Hammond kissed him. "It's okay. But lock the door behind me." He opened the door and went into the living room.
John locked the door, feeling like a wimp. But he was never the courageous one, even when they announced their relationship he let Hammond say the actual words to John's parents. John couldn't get them out of his mouth.
He flinched when he heard crashing sounds. Knowing his husband extremely well, he'd have grabbed a chair and was playing the lion tamer.
He heard a familiar crunch. Yup, that was the light stand. His favorite one, he could just tell. Oh, he was gonna kill Hammond. Hrmph! But not now, after this mess was over.
Then he heard some squishy sounds.
"Ah, you slimy bastard!" Hammond voice came muffled through the door. "You're not what I ordered."
John was worried, biting his nails. A bad habit that took him many years to give up.
"Take that, you bitch. Aha!" Hammond shouted after a heavy thud. Perhaps he got it? John should wait a bit.
There was no noise.
Then he heard the front door unlock. The tentacle monster couldn't unlock doors, could it?
The shuffling of garbage bags... Some dragging sounds. Mild cursing, that was Hammond...
And steps coming back inside.
The door handle on the bedroom turned. Someone tried to push inside.
"Hammond?" John whimpered.
"Yeah, who else would it be? Open up."
John opened the door and found his husband on the other side. "Oh, you got me worried there." He hurried up and hugged him. He looked at his own hands. "Eww, you're all sticky and filthy."
Hammond chuckled. "Yeah. But I won."
"That you did," John said with a sultry tone, raising an eyebrow. "Ugh, I wanted to kiss you but you stink. Go take a shower."
"Alright."
They had amazing sex that night. It was all the adrenaline, the fear of death, something primal. John didn't really care what the reason was, all he knew was that they hadn't had so much fun in bed for a decade.
Relationships simply go stale, no matter how much you try and how much you love each other. It was a sad fact, but a fact nonetheless.
John stretched his arms and grumbled, feeling rested. He hadn't even put the sleeping mask on, he was so tired after all the commotion and the amazing lovemaking afterwards.
Hammond turned on his other side, facing him.
John kissed him deeply.
"Hm?" Hammond grumbled. "Come on, let me sleep a bit. I fought an ugly monster last night."
"I know," John cooed and reach down his husband's crotch. What he found there excited him even more. Morning wood was always his favorite. "That's why I want to thank you."
"I'm tired," Hammond complained, his eyes shut.
"It's okay. Just relax and let me take care of you."
John blew his husband. He had a magnificent cock, and he loved the feel of it. He never got tired of exploring it, even though he knew every last inch of it quite thoroughly.
He sucked the tip, licked the shaft, fondled his balls, all the usual stuff that made his husband quite excited.
Then, he smacked his lips together. "You taste sticky," John said, tasting it around.
Hammond just groaned, half asleep.
John shrugged and went back to work, putting his husband's cock all the way in his mouth.
He felt something weird with his tongue. Something rubbery. Had they put on a condom last night? No, they didn't need to, they trusted each other completely. They loved each other.
John pulled his mouth away from the blowjob and looked at Hammond's cock in the dim light.
When he saw the tentacle coming out of the hole at the tip, he screamed.
The End.
Big, Round Snowballs
"This is not how I wanted to spend my Christmas, Nico," I said through gritted teeth.
More like chattering teeth, because I was freezing my ass off.
"Yeah, yeah, whine all you like after the drop," Nico said over the comms. He was currently flying a helicopter through a goddamn blizzard and the side door was open.
I, of course, ran through the parachute checks once again. It can't hurt to be too cautious about these things, especially when dropping off into rough, icy terrain on your own.
"Approaching drop zone in ten," Nico said and tilted the helicopter, adjusting our course. The wind was howling and my nose was...
Well, my nose felt like it was going to fall off.
I gripped the tether and the quick release and waited for my mark. I had that queasy feeling in my gut, no sane person wants to drop from a helicopter into a whiteout from kilometres up in the air, but someone has to do the shitty jobs around here, and that someone is me.
