7PM - Emily (A 5PM Short Story)

by Chris Heinicke

  The chopper was parked a hundred yards away in a bare field, the rotor blades slicing the air and looking majestic with its black paint and dark tinted windows. I had never seen such an object before, but in the life I was soon to lead, I would be seeing them a lot.

  The cop ran ahead of us, Helen not far behind, and me trailing last in all my naked glory. The pilot watched us pile in the back, his face invisible through the dark helmet.

  I quickly dressed before securing myself with the seatbelt. The cop smiled at us and pulled out two needles from a box sitting next to him. “Sorry, ladies, but I can’t allow you to see the way to the compound.”

  He injected Helen first, who passed out. “What compound?” I asked although I knew the answer from a previous conversation with Helen, anyway.

  He put the other needle in my arm, and the last thing I had heard before the world went black was, “The Praying Mantassassins compound.”

  Chapter 5

  My first day at the compound was one of strangeness but provided so much information about my past. Everything Gary the cop and Helen told me changed everything.

  First of all, I discovered my real parents were killed in a car accident when I was a baby, and I was adopted out to my mother’s sister, who turned out to be Miss Lizzie from the commune. She had been seduced by the words of a smooth talking gardener, who along with four male friends of his had convinced several single female parents to escape the society with them.

  Between them, they had enough money to pay for the land they set their commune on and to keep the local law enforcement inside to keep any outsiders from coming in. One of the first women to have been taken in was Helen’s sister, so Helen spent a lot of time and money tracking down the place she went to after disappearing from their hometown. By the time Helen found the place, she had discovered through conversation that her sister had died while giving birth to one of the boys I had grown up with.

  “Wow.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say to him as they sat me down in a room and spilled out my life secrets.

  Gary smiled. “It’s a big thing to take in, Emily, to know so much of your life has been kept secret from you. But here you can become something new.”

  “You called me Emily. My name’s Erica. Erica Steele according to you.”

  “We all take on different names here, and I think Emily suits you. Stay here with us and you get fed, have your own room, and get the best training at something you’re already good at.”

  “Killing?”

  “Yes. I think you could become one of our best assassins. You need to get some attitude,” he said.

  “I’ve got enough fucking attitude to make you choke on your boyfriend’s cock,” I said.

  He stared at me and got to his feet, and I thought he would smack me in the mouth. “That’s a good start, Emily, and yes, my boyfriend’s cock is so big I nearly choke on it, but boy, does it pack a big load.”

  My jaw dropped open.

  “A lot of us kind of dabble in sexual acts with both genders here. We’re not judgemental about any of it. Hell, I’ll probably do you at some stage if you play your cards right. Anyway, I’ll take you on a tour of this place and introduce you to those who are here.”

  ******

  Several weeks passed, and each day, I found myself learning new skills in hand-to-hand combat, guns, and knives and swords too. I assumed the organisation had an unlimited budget for mannequins and clay targets, and Helen soon found she had great skills at shooting targets from a long distance. We were told that our situation was unique, with only two of us being taken in for our recruitment round, which got me to thinking they must have a hell of a lot of people working for them.

  Talissa became my greatest mentor, following an explosive first encounter when she kicked my ass. She was super sexy too, just as Gary described her, and once this guy called Diablo arrived and created the famous communal showering block, I grew envious of her huge ass and tits. Diablo himself turned down my advances, knowing how young I was. And in turn, Talissa turned him down time and time again.

  For my first assignment, I found myself teamed up with Helen, Talissa, and Diablo, posing as a young girl bought by a wealthy drug lord. Before we ventured off, Helen pulled me aside.

  “Remember, no matter what happens, trust your gut. You can do this, girl.” She embraced me for what would be the last time.

  “My body is just an instrument for the job I have to do. If I have to fuck an old man to make this assignment a success, I’ll do it, and if I have to be the one to slice his head off, I’ll do that, too.”

  She looked at me, knowing the little girl she rescued from the paedophilic hippy elders was long gone. I liked the new me, the tough, take no shit and kick some ass me.

  We all knew our parts, and after having to strip naked in a room full of henchmen as well as my fellow assassins, I was required to perform a blow job on one hell of a creepy prick. And then I was taken away to a bedroom with a man we were led to believe was the real target of our operation.

  The man I thought to be Big Bill asked me to strip for him. I was ready to do so but had discovered a knife on a bedside table. I wondered if he intended to use it on me. He lay on the bed and pulled his trousers off.

  “Come on. Get on board, love,” he said, patting the bed.

  I smiled at him, pulling my panties down from beneath my skirt. I climbed on top of the bed and pulled his undies down, rubbing him until he was hard, and then I straddled him.

  “Oh, my God,” he said as he slid inside me.

  I bounced up and down, leaning forward until the bedside knife could be within my reach. He closed his eyes, obviously enjoying what I was doing to him, and just as I felt him shudder from reaching the peak of his enjoyment, I swiped the knife and stabbed down hard and quick at his chest. His face froze, and I stayed on with him inside, watching the life drain from him. It felt incredible, and I selfishly stayed in that position for a few more minutes, feeling as if his life’s essence flowed into me with his death.

