The Good Kill

by Kurt Brindley

  “Killian, that’s awful,” RJ said, holding onto him tighter. “I thought his death was accidental. Isn’t there anything anyone can do? Have you told anyone about your suspicions?”

  “Just Diego. And what can I do? According to the cops he died accidentally in a house fire. Case closed.”

  “If the authorities have already closed the case, maybe someone from your father’s company can… well, I don’t know anything about cyber stuff, but maybe they can help.”

  “Look, RJ, let’s forget it. I just want to put it all behind me. I don’t want anything to do with my father’s past or his business. I’ve already sold my shares in his firm and I have no plans of entangling myself with anyone from it. I got enough problems of my own to deal with.”

  “But Killian. We’re talking about your father,” RJ said. “You can’t just leave so many questions about his death unanswered like that.”

  Killian pulled his hand free from RJ’s. “Nothing I can do will change anything that already happened so what’s the point.” He nodded toward Toni. “Besides, you already have someone still in need of your angel power.” As he stepped through the hatch, he said, “Looks like that pill she just took is putting her back under. Better get her on her feet.”

  As he was about to close the hatch on her, RJ reached out and prevented him from closing it. “Leave it open,” she said. “And the big door up top, too. I feel like I’m trapped in a coffin down here.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Despite the madness spinning out of control all around him, it felt good to Killian to be back behind the wheel of his old Dodge Demon 440 again. With its giant polished blower sticking out of the hood like a screaming chrome beast and its big block 440 cubic inch diameter engine beneath the hood kicking out close to 1000 horsepower of All-American muscle, it was something real, solid, sane. It was something he could trust. Perhaps, right now, it was about the only thing he could trust. All the restomod rebuilding and refurbishing work he did on it so long ago still looked cherry and, even after all the years, still filled him with a gratifying sense of pride knowing that he was responsible for restoring such a quality piece of automotive history. The lines of the body were still true, the Glacier Blue paint still looked fresh, the Medium Blue of the upholstery, from carpet to headliner, was clean and without blemish, the upgraded white-faced Phantom gauges, the Hurst pistol grip shifter, and cushion-grip steering wheel still made the ride pop with style. And with its Alpine head unit, Phoenix Gold amplifier, four Infinity 6x9 speakers, and two JL Audio subwoofers, he had a finely tuned, high definition sound machine with power so immense and a dynamic range so vast that, regardless whether he was listening to one of his favorite Nineties-era Alt-Rock or Hardcore Punk bands, or even one of his favorite Baroque-era composers, so fully encompassing was the quality of the stereo’s sound that oftentimes when blasting out the tunes it became for him a transcendent, almost religious, musical experience.

  But now wasn’t one of those times. Not even the CD currently playing, one that he must have been listening to when he first took the Demon over to RJ’s garage, a bootleg copy of Battle Hymns of the Race War, the second album from the fight-the-system-at-any-cost hardcore punk rock band called Born Against. While never embracing the group’s leftwing and highly political message – a twenty-five-year-old message that seemed to have been orchestrated perfectly for the leftwing agenda of today’s militant Antifa movement – and only ever embracing its hyper-aggressive, thrashing sound, the group had been an underground favorite of his since his teenage years when he first began to feel isolated from his father’s growing rightwing political activities and autocratic tendencies. But now, not even the music’s fast-paced, angry and discordant beats – the exact type of sound that Killian liked to listen to to motivate himself whenever lifting weights or getting himself mentally prepared for a dangerous op – could move him from his current mood of despair.

  He ejected the album and flipped dejectedly through the bulky black CD case that set on the bench seat near the passenger door, looking for something more suited to his dark, depressed disposition. It wasn’t until he reached the Romantics of the Classical music section of the case that he came upon the perfect selection – Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Opus 74, also known as the Pathétique. The piece was the troubled composer’s final completed work and, because he died tragically only nine days after conducting its premier in St. Petersburg, Russia, a death which many believed was by his own hand, the emotionally expansive symphony is often regarded as Tchaikovsky’s suicide note. Wave after melodic wave of the symphony’s slow, gut wrenching pathos and frantic, heart pounding despair filled Killian with a melancholic desire to run away from it all; to just keep driving until all the madness that had been hounding him since Mosul receded away to nothingness in his rearview mirror.

  And Killian knew exactly where he could go. Back when those first far right conservatives and Christian fundamentalists, discounted outliers at the time who could now be regarded as the founding fathers of the Alt-Right movement, had begun working together to coalesce and refine their extreme political and cultural ideologies into one narrow-minded, sharply pointed political platform of fear and paranoia of the non-white, non-Christian other, Killian’s father, though a nominal Protestant, had taken a serious bent toward an insane affinity with all the alarmist, end-of-civilization religious and political conspiracy theories born of the collaboration, theories that helped establish the beginning of the modern day survivalist prepper movement. To alleviate his own personal fears and paranoia, his father not only constructed the bunker compound under the barn, he also purchased a 200,000-acre Montana ranch not far from the foot of Electric Peak, the tallest mountain in the Gallatin Range. To his father, the ranch was a remote, off the grid compound he could escape to whenever the corrupt and decadent liberal global system finally collapsed. To Killian, it was a place he could now go to, not to escape any global collapse, but to escape the epic failure his life had become.

