Sit Down Shut Up And Pull The Trigger_A Supernatural Action Adventure Opera

by Michael Todd

  Katie smiled sadly. “I’m sorry. I wish you guys had been protected.”

  “We chose to fight,” the girl shot back. “We wanted to stand up and be strong.”

  “Well, you did. Now, you said she won’t be home for a couple of minutes?”

  “Yeah,” Alice replied.

  “Okay, that’s perfect. It will allow us to find what we need.”

  About ten minutes later, Katie heard Mamacita coming in the front door. She popped her head out and smiled, watching her carrying a couple of shopping bags into the house. She was wearing new clothes, ones that fit her a lot better than before.

  She was dressed in wide-legged black dress pants, black and white Chuck Taylors, a sleeveless black shirt, and a pair of rimmed sunglasses with large lenses. Her tats were visible, too. She didn’t seem to have anything left of the old her at all.

  She smiled as Katie walked around the corner. “Hey, Katie! What are you doing here?”

  “I came at Korbin’s request, and I need to speak with you privately, if you don’t mind,” Katie answered.

  “Sure, come on back to my old office,” she said, nodding toward the back.

  Everything looked different; even the sitting area was sleeker and less Victorian. Katie felt a lot more comfortable with it like this.

  She sat down across from Stephanie, who had chosen to sit on her couch and put her hands in her lap.

  “So, I came to talk to you about what being Damned means,” Katie said. “I know that it looks all glamorous and stuff, but it’s tough.”

  Stephanie snorted.

  “Ok, maybe not ‘glamorous.’ You have to give up your whole life, you train your ass off every day, you have to go when called, you may or may not have a responsive demon in you, and there is always a chance that your demon could take control, which means you would have to be killed.”

  “Okay,” she said with a small laugh. “So sunshiny and bright you always are, my dear Katie.”

  “Beyond the fact that you have to give up your life and everyone in it, there is a rule,” Katie said. “When you become infected, you are given one of three choices: death, research, or exorcism—or of course the team. I guess that’s four choices, really.”

  Stephanie pondered her words for a moment.

  “Research?”

  “You are the research, so it really isn’t much of an option. That puts us back to three… Kinda one, if I think about it. Who is going to choose death?”

  Stephanie thought about it a moment before responding, “You know what I really hate? I hate the fact that Korbin is having any damn say in this at all. It should be completely my choice, whether I am Damned or not. Seriously, it should be mine. I guess I can’t do anything about that, so if it’s going to be a man making my choices, I suppose it’s not too bad that Korbin is that man.”

  Katie smiled. “I suppose not. If you choose to do this, what will happen to the house and the girls?”

  Stephanie looked around. “Oh, I’m not in the prostitution business anymore. I closed that down as soon as I got back,” she admitted. “In reality, we have been tapering down ever since you started that company and we helped out over there. I signed a contract this morning for an organization to turn this place into a halfway house. I put a clause in the contract that gives the house to the organization if I should randomly die, so whether I change or not, that is going to happen.”

  Katie stared at her for a moment with her mouth open before her mind caught up and she closed it. “Wow, that’s really…wow…generous of you,” Katie said. “What about the girls? Where will they go?”

  “Well, Joshua has offered everyone a job,” she replied. “Most are actually taking him up on it, and the ones that aren’t, they are moving back with their families. I checked if those girls had good home lives and they do, so I am satisfied with all of that. That means if I change I still get to see most of my girls, which was the majority of my life anyway.”

  “So, is that your choice?” Katie asked. “Do you want to be infected?”

  “Well, when you put it that way…” She smiled, her eyes a bit distant before she focused on Katie. “Yes, I do.”

  Katie nodded, cocking her head to the right. “Did you know that there are a couple of succubi living in this house?” she asked scooting up in her chair to get closer to Stephanie.

  “No. What do they do?” she asked, her eyes narrowing.

  “Well, they use whatever sexual energy they need, and then they send all sorts of energy back into the house to keep everyone aroused,” Katie explained.

