The Fever Dream

by Sam Jones

  That’s how life operated as a Contractor. You worked for The Trust for twenty-five years. On that day, you were handed a nice stack of cash. They called it a ‘Reverence.’ Unless, however, you were killed before the twenty-five-year mark, in which case there was no insurance, no will, and no estate or Reverence left to any sort of family.

  Because Black had no family.

  No Contractor did.

  Contractors were recruited at birth, all of them orphans or unwanted children, raised in an unknown facility in an unknown location. Trained in the art of espionage, self-defense, computers, tech, and everything else under the sun. The Trust was a gallery of assassins, an organization that loaned out custom-made spies like a car rental service.

  How did Black feel about it all? The Trust? A twenty-five-year contract that held his balls in a semi-permanent vice grip?

  It blows. I fuckin’ hate it.

  He was trained to be a killer, yeah, and he was decent at it, sure. But he wasn’t cold-blooded. He cared. He had morals, which was odd for a guy who was exposed to lethal dog fighting at the age of four. The Trust called it ‘Exposure Therapy.’ Black had only one specific requirement in place for any job he took – No kids. Everything else is game. He never took a job that compromised that prerequisite, and the bosses were lenient enough to allow him to have it. For a guy who was as effective as he was, it was a fair and lucrative trade, at least on The Trusts’ end.

  As for Black, true pleasure for him derived from his cover job as an English teacher. It was a fairly easy gig, he stuck to the curriculum, and there were a few moments where he was able to impart a nugget of knowledge or a moment of inspiration to at least one of America’s youths.

  He remembered when Calvin Kittle, a sophomore, had asked to borrow Black’s copy of The Catcher in the Rye.

  “Holden Caulfield is an asshole,” Calvin said when he returned the copy to Black.

  “It’s my favorite book,” Black said as he ran a hand across the cover.

  “Got one I can read over the summer?”

  Black slipped Calvin a copy of American Psycho and told the kid to keep it on the hush-hush until he came back in the fall.

  I might get fired for that one.

  What the hell was I thinking?

  But, all of that aside, Black never had a choice to be a teacher. He never had a choice to be a Contractor. He was born into his situation, and he had no choice but to follow through and do it. Black was a prisoner to The Trust and he was their unwilling servant. His motive was to survive twenty-five years and fantasize about the things he was going to do and the places he would go once he got his Reverence.

  It was a shit deal.

  But it was the hand he was dealt.

  Black was almost to his room when a yellow motorcycle flew down the street behind him with a deafening and deliberate pop from its exhaust.

  Looks like a Harley.

  The big guy driving it quickly cocked his head in Black’s direction. He also made it a point to speed up right as he drove past the motel.

  It was odd.

  Black threw his eyes towards the ass end of the chopper—

  Nevada plates.

  He took a mental note.

  Black checked both shoulders and his hand rested on the butt of the Beretta that was tucked neatly into a holster behind his back. He was ready to draw, should he need to. Black then pulled out the key to Room 8, approached the door, put it into the lock, twisted, and entered.

  The room was dark. The queen-sized mattress, a dusty 1990s era television set, and chest of drawers were all covered in shadows. Black closed the cream-colored shades. Hints of yellow were in the fabric, a result of several years of abuse from smokers. It filtered an orange glow from the light bulb that hung over the front door and casted a sickly glow across the room.

  Black locked the door, breathed, and sat down on the edge of the bed, the mattress somewhat springy under his weight. He removed his Beretta and placed it under one of the pillows. Took off his silver jacket. Took off his silver tie. He took a few moments to gather his thoughts. A breather.

  His burner phone rang. He answered.

  “Yes?”

  “Mister Black. This is a courtesy call from Mutual Debt Collectors. May I have your account number, please?”

  Tara…

  Black smirked.

  “D6982…”

  “ID confirmed.”

  “Hey, Tara. How’s it going, gorgeous?”

