by Tim Marquitz
“Holy shit,” Erika said, and then guzzled her beer.
Ben’s phone rang. He glanced at the number, then answered.
“I hear they are calling you Mr. Clean these days.”
“I hear they are calling you General these days, Stevens,” Ben responded.
“Brigadier, and up for my second, which is why I find my name on an operation package to protect your girlfriend extremely irritating,” Stevens told him.
“And my daughter,” Ben said.
“That girl yours? Thought she was hers the way she’s clinging to that woman.”
“Didn’t cross your mind that she’s ours?”
“Hell no. That woman is way too smart to have a child with you,” Stevens said. “Now that we have caught up, tell me ugly things. Something worth the hazing I’m going to get.”
“I have four dead ROTs in my garage with intel on at least twenty more, living, and further intel of longevity, as in decades at least.”
The silence on the line was hard enough that Ben checked to see if the connection broke.
“This line isn’t secure,” Stevens said finally.
“Nope. I don’t have a secure receiver, so this is what you get,” Ben told him.
“Aphrodite,” Stevens told him.
“Athena’s Shield,” Ben replied.
Through a code-word language, Ben told the General roughly what he knew. Stevens would have it decoded. Once finished with his statement, Ben leaned back against the island counter in the kitchen.
“Now, you get Star and Michelle out of there, down to the base, surrounded by your best until I make contact. The bikers too. Another group will arrive soon. The Devil’s Mustangs is their colors. They will arrive armed, employed to guard my daughter and Michelle.”
“I think I outrank you,” Stevens told him.
“I think you won’t tomorrow if you don’t do as I ask,” Ben replied.
“I thought you retired.”
“You don’t retire from Black Ops, sir. You just start working from home, for free.”
“Not a secure line, Colonel.”
“Not much caring, General,” Ben replied and broke the connection.
Erika blinked, then started to say something, but stopped, her eyes widening and her hand going for her gun as she looked past his shoulder into the backyard.
Ben turned to the kitchen island, gripped the top and ripped it off, tossing the countertop to the floor and exposing an arsenal of weapons, grenades and automatic rifles. Jake grabbed the AA-12 Auto Shotgun.
“Jake, garage. Erika, front door,” Ben commanded with solid authority.
Erika spun, knelt, and aimed at the door.
“You don’t have to wait to see them, Erika. Remember how fast they are,” Ben told her calmly as he slapped a magazine into an ACR Bushmaster, then set it down, pulled the pins on two grenades and threw them through the kitchen window.
Erika fired three rounds. Yells of alarm came from the backyard. Ben leaned another ACR against the wall next to Erika then turned and fired through the sliding glass door in back. Jake’s shotgun sent a blasting firestorm through the garage door in the kitchen. Full power 12 gauge shells exploding at 5 rounds a second, with zero kickback, allowed Jake accuracy and major damage. Kicking open what was left of the door he sent another storm into the garage.
The front door blew open. Erika took down three ROTs and then grabbed up the ACR, her Desert Eagle empty. She fired three round bursts, then clicked it over to full-auto. Ben dropped five full magazines beside her and showered the front door area with a short burst while moving into the living room.
Five ROTs came through the shattered sliding door moving fast.
Ben turned himself over to his instincts.
This was his house. He memorized every step and the placement of every piece of furniture. Guns, knives, even a few swords were inside the walls, plastered over to hide them between the panels of drywall. Med-kits and money caches were hidden in the same fashion. He did this fourteen years ago, when he decided to marry Sunny, give Star a father. At the time he felt it was paranoid, overkill and wildly unnecessary. He couldn’t stop himself from doing it though. After Sunny died he added more armament. The arsenal grew beyond psychotic. After all, a man has two hands, no more. Thirty-three rifles, shotguns, and handguns was beyond explainable. And the grenades? The LAWS in the closet?
His back smashed into the wall behind him. He was sure he’d been shot. The ROT rushing at him, fist ready to turn his head to goo suggested otherwise. His ACR was on the ground, knocked from his hands by the impact. A blur of action and he was leaping past the sofa. A gun was in his hand but it wasn’t one of his. Rapid fire from the AA-12 blew past him tearing apart a biker in Midnight Sons leather. Not a ROT, just a man. Another blur and he was yelling to cover up as five flash bangs left his hands, three heading out the sliding glass door hole, two sailing out the front door. The explosions of the concussion grenades pounded against him, his hearing vanished. Then he was at the back door. In his hand a combat knife. Its blade impaling a ROT from under his chin, piercing the top of his skull.
It was quiet.
Then full stop.
He turned, panting. Erika was looking at him, Jake standing beside her. He opened his mouth and yawned, then worked his jaw and dropped the ROT.
“Shit,” he said and could hear himself. “Can you hear me?”
Erika nodded with Jake.
“Fucking amazing. Flash bangs in the house. Fucking stupid.”
“They all blew outside,” Jake told him. “Would have been a lot worse otherwise.”
“Seriously fucked them up,” Erika told him. “They were rushing us. If you hadn’t used them, they would have been inside and we would have been put down.”