  Stephanie laughed. “No wonder I had such a good business here.”

  “I caught the strongest one, and figured it was time to put her to some real work,” Katie said.

  Katie leaned forward, opened her mouth, and blew in Stephanie’s direction. The succubus came out, screaming in fear at having spent the last twenty minutes with Pandora.

  Katie shook her head and laughed.

  That succubus is a serious PRUDE, Pandora bitched. Hell, I was teaching her shit!

  Pandora let go of her and the succubus sped forward, slamming into Mamacita. She gasped and looked at Katie, who was smiling widely. Mamacita tilted her head from side to side in confusion.

  “Welcome to the Damned,” Katie said as her new teammate fell over on the couch, out cold. “As Damian would say, ‘It gets them every time.’”

  Yeah, it does, Pandora chuckled. It’s cute. Really, it is.

  Okay, I need you to give me some extra strength, Katie said. I’m kind of sore, and I need to carry her out to the car.

  You got it, Mama, Pandora said.

  And please don’t make me a giant again. It worked for that situation, but it’s overkill for this one, Katie requested.

  Okay, she griped.

  Katie took a moment to let Alice know she was taking Mamacita with her before returning to the office.

  She leaned down and picked Stephanie up off the couch and sighed. She didn’t remember passing out when she’d gotten Pandora, but then again, she had been chained in an old parking garage.

  It hadn’t really been a good situation in which to fall unconscious.

  She remembered Garrett’s face as he’d wheeled her out to the SUV and taken her back to the base. It had been the beginning of some really good things, and now Katie was getting to do that for Stephanie.

  She opened the side door of the SUV and put her in the seat, buckling her in for safety. She pulled the straps tight and leaned her head back.

  “Welcome to Korbin’s Killers, Stephanie,” she whispered, closing the door, walking around the front of the vehicle, and hopping in the driver’s seat.

  The crowd was rowdy at the bar Torn Asunder, laughing, talking, and reconnecting since the last special night they’d had. Katie was going to start off the night again by talking about Jeremy and reading what they had now dubbed as “the Damned Creed.”

  She didn’t know how she had become the spokesperson, but she didn’t mind doing it. It let her pay tribute to her friends and family when they didn’t make it through.

  Katie looked down at her watch and winked at Damian as she stood up and made her way to the stage. She tapped the mic to get everyone’s attention, and smiled as several people cheered for her.

  “Thanks for joining us, as always,” Katie began, pulling that old wrinkled piece of paper out of her pocket and unfolding it.

  “Before I read the Creed, I want to start off by paying tribute to our fallen brother, Jeremy Croft. He was an FBI agent in his human life, or so I like to call it. In his Damned life he was a hell of a fighter, a friend, and a member of our family. We will miss him, and we hope that wherever he is now, he is having one hell of a time.”

  Katie raised her glass in the air.

  “To Jeremy,” she toasted, and everyone repeated his name. “And because I am a person of few words, I will just end this with the Damned Creed.

  We are the chosen.

  The infected,


  battling our demons night and day.

  Protecting the uninformed from reality.

  We fight where the stupid meet the clueless to

  perform the asinine for our

  teammates every day.

  We are cops, military, special forces, and SWAT,

  medical techs, priests, and clergy.

  We are the dimensional derelicts,

  the legion, the host, the forgotten.

  The feared.

  The sheep can sleep at night because we don’t.

  We fight for humanity—yours—and for our own.

  We are the Damned, and death is our enemy,

  our escape,

  and our tribute.”

  Everyone clapped and cheered, raising their glasses as Katie stepped down off the stage and made her way to the table to join the rest of her team. Stephanie nodded at her and smiled, and the others patted her on the shoulder. Derek handed her a shot.

  She held it up in the air.

  “To Jeremy,” Eric offered.

  “To Jeremy,” the group replied.

  After that they switched up the mood, and had some fun, laughter, and good conversation.

