Blasted

by Chris Martin

  She began to stir, so I carefully got out of the bed and headed for the shower. By the time I was out, she was awake, though still in bed.

  “That was an incredible night, Steve,” she told me as I took her hand.

  “You’re telling me. I don’t even want to know where you learned moves like that.”

  She laughed, but it was a half hearted laugh. She had other things on her mind. “I think I really am falling in love with you, Steve.”

  “No you’re not. It just seems like it. We’ve gotten pretty close over the last couple of days. This was bound to happen, but don’t let it cloud your judgement. You don’t love me, but if you keep saying that you do, I’m going to start believing it, and then we’ll really be in trouble.”

  “It’s okay to have somebody love you, big guy.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that you’re a few classes out of my league. I mean, I’ve never met a dame like you before. Most of the broads I meet don’t spend the night.”

  She sat up in the bed and let the sheets fall.

  “You’d better put some clothes on. We’re not on a honeymoon here. We’ve got work to do. It won’t take long for Moore to find us.” I paused for a minute, considering. “By the way, what’s your real name?”

  She laughed as she got out of bed, making a point of flaunting every curve in my face as she passed by. “See?” she asked fascitiously. “There is a gentleman trapped underneath that gruff exterior.”

  “Funny,” I said, trying to keep my thoughts out of the gutter.

  “My name’s Holly Samuels,” she said, rubbing her body against mine.

  I pulled her as close to me as I could get her. I kissed her as hard as I could, to the point where my bruised mouth started to bleed again. We parted and I looked at her as she wiped my blood off her lips with her tongue.

  “Don’t lose too much of that,” she told me. “We’ve still got work to do.”

  Then she turned, walked into the bathroom, and closed the door behind her.

  We left the motel at around eight that morning. We grabbed a quick bite in an adjoining coffee shop. When we got out to the SUV Holly asked me what the plan was.

  “Well, I don’t like the idea of calling in your D.E.A. buddies. It sounds to me like you’ve got an informant there. I don’t think we can handle this alone though, either.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “I think we should call in an old friend of mine from the CIA.”

  “I didn’t know you had any friends,” Holly joked.

  “You got me there, doll. Let’s put it this way. We used to work together.”

  “What did he do at the CIA?”

  “Same as me. MK-ULTRA guinea pig.”

  “Is he as deadly as you?”

  I looked at Holly, considering how I should answer. There was only one way. The truth. “He’s nothing like me, babe. This guy’s a complete psycho.”

  It wasn’t hard getting a bead on John Ravage. He’d undergone a couple of name changes and some cosmetic surgery, but his work was hard to miss. I just followed the trail of mutilated corpses and they led me right to his doorstep. I made Holly wait down the block in the SUV. I wasn’t even sure that Ravage would recognize me, and that would not be good news.

  Ravage was one of the CIA’s crowning achievements. The MK-ULTRA project had destroyed any moral base that he’d had. The project had not had a pleasant effect on him. He was insane when he entered the project. When he left he was psychotic. Back when we were with the firm, we would usually work solo, so Ravage and I had not worked together much back then. When we left, I took him under my wing till he could get stabilized. We did a couple of jobs together during that period, which worked out well. Ravage and I made a good team, with our strengths playing off each other. In the end though, it was clear that Ravage would not be “stabilizing”. Whatever MK-ULTRA had done to him, it was permanent. I flirted with the idea of putting a bullet in his brain. There was no place in civilized society for an animal like Ravage. I couldn’t do it, though. I saw too much of myself in him. I knew that when I let myself go off, I was just as murderous and psychotic as he was. The only difference between us was that I could control the animal. He never could.

  You don’t just sneak up on someone like Ravage. To even attempt to do so would be suicide. So instead, I walked right up to the front door and knocked.

  “John. It’s me,” I shouted. I tried to remember what name I was using back when we worked together. There had been so many, it was hard to keep track. “It’s Hank Thunder.”