  “Have you confirmed the contract for Mrs. Dubin?” Tara inquired.

  “I have.”

  “Excellent. Process all receipts and send them to me after you have finished with the contract.”

  “With a pretty, pink bow around the envelope, doll face. Anything else?”

  “Yes. Miss Trask wishes to speak with you.”

  Black went silent as he heard the one name he couldn’t stand to hear. It always sent a tingle up his spine that eventually manifested into a flurry of silent rage inside his brain. Trask was an Executive of The Trust, one of five who ran it. She was a top dog. She represented The Trust. And Black hated The Trust. His bosses. His slavers. But he kept his cool. Best to take the call, do the job, and mildly insult her when the opportunity presented itself.

  “Miss Trask, wishes to speak to me? That’s just peachy. Put her on,” said Black.

  A click. Then silence. Then another click. Then a woman spoke. Older, most likely in her 60s. Black wasn’t sure. He never met her face-to-face. His interaction with her over the past few years was limited to phone calls.

  She greeted him with a thick, whiskey voice. A tone that had the potential to once be sexy, but time, anger, and what Black decided was an unstable psychosis had turned her intonation into an intriguing yet villainous trademark. Every word she spoke held emphasis. Nothing that was said was a wasted breath of air—

  “Mister Black. This is Miss Trask.”

  Why the hell are you calling?

  “Been a spell, Miss Trask. I was just heading to bed.”

  “I require several minutes of your time.”

  “I’m kind of beat. Tell you what: how about we both go to bed and not hang up. Keep our phones on our pillows while we sleep? It’d be cute, no?”

  “Mister Black, I have neither the time nor the patience to indulge in even the simplest of life’s inconveniences. So, I most certainty don’t have any shred of a temperament for an arrogant, garrulous employee.”

  “Well, looks like one of us has a lack of intestinal fortitude.” Black curled his fingers into a ball, expect for the middle digit. He held it up, erect and defiant, towards a spot on the wall.

  “I know big words, too, Miss Trask.”

  “Enough jokes. Or shall I request an immediate Re-Val of your employment status?”

  Don’t. Say. Another. Word.

  And he didn’t. Hearing the phrase ‘Re-Val’ was something not to be taken lightly. Anyone who got called in for one never came back. There was only one Contractor who ever had one. His name was Marcus Silver.

  And he never came back.

  Whenever one Contractor crossed paths with another, every now and then, it came up in conversation. Saying his name was like slang; “Never pull a Marcus Silver.” Never fuck things up so badly that you can’t recover.

  A Re-Val was a thinly veiled (to the point of insulting) way of telling a Contractor that their time was up. They screwed up, hit the third of their three-strikes policy, and needed to turn themselves in.

  Don’t fuck around.

  Black straightened up and depressed his tone. “I’m listening,” he said to Trask.

  “I’m calling to check in.”

  “That’s not a common practice, last I checked. I thought it was better if Contractors never spoke directly with an Executive, unless absolutely necessary.”

  “Not after what happened with the Koogan contract.”

  The Koogan contract… Fuck …

  Black recalled the night it all went sour, three
weeks ago, in a hole-in-the-wall bar in Florida, hence his tan. The Koogan contract was a simple extortion job: dirty photos of a supposedly clean man, whose wife wanted to take everything from him in the divorce. After two days of surveillance and reconnaissance, Black had a rendezvous with a ‘friend’ of Mrs. Koogan, who wanted to see the pictures. He was a lanky guy dressed like a punk rocker. Whoever he was, Black figured it was somebody who was in trouble with Mrs. Koogan and coming here on her behalf was a step towards some sort of restitution. If things had gone from A to B, it would have been a good start. Unfortunately, that wasn’t how the night turned out. The meeting had gone from cordial to frantic in less than a minute.

