Rage & Fury

by Darryl Hadfield

  I felt the shakes coming on from the adrenaline that always pours through my system after hand to hand combat, and looked around… to see the woman that these four had originally attacked, gawking at me with her mouth literally hanging open.

  “What? What’s wrong?” I looked down at my chest and didn’t see any blood or anything, and I seemed to be okay…

  “You… you just… you just killed them like some sort of vid movie!” She was shocked, to put it mildly.

  “Oh, yeah, well… I umm… I learned that stuff a long time ago, and it just sort of happens without really thinking about it.”

  She wasn’t bad looking, but definitely had seen better days – probably early to mid 30’s, some junior intendant who was trying to save a buck or two by living outside the arkscraper. “Those guys hassle me same time, every week…”

  “Well, it looks like the hassling is done.”

  “Yeah, but… how did you do that!?” She still seemed incredulous.

  “I was a soldier… we get training. I never figured I’d use it HERE, though!”

  She seemed to want more discussion, so I chatted idly with her – I walked with her back inside the mallmunity, until we reached her door. She finally came out with it: “Could you… I mean, I don’t have much, but I’d pay, I mean, I really want to learn how to… you know…” She waved her hands and punched the air in a poor impression of fighting an attacker off.

  Yep, this would work quite nicely. “Yeah, I guess I could do that… I don’t need a lot, but yeah, if you could pay, that would help.”

  “I umm… I guess I should thank you, too – but I don’t even know your name?”

  I had to think fast, and let my focus slip to a lot further away for a moment while I thought. “I don’t really use any name anymore. You can just call me the Jew.”

  I told her my address and said she should come by the next evening and we’d start training.

  It wasn’t exactly what I’d intended to do, but it would serve my purpo… shit. That was eerie. I heard Sensei Kim’s words echoing in my ear again… “You will serve your purpose, instead of your intent.” Weeeeeeeiiiiiiirrrd.

  I had decided to use my living room as a dojo, after cleaning and scrubbing it – it was easily the cleanest place in my block of the mallmunity. My personal space was down the hallway, in my bedroom, and the bathroom and kitchen were used as ‘public access’ areas. The big window in my living room, my ‘dojo’ space, had a window ledge where I would leave Rage during class. It wasn’t the same thing at all as a proper shrine, but it would do. The window overlooked a small courtyard, and there was even a tree not too far away you could see, with a small patch of grass around it’s base.

  It worked, though. At first, Sherry was my only student – she came over to my place, which had practically no furniture – and it looked even more bare when I moved the chair and table from my living room / dining room area back into my bedroom.

  She showed up for the first class in simple t-shirt and shorts, shoes that she kicked off when she walked in and saw that I was barefoot as well. We started slow, but towards the tail end of my time there, she had actually done pretty well – well enough that she could fend off most of my attacks, until I started using my upper body strength and agility to counter her female liabilities. That was a historical piece that Colonel Haskins has always harped on – women don’t belong in combat with men, because they simply can’t uphold the same standards as men can. Fortunately, in my experience, the women who were in combat arms units were required to meet the same standard, or they were eased out eventually.

  I taught her the old-fashioned way – the traditional way. She had to do her pushups on her knuckles… if she couldn’t do that, then the backs of her wrists. If that wasn’t workable, then her fingertips – ideally, three fingers, five if she must, and failing all of that (which was the first few weeks), she had to do it on her hands. Man-style pushups, none of this using your knees instead of your toes nonsense. Warmup, basic stretching, and then into kata and very slow sparring – she kept wanting to know right away how I did, “those crazy moves” but I refused to teach her those specific ones. Anytime she pushed too hard, I told her she didn’t HAVE to come here, and that it wouldn’t hurt my feelings if she never came back. That usually quieted her down for a few days.

  Sherry showed up one day with a friend – Scott. I don’t think they were romantically involved, but it didn’t matter – she had a great rack, and, I wasn’t about to fuck my students any more than I’d fuck one of my subordinates. Scott was a rail-thin guy, shorter than Sherry, and not particularly muscular either – she could (and, frequently, did) beat the crap out of him while sparring.

  By the time I’d been living there several months, there were perhaps a dozen students who knew me as “The Jew” or “Jew” – or, when on the training floor, “sensei.”

  I was doing classes every other night, so I had some downtime to think – not to mention, to walk through the areas closer to the arkscraper, so that I could get a feel for the pulse of society here.

  Then the student count started growing. Sherry and Scott came because they honestly wanted it. The others, to varying degrees, just wanted something to do, or they wanted to say that they were learning to kick someone’s ass. That wasn’t what I wanted to teach, and it definitely wasn’t something I wanted to be known for – that would get the attention of the local Arkscraper proctors the first time one of my “students” (and I use that term lightly, in this context!) kicked some poor dipshit’s ass up around his ears.