“Any idea of the count?” Ben asked, walking toward them.
“Thirty plus,” Jake replied, picking up the last drum for the shotgun and slapping it into place.
Ben stopped and looked around. Then he walked to the back and looked outside, “Fuck me.”
Taking out his cell, he dialed the general. “It’s me. I need a sterilizer team at my house. Where’s my daughter?”
“In a column going to Lewis-McChord. Sixty-eight bikers following. All armed, heavy. I think they have more firepower than my men. What you got there?”
“Thirty plus ROTs.”
“Holy shit. This is way past the threat assessment.”
“Right.”
“What’s your status?”
“Three still alive,” he said, then noticed his shirt, and why Erika kept staring at him. “At least one with a couple of holes in his chest,” he murmured and sat down on the remains of the couch. “Better get a med-team here too. I’m passing out soon.”
“Ah Christ!”
#
They call him Mr. Black. He’s used this name for more than one-hundred years, and it takes him a few minutes to remember his name was Cuauhtémoc. Looking out the open window into morning-blue sky, he listened to the report of failure.
“Your orders, sir?” Alex Haley asked.
Alex Haley was the man who assured him the assault on the house worth the risk, a certain success. He promised Ben Brothers laying at his feet before the sun rose.
Mr. Black turned and faced him. “Nothing. Pull everything back, clean up the mess, and vanish. Time is ours. The night is ours. Nothing stands against these things. We’ll wait for the right stars.”
Alex looked at the ground, obvious frustration shaking his shoulders, then he relaxed and nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Mr. Black watched him leave the room. Alex was a failure. He would make a good meal after he cleaned up his mess. Black smiled and turned back to the window.
The Paper Smith
Chris Garrett
Chris Garrett is a storyteller based in Austin, TX. He runs a comic book company 'Overtime Comics' and at this time they've released two series 'Turbulence' and 'Defects'. This is Chris's first published story aside
from his work with Overtime Comics. http://www.overtimecomics.com/
The rooftops have always suited me better than the ground, more options to move should I need to make an escape; visibility where other assassins may be lurking. I’ll see one every now and again, but as a professional courtesy we ignore each other unless we’re heading for a similar target. I never knew if it was out of respect, fear of dying, or because letting another stalker of the night know they were seen is one of the biggest blows to the ego there can be, but regardless, we tend to drift away from each other.
The biggest reason I love the rooftops, though, is that the screams from the streets are almost always muffled. Some rare nights, like tonight, there’s a clear sky mixed with the dead silence of the Kromta actually staying quiet and not barking orders to their Yartim slaves, and you can hear the cries of the sleeping Kromta all the way up here. I hate clear nights.
I move slowly from rooftop to rooftop, trying to think about my next contract and recite everything I know about them, it helps to be prepared before a meeting. The thinking does nothing to drown out the occasional whimper as a Yartim is beat for gods only know what pathetic reason the Kromta can muster. I once saw a Yartim man whipped to near death because his master thought his eyes were too blue. Since blue eyes were nearly the only thing separating the Kromta and Yartim in appearance, I thought this absurd. I suppose beatings aren’t really meant for the one being beaten to improve or learn, they’re to teach the others fear and to fall in line.
I shook my head and tried to kick the Yartim’s struggles out of my thoughts as I knelt above the window where I would meet my employers.
“It doesn’t matter what price he asks, it’ll be worth it to see that traitor and spreader of lies pay.” The man’s voice was a harsh whisper.
“Don’t go sayin’ that or he’ll be asking for double! All the coin we gots between us is here, we can’t be leavin’ our post to try to get more coin. That’d mean getting it from another guard and I am not splitting this reward with nobody but who we gotta.” This man was significantly lower bred, his speech would both slow and speed up with no refinement, obviously a grunt brought in with the promise of a bigger reward.
I tugged my leather hood over my head, personally I hated the hood, it consumed too much of my peripheral vision, but people hiring an assassin, one who lurks in shadows, tended to want the entire show. I loosened the clasp on my dagger concealed on my chest, just inside my deep green cloak, this had a significantly more practical purpose that the hood.
Grasping the top edge of the window seal, I dropped my weight off the building and hurled myself with a swing into the open window. Two of the men in the room stood up and reached for their weapons; the one closest to me continued to write on his parchment as if nothing happened.
“Relax, we called him, remember?” The man with the parchment said through gritted teeth, I recognized his voice as the first man speaking. It took a moment for the tension to pass, but the other two Kromtas forced their hands away from their weapons, mustering it to look as casual as possible. Their shaking fingers betrayed them.
I stood casually, like I hadn’t just caused two of the guardsmen to have a near heart attack. I’ve always found quite subtle confidence to be more intimidating than any off handed comment could ever be.
“Well, let’s begin then,” the first man at the desk said after a few moments of silence.
“You can call me Magnot. We’d like to hire you for the assassination of one Draknul Kortil, an old paper smith.” He let his words trail off, leaving an opening for a question if I had one. I didn’t.
