Jen wasn’t sure how Seth would react to real emotions that weren’t just lust and passion. Sure, Seth was a great fuck, that much was certain, but he also needed to be a mature adult. And that’s where most men failed. Most men Jen had met were just grown up children who bumbled through life looking for a nut. And that was fine and fun sometimes, as far as Jen was concerned, but that also kept her from many a meaningful relationship. Now, sobbing in Seth’s arms, she knew she would find out if he was really a man that she wanted to be with emotionally and not just physically.
“I feel like I lost my family when the dojang burned down,” Jen said through her sniffles and hiccups. “I feel like that was the last real link I had to them, to my past with them when I was happy and not lonely and miserable all the time.”
Seth tried to say something to comfort her but it was drowned out by her sobbing. Jen tried to pull herself together, but it just wasn’t working. Every time she tried to push thoughts of her parents out of her head they just came back stronger than ever.
“Don’t you understand?” Jen said. “For me the dojang was much more than a building, much more than a business. It was a way that I passed on what my father had taught me and in doing so I felt like I was keeping in touch with him, like he had never left and was still right by my side teaching with me. And I felt like my mom was watching over me while I was there. Every time I walked in it was like we were a family again.”
Seth caressed Jen’s hair as he held her close.
“I’m not sure I have the right words,” Seth said. “I was never close with my parents. They hated the shit out of me for pretty much all of my life choices. But I can tell you were really close with yours and they meant a great deal to you.”
Seth lifted Jen’s chin up so he could peer into her bloodshot eyes.
“It’s really great that you have such a special bond with your parents,” Seth said. “And you know what, after this is all over, we’ll build another dojang, a better one. Together.”
“Oh Seth,” Jen said. “Thank you for understanding. I was scared that you wouldn’t get how much my parents meant to me. A lot of people don’t. I don’t know if it is a cultural thing or what, but I was really close with my parents. When they passed away it was like losing my arms or legs. I didn’t know what to do.”
“I understand completely,” Seth said. “Believe me, I do. And I can only wish that I was as close with my parents as you are with yours, even though they have passed on.”
Seth hugged Jen close to him and rocked back and forth gently. He hummed an old song his mother had taught him, but couldn’t remember the name of it or the words. Before long Jen was fast asleep in his arms. Seth carefully lay her down on the bed, and snuggled up to her. Dawn would come too fast, and with it, trouble.
Chapter Eight
Knock, Knock, Knock
Seth opened his eyes slowly. At first he didn’t know where he was at, the events of the last few days completely pushed out of his mind by the sweet release of sleep. Maybe that’s why they call it the short death, Seth thought as he sat up in the hotel room and looked around while he rubbed sleep out of his eyes. Jen walked out of the bathroom, already dressed, a tooth brush hanging from her mouth. After checking through the peephole she opened the door and in walked their ragtag group of comrades: Nate, Mike, Wizard and lastly John.
“Well boys and girls,” John said. “Today is the day.”
“The day for what?” Seth asked.
“I’m sorry, did I interrupt your beauty sleep,” John said. “You were supposed to be up and at it an hour ago.”
“Little Seth,” Nate said mockingly. “Always sleeping. Always tired. He’s like a bear, he wants to hibernate.”
“Fuckin’ aye,” Seth said as he sat up and put his feet on the floor. “What is today for?”
“It ends today,” John said. “In just a few hours our terrorist friends will be at the Des Moines airport, meeting a small plane—one of those ones that looks like a bottle rocket it’s so small—for ammunition and arms resupply. I’m assuming they will be getting rid of those stupid masks for some actual Russian body armor face masks.”
“The ones that look like wielders’ masks?” Nate asked.
“Exactly. The ones Russian special forces like to wear,” John said.
“What’s up with those guys wanting to wear heavy shit on their heads?” Nate asked.
John thought about it for a second.
“You know, that’s actually a good question,” he said. “But right now it doesn’t matter. What matters is that in my room there are a bunch of guns and ammunition and money. Using those things we are going to go to the Des Moines airport and roll everyone up as they stand on the runway.”
“But won’t they return fire?” Seth asked. “I mean, these guys haven’t seemed very shy about being more than willing to kill everyone to get what they want. They might love it if we just walked out on the runway.”
“Oh, but we won’t be walking out on the runway,” John said. “To the contrary my jarhead friend, we will be driving out onto it in heavily armored trucks.”
Seth put his face in his hands over his knees for a second and the talking in the room went quiet.
“Are you feeling all right?” Jen asked around a mouthful of toothbrush and suds.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just sick off all this nonsense. It just needs to go away,” Seth said.
“And so it shall,” John said. “Now get dressed and meet me in my room.”
John’s room was several doors down from Seth, and when he walked in he found everyone waiting. On the bed were a small stack of cash next to an assault rifle and several clips of ammunition.
