The Good Kill

by Kurt Brindley

  “…the price demanded was way beyond my expectations, but I paid it anyway. What choice did I have? I wasn’t about to start the process all over again. It took me over a month just to find…”

  …but it was difficult for him. Without the aid of sight, his father’s words became harder to understand, as if they were being distorted, spoken at a lower register, one his ear could just barely pick up. He tried to focus through the pain, to imagine his father’s face, the movements of his mouth as it formed the same words that he was now straining to understand…

  “…gave him everything I had, the makes and models, serial numbers even of the computer and phone they had given me, the phone’s number, the account information of the service provider I was using. I had copied down the contents of every text they sent me, so I…”

  …visualizing his father speaking like that helped, but it took a lot of effort to focus so hard when experiencing such discomfort. It was exhausting. He was exhausted. He had just spent how many days in bed recovering? And on the day he finally managed to get himself up he’s made to watch something so mentally taxing as his dead father’s confessional? Why? Why did he allow RJ to talk him into it? What good could come from knowing what secrets his father had stolen from the Russians? Nothing good, only more problems, more danger, more deaths even. For that matter, why did he allow her to talk him into letting her stay with him in the first place? It was all a big mistake. She needed to go. He needed to be alone. He needed to be able to think things through, to figure out what needed to be done. But now, since it was becoming obvious to him that she was beginning to have feelings for him again, he wasn’t sure if— He realized suddenly that he had allowed his mind to wander, to drift off to a place within the black where he didn’t want it to go. He took in a deep breath and redoubled his efforts to listen to his father…

  “…the wait was unbearable. After a week of not hearing back from him, I just assumed I had been scammed. That the little bastard, probably a god damned Russian himself, had…”

  …but it wasn’t working. He was trying to imagine his father speaking to him as he had before, but he could no longer see his face. He could only see his mother’s face now. Or was it the face of… what was her name, the Russian woman? He couldn’t recall it. His mother, the woman, began speaking to him, but he couldn’t hear her. He could only hear the deep, muffled sounds, no longer words, just sounds, that his father was making…

  “…but he did it… … …couldn’t believe… … …possible… … …everything I needed…”

  …but then the sounds from his father began to fade away and the words his mother was speaking began to fade in. It was his mother speaking, he could tell without question once he heard her soft, reassuring voice. She was telling him that everything was going to be all right, her face now close to his, like it used to be when she tucked him into bed as a child. All he had to do, she promised, was to just go to sleep and then everything that hurt, all the pain, all the sorrow, the confusion, would just disappear. But he didn’t want to go to sleep. If he slept then that meant she would disappear too. He wanted to stay with her now that she had returned to him. He wanted to ask her… if she knew that… as a child, every night after her death… that he had prayed for her to return to him… just like she had now… just like… the beautiful, comforting angel… of a mother… that she had always been for him… smiling down upon him… as he drifted… off… to sleep…

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE

  Killian is lying stretched out on the couch with RJ lying prone on top of him sleeping, her head resting on his chest and her arms wrapping around him as if he is a big pillow. He looks around, trying not to move his head so as not to wake her. The room is shrouded in a gray, dim light, a subtle, unobtrusive light, one ambiguous of time. And except for RJ’s soft, rhythmic breathing, the room is quiet, the computer setting on the coffee table silent, asleep, its screen black.

  He realizes then that the pain inside his head is gone, that the ringing in his ears has stopped, that the stomach has settled. He feels completely refreshed, healed, whole again, himself again; yet even better, as if he had just woken from a dream, a good dream, one of those rare dreams that carries over with you into consciousness, that leaves you feeling uplifted, renewed, as if you had just experienced something epic, eternal, or had just done something completely impossible, like flying or transcending dimensions of space and time as if you were an invincible being… a god.

  It is with this inflated feeling of hope and wonder and god-like invincibility that he looks down at RJ lying on top of him, covering him like a warm blanket, yet she feels so light its almost as if she isn’t there, as if she’s nothing more than a wisp of air, a hovering cloud. He can’t see her face, just the top of her head, stray strands of her auburn hair stick out and tickle his chin. He leans his head down until his face is buried in her hair. He breathes her in. She smells good, clean, not just a soapy shampoo clean, but underneath that a healthy, sweet clean, wholesome, a clean that comes from a life lived simply, honestly, one absent of toxic stresses and deceits. But mostly what he smells is a deep womanly smell, pheromonic perhaps, a delicious smell he hasn’t experienced for a very long time, and this moves him.

  His taking in of RJ causes her to stir. She moans softly, more like a purr, then begins shifting her body on top of his, writhing her hips, repositioning herself, searching for a comfortable spot until she ends up with her arms tucked in tight between his arms and sides and her face buried in his neck, her soft lips brushing against his skin, tantalizing it. And this moves him even more.

