Body Count

by mike Evans

  Tommy yelled, “Hey guys, can you come over here?”

  Matt laughed, not wanting to break the line that they were walking and said, “What, did you forget how to take the safety off of your gun there Tommy?”

  “That was only once asshole, now get over here damn it, I think this guy was in the plane wreck yesterday.”

  Bobby heard this and said, “That plane landed miles from here, are you sure that coffee sobered you up?”

  “Would you shut the fuck up and get on over here. If it isn’t the guy from that plane there must be a shit ton of planes letting people parachute out of them into places no one should be jumping, especially into a damn forest of all things.”

  At this all the men became quiet and slowly started walking towards him, realizing that if the man was still alive that their hunting week would easily be ruined. When they made it to the small clearing where Tommy was standing, he pointed to the man in the tree and commented, “Looky here what I found fellas, it’s a big one.”

  Bobby said, “Right, but we weren’t actually out here looking for anyone, that doesn’t make me feel any better at all.” He saw the harness on the parachute and the ripped open coat and saw what was beneath that. He took a few steps back, really taking in what he was seeing. When Matt and Steven made their way over, he pointed to the man’s chest, “Hey would you look at that?”

  Steven looked up and saw the man dressed plain and bloodied. “Yeah, I’d say this guy didn’t go out parachuting to often because he kind of looks like he sucks at it.”

  Bobby said, “Valid point, but look under his jacket up there, he isn’t wearing two parachute rigs. He’s wearing something underneath that, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look like he has pistols sticking out all over that thing. They don’t look cheap either.”

  Matt looked while walking the perimeter around the man and saw his buddy was actually right. He said, “What do you know about pistols?”

  “I know guys jumping out of planes armed to the teeth and ones that have silencers on their guns, which aren’t even legal, probably means that he’s wearing a pretty expensive set up there,” Bobby informed him.

  Tommy looked and said, “So what are you saying there Bobby?”

  “I’m saying that if a tree falls in the woods and there’s nobody around to hear it, did it make a noise?”

  When the three men stared at him he said, “Fuck, I need new friends. Ok let me paint ya’ll a picture here. He’s been here over night, you can tell that just by looking at him. Now what does that mean? It means that he ain't wearing no type of GPS or nothing. So if no one is looking for him and he’s pretty much dead anyway, I say we cut him down, find a nice place to leave his corpse that no one is ever gonna find, and then we take the guns, break them down, and sell them at the swap meet next month. There’s no way in hell that there won't be at least a few guys who are going to be up for some fancy shit like that. We can research what all this shit is worth and sell it half price.”

  “Well that sounds just a bit crooked doesn’t it?” Matt questioned.

  Steven thought about it, it was money he surely could use thinking of Christy and said, “Yeah, but, what if he’s still alive?”

  Bobby looked at his shotgun and then back at him and suggested, “Well it looks like we could probably help him with that. We don’t want to make the man suffer do we?”

  The rest of them smiled, thinking of the cash at this point only. Matt said, “So how do we get him down? Look how high that tree is, I ain’t climbing that, hell we’d break our asses if we fell from there.”

  They examined the rig of the parachute, none of them ever being in one before. They saw one button that resembled that of a car seat strap for children that would undo everything if pushed. Bill used his rifle to push at it. When he did, the chute straps separated and Gabriel fell to the ground hard. Gabriel coughed when he hit the ground. The men jumped back and looked to Bobby. Matt asked, “So what are we going to do now tough ass, it was your idea to take him out, so what do you want to do with him?”

  Bobby, not wanting to back down and knowing that the men wouldn’t defy him said, “You hold him down and let me help him with his breathing problem.”

  Unfortunately for the men, this was not something that Gabriel needed to hear upon waking up stiff, sore, bruised, and bloodied. Gabriel tried to get up for a second but needed a moment to rest. Gabriel assumed that he’d hit his throat on the way down because he was unable to form words, but had no issues still performing actions. Gabriel tried to rise up from the ground but Bobby put a boot on his shoulder, pushing him back down. He could hear the sliding of a bolt action rifle being opened and checked and then closed again. He was confident that it also sounded like a safety being clicked off. Gabriel motioned to his throat. Matt said, “Hey Bobby I think...I think he wants something to drink?”

