by Rob Shepherd
The best thing about someone trying to murder me was that I couldn’t hear that damned Muzak anymore. My ears being nearly deafened from the shots, and therefore immune to the electronic music, made me smirk in spite of my situation.
Everything was silent until the echoes faded, almost deafening in its totality. One of the would-be assassins called to me, the goon’s voice hard to hear after the rapport of gunshots. “Give it up, Greene, or your ass is toast!” I laughed at that, my eyes glittering with mirth behind my shades. His bravado was admirable, but clearly no one had properly briefed this poor schmuck before sending him after me.
“Wrong!” I shouted in reply, palming an orange and crushing it in my fist, fingers puncturing the skin so that it oozed fluid down my wrist. “My ass isn’t toast, but yours is about to be juiced!” I threw the pulpy orange like a grenade, effectively blinding the smarmy killer as he was pegged in the face with the fruit and its acidic juice. Mr. Revolver screamed in agony, scrubbing frantically at his now-streaming eyes. I snorted lightly at his exaggerated reaction; I’d had so much worse.
The sawed off shotgun I’d been concealing came into my hands and I peered around the corner, easily silencing the temporarily blinded man with one well-aimed round right between the eyes. He went down like a sack of potatoes, his eyes wide open, destined never to see anything on this plane again. The dead man’s gun hit the floor and went off, accidentally shooting one of his two partners in the shin. The spatter of blood oozing forth from the ruined meat sent a thrill through me. The sweet sound of bone splintering like dry tinder in a lightning storm made me chortle. My laughter caused the remaining pair of men to swear loudly and then empty their clips in my direction. I was glad to see that some people felt the need to keep their firearms up to date as oranges exploded with gouts of juice, bits of wood and ceramic flying everywhere like shrapnel.
When the two men momentarily ceased their assault to reload, not a single shot had hit me from their entire volley. I shook my head and muttered under my breath, “Amateurs…” as I took advantage of the opening.
I came to my feet like an avenging angel, the shotgun resting on my hip. “Like fish in a barrel,” I said, more to myself than anyone else. It only took me three shots to take the remaining two killers down, one of them getting in a last lucky shot that grazed my shoulder and blew a small hole in my leather jacket. I swore softly as it started to bleed, the sticky warmth of it trailing down my arm, but I mostly ignored the burning ache from the wound. I was really more pissed about the damage done to my jacket.
I hid the gun away and collected my groceries, avoiding the bodies of the thugs and quickly hauling ass to get away from the scene. I heard the thundering approach of a slew of security guards, the wail of sirens in the distance queuing me to motor. I ducked into a different aisle and acted as normal as possible, getting the rest of my supplies and going to check out.
Having procured my essentials, I was just getting ready to walk out the doors as a Muzak version of Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” became audible on the speakers. As I Having procured my essentials, I was just getting ready to walk out the doors as a Muzak version of Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” became audible on the speakers. Horribly inappropriate and hilarious all at the same time. As I exited the automatic doors with bags in hand, I said softly to myself with a little grin, “Clean-up on Aisle 3.”
It wasn’t always that way. Me being the cool and aloof assassin, that is. I’d been softer once, and I vowed to never be that way again. Not after how they took Audra from me…
The whole affair began in the spring. The time when Mother Earth and all of Nature kicked Father Winter’s chilly old ass back into hiding for a few blessed months of warmth and sunshine. The beauty of rebirth can’t be experienced fully in any setting other than immersed in the wild of the forests. The smell of damp, rain-fresh soil pervaded my nostrils, the serenity and peace of this place soothing every wearied fiber of my being. I sighed softly, my chin resting on my fist as I sat on the large, moss-covered chunk of granite that had always been my place of refuge.
The world had never seemed so beautiful before. The majestic splendor of the five-trunked pine I sat beneath held me in partial awe. A fresh breeze blew through the clearing and I breathed deeply of the untainted freshness as it ruffled my blond hair.
Nearby in a tall oak, a woodpecker happily drilled away at the bark, hunting for edible insects. The cicadas hummed and droned loudly, their buzzing rhythm permeating the vast expanse of the woods around me. I leaned back against the thick trunk of the pine whose canopy sheltered me from the gentle and warming rays of the sun. Dappled sunlight fell in blocks of brightness and shadow about me.
Everything then made smile: the incessant chirping of the crickets, a pair of chickadees singing back and forth to each other, and even the rustling of the so-green leaves and needles above my head. In a world so scarred by ugliness, pain, and death, I’d finally been shown how marvelous and full of wonder life could be again. Her laughter was so like the nearby brook that tripped and trickled over fallen branches and water-worn pebbles, I could almost see her standing there beside me, chuckling about something I’d said that wasn’t really that funny.
Some of the best things in life were free, and her smile didn’t cost me a single cent. She’d brought light into this abysmal world of darkness like a torch’s warm glow in the night. We had initially been drawn together by our common mark: the Jackal.
How one so deep into the biz could be so cheerful had been beyond my comprehension. It had actually bugged the hell out of me, at first. With time, she had made me able to appreciate the beauty of the wild places, once more. I felt like I’d been seeing everything in black and white and shades of grey, but she’d brought color back into my vision and life.