  Killian glanced unconsciously down at the phone setting next to him. On his way over to RJ’s garage to pick up the Demon, he had found she had left her phone in her tow truck still hooked up to its battery charger and had decided he had better bring it back to her. He picked the phone up and began turning it over and over in his hand as he drove, as if the piece of hardware were a charm or a talisman with the power to make all his troubles magically disappear.

  No, he couldn’t possibly run off to Montana, he concluded firmly, not from any magical insight gained from the smart phone, but from thinking hard about to whom the phone belonged. He couldn’t run scared and hide himself away in the mountains while leaving RJ in such a horrible bind, a bind that he himself had put her in. He would have to go back to her and make things right. He set the phone back down on the seat wondering if it was even possible to make things right, seeing how nothing had been right for him since before Mosul, since before all the injuries and the madness.

  He began thinking about those better days, back when he still had control of his mind, his body, and his destiny, and realized suddenly how much he missed the navy – its sense of discipline, it’s sense of purpose. He missed it all and all that it took to keep the machine of it running. The chain of command. The accountability. The mission. The brotherhood – he especially missed his shipmates. The constant training, evaluating. The pre-op planning, the post-op assessing. The imposed structure, the regimented routine, aspects of military life many unknowing civilians regarded as Big Brother-like, mind-controlling restrictions, but which Killian regarded as just the opposite. For him, it was this militaristic rigid structure and the uniformed high standards it demanded of both the individual and the service as a whole that liberated one from the mindless, Rat Race-mundanities of a civilian 9-to-5 way of life, life-sapping mundanities Killian saw as much more rigid and limiting on the individual than the military’s way of life. No, to Killian it was the military that allowed him and other men and women lik
e him the freedom to become exactly who they were born to be – full-time warriors free to sacrifice themselves in defense of their nation and its American way of life.

  And even if the military way of life didn’t alleviate him of all of life’s life-sapping mundanities, civilian or otherwise, at least it rewarded him with one hell of a kickass mission: The good fight. The just cause. Sacramental warfare with its holy battlefield, the place where, in finding oneself closest to death, right close to the end of it all, one felt most alive. Living life to the fullest – the truest state of grace imaginable. That was what Killian missed the most.

  But never again would he be filled with such grace. He had given up trying to deny to himself that his Mosul injuries weren’t that serious. That all he had suffered was just a good knocking about. That CTE was something that happened only to old football players and boxers. That he still had a lot of fight left in him. No, he couldn’t lie to himself anymore, not after the indisputable evidence from last night’s failed mission. And if he were to be completely honest with himself, he would also have to admit that perhaps his health problems were getting worse – he had absolutely no recollection of a large chunk of last night’s events. He could remember nothing from the time he killed the pimp until the time he was driving away from the scene, right when he first realized there was an unconscious woman sitting naked next to him in the car.

  While he knew of his shipmates drinking so much alcohol they had been unable to remember long periods of time, he had never blacked out like that before, not from any excesses at the bar – even as drunk as he was when he got in the fight at Reggie’s he still remembered, for better or worse, everything that transpired that entire night – nor from any excesses in battle, except for his last battle, of course. Regardless, he was certified damaged goods, and he had the medical review boards and his mandatory retirement papers to prove it. His brain was too unreliable for him to ever again serve in the navy, and now, after the debacle from last night, it appeared it was also too unreliable for him to serve as a vigilante seeking dark justice on those deserving it most.

  No, he was no longer safe to himself or anyone else and all would have been better served had RJ not saved him from the end of the rope. It was time for him to abort his mission, his future, his reason for living. And if he were too unsafe to continue to eliminate the bad elements of society, then he surely must be too unsafe to try to help the good. He would have to tell RJ that, despite her objections, he couldn’t help her rescue Toni’s sister. He was too much of a threat.

  Killian came to this conclusion just as he pulled into the Walmart parking lot. He would purchase the items that RJ had told him to, but when he returned home, he would tell RJ that he was going to go to the police and tell them everything, not just about the kidnapping of Toni’s sister, but also about his role in the murder of Toni’s pimp… his roll in all the murders he committed. Perhaps being arrested would be the best thing for him… second only to his elimination.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  When Killian pulled onto the farmhouse drive, he was at peace with his decision, but the closer he got to an impending confrontation with RJ about it, the more anxious and nervous he became. As he drove past the front of the barn and headed back to the bunker, he didn’t notice the new tire marks dug into the gravel. But after coming to a stop on the hump of the bank leading to the barn’s loft, he couldn’t help but notice that the Barracuda was no longer parked down in front of the root cellar where he had left it when arriving with Toni.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Killian stood outside the root cellar pacing back and forth in front of the Demon now parked where the Cuda had been, admonishing himself for leaving the two women alone. He could see by the tracks dug deep into the snow and grass all around him and leading up and around to the bank that the women must have left in a hurry. But why? Did they decide he was too much of a liability so they left to find Toni’s sister on their own? If so, why the rush? He was frozen into inaction from indecision, unsure as to whether he should turn himself in to the police now in an effort to protect the women, or whether he should just let them go, let the consequences fall as they may. Not only didn’t he understand why they left the way they did, without waiting for his return, he didn’t understand why they would take the Cuda. It was covered with blood, fresh from a crime scene.