  “Well I don’t give a shit what he wants. I’d say after I put one of these here rounds in his head that he won’t be too thirsty at all after that, what do you think?” Bobby asked the others.

  The men laughed nervously, they weren’t murderers but they all had come to peace with extra cash as well as the fact that this man couldn’t be any closer to being dead than he looked right now. “You two stand aside, I don’t want you getting a bunch of brains all over your good hunting boots. That’s a good way to ruin a weekend if you know what I mean,” Bobby instructed

  The two men slid to the side and out of the way. Matt said, “Do it Bobby, do it, get it done with now!”

  Gabriel blinked his eyes rapidly and saw the man with the rifle approaching from only a few feet away. He knew that the scope on it would be useless at this range of distance. The man started to squeeze the rifle’s trigger when suddenly Gabriel swung up a leg and did an inside outside kick on the rifle causing it to swing to the left. Bobby did not mean to pull the trigger yet he did. A piercing scream from his left came out of nowhere. He snapped his head around and saw Matt clasping at his gut, blood was covering the light tan gloves he was wearing. Matt instantly had tears forming in his eyes and his lips and knees began to quiver. Matt whispered, “What the hell man. What are you doing?”

  Bobby went to say something while Tommy and Steven stared in shock at their friend as he fell back against the tree and started to slide slowly down to the ground. Bobby looked back at Gabriel, who was much more awake by now, and started to tell him he was a dead man. However when he looked down, it was only to see that Gabriel had his knees curled up to his chest. By the time Bobby figured out what the stranger was doing, Gabriel kicked his legs out and landed both of them into Bobby’s knee caps, sending him off balance and to the ground where he landed flat on his face. Bobby did his best to scramble quickly up from the ground, though when he did, his eyes met with the stranger’s then slowly travelled down to see a silenced pistol gleaming in the sunlight and pointed directly at him. Gabriel smiled as best that he could, never breaking eye contact, then squeezed the trigger three times, leaving little of the top half of the man’s skull still in place.

  Steven and Tommy watched both disgusted and horrified as they stared at what was left of their friend’s head. They focused back on the deadly stranger, both fumbling with their rifles. Gabriel shot Tommy in the ankle and then in the knee cap, dropping him to the ground. As he was falling down, Gabriel repositioned his aim, directing it towards Steven and shot him in the crotch, stomach, and finally in skull twice. His gun clicked empty which was when a screaming Tommy got the worst of it.

  Gabriel reached to his chest rig and with a firm grip, ripped free his knife. He brought the blade up under Tommy’s chin and drove it up through his neck until the butt of the blade stopped him from going any further. Tommy’s screams disappeared into the distance and the last thing that he could see before the light in his eyes dimmed was Gabriel staring back at him.

  Matt screamed at the top of his lungs. His screams fell only upon those ears of animals and Gabriel, who could care less for his pleas to b
e saved. Gabriel let the magazine go on his pistol and replaced it with a fresh one then pulling the slide release down. Gabriel pushed up from the ground, leaning on Tommy’s prone body, using him to prop himself up. Gabriel reached for his pocket, never taking his aim off of Matt, knowing that the man would either be passing out or bleeding out very soon. He found one of the water bottles that was still intact inside his coat pocket and gulped the entire bottle down, feeling both pain and burning in addition to the satisfaction rehydration, something that he knew he very much needed right now. Gabriel tested out his vocal cords and when he knew that they would work he said, “Where is your camp?”

  Matt replied with fear in his voice, “You, you are gonna shoot me aren’t you?”

  “Do you want to live?” Gabriel asked.

  He nodded nervously, snot and tears running down his face, adding to the mix of drool and blood from his mouth. Gabriel repeated himself, “Tell me where your camp is.”