  I started telling my students that I specifically did NOT want them to refer anyone else to me – or, if they wanted to, they could tell their friends who they trusted not to be idiots in class, but to make sure that their idiot friends didn’t follow them to my little apartment, because I didn’t want to deal with anymore people who just wanted to kick and punch.

  I forced my students to learn the other side of this, as well – both Karate (and a little bt of Jiu Jutsu I’d picked up) were great skills, but they needed to be tempered with focus, as I knew all too well from my own history.

  Things took a turn for the worse for a while, since after I started berating my students for being lazy shits who weren’t really trying, I had MORE lazy shits who weren’t really trying showing up, and wanting to join. I turned them away – and if I found out who the student was who told them, I told them to leave and not come back.

  By the time Christmas rolled around, I had culled the classroom down – I had nearly thirty students, but of those, only a third had been with me for very long. The rest were all decent kids, some jaded and wanting to be more ‘capable’ (I thought that they’d actually been coached on what to say and what not to say, honestly), some just airheads who wanted the training – but they really did want it, so I let them stay. They were the hardest part – they wanted to learn, but goddamn, they were stupid. More money than sense.

  They were learning, at least, and honestly weren’t too bad – I just didn’t really have the drive to teach them much more, after I heard the news about Sensei Kim passing. I trained them out of a sense of obligation – but my heart wasn’t really in it. I was getting old, and those who were responsible for the major parts of me that I liked, were much older, if not dead already. I was feeling my age, and I didn’t like it.

  It didn’t help that the reconnaissance that I did around the arkscraper was pissing me off. Several of the airhead students I’d tossed out of class were harassing everyone just on the outskirts of the arkscraper – they were worse than the streetgangers in many ways, because they DID have a better life, and they were making life hell for people who were struggling trying to make ends meet.

  When my fifty sixth birthday rolled around in 2125, I was sick of it. After class I Philadelphia, Pennsylvaniashowered and picked up Rage, and used her razor-sharp edge to shave my head bald. I didn’t touch my facial hair with the blade, but I did use a small leather strap to tie down my beard a
nd mustache, tucking it up under the band multiple times until it looked a lot shorter than it really was. I got dressed in the same clothes I’d arrived in, laced up my boots, strapped Rage onto my belt again and walked out the door, not bothering to lock, or even close it. I’d been paying cash for my time there; the landlord would figure out I’d left, eventually – odds were good some of those airhead students would ask him the next day. I didn’t expect to be on the continent for much longer.

  It was late, I was relatively well fed and rested, and I didn’t feel like seeing or dealing with people – so I walked via back roads and alleyways after I left the mallmunity, headed to the hyperloop station. When I got there, I slipped into an empty pod and watched the tube supports scream past. I was alone in my own head with my own thoughts, until I got to the Washington DC station about an hour later – close to midnight. Switching to another hyperloop, I killed another 2 hours riding to Raleigh, North Carolina.

  I left the hyperloop terminal and went outside, off the property, and started looking until I found a questionable-looking private vehicle for hire. “If you have the legs for it, I’m looking for a no-questions-asked ride to Fayetteville. Hard Cash.”

  The driver grunted and flipped off his “available” sign on the top of his automobile, and I got in, throwing him a hundred dollar bill over the seat. “Take 40 and 95; I don’t want to deal with those military dicks and their damn checkpoints by the base.” He grunted again and nodded in the affirmative.

  An hour later, I had the eloquent and over-talkative driver, “Rick,” pull over on the side of the interstate. I tossed him another hundred dollar bill, suggested that he forget he’d ever seen me – and with a third and final grunt, he drove up to the next exit and turned around. I waited until I saw him headed north on I-95 again, and then I started walking into town.

  I knew where McDirk’s offices were; they were on one of the higher floors in the arkscraper in Fayetteville, and I wasn’t going anywhere near them. His house was on the south side of town, just off of I-95 (this fucker had so much money he’d had them build him his own on and off ramps off the damn interstate!). I threw out my thumb to see about hitching a ride – and wasn’t disappointed; a cargo truck saw me and started slowing down. I got in the passenger side and nodded while I said “Thanks Neighbor.” The driver was an older guy, probably my age, and just as talkative as “Rick” had been. I asked him to drop me once we passed through most of Fayetteville, which he did, and I walked the rest of the way to Steve’s exit.

  At that point, I could either wait till Steve was headed in to work, or I could invade his privacy, waltz through his (adequate but not enough to keep me out) security, or ring the bell and have him open the gate.

  HA! Of course I’m going to invade his privacy.

  I walked the border of his property until I found a section of fence that had seen significant overgrowth and didn’t look like it got much maintenance – and scaled the ten foot tall brick wall, careful not to reach fully onto the top where there was… yep, there it is, broken glass embedded into the concrete. I swung up carefully, relying on the thick rubber soles of my boots to protect me from the sharp and jagged edges. I looked over the far side and didn’t see anything on the ground, so I did a light jump down, rolling in a perfect, “Parachute Landing Fall,” that rolled me back onto my feet right away.

