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short fiction

Radio chatter

March 27, 2017 by Pen Leave a Comment

You’re not going to believe me, and that’s OK. I really don’t believe it myself. I’m writing it down because I have to. I don’t know how much time I have. There isn’t anywhere to run.

I listen to those app scanners on my phone. Used to listen. The police scanners. You can choose from all over the place. All the big cities and some of the medium ones. I used to like listening to Chicago PD. It’s amazing how calm all of them stay. The professionals who keep society from fraying. I wouldn’t want to face the kind of grind they do. Constantly dealing with people who are on the edge of disaster, or have gone over the waterfall completely.

The situations play out in ways more macabre than any reality show writer could come up with. The questions and conversations baffled and fascinated me all at once.

“Seven children being taken into protective custody. Parents argumentative. Need assistance at 1024 Roberts. 10-4.”

“I have a recovered box of stolen items. Do I need to hold it for fingerprinting?”

“What’s in the box?”

“Clothing.”

“They can’t print clothing.”

“Short hair, hoodie, dark jeans, white shoes.”

“Time for a shift change. Good night everyone, and get home safe.”

Male voices. Female voices. Impassively discussing the fragility of civilization and the bad behavior of the days and nights in the cities where they act as counterweights to every type of bad behavior imaginable. It’s a show, and I’m in the audience nearly every night.

Or was. Until I tuned in last week. I dialed up Chicago PD, except that’s not what I got. Something got snarled up.

“What’s the status of the shipment?” I couldn’t place the accent on the male voice. Perfect English. Like too perfect. Everything enunciated crisply. Like someone who isn’t from anywhere at all. Maybe someone who has lived everywhere and been to some kind of school that teaches you to talk perfectly.

“Shipment due at 2300. Agent is in place to receive.”

“What about the entry team?”

“We’re go. Team is assembled three clicks from insertion. Status yellow. Will go green when shipment has been delivered and QAed. Primary and secondary extraction plans look good. Six approved.”

The feed squelched. Then I heard, “Passing 5100 block of Walcott. Wearing green shirt and blue jeans. Wanted for eluding police. One Amelia Anderson. She is a 27-year-old female, short blonde hair, blue eyes.”

“Two male blacks aggressively panhandling and grabbing people walking by. They have a bottle of whiskey.”

“Rolling northbound.”

“Thank you units.”

“The kill order is confirmed. We are Romeo, Echo, Alpha, Delta, Yankee. Will update when the package is in place.”

“Two black males, shoplifting.”

“He’s in the alley going through garbage.”

“This is the leader of the free world we are talking about. This is the highest profile target in the United States. There will be fallout.”

“Three male Hispanics having a loud argument, West Plains and 30th. Six one eddy. Headed to complainant.”

“Stand by a second. Twenty is going east. How is the victim?”

“She’s fine. We’re rolling to the hospital.”

I hear the static of an open mic and then, “Watch your keys, watch your keys. We’ve got an open key.”

I shake my head, trying to make sense of the secondary conversation. Someone must be playing a practical joke. I wonder who will be getting a visit from the Secret Service in a few hours or maybe days. I wonder how they track down trolls making jokes about stuff like this.

“We’re cleared.”

“Two one Robert we need a welfare check. Four two three Robert, who has the plate reader?”

“Thirty-three is coming in with it.”

“Confirmed with the client that there is an individual bonus. Double the standard rate. Whoever gets the best body cam footage of the terminal moments earns triple. Verification that team will be extracted to non-extradition territory per original discussion.”

I shut it off then. I was scared I could get in trouble just for listening. I’m not dumb enough to shout “bomb” in a crowded airport, and I don’t want to be party to people playing jokes that are also felonies. Christ they sounded serious. People. Never cease to amaze me with their stupidity.

I took some NyQuil and lay down in bed. Next day, I checked Google News. Nothing. Trolls. Just trolls.

Except two weeks ago, the President was assassinated. That was less than 72 hours after the weird radio chatter I heard.

I deleted all those scanner apps. Too late.