“That’s for you,” John said. “Since I can’t promise I’ll live through this I figured I’d pay everyone up front. Know that if you try to run with the money without holding up your end of the bargain I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
“What exactly is my end of the bargain?” Seth asked as he picked up the stack of money and looked it over. It appeared to be tens of thousands of dollars. He couldn’t be sure how much since he wasn’t in the habit of handling large amounts of money.
“It’s thirty thousand dollars,” John said. “Each of you got the same amount. If any of you go down I’ll leave it to the others to get the cash off of their corpse. I don’t really need money at this point in my life. I just need to stay alive.”
“The bargain,” Seth said. “Why don’t you outline exactly what is happening for me so I know what is going on.”
“Well,” John said. “Everyone will exit this floor through the stairwell and walk all the way down the flights of stairs to the bottom. Outside the van is warming up for us. From there we’ll be headed to a friend of mine’s place where I will spend the rest of the money on armored trucks and a machine gun for the turret. Then we’ll head to the airport and catch the little jet right as it touches down. We waste everyone.”
“Kill everybody?” Mike asked. “Is that smart?”
“Wipe them out,” John said.
“What about witnesses?” Wizard asked.
“The more dead bodies, the better,” John said. “We’ll assume that anyone hanging out with the terrorist scum has done some very bad things in their lives and needs to be killed real good and dead.”
“Man,” Nate said. “You weren’t joking about having served, huh.”
“Not even a little bit,” John said, racking a round into the chamber of the military grade assault rifle hanging from his body by a sling. “I am in the business of death, and business, my friends, is good.”
There was an awkward silence that hung in the air for a moment.
“Well then,” Jen said in a voice full of forced cheer. “Now that we know what is going on let’s head down to the van!”
“One more thing, before we leave,” John said. “I sent in a writ to the insurance agency about your dojang burning down. Hopefully everything pans out on that front but I can’t pr
omise anything.”
“A writ?” Wizard said. “Are you some kind of judge? Writs usually come from judges or captains of a ship.”
“Kind of like a judge, yes,” John said. “But not. There are no trials with me, no juries. I wade in to the fray, find out what is happening, and dish out justice as I see fit. That’s what I get paid to do. If you had any idea what a shit show the court proceedings for these assholes would be you’d agree whole heartedly.”
“I don’t know,” Nate said. “I kind of believe due process. Things like that. You know, that deter fascism from creeping into things.”
“When you are in my position you can do as you please,” John said. “But I don’t see that being the case in this lifetime.”
Nate looked at John with disdain.
“Fine,” was all Nate said.
“Well I’m glad that you can at least abide,” John said.
With that the group turned and headed down the hall toward the stairwell.
“What if someone sees us with these bags of money or guns?” Jen asked.
“I reserved the entire floor of this building when I checked in,” John said. “I like my privacy.”
Mike shook his head and laughed.
“I fucking wondered why I didn’t see anyone else up here,” Mike said. “It just didn’t make sense in such a swank place, to see not a God damn soul. But I guess my instincts were right, we really were all alone here.”
Making their way down the stairwell to street level was a struggle. The cases banged against the weapons everyone had slung to their bodies, and the bags caught on the railings. More than one time one of them had to steady the other to keep a comrade from tumbling down the stairs head first.
“Holy shit,” Seth gasped. “I thought I was in shape but these stairs are fucking killing me.”
“Everyone thinks they are in shape until it comes time to actually do something,” John said. “Hauling heavy shit is a lot different than fucking.”
The whole group chuckled at this, even Jen and Seth, though the joke was somewhat at their expense. By the time they hit the exit door and loaded everything into the idling van everyone was exhausted. Mike, Nate and Wiz slept like babies during the drive to John’s contact to buy armored vehicles. Jen tried to stay awake as best she could but before she knew it she was drifting off into the land of nod with the rest of them. Then it was just John and Seth left awake, with John driving and Seth in the passenger seat.
“So are we really going to purchase armored vehicles?” Seth asked.
“Why wouldn’t we be?” John replied.
“Well, it just seems a little farfetched is all,” Seth said.
John slowed down and stopped at a stoplight. The streets were busy with the traffic. The sun was about halfway to noon and everyone on the road had their jaw set in a determination that spoke of people who needed to get where they were going in a hurry and if they didn’t make it in time their excuses would fall on deaf ears. John nudged the van forward as the light turned green and they were off again, this time driving more aggressively. John weaved in and out of traffic like he was some kind of professional driver.
It occurred to Seth, as he gripped the door handle with white knuckles, that John was probably some kind of professional driver. Seth thought about what he knew about secret agent types and realized that he knew almost nothing. He also thought long and hard about how he wasn’t really sure that John was working for the NSA. It was one thing to say that, hell it was one thing to even have a badge—Seth couldn’t remember ever seeing a badge—but that didn’t really mean shit. As far as Seth knew the whole NSA thing was just some elaborate ruse by a con man to get his way out of the whole thing going on around them.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s not polite to stare?” John asked him with a sidelong glance and a smirk on his face.