  I could never figure out why the government was so enamored with cutesy names. Mission code names and aliases – they always had to be something cute. When it finally came time to pick my own alias, I couldn't break the habit, which is how I wound up with Blast.

  “Thunder?” I heard a voice say, sounding like it was trying to size up the reality of the situation.

  “Yeah, Ravage. It’s me.”

  The door slowly opened and I found myself staring down the barrel of a sawed-off shotgun.

  “Ravage! Don’t shoot! It’s just me. It’s Thunder,” I said, trying to calm him down.

  “How do I know it’s really you?”

  I thought back and remembered the code name of our first mission as a team.

  “Operation Pentagram. That was our first assignment together, Ravage. Just you and me. Right after we got out of MK-ULTRA.”

  No one else could possibly know that. Just me and Ravage. “Thunder! It is you!” Ravage exclaimed, dropping the shotgun and giving me a big bear hug.

  He invited me in and I entered. The flop house where he’d holed up was just as shitty as mine. He showed me to a flea infested sofa and then disappeared down the hall. When he came back a couple minutes later, he had two beers. He handed me one and sat down in the chair to my right. The beer was ice cold.

  “Goddamn, Thunder. I haven’t seen you in, what, two years? Jesus fuckin’ Christ. What’s the deal? You got something for me?”

  “Maybe, Ravage. I’m in some trouble.” He raised his eyes. He knew that if I was in trouble, it had to be something big. “With Adrian Moore.”

  Ravage wasn’t stupid. He nodded his head, but didn’t say anything. He waited for me to finish the briefing.

  I brought him up to date, not leaving out anything. I trusted Ravage with all my secrets. He knew everything about me that I knew, and vice versa. When I was done, I waiting for him to take it all in.

  “So what do you want me to do, Thunder, or I guess it’s Blast now, huh? Nice name. You want me to join up with you and this dame on some sort of suicide run at Moore?”

  “Yeah, Ravage. I guess that about sums it up. You up for it?”

  “Fuck, Thu -- Blast. I’m always up for it. And besides, you know I could never turn you down. Not after what you did for me when MK folded.”

  “Thanks, John. It means a lot to have you with me again.”

  “Fuck yeah. It’ll be just like old times, Blast.”

  That was exactly what I was afraid of.

  -9-

  “Holly, this is John Ravage, an old friend of mine,” I said as Ravage climbed into the back seat of the SUV

  “Nice to meet you,” Holly said, eyeing Ravage suspiciously.

  “Goddamn. You’re right, Blast. She is a looker,” Ravage said.

  Holly smiled and I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “All right. Let’s get down to business. Ravage, I assume that you’ve kept up with training and all that.”

  Ravage nodded.

  “Good. Well, I considered a frontal attack on Moore’s estate, but I’m a little wary of the three of us jumping into that situation with no previous work together as a team. Besides, I’d like to take that fuck down another notch. Let him know we’re coming, but not when to expect us. He’ll figure that we’ll come to him, but we won’t. At least not right away. I think we should take out another of his mobs.”

  “What about the disk?” Holly asked.

>   “We can go back for that later. It’s safely stowed away for now. Believe me, I’m as anxious as anybody to get my hands on it, but we’ve got more important things to do.”

  “It seems awfully risky for us to take on another one of the families. The first one didn’t exactly go according to plan,” Holly reminded me.

  “I don’t think we need to worry. This time we’ve got Ravage.”

  “Yeah. No problem,” Ravage backed me up.

  “There is one minor problem. We don’t have any weapons,” I informed them.

  “That’s no problem, Blast. I’ve got all we’ll need at my other safehouse,” Ravage said.

  That was good news. I thought we were going to have to rob a sporting goods store or take a chance and go back to my dump. I didn't want to head back to the train station to recover the duffel bags just yet. It was a cinch that Moore would have at least one man covering the place. He had to figure there was a decent chance I'd stashed the disk there before I'd been grabbed.