  I knew this was the life for me and smiled as I slowly sawed off his head with the same knife I had put through his heart.

  ******

  Diablo perished during the cocked up mission and Talissa ordered me to take some African bitch and a crying child who lost her mother away in one of our transports to rendezvous with the chopper. I didn’t get to say goodbye to Helen. I found out she was shot dead by Talissa on the assumption she had ratted us out to the real Big Bill.

  The word was that Talissa had been sent away to an undisclosed location—none of us knew where the place was. But I swore I would find her one day and take revenge, with or without the blessing of the Praying Mantassassins. The woman who started out as my idol became my sworn enemy, but I took pleasure in my last conversation with her that I would get her one day.

  Chapter 6

  Fourteen years had passed, and Gary’s stepson Ed had long taken over the active recruitment role as well as being the Praying Mantassassin’s eyes in the police force. He brought in some great women. Two of the best were his stepsister Hayley and a young but tough battler named Brittany.

  Ed came to us with a mission, a weeklong assignment involving five of us women to really fuck a real estate agent over, but none of us was to do the killing. The details seemed peculiar, but a million dollars is a million dollars.

  “Her name’s Kate, a real estate agent who wants revenge on a work colleague for something that happened a long time in the past. Here’s her picture and the amount she wants to pay us.” Ed passed around two eight by ten enlargements of a less than attractive red-haired woman.

  “She actually applied to be one of us. Can you believe it? I mean who would want to sleep with her for a fee,” Ed continued. “But our target is to be left for her, who says she has something special in store for him. My opinion is she’s a little bit mentally unbalanced but look at the zeros after that number five. That’s what she wants to pay for a job done right, so that’s
what we’ll do.”

  “I’m in,” I said. Brittany and Hayley also added their interest, but the next piece of information got the hair on the back of my neck to stand up.

  “There’s something else. The target is married to someone who was an active member, so we’ll be using this mission to bring her back in if she’s still got the moves,” Ed said.

  I only knew of one Mantassassin in hiding.

  Talissa.

  I stuck around after the briefing had finished so I could have a quiet word with Ed. “That bitch killed Helen after a mission we were on went south, without a single bit of proof that Helen had ratted us out. If you bring her back, no one is safe.”

  “Hey, Emily, I’m not in charge of this facility, so I don’t get to make the rules.”

  “But you could turn a blind eye while I put a bullet in her. We haven’t needed her for this long, so what could she possibly contribute now? Please, Ed, trust me.” I took a few steps closer to him and sat on the table.

  “Emily, you’re beautiful and everything and one of the best assassins who have ever served here, but if you plan on doing something to one of our own, you risk everything. So either get those ideas out of your head,” he looked at where my skirt had hitched up from sitting, “or keep them to yourself.” He took another look. “And please wear some undies for a change.”

  “You know how uncomfortable they make me, and you’ve seen me in the shower so many times you probably see my body more often than I do.”

  “Save that pussy for the target of the next mission.”

  “Another thing, Ed. Who’s playing the part of your partner? Going by the details of the briefing, we seem to be a girl down.”

  “I have a new partner at work. She’ll do fine. I don’t entirely trust her, but we can take her out during the mission, make her look like the guilty person behind it all who met an untimely death by the hands of a great cop—being me.”

  I slid off the table and pulled the hem of my skirt down. I knew Ed only really had eyes for Hayley and Bjorn, but there was no harm in trying to score some sex to try to sway his opinion. If only he were more like other men.

  I left the little room and made my way for one of the helipads. Even after so many years at the compound, I still didn’t know where it was located. As usual, there were a couple of pilots standing by waiting to conduct their taxi service. I had a rented apartment I wanted to spend some time in before the mission to prepare myself for my next acting role—a temp real estate agent with a fake background.

  ******

  Walking into the apartment, I found myself impressed with the facilities. Of importance was a computer I would need to use to communicate with the target named Terry under the guidance of our client Kate. I would only need to use the chat program once, and it was important he would hear my voice to throw his suspicions firmly in my direction.

  It all seemed a little weird, but many missions had been that way. If any of the missions seemed bizarre, then what happened after I heard the knock on my front door made everything else seem normal in comparison.

  Who the hell knew I would be at the apartment? I had my pistol at the ready and made my way taking short steps until I reached the door. Professional assassins knew you never look through a peephole. There was always the risk of being shot in the eye by someone who wanted to take you out.

  I grasped the doorknob, flung the door open, and aimed my pistol with my other hand. Looking ahead, I felt like someone placed a full sized mirror on my doorstep. “What the fuck?” I asked.

  “Erica, it’s me,” the woman smiled.

  I knew the voice from long ago, it couldn’t be. “Rebecca?” I asked.

  “Yes. What do you think? Do you think I look like you?”

  “Um… I don’t know what to think. How much did all that surgery cost and why would you do such a thing?”

