalk — that included anyone not looking where they were going while texting; people on their phones walking their dogs; texting jaywalkers; and people texting while driving. He’d almost caused a few car accidents among the last group — or more accurately, the texting drivers almost caused the accidents. Didn’t they know it was against the law?

After two weeks, the local TV news reported on the “cell phone malfunctions” that plagued Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood — along with some isolated incidents downtown, in Queen Anne, Ballard and Fremont. Cell phones were recalled and phone towers were tested. An article about it even popped up on page one of The Seattle Times.

Ed felt compelled to write The Times an email:

He sent the email from a computer in the Ballard Public Library so it couldn’t be traced to him.

But as soon as he sent the damn thing, Ed regretted it. He’d just admitted to The Seattle Times that he was behind all these people getting hurt and all that property damage. Were there cameras inside or outside the Ballard Public Library? Could the police track him down as the “Ed” who had written the email?

He suddenly felt like a hunted man — and they hadn’t even published the email yet. He wondered if they would. Maybe The Seattle Times would assume he was a crank and simply ignore the letter.

Two days later, his note was printed on the newspaper’s front page under the headline: “Anti-Phone Zealot ‘Ed’ Claims Responsibility for Series of Phone Malfunctions: Hero or Terrorist?”

Ed suddenly felt like the Zodiac Killer or the Unabomber. Portions of his email were read on TV — and not just the local news, but national news, too. He was all over the Internet. Some people thought he was absolutely nuts. But others spoke out against phone-abusers — or to quote Ed, “cell phone scum.” And to them, he was a hero, a crusader.

A follow-up article appeared a few days later. It cited the benefits to the “cell phone scare.” Movie attendance in Seattle had gone up by twelve percent. Washington State Highway Patrol reported accidents due to distracted drivers were down by twenty-one percent. The Seattle Humane Society issued a statement that dogs were “healthier and happier” now that less and less dog owners talked on their phone or texted while walking their pets.

Ed’s friend, George, was off the current events grid. He never turned on the TV or read a newspaper. So Ed didn’t have to worry about George finding out. But it was weird to have created such a stir and not talk with anyone about it. Nobody knew he was famous. He couldn’t help feeling lonely, but not quite as alone and isolated as he used to feel walking down the Seattle streets full of phone-focused people.

He couldn’t use the Intruder quite so freely anymore. He found out the hard way — on the bus. The number of people texting or talking on their phones while riding had definitely decreased. It was quiet, except for one twenty-something guy talking loudly on his phone, laughing and casually cursing a lot too. His favorite modifier was “fucking.” He used the word in practically every other sentence. After a while, it became annoying as hell. Ed could see he wasn’t the only one. Other passengers on the bus were bothered by the guy, too.

So Ed subtly took out the Intruder and zapped him.

The guy howled and dropped his phone. “My fucking phone just fucking shocked me! Fuck!” The whole bus heard him.

A few people applauded. Ed suppressed a smile.

“Oh my God, Ed’s on the bus!” another passenger declared.

“Ed, where are you?” someone else called. “Stand up!”

A couple of people started chanting his name, like he was a football star or something.

“Shut up!” yelled one man near the back of the bus. “That guy’s nothing less than a criminal! He’s a self-appointed vigilante. He’s killed people!”

That was a boldface lie, but Ed wasn’t about to say anything.

The guy he’d zapped was seething and out for blood. “Where’s this Ed guy? He’s gonna fucking pay for my fucking phone!”

Ed quietly slinked off the bus at the next stop — even though it wasn’t his.

During the long walk home, he decided to retire the Intruder for a while. He’d become too famous to use it.

But then something happened, something he had no control over.

People started getting attacked while using their phones in public. It started out with texters and callers being doused with water, sodas or Slurpees — and in one noteworthy case, hot coffee. When the coffee-pitcher was arrested, he claimed, “The cell phone scum had it coming!” The victim, who suffered second degree burns, had merely been standing at a bus stop, texting a friend.

Incidents of people on phones being attacked went on the rise in several cities across the country. They were punched, pushed, and in some cases, even stabbed or shot.

When Ed read about the first fatality, he was sick with guilt. He knew it wasn’t really his responsibility, but he’d started the trend. Some people even referred to the attacks on Smartphone users as “ripping an Ed.”

It only got worse during the summer. Drive-by shootings were reported, with phone users as the targets. Road rage against texting drivers turned even more lethal with the phone users getting shot at or run off the roads and highways.

Everyone seemed to blame the elusive, mysterious “Ed” for all the carnage. The Seattle Times reported that the police manhunt for him had intensified.

But no one was getting shocked anymore. They were getting killed.

Ed wanted to write another letter to the newspaper saying he’d stopped zapping phone-abusers months ago, and he disavowed all the violence. But he decided he was better off maintaining a low profile.

Meanwhile, it got so nobody felt safe using their phone in public anymore. Phone booths started popping up again in various cities, but now the glass was bulletproof.