  Nothing made any sense to him. His body was exhausted. He was in need of nourishment. He needed to get his head cleared so he could think things through, but the dull ache of a pain that was always there grinding beneath the left temple began to grind harder, vowing to become a major headache. He told himself that he’d been in many situations much direr then this one; he just needed to think things through. Develop a plan. However, he couldn’t help concluding that, unlike now, back then he still had his full faculties. His brain didn’t function then like a possessed movie projector randomly skipping past some scenes and continually replaying others. He massaged the temples in an effort to stave off the assault, but the sky above had cleared and the late morning sun was bright, too bright, and enhanced the vindictive needles of pain grinding into his brain. To the west, the gloom of the low, snow-laden clouds darkening the skyline brought him a small level of comfort.

  The blast door was still open just as he had left it, and down at the hatch, he found the bunker empty just as he had expected it would be. He was getting ready to close the hatch and head back up topside when a thought struck him. Maybe, as sideways as things were going, he should carry a little insurance policy with him.

  As he was passing through the operations area he saw that the motion detector alarms for just about all the security cameras were lit up. At first he was going to ignore them, thinking that they had just been triggered by RJ and Toni as they departed the compound. But then he stopped suddenly. If RJ had reset the alarms after he left, and the alarms were then triggered again after she and Toni had left, then why were there no audible alarms sounding? He went back to the panel and studied it. Sure enough, the toggle switch for the audible alarms was in the down position. She had toggled off the alarms so she wouldn’t have to listen to all the annoying beeping, but she had never reengaged them. Why?

  Killian extended the keyboard out from a tray under the desk and began typing in commands to reset all the camera feeds back to when he had left the farm to get the things for Toni. He then played them all from that point on but at four times the normal speed. He studied the monitors as time raced by on each of them, with nothing significant happening except clouds streaming across the sky, an occasional crow flashing across the field, or a nondescript pickup truck zipping down the road. But when, on monitor #20, he saw a black Cadillac sedan seemingly materialize at the intersection of White Church and Rust Creek roads, the roads running parallel to the farm’s eastern and southern boundaries, his instincts told him right away that the sleek car with its heavily tinted windows was bad news.

  He slowed the feeds down to normal speed and watched as the Cadillac turned right onto Rust Creek Road and then sped out of frame. The car looked like a black blur as it blew by camera #19 set up along the entrance of the forest path near Rust Creek Bridge – it was only with an unconscious eye that he caught the brief image of the front end of a white pickup truck parked along the side of the road. He wasn’t surprised to see on the monitor for camera #18, the Cadillac making a slow right turn onto the farm drive. He followed the car’s progress down the drive from the feeds of the farmhouse camera’s, first from #17, which was mounted on the roof’s right front corner, then from #13, which was mounted over the front entrance of the farmhouse, but which also had coverage out across the lawn to a portion of the drive, and then finally from #14, which was mounted on the roof’s left front corner. Once the car was out of camera #14’s frame, he didn’t pick it up again until camera #9, mounted on the front peak of the barn roof, which caught it making its way around the final bend that led to the barn. As the Cadillac drew closer, camera #8, mounted just above t
he barn door, also picked up the car. Killian had two perspectives of the black sedan as it crept its way slowly down the drive until finally coming to a stop directly in front of the open barn door.

  Right away a large white man with long brown hair pulled back into a loose ponytail cautiously exited the driver’s side of the car with gun drawn. Seconds later an even larger man exited the passenger side, but instead of being white, he was black, instead of long hair and a ponytail, he was bald, and instead of carrying a gun, he held a phone out before him and stared at it as if it held him under its spell. Both men wore dark, wraparound sunglasses and were dressed in matching dark blue sport coats, light blue Oxford shirts, khaki pants, and burgundy brogue leather wingtips. The bald man pointed the phone toward the open barn door and then nodded to his partner. The ponytailed man led the way, clearing the inside of the barn before the bald man followed him in, holding the phone out before him as if it were a divining rod leading him to water.

  Just then Killian remembered how Toni had told RJ and him, warned them actually, about how whomever it was who had purchased her would be sure to come and claim their property. But if that was the case, if the animals now in his barn were there to complete their transaction, how the hell had they found her so fast?

  As he was asking himself these questions, he saw RJ on the monitor for camera #1 leading Toni out the bunker hatch into the decontamination area. The women both looked frantic, desperate, as if they were trying to escape a burning building. Killian wasn’t sure if Toni was trying to resist RJ or if she was just having a hard time getting through the hatches because of the blanket she had wrapped around her naked body. Either way, RJ looked to be shoving Toni to get her through them. He lost the women as they made their way up the passageway and didn’t pick them up again until moments later on camera #2, which was mounted over the root cellar’s outside door.