  His heart beats hard, too hard, as his hands, shaking a little, begin to tentatively find their way under her robe and then under her tee-shirt. He caresses her back. It is warm, smooth, bare, gratefully unhindered by a bra strap. She responds to his touch, lifting her head sleepily so that he can kiss her. He does. Deeply. As they kiss, one hand of his slides around to a breast and, upon first touch, when finding it so warm and soft and smooth and so readily available for him that it suspends his breathing and ignites a surging, sensational rush that runs the course of his body, just as the other hand slides down the arch of her back, slides under the thick elastic band of the sweatpants, under the dainty band of the thong underwear, searching, touching, caressing its way downward until it finds what it’s after, the moist, delicate touch of which sends another explosive rush throughout his body, this one greater than the last...

  As if from a great distance he hears his name being called. He tries to ignore it, tries to not let it distract him, to ruin what he has, and he, almost frantically now, continues to caress, to touch, to kiss. But then with a sudden shock, just as everything begins to slip away, he realizes it isn’t RJ whom he is caressing, touching, kissing, it is—

  “Killian!”

  Killian’s eyes caught a spark and slowly, reluctantly came back into a blurry focus, seeing only the white of the ceiling briefly until the glare from the sun made its presence known and forced them closed.

  “Killian, oh my god, what’s wrong with you? Look at me, god damn it!”

  He did, and he was vaguely surprised to see that it wasn’t Ruby Black sitting on his lap, shaking him by the shoulders.

  “RJ?”

  “Oh, Killian,” RJ said with great relief. “I-I thought... your heart... I mean, your eyes were open but... Jesus, dude, you scared the shit out of me.” She collapsed into him, hugging him tightly.

  That inflated, god-like feeling that had overcome him while he was out, lost somewhere deep within the realm of the subconscious, was leaving him fast, seeping away from him like steam from a boiling pot, evaporating into thin air. As his spirits crashed, as he felt himself hollowing out from the inside until only the brittle shell of him remained, he remembered vaguely, sullenly, the promise his mother had made him, the feeling of comfort and hope her words had given him, but the pain still pounded in his head, the sharp ringing still pierced his ears, the nausea still sickened his stomach, and h
e felt more confused and helpless than he ever had.

  On top of it all, he was suffering from an uncomfortable, straining erection. He realized then with a sudden, sickening shock to his heart that RJ was sitting right on top of it, that he was digging it, grinding it into her, right between her legs, legs spread wide as she straddled his hips hugging him, and he reactively pushed her off him, crazy-like, as if he were brushing off a giant spider he suddenly found creeping up his chest. He stood up, wrapped his robe around himself in a paranoid, concealing manner, and began walking away, leaving RJ lying stunned on the couch, her cheeks flushed, her eyes scared and confused.

  But despite her present state, RJ sat up quickly and said, “What the hell is the matter with you, Killian? What about the video? You completely missed the end of it.”

  Killian stopped just before reaching the hallway and turned back around toward her. The look on his face was frightening.

  “What’s the matter with me? I’ll tell you what the matter is. You, you’re the matter. You being here is the matter. You tell yourself that you’re here to help me when we both know the only reason you’re really here is to fu—” He cut himself off, shaking his head angrily, and started pacing back and forth. He was breathing heavily, his eyes wide, unfocused. “And as for that fucking video... How many times do I have to tell you I don’t want to have anything more to do with it... with my dead father... with the god damn Russians?!” He pivoted out of his pacing and began marching back toward RJ, causing her to instinctively shy away from him as he approached, scooting herself into the far corner of the couch.

  But he wasn’t coming for her, he was coming for the computer setting on the coffee table. He sat himself down on the edge of the couch in front of it. RJ watched him carefully from her corner of the couch, wanting at the same time to reach out and console him because she knew it wasn’t really him behaving like this, and to stay completely clear of him because, like this, she didn’t know what he was capable of.

  The video player was still open, showing the final frame of his father’s video, its final image, and Killian stared at it for a long time. It was a still shot of his father leaning in from the couch, his arm extended in front of him as if he were reaching out for Killian. RJ relaxed a little, thinking that he had calmed down and was planning to watch the parts of the video he had missed. But instead Killian closed the player, leaving on the screen the folder for the flash drive which contained the file for his father’s video and the other file still unknown to him, the one he assumed to be the hacking program his father had contracted for. He dragged both files into the trash can and then emptied it.

  It wasn’t until Killian had right-clicked the icon for the flash drive and selected the “Format” command that RJ realized what had just happened. “But Killian, President Trump, the conspiracy,” she said softly, “your father proved that it was...”

  But Killian couldn’t hear what RJ was saying to him. The rage boiling and roaring in his ears drowned her out.