By October, the violent aggression against phone users was on the wane. On the streets, in the stores, and on public transportation, people still weren’t using their phones. Instead, they talked to each other, read books or just seemed to notice things around them. Every once in a while, Ed would see someone furtively pulling out their phone in public, and they’d check something. Then, right away, the phone would go back in their pocket or their purse.

Ed still carried the Intruder around, like some people carry a rabbit’s foot. He had it with him a week before Halloween when he went downtown to Nordstrom to buy George a pair of sneakers for his birthday. But Ed had had too much coffee that morning, and before browsing Men’s Shoes, he ducked into the restroom. There was an open stall, and he grabbed it.

“You’re a two... you’re a four... you’re a six...” he murmured to himself as he stood in front of the toilet. Then he peed right on cue. He flushed the toilet and stepped out of the stall. He was about to wash his hands at the sink when another man stepped into the restroom.

What were the odds?

It was Rude Jason again, still sporting the backward baseball cap look, and once more, on his phone. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Well, he’s bluffing...” he said into his phone as he headed to the urinals. He unzipped with his free hand before he even reached his destination.

Agog, Ed stared at him. Despite everything that had transpired in the last ten months, this rude, self-important, phone-obsessed asshole was still a rude, self-important, phone-obsessed asshole.

Ed quickly washed and dried his hands. Then he reached into his pocket. He had to take the Intruder out of retirement just this once. He wasn’t even sure if the device still worked, it had been so long since he’d used it.

He stared at Rude Jason’s back while the guy continued his phone conversation at the urinal. With a smile, Ed pressed the Intruder button three times in rapid succession.

“Son of a bitch!” Rude Jason wailed. His voice echoed off the bathroom tiles. He dropped his phone in the urinal and staggered back. He was still peeing. The yellow stream shot around the men’s room — all over the floor. Ed almost got squirted.

Wincing, the guy crazily shook and waved his hand as if his sleeve was on fire. He finally turned to the urinal to finish peeing and then zipped up. But obviously, he was still frazzled. He kept wringing his hand as he stepped back from the urinal. Then he slipped in a puddle of his own urine.

Agog, Ed watched Rude Jason’s legs slip out from under him. He flipped back and landed on the floor. His head hit the tiles with a horrible crack.

His baseball cap askew, he was sprawled on the washroom floor, perfectly still. Beneath his head, a crimson pool began to bloom on the gray tiles.

“Oh, Jesus,” Ed murmured. He stuffed the Intruder back into his pocket, and quickly took out his cell phone. “Hang in there, buddy!” he called to the man, who didn’t respond at all.

Ed dialed 911. He kept thinking there might be a doctor somewhere in the store. With the phone to his ear, he hurried out of the men’s room. He almost ran into a short, pale man with a thin mustache. He wore an army camouflage jacket. The man glared at him.

“Nine-one-one,” Ed heard the operator answer. “What’s your emergency?”

But Ed didn’t reply. He froze in his tracks.

The man in front of him pulled a gun out from inside his camouflage jacket. “Cell phone scum!” he declared, raising the weapon.

The last thing Ed heard was the gunshot.

Then... nothing.

The shooter was an unemployed thirty-seven-year-old named Ronald Jarvis Barr. A security guard at Nordstrom tackled him at the exit as he tried to flee the store. No one else was hurt.

Ed was rushed to Swedish Hospital — along with Turner Pollard, 34, who had been discovered in the men’s room. Turner had suffered a mild concussion, took four stitches in his head, and was released later that night.

Ed was lucky in many ways. The bullet that had passed through his gut didn’t hit any vital organs. Moreover, the police and paramedics didn’t make any connection between him and the notorious “Ed” who had started the anti-phone-abuse trend. Turner’s memory was blurry, and he didn’t recall getting shocked. His phone had been found in the urinal. The police assumed he’d panicked after dropping the mobile device and slipped on his own pee.

They also must have assumed the Intruder found in Ed’s pocket was the remote keyless device for his car.

Ed decided that once they released him and he got home, he’d destroy the Intruder. He never wanted to use it again.

Ed had to stay in the hospital a couple of nights. On his second day there, he was still unsteady on his feet. But he wanted some exercise, so they gave him a walker to get around. He made sure his gown was closed in back as he feebly hobbled down the hospital corridor with some help from the walker. His stomach felt like it was on fire. But the doctor had told him that was normal in his circumstances. Still, Ed stayed slightly hunched over as he navigated the hallway.

Just ahead, he saw a thirty-something woman leaning against the wall, her hip pressed against the handrail. Her back was to him. “Oh, I’ll be here again tomorrow — and probably the next couple of days,” she said — apparently to no one.

As Ed passed her, he saw she was talking on her Smartphone. He also saw, on the wall directly across from her, a sign with a cell phone inside a circle with a line through it and the words: NO CELL PHONES ALLOWED.

“I think I’m just going home and making an omelet,” she was saying into her phone. “Probably Tex-Mex...”

Ed stopped and stared at her until her eyes finally met his. “I hate people,” he whispered, smiling.

The woman gazed at him as if he were crazy.

Ed nodded, then turned and slowly shuffled down the hallway.