  “Don’t worry, Erica. I did this so we could make it work for us, start up our own killer for hire business, and be each other’s alibi. I’ve been trained by the best, but when I heard through the grapevine where you’ve been since I left you and Helen that day, I came up with this great idea.”

  “You thought spending thousands to look like me was a great plan without discussing it with me first? I’m quite happy where I am and doing what I’m doing.”

  “But you don’t have complete freedom. You don’t even know where the compound is. At least where I’m from we come and go as we please. How about you just listen to me for a while, and if you don’t like what I have to say, I’ll drop the idea.”

  I smiled. “Okay, let’s chat.”

  We sat and talked for hours, discussing where we each came from before life at the hippy commune and what we had done and who we had killed in our time working for our respective organisations. The more we talked about her idea, the more I liked the sound of it and how we could utilise that tactic to take out Talissa after the mission, deciding it would make for the better option.

  We even searched online for information on the cop who Ed was bringing into the mission, Hannah Hall. While information on her was limited, we found she had a father who once had a vendetta for a mystery organisation. I read everything about him I could find, and then read it a couple more times, sitting and staring and thinking how we could use this.

  “I’ve thought of it—how we could do this. I play my part as planned, and you find Hannah’s father and hold him captive. We use him as leverage to get her to either kill or arrest Talissa after the mission, and if she’s still alive, Hannah delivers her to me in exchange for her father. We just have to bait him to isolate him and take him. He’s an ex-cop with forty years of experience and probably has a lot of friends.”

  “Is he still married?” Rebecca asked.

  “Yes, but I’ll see if I can get Hannah to spill the beans on whether he could be swayed,” I said. I stepped away from the computer and looked her up and down. “You look great.” I took a few steps towards her.

  She closed the short distance between us and touched my face. “I should have come with you and Helen that day, but I let a boy come between us. I love you, Erica. I always have and I always will. I want us to finish what we started in that lake all those years ago.”

  I unbuttoned her shirt with one hand and slid my other hand up her thigh, finding that she too wasn’t wearing underwear. Her hands returned my gesture. As weird as it seemed to be making out with someone who looked just like me, I was dripping wet with excitement as her finger invaded me. She rubbed me gently, finding my most sensitive area. In the moments leading up to our mutual orgasms, I decided yes, I would do one last mission for the Praying Mantassassins. Then I would retire and work with Rebecca.

  Epilogue

  Rebecca, aka Ebony

  When I heard Erica had perished in the 5PM mission, I had cried for days. Our relationship had been a weird one. For so many years, we were friends in a hippy commune and then road buddies until she pulled a gun on her guy.

  I should have gone with her and Helen instead of staying with the bikers. While they were nice guys, the brothers thought they had a right to use me when they felt horny. I could have said no on many occasions, but I feared they would send me on my way once I didn’t put out for them whenever they requested some action.

  It didn’t end badly, though. I had an opportunity to slip away one night when a busload of swimwear models stopped at the same campsite, happily taking me on board and giving me a temporary gig showing off the best bikinis and one-piece sets on my trim body on the catwalks and beach exhibitions.

  But one day, I found my true calling—killing. We were on a fashion parade along South Beach in Miami when a crazed gunman threatened to kill our manager for not taking his girlfriend into the modelling team. In a split second manoeuvre, I transformed myself from hostage to action hero, springing up from lying on the ground with my hands on my head to jumping on the guy’s back and wrestling the rifle from his hands.

  During the struggle, the gun fi
red and blew a hole where half of his internal organs had once been.

  My journey paralleled Erica’s, recruited by a corrupt cop and taken away to a hidden base to be trained to kill. We operated differently than the Praying Mantassassins. There was no sex before the killings, just a straight out murder of a target or targets as requested by the clients.

  I was an official FFF, Foxy Femme Fatale, operating under the name Ebony. They were able to track down my history, and eventually, they were the source for my recent locating of Erica—or Emily, as she had become known. We had it all worked out. We would team up and work independently from any organisation. It would have been risky, but the money would have been huge.

  However, after her failed mission, I decided I would set things right.

  “Okay, ex-Sergeant Hall, your daughter failed to take out Talissa, and my sister is dead, so I have no reason to keep you alive. But I also have no personal reason to kill you, so I’m about to let you go on the condition you keep me updated on Talissa’s whereabouts.”

  He sat hog-tied to a chair in the secret basement of a gymnasium. “Why should I do that for you?”

  “Because I have no reason to hate you or your daughter, so I don’t need to kill you. Why do you care about Talissa’s well-being any more than my dead sister’s or mine?

  “You’re all evil, every single one of you. You don’t get to choose who dies for his or her sins because someone pays you. This isn’t the time of the wild west.”

  I walked up to him and put the barrel of my gun to his temple. “I’m asking you one last time to do a simple task. You have a daughter. Think about her. Should she lose her daddy, even if you don’t give a shit about your own life?”

  He bowed his head, hiding his face from mine. “Okay, I’ll do it. But you don’t ever go after Hannah. Do you understand? If anything happens to her, you’ll have the whole force on you in a heartbeat.”