  Ravage directed me to his other residence across town. It was in a terrible part of the city, where even the cops don’t go. Ravage, Holly, and I loaded up on the weapons that Ravage had secreted in a hidden basement, much like I’d set up at my rathole. Not really that surprising. We'd both had the same teacher.

  I walked away with a new .45 and a couple SMGs with enough ammo to take over a small country. Holly stuck with the .38, but also loaded up on an Uzi and some grenades. Now that I knew she had government training, it made a little more sense how she could handle hardware so well. What was left, Ravage took. Ravage had always been a little gun crazy. He liked high-powered weapons and he liked killing. Me, I’ve never been one to enjoy killing. It’s always been just part of the job for me. I didn’t even like to hunt. Ravage was into it, though. He liked to kill using various methods. He’d shot people, blown them up, hanged them, electrocuted them -- one time he’d even drawn and quartered some poor sap. Most of all, though, Ravage liked to kill with his bare hands. I’d seen him strangle people and beat them to death. I’d also seen him dismember a few people with his mitts. Towards the end of our partnership, he’d gone to crushing his enemies’ skulls with his hands. It was a sickening sight, and it was one of the reasons that Ravage and I had finally gone our separate ways.

  On our last assignment together, we were hired to wipe out a street gang that had caught the wrong man’s daughter in their crossfire. I always preferred execution style when I could manage it. Two bullets to the brain was more than enough for anyone. Ravage had moved on to his skull-crushing by then and was enjoying every blood-soaked minute of it. We were both neck deep in the Kill Zone. I finished with my targets and began to come down from the death high, when I happened to catch a glimpse of Ravage doing what he did best. He closed his gigantic hands around this guy’s head and squeezed. There was the sound of bone crunching and a wet pop as the skull collapsed. Ravage squeezed so hard that his victim’s eyeballs popped out of their sockets. I took an eyeball to the side of the head. I knew then that the partnership was over.

  But here we were, back together again. I didn’t know what new methods Ravage had developed since we’d last been together and I was in no hurry to find out. Then again, the more horrific the killings were, the louder the message would be to Moore.

  Back in the SUV, I told Holly and Ravage of my plan. I wanted to hit the Russians, one of the most feared mobs in the city, and a lynchpin in Moore’s syndicate. Holly and Ravage agreed.

  The Russian mob were headquartered in the part of the city known as ‘Little Ukraine’. It was about ten square blocks on the southside of town. By day, it was a nice little burg with lots of shops and restaurants. A tourist’s dream. By night, though, the mob ran wild. Every night there was at least one murder, plus either an arson or a rape or some other violent crime. Since it was located within the city limits, the Russian mob didn’t run the town, but they kept their part of it through fear and extortion and murder. This was a bloodthirsty gang and one of the most feared in the world. That Adrian Moore had ever managed to take them over was one of the main reasons he was able to set himself up as kingpin of all the mobs. The other gangs figured that if one man could take over the Russians, then no one else stood a chance.

  That was pretty much my thinking too. If we could take down the Russians, a clear message would be sent. I hoped and figured that it would lead to the demise of Adrian as a mob kingpin. If the three of us defeated the Russians, the other gangs would lose confidence. With three of the families taken down within days, the other families would be wondering exactly what Adrian was doing for them, and his life would be worthless. He'd united the various mobs in the city, but they were still more or less autonomous. His role was primarily to keep the peace, settle disputes, and centralize some of the operations. But he was only as valuable as the rest of the syndicate perceived him to be. If the heads of the other families believed that he'd lost control of the situation, he would be eliminated and his second-in-command would take over, barring an all-out gang war for the top spot.

  The Russians had been under investigation by the feds for the past several months. As a result, they had relocated their base of operations from an office building to a warehouse down by the train tracks. Having played both sides of the fence for a year, Holly had no problem leading us down to the warehouses that the Russians controlled.

  “So what’s the plan?” Holly asked, checking her weapons.

  “Let’s kill some commies!” Ravaged roared and bounded from the SUV. It wasn’t exactly the plan I had in mind, but you couldn't complain about his enthusiasm.