  Matt held out a blood soaked hand, while pointing he said, “It’s probably a quarter to a half mile that way. Hell, you’ll smell the food once we get close to there. It won’t take us long, but I'm gonna need a doctor. I can’t believe you shot me.”

  Gabriel managed to fully rise from the ground with the help of a rifle, hoping that he would be able to walk that far in his current state.

  “So you gonna help me get back there too buddy?” Matt asked with trepidation.

  Gabriel stared him down while aiming the rifle dead center at the man’s skull. “You guys just tried to murder me in cold blood.”

  “But we didn’t mean nothing by it.”

  Gabriel tilted his head a bit, unsure how to respond. He leveled the rifle at him and while squeezing off one round he casually replied, “Well then try not to take this too personally will ya?”

  Gabriel looked around the clearing in an attempt to get his bearings. He tried to walk but fell back down to his knees and decided it wasn’t time to try and stand again yet. He crawled to each of the men, feeling their pockets and taking their wallets and keys. He didn’t want to leave anything behind that might be useful, especially if he wasn’t sure he’d be able to make a return trip. Gabriel took the ammunition from the man he had taken the rifle from.

  Gabriel favored having a long gun, and having a choice, he wouldn’t ever want to pick a short distance shot over the preferred long distance shot. There was always safety in distance when you had the longer shooting weapon. Gabriel grabbed a second long gun but this time chose it for its length over the caliber. He needed a makeshift crutch to get him back to the lodge. Gabriel was well aware of the little time that he had before he would pass out again.

  Gabriel hobbled through the woods, resting frequently against trees and sitting on fallen logs. The final man did not lie, eventually Gabriel could smell the food cooking in the small cabin. By the time that Gabriel made it to the cabin, his entire body felt like it was on fire. The soreness and bruising from the previous day was in full tilt, his joints ached from sleeping in a parachute rig while hanging from a tree. He looked around the clearing and saw that there were only two trucks, and figured that there only being four men in the area made sense.

  Gabriel walked across to the cabin, checked the locks and said a small thank you aloud when it opened. Gabriel shuffled over to the cooking food, looking inside he saw that it was still raw but that almost didn’t stop him as his stomach tore at him with hunger pains. He opened the small cast iron stove to make sure that the fireplace was packed to the brim with wood, grateful that it was. He had no idea how long he would be able to sleep, but figured it would easily be for the rest of this day for sure, and possibly the next, before he’d be able to make an attempt to move on from the place. Gabriel hobbled over to what was one of four beds in the cabin and collapsed onto it, letting himself drift off to sleep. He would get the sleep that he needed but with new nightmares in place of old.

  Chapter

  Eleven

  Director Lincoln’s office

  Director Lincoln now knew ‘the who’, but wanted to know ‘the why’. He knew there’d be questions that were going to be asked and that he could end up in front of review committees before this entire thing was said and done. Lincoln looked at his email inbox that he’d been ignoring, those with exclamation points marking them as urgent were opened first. Looking down the list he saw subject lines headed with things like, ‘terror attack level raised’, ‘retaliation threat’, and that was just the first fifteen emails. When he opened the first, a picture of Imad, dead in his room, met his eyes. He read the line below the gruesome photo and saw it mentioned that there was an infiltration at the prison, which was less than a half hour’s drive away from his current location. Lincoln read on further, noting that there had been a full on assault on Allah’s Hand. The memo said that all of the men in the prison associated with the group had been tortured like Imad or blown up. He scrolled the files of jobs going out local and saw that there was no way that this was a CIA job.

  Lincoln opened a second email and saw that it was from the FBI on behalf of the president's advisor. It read that they wanted to have a conversation regarding who he thought might be responsible for the prison ordeal. It went into great detail, explaining that they were worried about a serious high scale retaliation once news hit his homeland. Lincoln, as well as the FBI, were not ignorant about the fact that any sleeper cells that were already in the United States could retaliate.