I'm Deimos. Deimos Çelik, pronounced like Che Guevara, though we're nothing alike. For starters, I like to take showers. And we've probably fought the same amount of wars, but I'm not doing it for ideology and all that skata.
I'm just doing it for the money.
I'm a mercenary, a hired gun, an enforcer, call it what you will. If the money is right and if kids ain't gonna get killed, I'll consider the job. I don't do the nasty ones, but I have no illusions about the ones I end up doing. The people that hire me aren't exactly on Santa's list of present recipients.
"Three!" Nico shouted over the blizzard.
Right. Time to jump. Sorry, no time to chat about me, maybe afterwards.
I clicked the quick release and held on by my own, frozen fingers. Sure, I had a proper survival suit on, no armour, of course, what are you, nuts? Just a Kevlar. But it didn't do much, simply because it was freezing outside.
"One, go go go!"
I jumped without hesitation. Missing the mark was a stupid thing to do. Even if something went wrong, at least if you make the mark for the landing zone your people would know where to look for your splattered guts. I know that the image of a parachute guy comically hanging from a tree comes to your mind, but this isn't the case. This is...
Well, you'll see in fourteen seconds.
I dropped like a brick, waited ten seconds, pulled the parachute release and got jerked up like a marionette.
A marionette with a big-ass rifle!
I had four more seconds to clear my own landing zone or I was toast from the automated anti-air guns.
Hence, dropping in the blizzard. I wouldn't have done it if it wasn't necessary.
I aimed my rifle using the WAR aiming. WAR is Weaponised Augmented Reality. It's basically what civilians use to mess around all day with reality shows and internet celebrities. We use it to kill people and blow shit up. WAR needed about a second to lock onto the anti-air turrets, a second which I didn't have.
Falling like a brick makes you invisible to optics and radar, but opening a parachute so that your head doesn't drop like a melon? That was easy pickings for the anti-air turrets, and I was a falling duck with a big, fat target on me.
I had three more seconds to take them out. "Come on, come on..."
WAR kindly painted the targets for me. I aimed and fired quicker than I have ever had in my life. There was a satisfying crunch and a flash of an explosion.
And then I hit the tree branches. "No no no!" I said out loud, trying to avoid them.
I got tangled up in a tree like a goddamn rookie. "Vlaka, Deimos, vlaka," I slapped myself, mostly because I needed to get some feeling back in my frozen face. I pulled out my knife from my leg holster, never leave home without it, and cut the parachute ropes.
And I fell like a melon on the icy ground. "Ouch! Couldn't it have been soft snow or something?"
"Are you on site?" Nico said from the comms. He sounded anxious, but I didn't give a skata about him right now. He was safe and sound up on his helicopter, the smug bastard, and I was on the ground. The very cold, hard ground, if I may add.
"Affirmative."
"Going radio silent."
I released myself from the parachute and started to run north. No, of course I couldn't
see shit, but I do have a compass. WAR showed me the proper path a second after I started moving. That delay was understandable in enemy territory, but too many rookies had lost the top of their heads because they were sitting around like idiots waiting for their WAR to guide them. No, sir, you duck and take cover, then get your bearings. I swear, this GPS generation can act very stupid sometimes.
I strafed and zig-zagged, just in case. The air defences were out, but there could be ground ones too. Actually, with my luck, there would definitely be some aimed right at me.
Nothing fired at me, that was a good thing. The bad thing was that the blizzard, which was giving me a nice window to infiltrate, was also still blasting the terrain. I was within survival range, not freezing cold yet. But surviving and fighting are two entirely different things.
I aimed my rifle at some dark spots and things I thought I saw moving. WAR would paint the targets if there were any, but I wanted to have my instincts sharp. I approached the southern wall of the compound. There was commotion from inside, and there were guards losing their shit. WAR translated their foreign language. Someone had blown up their anti-air turrets.