  Holly and I leapt from the truck and ran off after Ravage, who was heading in the direction of the closest warehouse. There were three warehouses that the Russians operated out of, side by side along the tracks. The most important thing in my mind was to make sure that none of us were killed. If that meant aborting the mission, then we would. I knew that Ravage could take care of himself, but Holly was probably out of her league going up against the Russians.

  I heard a string of gunfire and rounded the corner to see Ravage in full Kill Zone. I let my mind slip into the trance and joined him.

  Inside the warehouse were crates and crates of weapons that the Russians planned to resell on the streets or use to arm their own private army. There were close to a hundred workers in that one warehouse. They were all dead men.

  Ravage and I began mowing down the bodies with a heavy automatic spray of bullets. We kept our fingers on the triggers till our ammo ran dry. When that happened I simply popped in a second clip in each of my SMGs. Ravage tossed his to the ground and ran full-on into the enemies’ fire. I tried to cover him as best I could while he ripped and tore his way through a dozen Russians. Judging by the screams of agony and sobbing pleas for mercy the he was incapable of giving, I figured that Ravage had this warehouse pretty much covered.

  I pulled back and looked for Holly. She wasn’t around, but I heard the sound of gunfire coming from the second warehouse. I ran over to the door and kicked it in. A quick survey of the area was all I needed. Holly was pinned behind some crates by an army of Russians. I opened fire, tearing the front line of the Russians in two. The SMG in my left hand ran empty, so I tossed it. I got off another couple of volleys from the remaining SMG before I emptied it. I grabbed the .45 out of my waistband and started plugging the Russians. I ran through three clips in less than a minute and took out a couple dozen Russians, but they still kept coming. I dove for the crate where Holly was hiding as the Russians’ bullets whizzed past my head. I rolled to a stop behind the crate and checked to be sure that Holly wasn’t hit. When I was sure that she hadn’t been I grabbed three of her hand grenades and launched them over the top of the box.

  I wasn’t sure if there was live ammo stored in the warehouse or not, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Holly still had her SMG and a clip, so I grabbed it from her and started laying down some cover fire. We ran to the door and had just made it through t
he threshold when the grenades detonated. We were thrown violently forward with the force of the blast and knocked off our feet. Still dazed, I searched around for any sign of the Russians or Ravage. Ravage was running from the first warehouse, caked in blood, screaming. He spotted us and ran towards us. At first I was afraid that he was still in the Kill Zone and was going to open fire on us. Luckily, he wasn’t, but the adrenaline was rushing.

  “Thunder! I think we got ‘em all! That was the best yet. Goddamn!” Ravage was raving.

  “Ravage. Ravage. Calm down. We’re not out of the woods yet,” I said, still aware of the danger that we were in. We’d only hit two of the three warehouses. The first one was covered wall to wall with blood. Ravage had done his work well. Anybody that was still alive in that slaughterhouse had to be wishing that Ravage had killed ‘em. The second one was drenched in flames. There obviously had been some live ammo inside, but there had to be more. A lot more.

  The third warehouse, I figured, would be where the bulk of the ammo was. You couldn’t very well build an army with no bullets. I wasn’t sure where the head of the Russian mob was, if he or she was even present. No one knew who ran the Russians. There were plenty of theories, but no firm answers. It was quite possible that whoever it was was already dead.

  I figured I’d cut our losses while we were still in one piece. We’d delivered a devastating blow to the Russians. Even if their boss wasn’t dead, we’d destroyed millions of dollars worth of weaponry.

  “Let’s get out of here. Our job is done,” I told my teammates.

  “Bullshit, Blast,” Ravage said angrily. “We never leave any witnesses behind.”

  Ravage took off running towards the last warehouse, already in the Kill Zone. There was no reasoning with him. I knew that in this state Ravage would have no qualms about killing both Holly and me. It was best just to stay out of his way and enjoy the show.