  I followed the wooded area until I was behind his house and had a clear path to the building itself – I was targeting the garage, since that’s where I expected security to be the most lax.

  Turns out he had a fairly decent alarm system… and had learned to rely on it far too much. He’d left a window on the side of his garage partly open – and I eased it the rest of the way open and boosted myself inside.

  I’d been in his house before, so I knew where his bedroom was – upstairs, to the right, last door on the left. I went there, crept into his bedroom and laughed – he was going to shit himself.

  I knelt on his side of the bed, with his wife snoring slightly, next to him, and covered his mouth hard so he couldn’t make a peep and shook him lightly until his eyes popped open. I had to fight not to laugh at the initial look of terror on his face.

  “Get up and get dressed, I need a ride.”

  He hissed back at me, “Where the fuck do you need a ride to?!?”

  “Cape Town. Get up.”

  Chapter 38: Back in Black

  Steve wasn’t happy with me, but that didn’t matter – I was the boss for all of his professional endeavors except for his financial advisor stuff, and I already knew he’d ditched all his other clients in favor of managing mine. By now, I figured I was probably a ghost billionaire – and it occurred to me to finally ask.

  “So, Steve, how *AM* I doing?”

  “You’re barely this side of life, after scaring the shit out of me, and insisting I fly with you halfway around the goddamn world is how you’re doing.”

  He was upset, but it wasn’t that bad.

  “No, you pasty white collar bozo, how am I doing financially?”

  “That depends on in what respect you’re asking.”

  There’s one problem you will consistently have when dealing with the professionals who’ve been in their world for long enough to recognize their own expertise. They tend to lose track of how others view their profession, and they seem to lose their perspective.

  “What’s my net worth, as of oh, last week?”

  “Well, if we weren’t on a plane halfway over the Atlantic ocean, I could have dialed up my implant and checked, but since you insisted I take this ride with you…” He smirked slightly, trying to get a rise out of me.

  “Oh shut the fuck up already and answer the question. If you haven’t had this private jet wired up as a node to the global net, you’re fired.” I was only mildly annoyed, but showing it helped get Steve’s mind back on track.

  “About eighty billion.”

  “HOLY FUCK! Goddamn, Steve, I knew you were a financial genius, but how the hell did I get that much??”

  “Well, you barely spend anything of your paycheck, which helps, you’ve given me full financial power of attorney over your personal finances, and you’ve managed to come up with a lot of additional capital from… shall we say…” He pointedly looked down and in the general direction of Africa, “unusual sources.”

  “Ah… but even still, that was supposed to be spread across the unit funds, all the way down to the platoon level, with additional payouts for those wounded to the point of medical retirement, are you sure you don’t mean eighty billion from all of it?”

  “Hell, no, James. You are, personally, good for about eighty billion – and growing at a rate of about a billion per year. If we factor in the no-longer-shell corporations that we’re expanding, the contributions that have been made to unit funds, the payouts… Your lowest private in the ninth army is probably halfway to being a millionaire, and we’re looking at closer to a trillion dollars, if we factor everything in that your corporate umbrella owns or materially controls in the way you mean.”

  This actually changed a lot – both my personal perspective, as well as my goal of trying to ‘right’ the country and put things back the way I felt they should be.

  “Steve, when you get home, I want you to expedite our plans. The security industry needs to start expanding faster and taking a more prominent role in government contracts, country-wide. I expect that by the end of this year, we’ll have pacified this country and I’m not entirely sure how much longer they’ll keep me around – I know I’m not making any friends, and the last portion of this campaign won’t win me any medals. I want the final preparations ready for a mid-next year start.”

  The rest of the flight we covered specifics of what exactly I wanted – security companies to handle the surveillance within arkscrapers, country-wide. I wanted to be the guy that owned the companies that built the software, manufactured the drones, employed the security guards, all of it – and I didn’t want my name directly associa
ted with it. That was increasingly difficult, but it was necessary – I didn’t want to scare any of the civilian leadership into checking any deeper than the cursory bullshit they did right now.

  After all, who better to take over, than the person who already knows everything, owns everything, and is the one who pays – or owns – the people watching everyone else?

  Veterans from my African Campaign were to get top priority for the new jobs in the new companies that were forming, as they got out. Dishonorable discharges were still a thing, however, they were increasingly just ways to eliminate the ones who were believed to be ‘problematic’ to the party of rulers in America. Fortunately for me, the ruling elite had screwed themselves already by establishing ‘good for me but not for thee’ rules, which meant that security staff histories were inviolate; they were no more visible to the ruling class than they were to the public at large – because they were hired by “trusted” companies.