Gosh! Who might that be? What a vandal!
I found a guard all on his own busy with his radio, and promptly sliced his throat from behind. WAR rewarded me with mission points for the kill. This made my stomach turn, but there was no time to philosophise right now. Things to steal, people to kill. Oh, yeah, I can't say which nationality these guys were, or which language they were speaking. This was a top secret mission, so consider that info redacted.
The guard, he was too young, I noticed with a pang in my heart, bled out on the icy ground. There was a muddy path with ice on it, well used. It also had tire tracks, wide ones. They were carrying something with trucks around here. Hm...
Intel was still spotty, and usually I wouldn't have taken a job that required me to go in blind like that. I raised my rifle and watched the bogies on my WAR running around the compound. I took cover to the side, there was a guard post. I checked for monitors to get more info, but there was nothing! What a backwater compound this was. No cameras on the perimetre? Were they checking them from somewhere inside? Damn. Nevermind, I was still blind. The whiteout was harsh outside, I couldn't see anything after ten metres or so. Visibility was slightly better inside the compound with the surrounding walls, but not by much.
WAR was intelligent, or at least that's what it looked like with its vast capabilities. It blended together massive amounts of data to predict and point out enemies, automated defences, heck, even traps. It used everything it could find, radiowaves, WiFi signals, internet of things devices by hacking their backdoors, even gait prediction on thermal scans. Everything, more things than a human could see with his narrow and pathetic band of senses. It translated all that into a neat visual interface on my ocular implants. I observed the guards and saw my window, so I ran in a dead sprint towards the middle. Keeping my wits sharp, I was ready to react to anything. And my reaction time is not bad, if I may add.
I took cover behind a bunch of crates. They didn't have any signs that said they were ammunition or anything explodey like that, so I hid there. Rifle raised, I didn't even need to hide all that well. I could barely see the guards and they definitely couldn't see me. And I was cheating. WAR was, let's say, a soldier's wet dream.
I extended the barrel of my rifle and steadied my elbows on the crates, then took aim. There was a red splotch of a man on the top floor. An officer, definitely, by the way he stood around and the others ran about. There was another person beside him, sitting. No, laying on a bed or something.
Wounded, perhaps? Someone suffering from frostbite?
I caressed the trigger, like touching a freezing nipple.
One shot, one kill.
The officer went down, he didn't even twitch.
The soldiers heard the gunshot, so they became even more frantic. It was impossible for them to pinpoint my position from a single shot through a wall, so I didn't relocate just yet. In different conditions, playing the sniper like that, I would have relocated immediately. A sniper that nests is a sniper that's dead. No famous person said that, I did.
I took two more soldiers out with three quick shots, and then ran like hell to the other side of the compound. I was open wide, easy to spot, easy to hit. Bullets whizzed behind me. They were too slow, they shot up the crates where I was like ten seconds ago.
Poor little wimps.
I crouched behind a truck. Oh, there you are, my sweetness! I couldn't even see it from the other side of the compound, this visibility sure is crap. I made a gesture to WAR and marked the spot so I could return to it after I had asked those soldiers to please stop shooting at me. I went around to the back and threw the tarp aside. There was something there, most certainly.
It was big.
It was round.
And it was frozen.
Big, round snowballs. That was the mission objective. I shrugged. Of course it wasn't just snowballs, but I wouldn't reject a mission that paid 200.000 euro for a simple retrieval. I noticed there were two big, round snowballs along the back of the truck, tied down. I threw the tarp back and went round the driver's side. This was going to be an easy mission, it seemed. In and out. I checked the truck. Fuck, the keys weren't on it and it was at least fifty years old. I sent a request to WAR to try and hack it, costing me WAR points. WAR said it couldn't hack it, it was dumb. No, it didn't say 'dumb,' it said something like 'Non-iot devices detected.'
Same end result.
Skata.
My instincts said to duck, motherfucker!
So I did.
Bullets pinged right on top of me.