  Black and the kid were seated in a dark corner. A round, plywood table with cheap liquor stains put about three feet of distance between the both of them. The punk rocker, who Black figured was tweaking on something at the time, hadn’t shown up with the full payment. Most likely he had pocketed some of it to get another fix of whatever he was currently on. Black, levelheaded at the time (but a little edgy from a thirty day ‘no smoking’ binge), had told him the photos weren’t going to be forked over until all of the money was present. Black told him to call when he had it. The punk rocker responded by pulling a gun.

  “Oh, buddy,” Black calmly told the punk rocker. “Do you even know how to use that thing?”

  “Give me the photos!” the guy said with a shaky hand and red, withdrawal eyes.

  “You’ve got three seconds to put that thing down, Johnny Ramone.”

  “I said fork ‘em over!”

  “One.”

  The punk rocker cocked back the hammer.

  “I’m warning you,” said Black. “Two.”

  “Fuck you!”

  The punk rocker went to squeeze the trigger. Black gripped the guy’s wrist with his left hand and turned the gun out just a shot went off and buried itself into the ceiling. He then grabbed the guy by his greasy hair with his right hand and slammed him down on the table. His nose broke and blood smeared across the cheap plywood.

  That should have been the end of it.

  But it wasn’t.

  Some guy waiting in the wings, another punk with a Sex Pistols shirt, most likely the guy’s friend. He charged at Black with a knife he snagged from behind the bar. It was compact with a yellow, plastic handle. Cheap. Probably was being used to slice the lemons and limes. Relying on his instincts and training (beaten into him over the course of years by a Contractor Instructor, or ‘C.I.’, by the name of ‘Fitzy’), Black cupped the man’s wrist, broke his nose with the palm of his free hand, took possession of the knife, and jammed it into the guy’s neck. Both punk rockers lay dead on either side of each other, almost as if Black had planned the placement of the corpses.

  That should have been the end of it.

  But it wasn’t.

  The bartender got worked up and pulled a shotgun. A scurry of activity followed. The end result was Black standing over three dead bodies with a shotgun in his hand. Needless to say, when he reported the outcome of the Koogan contract to his bosses at The Trust, they were far from pleased. Last Black had heard, Mrs. Koogan had gone missing.

  The Trust always manages to tie off those loose ends...

  He shook off the memory and cracked his neck. Trask must have heard it because she let out a sigh.

  “Is there a point in all of this, Miss Trask?” asked Black. “I thought I might try to catch some extra sleep. They say nine hours is the new eight hours.”

  A long beat. A protracted breath being drawn by Miss Trask.

  “I’m going to state something to you, Martin, so there is no confusion as to where you stand and what your purpose is. I want it well-defined, since you seem to lack any basic sense of self-awareness.” Her voice became louder, “We are your employers. You are our employee. Until your twenty-five-year mark hits, you belong to us… Do you know why we chose you?”

  Black didn’t answer.

  “We didn’t,” she said. “You were a healthy baby up for adoption. You were an empty vessel that was primed to be turned into whomever, or whatever, we wanted you to be. What you might call a ‘personality’ and sense of ‘humor’ are nothing more than side effects from your training and upbringing. Your larking is not special. It’s expected, because you, Martin Black, are not special. You’re a color lost in a sea of other colors. You aren’t even a color. You’re nothing at all. You’re the absence of light. An entity. An entity that belongs to us. You are befitted to The Trust. And if The Trust believes, if I believe, a Class Seven Operator, who is already skating on the edge of termination because of a botched assignment, is engaging in a misguided attempt at being disparaging towards his superiors, I might think to have him executed for sake of preventing him from creating yet another debacle… and to put a lid on his unremitting ego. Point being: this contract better go smoothly. Otherwise your employment status will be brought into question. Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Martin?”

  Black felt homicidal. But he kept it to himself.

  Christ, I need a cigarette…

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Good. Then I expect you to report in once the Dubin contract is finished. Should something go wrong, the tonality of our next conversation will be in regards to the time and place of your Re-Val. Are we on the same page, Mister Black?”

  “We are, Miss Trask.”