There are people following me. I don’t know who they are. I don’t know what they want. I don’t know who to tell. No one is going to believe me.

I didn’t do anything wrong. You need to know that about me. I was just listening.

The TV news people are saying it was probably the Russians, but I know what Russians sound like. They weren’t Russians. They sounded like broadcast news anchors to me. Broadcast news anchors who kill important people for a living.

Shit. I’m fucked. Maybe all of us are.

Filed Under: Short Stories Tagged With: assassination, dark short story, fiction, hit team, plot, police scanner, reality show, short fiction, short story, voyeur

Highlands, North Carolina

May 2, 2016 by Pen Leave a Comment

Forty-four hundred feet above sea level. We’re sitting in comfortable plastic and aluminum chairs next to a rushing stream in a magnolia forest. Winter is coming on, the temperature mild and the fresh air mixed with our camp smoke are incredibly aromatic. They are smells I thrive on. This sun is starting to dip, and a gentle breeze is coming across the ridges all around us. Kimber, Low, Simmons, and me. We’re old men now, the only ones left from the time over there.

Baghdad. We spent a year together, in the way back. A year in which the sound of things exploding seemed more common to me then gunfire, which I don’t tend to think of as an explosion, but more of a controlled detonation. Although I have to admit, a lot of the trigger fingers in Baghdad weren’t starting controlled explosions during that year. More like panicked ones.

I think all of us knew, somehow, that this would be the last trip to Highlands. We’re old now, and we want our comfort. Plus. What happened.

Kimber was the first sergeant. Low, Simmons and me were one section in his public affairs team. Our job, reporting on the war from inside the war. I suppose it was important. But it was also a heaping helping of bullshit. We weren’t reporting from an unbiased perspective. We were mouthpieces for men who loved metrics and spin. You know the type, I’m sure. They act as talking heads on the boob tube daily, even though all that shit happens in holovision now. War isn’t the same when you’re projected right into the middle of it. It’s harder for those power mongering fucks to start wars these days. An invasion in holovision, well, you can’t control the footage that gets out of a war like that, and it shakes people up a lot more than what they got to hear and see back in 2005. I had a fucking panic attack for the first time in 20 years the first time I watched Dark Descends on Baghdad in holo. Fuck, that brought it back.

Mortar attack, Christmas, twenty o’ five. I ran for my life. Ran like I never had before in all that rattletrap bullshit gear they gave me to wear. Wished I wasn’t wearing anything but some track shoes. The ones who weren’t wearing body armor made it into the bunker precious seconds ahead of me. That fucking war movie sent me right back into the moment. Whooooop. The sound of  a mortar coming in is something you never forget after the first one lands near you. Your brain trains itself to get running the instant that whooooop starts. Cause you know more of them are coming behind and you better be inside a concrete structure quick.

I was proud when the IVAW got that Pentagon rule about showing wounded and dead troops rescinded. People need to see what the ones in charge are responsible for. On all sides of any given argument or dispute. I believed it then, and I still believe it now. It gets a lot hard to make bad decisions when the results are right there in your living room, in full holo. Those nicer units give you the smells too, and believe you me, the smells of war will make a protestor out of you. I think the Chinese incursion of 2030 had a lot to do with that policy being rescinded too, while I’m rambling. Alaska being renamed New Hainan kind of shook things up and made us take a step back when it came to being the world’s loudest blowhards.

Kimber is a human piece of shit. We’ve been doing this trip once or twice a year since we got back alive in 2005. This is the first time Kimber made it. Why?

We all hate him. Plus, he’s been incarcerated until recently, so even if we’d gone crazy and asked him to come along, he wouldn’t have been able. Couple years after the unit got back from the sandbox he got arrested for touching his stepdaughter.

No one was surprised except Kimber. Fifty shades of self-delusion and an untouchables complex that stood a foot taller than he did. This guy. Kimber. What a bull necked, hard-headed, misogynistic, crude loudmouth. Or just bully for short. Big guy. Of the kind that goes sorta soft around 30. Fat rolls around all the vitals. Running up into the neck. Enough size and muscle to push the medium size guys around still, but would go down hard if a real brawler showed up. Kimber was a real pro when it came to using verbal threats and cajoling to get things done.