Paper smiths were a simple lot. Normally too tired from a long day of spreading what the Yartim’s saw as lies against their beloved race and leaders, a paper smith would infuse thin pamphlets of paper with just enough magic to make the words legible only to those they intended to read it, rendering the paper often invisible if you weren’t the intended recipient.
“This particular paper smith,” he continued, “has been spreading lies through our city about the unneeded cruelty of my great people towards those that serve us. It’s filth that simply won’t do in my city and I want you to punish him on our behalf, for a fair price of course, and retrieve his latest bindings for us, so we may review his lies.”
This part I did have a problem with.
“I’m no thief,” I said, as plainly as possible. “If you wish the man dead and pay, it will be so, but I will retrieve no such item.”
“An assassin that draws the line at theivin’ from the one he’s killed? What kind of morals you got twisted there?” said one of the guards, still eyeing me.
“Not about morals.” I slowed my speech to a near crawl. It was painstaking to take this long and talk this low, but having a dramatic flair when it’s required is very important in my line of work. You wouldn’t know it from your side of the table, hiring us to do the work you couldn’t risk being caught at, but the negotiation can oftentimes be far more deadly than the job itself. “Thieving takes time. Killing is easy; the blade goes in, the blade comes out, I am paid, our business is concluded.” I let my thumb dance along the hilt of my visible dagger, watching the two guards me view it like a magic wand that would explode at a moment was far too satisfying. “Finding the right book, in what are sure to be hundreds of volumes, takes time. Time spent longer than necessary is not wise of an assassin… Nor is it—” and I let this word hang in the air with as much subtle flare as I could muster “—profitable.”
“Ah,” Magnot said, “so you were listening.” He shifted his eyes to the other guards, obviously furious that their idle chatter was overheard, causing him to pay more than he wished. That’s the price you get for gossiping when a man who kills for money is on his way to see you. “Fine. The book and the paper smith’s life for, say, three hundred gold?” Magnot reached into his sleeve, slow and obvious, keeping his hands as visible as possible for me and withdrew a pouch, setting it on the table.”
I walked over and picked up the pouch, slowly pulling the drawstring loose while eyeing the room. Something was wrong.
Either these men had never hired an assassin before or they were far too eager to get this job over with as few complaints as possible. Most men will come up with an excuse to keep their coins in hand for as long as possible. An assassin never really worries about payment up front, because their specialty is tracking down and killing people. If the ones who hired him were to run off without paying, well odds are if they hired anybody of quality worth doing the job in the first place, they wouldn’t run far. Likewise, we rarely ask for the coins up front since it shows distrust in those we could easily track down if they crossed us. I am, after all, a professional.
Magnot definitely had dealings with the Shadow Lurkers before; maybe he just paid so his guards would know their coin wasn’t going to stay in his pocket somehow... Still…
I re-tied the bag after examining the gold and fastened it to my belt. “What sort of things does this paper smith print?”
“Dat ain’ for none of your knowings, Lurker,” the pudgy guard said, finally finding his voice in front of me.
Magnot and I both ignored the man’s jab. Magnot finally stood from his chair and passed a blank piece of parchment to me.
I extended my hand and took it from him, as soon as my fingers pressed against the edges it pulsed with a thin, blue light.
“It’s becoming visible for you, isn’t it, Yartim?” Magnot said. I’d need new contacts, it seems these failed me.
“This message is meant for me then?”
“No, it seems to be readable to all Yartims. Not an individual person.”
Now that was impressive. Paper Smithing was never something held in very high regard, each regional steward would keep a paper smith to write letters in secret and send them off in the night so only their intended targets would read them... But a paper smith who could make their words legible to an intended group of people—that was unheard of.
“
I’m told the words are a quote from ancient Yartim prophecy, about The Liberator. You are no doubt familiar with his tale?”
“Of course.” No point in hiding it, every parent whispered tales of The Liberator to their sleeping children at night, the myths provided hope. The Liberator was meant to be a half breed, part Yartim and part Kromta, who had escaped his oppressive, high born father and now fought to rally his people together, in secret, and one day they would strike to take back their freedom.
It was so common that the legends spread to the Kromta years ago, since then they have been on the hunt for The Liberator. I myself have been hired no less than five times to assassinate men that my various employers thought was The Liberator. After a time of following them and confirming they were no savior to my people, only another meal on my table, I’d complete the job. Most Yartim would spit in disgust to know that I’ve slain so many of my own, but the rebellion, in its own way, would benefit from ‘traitors’ like me. It gave them a lesson in caution. That’s what I spent the nights telling myself after I killed my first Yartim anyway.
"This paper smith is a false prophet, filling the heads of the Yartim with foolish thoughts. There is no Liberator, or if there ever was he is long dead. It's because of rumors like these that the half breeds have to be slain before birth. It's a shame really, if it was up to me they'd be allowed to work the fields at the very least..." He trailed off while staring at the parchment in my hand, its blue lines danced, but if what he said was true, then its magic was lost on him.
I sat the paper on the desk, as I did each letter popped out of existence.
"Name?" I asked.
"Don' give'm our names! " the guard said. "Shadow Lurkers use your name to follow you."