Seth didn’t reply and instead shot his eyes forward, out of the windshield.
“Are you wondering about whether or not I’m actually in the NSA?” John asked.
Seth looked at him with alarm.
“Oh, don’t act like you have even a decent poker face,” John said. “And in all honesty I was expecting at least one person to voice the concern that maybe I was full of shit, you know? But I guess I make a pretty convincing NSA agent. I guess I should have shown you my badge at some point.”
Seth watched out the window as they passed out of the city limits and kept heading south out of town.
“Well,” Seth asked. “Are you?”
“I could be, couldn’t I?” John said. “And does it matter if I’m not? Somehow I’ve managed to make all this work out. Now we are going to wipe out the people that are after your dearest and then we’ll call it a day and everyone is $30,000 dollars richer.”
Trees flew past them as John did upwards of fifty-five down gravel roads. The rural Iowa scenery was beautiful, and Seth couldn’t help but admire it, even though there were much more important things afoot than noticing how a vine wrapped around a tree, snaking its way to toward the top. Several robins broke the cover of timberline and floated through the air on wings that made them bounce up and down. A stiff wind kicked up for a second and the birds were tossed about with its force, but managed to hold on to their course.
“How much are we like those birds?” John asked. “We try our best to hold on to the course we laid out for ourselves in calm waters, but when the sea gets choppy and the wind blows thunderbolts down around us, do we not waver? Are there not times that we bend and then break?”
“Maybe there are,” Seth said. “But the important thing is to remain true to yourself. As long as the internal compass still spins people end up ok.”
“You give people too much credit, Seth,” John said. “Sure, there is an internal compass, but most people’s little northward pointing arrow sticks toward whatever is convenient at the time. And thusly they are lead from a room that is blue, to another room that is a little less blue and a little green, and then another and another and another until finally they look around and call the green walls blue.”
Seth looked out his window, watching a creek wind through a valley.
“Is it not so?” John asked. “Would it not be easier for me to just leave you all to fend off these people for yourselves?”
“Oh please,” Seth scoffed. “Don’t act like you don’t have a stake in all of this.”
“What stake?” John said. “I was here simply to keep the ‘terrorists,’ as I have aptly labeled them, from raising funds by acquiring and selling your friends dojang. That I have done. Now I am simply sticking around to follow the initial motion to its logical conclusion.”
“Which is?” Seth asked.
“To finish the job,” John said. “Even though I could leave right now and without any stretch of the imagination say that I did my duty, I would know in my heart that I left you people to be hunted and butchered in the most horrible ways imaginable. I guess, somewhere in the deep and icy tundra of my chest, I have a heart. Somewhere.”
“Well, lucky us,” Seth said.
The van pulled off the pavement onto a gravel road and soon they were parked in front of a large red barn.
“All right,” John said loudly. “Everyone get ready to leave our cozy little van behind for some much more aggressive digs.”
“Did he just say digs?” Nate asked.
“I think that’s what he said,” Mike answered.
John was already out of the van and making his way around to the back. He opened it and grabbed both duffle bags of money and started walking to meet the old farmer that had just walked out of the big red barn.
“Bill!” John shouted. “I’ve got all this money I don’t need and none of the armored cars I do!”
The man John had called Bill just laughed as he pushed the barn door open the rest of the way. The suns’ rays shooting into the barn at a slant made visible by the dust and exposed two cars that appeared to have thick armor plates welded to them. Set
h and the rest slowly made their way out of the van and toward the barn, their guns rattling around.
“Well, what I have here for you today are two just made armored cars, one equipped with a turret and the other with extra armor,” the man named Bill said. He was a fat mid-sixties farmer with no hair and thick glasses. He wore blue overalls and had a weed hanging out the side of his mouth, as if he had just got done hanging out at a movie set.
“That’s real good, Bill,” John said. “Because I’ve got some men to kill. Speaking of which, does the turret come with a mount, the pins to lock it in place and a machine gun to be held by it?”
The small group hesitantly stepped into the open barn and started walking around the cars, looks of awe on their faces. These cars were no makeshift job. This Bill character really had to know his way around a welding machine, not to mention a sanding machine as well. All of the seams were well done, wherever the armor met the body of the car. The cars themselves appeared to be very old, and instead of the regular metal panels on the outside there were thick plates of steel.
“Well, I got a machine gun I could throw into the deal no problem,” Bill said. “It’s an old .50 caliber from wars long gone by. You’d need a man that knew how to operate it though, and around these parts that’s hard to come by. And I mean someone that really knows how to operate it, not just someone that knows how to hold the trigger down, because that will only work until the first jam occurs. It takes a certain kind of skill to keep an old fifty running, and not many people have it. By God you might need someone who is a no shit United States Marine to run the mother fucker. And not just any Marine, but a no shit 0331 Machine Gunner, as their Military Occupation Specialty is numbered.”
Knights Templar (Sean) Page 14