It had been years since I’d been to this spot. I found myself wondering how I’d survived this long without the cleansing air of this sanctuary in the forest. The answer was simple: I hadn’t really been living. The banality and pollution of the big city had been killing me slowly, eating away at my physical health and spirit.
Getting to my feet and stretching luxuriously, I sighed happily as I went to the streambed and knelt beside it. After gazing into the water for a moment, I gingerly reached my hand into the chilly liquid and plucked a smooth, round stone from the brook. It was purely clear quartz, looking almost like an uncut diamond the size of a robin’s egg. After patting it dry with the edge of my shirt, I put it in my pocket with a little smile before slipping sunglasses back onto my nose.
Audra would thank me and smile about the gift, and it would warm my heart. She’d love it, but not nearly so much as I loved her.
Things went amazingly the whole summer. We went on dates, and it seemed like we could have a chance at normal lives. Did we still lead mostly nocturnal existences and kill for money? Most certainly. But some things are just better when you can share what you’ve gone through with someone, someone who actually understands from first-hand experience. Someone who would never call you a monster.
Our love had made us more complacent than we realized during those lazy summer months. The Jackal’s minions took her from me in a splatter-fest that I’d never really be able to clear from my memory. The afterglow from the green residue all over our apartment was still burned into my retinas. Thousands of tiny bites covered her body, whole chunks missing here and there, her blood covering the floor like cherry syrup. I’ll never let myself forget the way her breath had rattled from her lungs as I held her chalky hand, knowing there was nothing I could do for her when she closed her eyes for the last time, a declaration of love for me dying on her bloodless lips as her heart stopped beating.
Later that evening, after making arrangements for her burial, the bare branches of the trees above my head rattled and scraped against each other, skeletal fingers closing in on me in the near-darkness of twilight. I’d taken my seat on that well-worn chunk of granite, a bottle in my han
d. The world here, which had been so gorgeous a few months ago, was now as dead and ugly as I felt inside. A whippoorwill’s long and mournful cry echoed through the clearing, making my throat constrict as the tears threatened to spill from me once more.
Railing against my sorrow, trying to wrap myself in a warm blanket of rage to keep away the chill of sadness, I stared down at the leaf-littered ground. The darkly red leaves that washed across the dirt like a river of blood did the trick, filling me with anger that burned white hot like the fires of Hell. The leaves… There had to be hundreds of them that were this deep arterial crimson, no variations that were orange, or yellow, or even brown. So many leaves, like her blood… There had been so much blood…
My eyes were reddened, there was no need to look in a mirror; they felt dry and shriveled like raisins, as dry and crisp as the leaves that had fallen to the ground like gunned-down bodies. All the tears my body could produce were gone, I was as dried up and empty as the wraith-like trees that surrounded me. An ominous cloud passed overhead, blocking out the moon and plunging me into complete darkness. I could’ve given a shit less.
I could see my breath rising in a fog above me, but it didn’t feel cold. My vodka-induced stupor was helping to keep me from feeling anything. Physically, at least. My heart still felt like it had been ripped from my body and left behind nothing but an aching, bloody chasm that could never be filled.
I lifted the bottle to my lips again, my mouth trembling at the feel of the cool glass. I stopped before taking the large swallow I had intended to, looking down at it as if I’d just been about to consume some instantly fatal poison.
“Half way along the road we have to go, I found myself obscured in a great forest, bewildered, and knew I had lost the way.” I softly quoted Dante, one of Audra’s favorites, tears welling up in my eyes. “What the fuck am I doing?” I whispered softly.
I got to my feet and threw the bottle at the rock, the vessel exploding in a shower of fragments of glass that glittered like diamonds in the renewed moonlight. I started walking away, vowing to come back in the morning when I was in a better frame of mind and pick up every last shard of alcohol coated glass.
Glancing back over my shoulder then, I couldn’t resist a soft smile as I rubbed the quartz I’d given her, now hanging on a chain around my neck. Audra was gone, but I’d never forget her or regret the time we had been able to spend together. She wouldn’t have wanted me to be wallowing in self-pity like this. Oh, no. Audra wasn’t that kind of a girl. She’d want me to get revenge.
It had been nearly five years since that had happened, and I still hadn’t been able to destroy the ones who took her away. That year made up the most peaceful days I had ever experienced, and the most painful that followed. Still, the Jackal thrived. Their network of Others wreaked havoc with little regard for consequences and any innocents who got caught in the crossfire.
After much searching, I’d hooked up with a group of mercenaries after my own heart: The Order of Khonsu, defenders and combatants of rogue Others who refused to live in symbiosis with society as a whole. Were we killers of every vampire and werewolf who crossed our paths? Not by a long shot. But when those same vampires went about killing every unwary blonde woman for three city blocks, or those werewolves caused a ten car pile-up because they jumped through a trucker’s windshield, we were there.
I’d always known there was something more, but my exposure to the Others, the super naturals, had been limited until Audra’s murder. Then the Order found me, and everything I knew about the world shattered into a thousand glittering, blood soaked shards.