He used to trade favors over there. “Hey,” he’d say, “I’ll get my guys to write a story about you, a real good one, that you can send to the fam back home. You get me some better meals.” Shit like that. He wrote himself up for a bronze star at the end of our year. It got approved. You know, connections. Fucker stayed under cover in a fortified parking garage the whole time we were there, but the commendation didn’t mention that. Bronze stars are supposed to be for folks who actually take risks and achieve something that means something. The first sergeant didn’t take any risks, and he sure as shit didn’t achieve a damn thing unless it somehow made him more comfortable or forwarded his career somehow. He spent all his time handing danger out to us, and he enjoyed the hell out of it. One week it was a story in Mosul, the next in Mamudiya. We’d come back in one piece somehow, and have to listen to his endless critiques about our shortcomings as war reporters. He liked to use massive, ripping farts as punctuation marks for the creative verbal beatdowns that flowed unceasingly out of his mouth along with foul smelling breath.

He liked to touch us inappropriately, pretending he was some sort of crossbred father/teacher/wiseman, and that he was only telling us how much we sucked because he wanted to make us better at what we did. Bop in, put an arm around your shoulder all friendly like, and start talking in a low conspiratorial voice about whatever his latest great idea to fuck us all over happened to be. By the end of our year in hell with him as the main decision maker, I lost count of how many times I’d fantasized about shooting him in the back of the head just to shut him up.

There was one guy, Escridida, who was from Guam or somewhere, I can’t remember for sure, and had a hard to understand accent. Short little guy who talked really fast and got nervous often, which made him screw up the simplest tasks. Escridida made it through the year in Baghdad. He ate a bullet about three months later. I’ve always believed it had something to do with the fact that Kimber spent a year riding his ass and mocking his accent. Truth be told, the guy was hard to understand, but none of us are perfect, and most of us don’t need someone riding our ass about it 24/7. Kimber and Escridida were only one rank apart, but Kimber treated that poor guy like he was a private. Fucking asshole.

He was more than a standard issue fucking asshole though. He drew energy from the simple pleasure of making everyone under his control as miserable as possible. How we all got through those missions he sent us on for a year unscathed is something I still wrestle with. Touch of survivor’s guilt. I’m pretty sure of that. We weren’t really unscathed. More like the scars just weren’t visible. They were there, and lots of things would make them scream. The scars he put on us were up in our grey matter. Most people don’t jump under a table in a restaurant when the server drops a plate and it shatters. I’ve been doing that for a couple of decades.

Kimber found Jesus when he got pinched for touching little girls. He served 27 on a 30-year sentence. It happened about three years after we got home. While he sat in jail talking to Jesus, Low and I went to the VA for counseling and to get some of the road wear looked at. I ended up on the middle of that scale they use to calculate just how fucked up you are from going to war. Only fifty percent fucked up. Yeah, that’s me. I get a little extra paycheck at the end of every month, and have been for a good long while.

You might be wondering why the three of us were sitting around that little campfire with a guy each of us hated with a passion. I was too, back on that night. Kimber always was a good cajoler and convincer. Even though we hated him, I gotta admit he’s a good talker. He told us that he wanted to talk about Baghdad and make some amends. You know, like those AA guys are supposed to do. Apologies won’t do much for Escridida, was what I was thinking, but Low and Simmons wanted to hear him out, so I grudgingly said yes, he could come along and have a heart to heart if that’s what they wanted.

Anyhow, he made his apology, while we were all sipping on some Jim Beam. It didn’t sit right with me, mostly because of the way he kicked it off. Nothing he did really ever sat right with me. I gotta admit that. Don’t start an apology by telling someone that you’re not guilty. Don’t tell three people you put through hell that you didn’t touch little girls, that it was just she made the story up because she got in trouble. I’ve heard enough of his horse shit to know when he’s lying, and when’s he twisting up reality. Plus, while I didn’t attend the trial, I read the court transcripts. He was guilty as shit, and he’d been doing it a good long while. He messed both of their heads up, bad.