  “Good. Then have a pleasant evening. And sweet dreams.”

  The line went dead. It took every ounce of restraint Black had to not smash his phone to pieces.

  For a second Black wondered if he could be pull a Schwarzenegger – get a bunch of guns, track down The Trust, and blow them all to pieces. Free himself and the other Contractors with names tailored after colors. But it was just a fantasy. He wasn’t a single-man army. Black was one of many. Like Trask has so eloquently put, a color lost in a sea of colors.

  Bite your time. Do this job, and do it right.

  For a moment, Black thought about switching on the TV to find something to take his mind off the maniacal, power-tripping Trask, if only for an episode or two.

  But it would have to wait.

  A bald guy with a beard was at the front door with a cocked revolver in his hand.

  SMASH! The front door was kicked open just as Black moved towards it. The hand holding the revolver came in first.

  Black rushed towards the back of the door and slammed it closed; the hand clutching the revolver was now wedged in-between the door and the frame, the combined sounds of bones cracking and wood splitting echoed off the walls. Whoever was holding onto the gun didn’t scream, didn’t even whimper, even in the midst of his thumb and index finger being snapped in four places. Despite the damage, he managed to keep a grip on the revolver.

  The shine of the metal of the barrel made Black realized that he forgot to snag his Beretta from under the pillow as he ran towards the door.

  Nice job, dude-o.

  Black pulled the door back open with his left hand as his right reached through the narrow opening and proceeded to haul the bald guy in by his head.

  Shit. Too bad he doesn’t have hair. Better grip.

  Then the odds shifted in the bald guy’s favor. With all his might, he rushed forward and tackled Black into the ground, the fifty pounds he had on Black now working towards his advantage.

  The bald man tried to switch the gun to his left hand as he buried his weight into Black. During the pass-off, with a free hand, Black slapped the guy’s revolver out of his palm and toward the floor. It skidded with loud, metallic thumps as it landed underneath the chest of drawers.

  The two men became entangled. Black struggled to find a way to leverage himself out of the semi bear hug he was now held in on the ground. He saw that his right leg was the only limb not entwined with the bald man’s so he used the thick, muscled part to hit the left side of the guy’s ribs.

  One hit, two hit, three hits. One more.

  Ribs were cracked. The bald guy moved
off of Black. Black got a foot of distance between him and stood up.

  The two men locked eyes. The bald guy’s darted towards the area underneath the chest of drawers.

  Black caught on.

  “You want that gun, don’t you?” he said.

  The bald guy clenched his unbroken hand into a fist.

  Black grinned.

  “Go ahead, bud. All yours.”

  The bald guy dashed downwards towards the chest of drawers, his unbroken hand reaching towards revolver, his body now somewhat sprawled out.

  Perfect.

  Black kicked the guy in the left side of his head as the tips of his fingers touched the blue steel of the revolver. Nothing but a crack of bone and silence followed.

  Lights out, asshole.

  The bald guy awoke two minutes later. Black had hogtied his hands and feet during that time and propped him up against the wall by the door. He awoke, Black standing over him, Beretta gripped into his left hand with a suppressor attached. He wasted no time—

  “I’m pretty sure management called the cops, so we’ve got about thirty seconds of chattin’ time,” Black said.

  The bald guy spoke. Blood on his teeth. A few of them missing. Collateral damage from the kick to the head—

  “You know who I am?” he asked with a thick, Brooklyn accent.

  Black sighed and threw his hands up in the same manner someone would when they found out a pizza delivery was running late.

  “I said we had thirty seconds, my friend. You’ve now wasted ten of ‘em. I’m going to ask you this one more time: who are you?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Suit yourself,” said Black.

  He raised the Beretta and fired three shots into the guy’s chest, a quick secession of pff noises emitting from barrel, red mist now on the wall behind the bald guy. Black then checked the guy’s pockets and found a wallet and keys to a Harley.

  The motorcycle…