I’d been an exterminator of scumbag humans for nearly a decade before I met, and lost, my Audra. I’d been on the swim team for years, and I dealt with my fair share of abuse at the hands of my classmates. I was fed up and had no tolerance for those who treated others as lesser than themselves, so I became something of a vengeance bully in high school. The one every stealer of lunch money expected to be lurking around the corner, waiting to bestow upon them the swirly of a lifetime to put them in their victims’ shoes.
Unbeknownst to me, my Economics teacher in the tenth grade was the leader of a “pest control” service. He saw the way I defended the other teens and, rather than reprimanding me, said he admired my skill. That I could be taught to be better and hone my natural abilities, and to be able to make a real difference. He totally sold me on the idea with little coaxing. He assured me that they had cleaners who picked up the mess. All I had to do was stop some hearts from beating, by any means I deemed necessary. All that and get paid for it? Sounded like reasonable enough terms, to me.
Should I have been squeamish about taking lives at the tender age of sixteen? Probably. Blame my desensitization on the prevalence of excessive violence in the media, if that helps you sleep at night. But the hits I had mostly consisted of rapists, dealers, crooked would-be politicians, and abusive douche bags in general. Two wrongs don’t make a right, my ass.
After high school, I kept working for Mr. Krenek, and that was how Audra and I met. She’d been gorgeous, but that wasn’t the thing that drew me to her the most. It was the fact that she was a better shot than I was, and everyone loves a girl who’s good with a gun. Krenek sent groups of us to the range together so we could give each other tips, learn who we worked best with, and promoting a strong bond between us all.
Ear protectors hanging around my neck after everyone stopped firing, my jaw nearly dropped to join them as I gazed enviously down the range to the silhouette at the end of her lane. “Better close that thing or you’re gonna catch flies, Mathias.”
The laughter in her dark grey eyes was like hematite, completely magnetic. I tried to shrug it off, sheepishly rubbing the back of my neck. “Were you nursed with a gun instead of a bottle, or what?”
She laughed out loud at that, perfect rosy lips showing off pearly teeth that most models would have killed to possess. Hands on her hips, she leaned forward a bit to look down the range at my own target, her pose displaying her womanly curves in a way that made my mouth dry. “Yours isn’t that bad, hun.” She put her gun away and lifted the amber protective lenses onto the top of lazily piled auburn curls, turning the full force of her eyes on me. “But maybe if you were more interested in the target than what my ass is doing, your shots would be a bit more centered.” I blushed and she’d actually ruffled my hair, a gesture made more ridiculous by her being half a foot shorter than me. “I didn’t even know someone as pale as you had enough blood in ‘em to blush!”
Everyone in our normal shooting group jokingly called me “Bloodless” because my coloring was unnaturally pale, aside from my eyes. Platinum blond hair, porcelain skin, and green eyes so dark they almost looked black. I gave her some stupid attempt at a witty retort, and she had found my total lack of game charming enough to give me a chance, and we’d had the most memorable summer of our lives.
Walking away from the scene at the store and thinking back on all of it, I was grateful that I’d found Amasis Rehu: the leader of the Order of Khonsu. He helped me discover my true heritage, and the reason for my affinity with water. It was a few generations back, but my bloodline wasn’t wholly human. My mother’s grandmother had been full Atargati, a race of semi-aquatics who originated in Assyria thousands of years ago. Unlike their Greek cousins, the Derkatori, the Atargati chose to live the majority of their lives on land. The Atargati, for the most part, also didn’t share the palates of the Derkatori, which consisted primarily of human flesh. It was a point of contention that still separated the two families of merpeople, but they’d finally been able to agree to disagree rather than trying to wipe each other out.
I may not have had much luck tracking down the little flying demons that had killed Audra yet, but I knew that what we were doing was good work. We were making the world a safer place, so those lucky enough to be able to have children wouldn’t have to legitimately worry about the monster under the bed or the boogieman in the closet.
I was t
raveling on foot and I stopped a few blocks from my apartment, bags of groceries dropping to the ground. They were totally unimportant now, and my gun was back in my hands almost of its own volition as I ran to the park, vaulting easily over the closed wrought-iron gate.
It was supposed to be closed down at night, but I saw a lone tennis shoe off to the side of the path, and it confirmed my suspicions. But the shoe wasn’t my main focus. What had drawn my attention so completely was pixie dust, glowing faintly in phosphorescent green along the path behind the gate. A residual sign that those ungodly little creatures had been through this way. Cute? Sure, if flesh eating, pocket-sized demons with the teeth of a piranha were cute. Their song and dance often lured drunkards or junkies away from the path and safety, only to meet their doom by a plethora of doll hands and tiny, venomous mouths already rank with the scent of rotting flesh. The very same tiny hands and mouths that had ripped Audra to pieces.
Normally, it was my job to deal with disappearances, and then to dispose of whatever rogue Others had caused the trouble. Most days, I hated this thankless job. Today, it was personal and I was filled with fiery purpose. Game on.
R.A. Sears is a lover of the weird and has been telling stories since before she could write them herself. You can find her first novel “Lunacy” on Amazon and Smash Words, and its sequel “Sanguinarium” will be released in fall/winter 2013.