I let him finish telling the three of us what Jesus did to make him a better man, and how sorry he was about the way he treated us back in Baghdad. I only asked him one thing.

“Did you send us on missions out of the wire just to get in good with people?”

He lied and said no, that all those missions, especially the hot ones, came from the major. It disgusted me. I’m not sure quite how to put how gross the man made me feel inside into words. I’d heard him plotting through the thin trailer walls on phone calls more than once. He sent Pincher to Fallujah for a week just so he could get on some pogue run to the biggest PX in the city, and buy who the hell knows what. Probably some goddamn Xbox game. Pincher came back different. Fallujah was real hot back then. Lots of stuff flying around. Pincher saw things people really aren’t supposed to see. He told me one of them. About the wounded enemy laying in the street. What it sounded like when the Abrams ran over his head and it went pop. Pincher told me about what the brains felt like running down the inside of his uniform collar. And how the pulp went real far and got on everything.

There was no plan. I’d swear to that. Not that night. I got up and said, “who needs a refill?” I was thinking about Jim Beam. Everybody held their cups out. I went around the circle and filled. Kimber was the last one. When he leaned back to take a nip, he smacked his lips and something broke. Suddenly, I wasn’t thinking.

When I looked down, I realized that I’d put my Benchmade into his gut. That Benchmade has got me out of some shit over the last 30 years. Kimber looked down and dropped his plastic cup. A waste of good alcohol, if you ask me.

First, I didn’t feel anything at all. Then, I felt the need to get my knife back. It’s expensive, and well made, and I am never without it. I pulled it out real hard so it wouldn’t hang up on anything. The back is serrated. Kimber, even though he’d shrunk an inch or two from getting old, was still way bigger than I ever hoped to be. He tried to grab me. I just put one arm on his face and pushed.

That’s what another thing I wasn’t expecting happened. Low and Simmons put their knives in him too. They went for the neck. He bled out in maybe a little less than a minute. Couldn’t talk. He was trying, but nothing came out except some air, and a lot of blood. You cut on either side like that, and it’s over quick. It was done, and we just looked at each other when he fell backwards into the camp chair with his mouth open in a way that felt obscene to me.

We dragged him a good half-mile, dug a hole, dumped him in. I told Jesus how sorry Kimber was for all the wrong he’d done. We burned the camp chair because it was easier than trying to clean all his blood off.

It’s been about a year since that night, and I just had to write down what happened. It’s what I do. No one ever came looking for him. I don’t think anyone cared enough to do that. The three of us have never discussed what happened, and we never will.

I don’t know if this story has any lesson in it, but every word of it’s the truth and I needed to write it down. I still have a conscience. Somewhere deep, it’s telling me that maybe what we did needs the light of day. I slept good in my tent that night though. Better than I had since 2005. My night terrors and the teeth grinding rarely pay a visit now.

Sometimes the wrong things die, and sometimes they don’t. I’m just a guy who tells stories. I’ll let you sort out which kind are what.

Filed Under: Personal, Short Stories Tagged With: a lot happened over there, aftermath, fiction, fiction based on reality, Iraq, penfist, revenge, short fiction, short story, things that happen

Home

September 27, 2014 by Pen Leave a Comment

She did her shopping alone today. Casually browsing the aisles looking for nothing in particular. It was strange. They were all grown. Finally. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. Birds flown from the nest. Her husband was on the golf course. Enjoying stories and lies with his friends. She thought about what a good man he was. Then she thought about how content she was. It made her uneasy. And she liked it. She had always liked the sharp edges of things.

He’ll do well in college, she thought. Her youngest son had always been her favorite because of how different he was. Like her but unlike her. She sighed and placed an avocado in the plastic bag which crinkled with a noise she loved. She loved many strange little details of her white picket fence life.