Fuck, they're shooting up the merchandise. How inconsiderate. The mission did say they wanted the big, round snowballs intact. No, it didn't call them that, WAR called them something boring like, 'spherical objectives.' But I liked to call them snowballs, 'cause that's what they seemed to be.
I returned fire. I wasn't gonna just sit there like a chump. Unfortunately, from this angle WAR had nothing to play with and couldn't paint the targets for me, so I just shot back at them old school.
I heard a grunt, so I definitely got one of them.
They cursed at me and I chuckled as WAR translated for me. "Chicken head! Fuckdick!"
"No, you're the fuckdick!" I shouted back and tossed a grenade at them. Didn't I tell you? I love grenades. They're like little gifts from me to every fuckdick in the world who wants to kill me.
Kablowie. Their position turned to rubble, little fires burning on frozen ground. That was ironic. I charged at them, taking the offensive. "Aaargh!" I shouted my war cry and shot another fuckdick in the fuckdick. "No more fuckdicking for you!"
I felt bad, watching him clutch his fuckdick, so I took him out of his misery with a double tap in centre mass.
The place next to the entrance was a pile of supplies and folded up tents, possibly stored away for a warmer time of the year.
I went inside the main building. The officer was down, and I didn't know if there was another to rally them up and organise them. Shock and awe works for a little while, and I was a fool on his own charging an enemy compound.
An auto-turret swivelled towards me and I saw the barrel. I didn't even have time to gulp, I was dead.
WAR showed a red 'X' over it and a 'Defences disabled,' message. 'Mission points deducted from total.'
Fucking fuckdicks! Taking out payment points because they actually helped me finish the mission? This wasn't unexpected of Ares, but still. It was shitty. I was getting shot at. I was freezing my ass off. I was putting my ass on the line for a pair of big, round snowballs. And some dickless executive decided that, no, if our operatives need help on the field to accomplish our own shady missions, we'll CHARGE THEM FOR IT!
Fuckers.
I went inside and hit them like a storm. I needed to earn some more points or the payday from this fiasco wouldn't be enough to pay Nico, his gas-guzzling helicopter o
r the ammo I wasted. I found a terrified soldier inside. He pointed his rifle at me, trembling.
"You poor little fool," I said and stepped up to him.
He threatened me with his rifle.
I snatched it out of his hands, then clubbed him over the head with it. It gave me no WAR points, but I wasn't gonna take out a man who had peed his pants upon seeing me. No really, he had a dark spot on them and everything.
Thankfully, I found another soldier inside who wasn't a rookie, who took a shot at me and grazed my Kevlar. I winced and shot the fuckdick back on the face. He dropped like a sack of balls.
He had a radio, and I took it. It wouldn't help me much but WAR could tap into it, extrapolate data and show me the positions of the enemy. I told you it was a soldier's wet dream.
WAR painted a guy behind the wall who was carrying his own radio. I simply hid around the corner and waited for him to approach. He got a mouthful of my boot in his face. "How does your mud taste like? Frozen, right? That's what I thought," I said, and then sliced his carotid.
I kicked his pistol away and didn't even bother to watch him bleed out. I took the stairs, and WAR suddenly flashed red in my face.
TRAP.
Well, fuck. I froze in place, not that hard to do since my ass hadn't warmed up one bit since I dropped from the helicopter, and inspected the steps. Yup, there it was, a pressure plate on the second step. I just hopped over it, no time to disable it. I just let WAR paint it so that it would remind me when I came back down. It would have been very embarrassing to survive a trap only to fall right into it when coming back down.
I got on the top floor, that was it, the building was quite small. And I turned, feeling confident by WAR not showing me anyone around.
Where would the keys be? In the guard post, which was empty. Or in the officer's desk. I pointed my rifle and went towards it.
And then I came face to face with the barrel of a gun.
The woman holding the gun to my face was rather sexy. "Who the fuck are you?" she asked in English.
MOAB � Mother Of All Boxsets Page 135