  Lincoln pulled up the website for the prison and using his credentials to log in, he went through their computer records, finding the video footage at the time of the attack. He saw a lone car pulling up to the prison and a very well to do looking man walk to the gates with a single briefcase in his arms. Lincoln switched to the inside camera view of the gates and watched the man signing in. He noticed quickly that the man was not showing his face in any of the pictures, regardless of the different camera angles that Lincoln checked.

  Lincoln switched his view to the main housing unit, running it down the cell corridors that the men of Allah’s Hand were being held. He zoomed in and while it was not crystal clear, he definitely knew that the man he was looking at was the man that he was chasing currently. The cards started to line up in a scary way and things were beginning to make sense. Lincoln accessed phone records between Fox and Christian and saw that they had, at most, spoken a few times over the last two days.

  His second move was pulling up Fox’s meeting notes. Rifling through them he noticed that Fox had a meeting about finding Tony Baker. He looked further into the file, discovering that yesterday Baker’s body had been found. He had been tortured. The report went into detail, advising that he had taken out a few of the men who had abducted him. He was not surprised to see that all of the men were of Islamic decent. In the end, despite fighting back, Baker fell to his captors’ hands. He knew that Baker was one of Fox’s men and realized he was only at the beginning of a serious shit storm, one that he was going to be responsible for cleaning up.

  The idea of denying everything to the President's advisor seemed more and more like a plausible idea. Lincoln figured it would take a very long time for them to be able to figure out and tie everything together. Lincoln seriously wondered who this mystery man was now. He knew that he had been a killer for them in the past, though he wondered what his profession was now, to have the hardware and skills to still be able to move through a prison almost all but undetected. He thought if he had possibly been one of Fox’s men, that he used to do the dirty work, which he did not want the CIA’s name attached to was the only conclusion that he could come up with.

  He Googled Allah’s Hand on his computer and a report popped up as breaking news. “Family home blown up, police and FBI investigating.” He read the report; a van parked near the home was filled with enough explosive materials to build a serious bomb, weapons, and literature describing why America is evil and that people should join Allah’s Hand.

  Lincoln read the full article and by the
end saw that there had been approximately fifteen men found dead inside and around the home, as well as one shot in a housing development down the street from the house. Lincoln ran his hands through his hair, he knew that if this could be pieced together by himself, someone else would be able to as well. He thought of the one man that they could tie it to and knew that he needed to be taken out.

  He typed in the address of the home and found something strange, a corporation owned the home. Lincoln referred back to the article one more time and read that friends and neighbors reported to investigators that a couple lived there with a small boy. He read that an Addison August, who was in her early thirties, as well as her husband Jacob along with Michael their toddler son, lived there happily and were quite pleasant to have as neighbors.

  The neighbors were all terribly sick with worry about the trio as they appeared to be missing. He went to the motor vehicle registration and license office and typed in Jacob August first but nothing came up. When he typed in Addison August, a photo of a beautiful woman came up matching all descriptions. He dug deeper and looked at her hospital stays. She’d been checked into a hospital only once in the last four years and that was for the birth of a Michael Patrick August, now four years old.

  Lincoln sat tapping a pencil on the table. His head was spinning in a thousand directions. The fact that all of this was strung together was filling him with more hate for Fox than he thought that he could have. He thought about the man firing shots at two of them, knowing that if Frank somehow hired him and possibly screwed the man over, that there was good reason why he would come after him. Lincoln knew from the old days the number one rule was not to screw over those working for you. Especially the ones that were killers.

  Lincoln thought hard about the fact that the man had come purposely to the office midday and fired into it. He knew that there was nothing that would stop a man that was hell bent on revenge, which is what this Jacob August man very much seemed to be doing. The prison, the home, and the shootings all were starting to tie together. He thought that Fox might have thought it the easy way to get rid of Allah’s Hand and for this Jacob, or as Clary had called him, Gabriel, had both mutually gotten something out of it all.