Moving down the aisles aimlessly she continued to think about her children. It was hard to believe they had grown into adults. It was hard to believe that she was so old. She’d never expected to be old. She wondered what she would watch on television. She wondered if he would come home drunk again and fuck her. He seemed restless. Retirement didn’t suit a company man like him. He was driving her crazy. Maybe they would take a trip somewhere exotic. They needed something different.

He built his power base carefully. A marijuana business had never been something that interested him. It was lucrative though. When more than half of the states in the union found their sanity and legalized recreational use he invested in cultivation. Then he expanded to retail. He was a criminal but he was also a gentleman. He broke the rules but never for the sake of breaking them. He was cautiously reckless. By skirting the lines and applying grease where it was needed his business outgrew that of his competitors.

He had to kill one of them. She was a cutthroat. She was unhinged. When his competitor had one of his fields burned her people killed one of his employees. That was unacceptable. He went to his locker, took out one of the rifles and practiced for several days. Then he shot his competitor through the head from a hilltop a mile away while she was sipping white wine from a crystal glass. The glass didn’t break when it hit the deck of her home with expensive mountain views. Her head exploded and he had the rifle smelted down into its base elements. The deck was demolished and rebuilt so the realtor wouldn’t have to disclose that someone had been murdered in the home. His business continued to grow. His remaining competitors became more cautious.

When she arrived at home she thought about how empty the house felt. Then she got high and fisted herself. Got lost in a memory and talked to a man who only lived in her head. He didn’t come home until well after midnight. He didn’t fuck her. She wondered if he had someone else and realized it didn’t matter if he did. She dreamed about a demon who shape shifted into an angel. At times she forgot if the being had appeared as the angel or the demon initially. She realized it didn’t matter. In the morning he went into the garage and lost himself in a project. She got high on the porch. That night they began planning their exotic trip.

He took a small portion of his profits from the marijuana business and built a special place. In his travels all over the world to meet growers and convince politicians it was in their best interest to vote his way on legalization he’d come across a few very special parcels of real estate. Through a shell company he made a land purchase. Then he drew up a blueprint and hired an old friend who had gone into contracting after they left the military and the wars. The contractor was reliable and knew how to keep his mouth shut. The place took a year to build. It cost him millions. Mostly because everything had to be flown in from a great distance by seaplane. The house at the end of the world took shape. The special room inside was constructed exactly to his specifications.

When they did the final walkthrough his friend knew better than to ask any questions about that room. They were like that. There was no need to discuss what the room would be used for. They had been through so much together. There was no need to talk about what or why anymore. Some people just get things done.

The trip was going wonderfully. She was falling in love. She did that a lot. The girl was younger than her. Beautiful. Her husband was too busy drinking and playing golf on the savanna to notice that she was sneaking off to play with her new friend. The two of them were comfortable being apart together. When she and the girl finally decided to explore each others’ bodies fully it was magical. They got high and tasted everything including each other in the tent while giraffes grazed outside in the acacias. She drifted off to sleep and dreamed that she was being kidnapped.

Everything was ready. It had been for some time. The plane arrived on time. He had interviewed and hired everyone for this job personally. It went like clockwork. The girl arrived with the package on time. Everything had been planned meticulously. She woke up a little groggy. It took a few minutes to realize that she was in chains.

“Hello girl,” he said. “It’s been long enough.”

She fainted.

When she came back he was doing something noisy. She heard scraping and a crackling noise.

“Hello again girl.”

She struggled to see but her head was clamped into something. Something made of metal. She realized that her head was trapped inside a cage made of metal mesh.

“I’m going to brand you now,” he said quietly. The words sounded so loud inside her head. “It’s well past time.”

She thought about the history the two of them shared. About the decades in between the beginning and the now.

The smell of her own flesh burning made her feel more loved than she ever had before. She cried as she realized she would never leave this place. The wandering and wondering were over. She was home. She was his.

Filed Under: Short Stories Tagged With: abduction, creepy, dark short story, kidnapped, short fiction, short story, slave

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