  After the flash drive had been reformatted he yanked it out from the USB port. He then tossed the computer next to him on the couch. He then stood and walked around the coffee table to the center of the room. He then looked at RJ with mad, crazed eyes as he dropped the drive down to the age-darkened hardwood floor. He then began stomping down on the drive with the heel of his bare foot as he continued to glare at RJ, stomping down on it over and over again until the heel was bleeding and the drive was nothing but a splintered mash of silicone and plastic.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO

  Killian sat in the back of a beat-up white Nissan pickup truck as a lonely road running north through nothing but dull empty miles of sand and sadness stretched out endlessly behind him, as a manmade berm off the shoulder walling him off from the troubled land he was leaving behind snaked by in an endless ochre blur. He wore a faded green camouflage field jacket and had a blue-and-white keffiyeh wrapped around his head and face for warmth against the March wind blowing in cold and chafing, leaving open just enough of a gap in the scarf for vision. Over this gap he wore dark wrap-around sunglasses, not for protection from a cold white sun shining thinly from behind roiling gray clouds moving fast across the wide desert sky, but from the sand blowing off the top of the berm in angry streams and whipping in at him with the wind’s relentless fury. He sat leaning back against his seabag with one leg stretched out, the other bent at the knee, and hands shoved deep into the jacket pockets as he stared absently at the four black holes spotting the middle of the truck’s bed, holes looking like well-patterned shots from a large-caliber gun, holes that just three days ago were in fact used to secure the mount of such a gun, a 50-caliber machine gun in fact, an old reliable gun, one with many kills to its credit.

  It had been easy enough for Killian to get back into Syria, back into the war that close to two years ago had nearly killed him, that had completely altered his life, disabled it, forced him to live with the constant thought buried in the back of his mind that the next breath he took could be his last. Yet despite all that, and despite all the new risks that he knew would await him on his return to the battlefield, he also knew it was where he needed to be, where he wanted to be.

  By the time he had made the decision to return to Syria, the war was already beginning to wind down, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Daesh as the terrorist group was referred to derogatorily in the region, was on the run, on a certain path to their defeat. Even so, all the major militias and competing terrorist groups fighting there were still recruiting heavily for experienced foreign soldiers. All one with the proper prerequisites had to do was find the website or Facebook page of the militia one wished to fight for, or at least for the one that was still willing to take on private U.S. citizens even though the U.S. government had forbidden the militias it backed to do so, and send them a message, convince them of one’s legitimacy, prove one’s potential worth to them on the battlefield.

  It could have been even easier for Killian to return to the war had he wanted to get hired on with any one of the private military contractors the U.S. military had supporting them there. They were scooping up as many former Navy SEALs and other special forces operators as they could, even medically retired ones like him. But he didn’t want to go as a PMC, their typical job being only to provide sentry services for forward operating bases, or to serve as bodyguards for high-valued targets, not to fight on the frontlines where he had wanted to be. Nor did he want to make his way there by leveraging any of his navy connections, wanting to be able to fight there without any distracting obligations so he could do as he pleased without worrying about hurting anyone’s feelings, answering only to those who could afford to keep his services. So he made his way to Syria discreetly and by his own devices, as a mercenary, a soldier for hire, one completely unattached from any person, corporation, or country.

  But his fighting in Syria was over and he was now traveling through northernmost Iraq with three Iraqis, three soldiers from his unit who, like him, had just this morning been discharged from service, three childhood friends from Ain Sifni, a small town an hour northeast of Mosul. Ali Hassan Salim and Jalal Hadid were up front in the cab, Ali drove, both sat mostly still and stared silently at the dusty road ahead. Yasser Qassim sat in the back leaning against the cab next to Killian, maybe he was sleeping, maybe he was staring down blankly at the same black holes in the bed of the truck as was Killian, it was hard to tell as his eyes were barely visible behind the thin slit left from the keffiyeh he also wore wrapped around his head and face. Yasser spoke the best English of the three and he liked to use this skill of his when speaking with Killian, even though by now Killian could speak a near fluent Arabic and a pretty decent Kurmanji. And though the three former soldiers were more than a decade younger than Killian, they looked much older, aged, each hastily wizened from the wearing years of fighting back against the evil of Daesh, against an evil that had brought a brutal death to many they had loved and cherished and soldiered with, against a
n evil that they had sworn to God five years ago they would avenge.

  There was a fighter from Germany named Bernon, a big and husky and garrulous thirty-year-old who kept a shaved head despite the thick brown hair that grew back in almost as quickly as he shaved it, and who on his very first action with the unit met his sudden end with a sniper bullet to the left eye in an abandoned village outside of Aleppo. Bernon was a self-proclaimed cinephile and in the short time he was with the unit he gave everyone names of characters from movies rather than trying to remember everyone’s given name. Killian became Thor, named after Chris Hemsworth’s Marvel character, a name which never stuck since everyone preferred to continue to call him the Old Man. But the collective name he gave to Ali, Jaffar, and Yasser did stick. Even though they were far from being comical, after noticing that the three serious friends from Ain Sifni were rarely apart, Bernon took to calling them the Three Amigos after the movie of the same name starring Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, and Martin Short.

  The Three Amigos had been attending their first year of university in Baghdad when the Daesh terrorists brutally overran and seized the Yazidi city of Sinjar, destroying most of its infrastructure, summarily killing thousands of its men and boys, rounding up as many of its women and girls as it could to become their sex slaves, and forcing tens of thousands of others to flee the onslaught with only the clothes on their backs, taking refuge in the sacred Sinjar Mountains that stood an ancient watch over the city. Being devout Yazidis themselves from Ain Sifni, a small town by population but one which maintained an oversized role in the lives of Yazidis all throughout the Middle East, it being one of their religion’s major holy cities as well as its de facto capital, the three young men were deeply connected to Sinjar by the many relatives and friends they had living there.