  About an hour into it, though, they heard a commotion behind them and Stephanie turned around to check it out. Everyone at the table picked up their food, but Stephanie was too busy watching the fight, commenting on their lack of proper balance as she critiqued their form.

  Her eyes grew big as one guy picked the other up and tossed him straight at their table.

  Stephanie slid her chair back immediately, putting her arms up in the air as the guy hit the table and it smashed into a pile on the floor—along with her food.

  She looked down at the guy and pushed him with her toe, narrowing her eyes at the cheese fries sticking out from under his back. The bartender waved to two others, who moved quickly to grab a table and set it atop the passed-out guy.

  Stephanie realized the others had their food in their hands, and they were all staring at her with smiles on their face.

  “And that,” Korbin told her, setting his food back down. “is why the furniture is in such horrible condition.”

  Author Notes - Michael Todd Anderle

  Written March 31, 2018

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  First, THANK YOU for not only reading our stories, but also reading to our author notes here in the back, as well!

  John Kern, Proprietor of Spurlock’s Guns in Henderson, is real

  So, a huge shout-out to John Kern with Spurlock’s (http://www.spurlocksguns.com) for helping me understand how to go about properly strategizing what to do with the rounds for Katie and the team.

  So, most of this book was finished, and editing and beta reading was happening with one huge issue:

  Chapter 17 still needed to be written!

  Yes, you read that right, I had a big glaring hole in the middle of the manuscript. My intent was to locate source here in Vegas that I could talk to, and put that information here in the book. Further, I wanted the information for Joshua to be accurate as well so the logic behind the solution.

  Finally, if I could I wanted it to be a place fans could look at and realize ‘that place is real, that person is real.’ Rather like Mike Ross of Jessie Rae’s BBQ.

  The problem was that all the other writing for this book was complete, and I was caught in the middle of projects and was having a “damned” hard time getting the time to do this chapter.

  I had researched a lot of gun stores in our area (Las Vegas / Henderson / North Las Vegas etc.) and used Google and Yelp to get a feel for the reviews about the support staff. I didn’t want a big chain store type of contact. I needed down in the details about how a professional might take Joshua’s challenge and solve it and therefore wanted real heavy-duty gun people.

  I chose Spurlock’s based on the reviews on the internet, after checking out their website.

  So, I’m hours away from holding up the editing and the book is going to get behind if I don’t go find a consultant FAST. I have about two hours or a touch more before Spurlock’s close and I need to drive the forty-five minutes to Henderson from my place on the Strip. I choose a bad route (no thanks to you, Google Maps) and bad Vegas traffic, but I still get there fairly fast with time to spare.

  When I walk in, the store is exactly what I was looking for, which is to say completely focused on guns (of all types), and I felt confident that someone in the store would have a clue about my questions…

  If they didn’t think I was a nutjob. I wish I had completely thought this part through and practiced how to introduce myself in the car on the way over to Spurlock’s.

  I came in with a laptop bag, two books (both Torn Asunder and Death Becomes Her in print) as my bona fides to prove I really was an author.

  Now, I know how well my books sell, but 99.99% of America (or even greater) has NO clue who I am, so I’m very nervous when I ask to speak to someone with very specific technical questions. The person behind the counter on the left waved to the other counter (they are in an ‘L’ shape) and told me to speak to ‘the bald one.’

  I looked at him funny, since I have noticed all the guys are bald, or close to it. Fortunately, John stepped aside and waved a hand to let me know that he was the bald guy I needed to speak with.

  I stuttered and stammered my questions out (not because I typically stutter, but because I’m nervous as hell) and started my pitch about being an author, and I have this book coming out where one of the characters needs some advice…

  It wasn’t going down very well.

  You know that moment when you look into the eyes of the person you are speaking with and you can see them tagging you as something less than awesome? Yes, that was my feeling.

  To be TOTALLY fair to John, here is this guy walking in off the street. I am asking very pointed questions with no context, and inadvertently took him away from a sales relationship (another counter rep was supporting the young lady and her mother) and he is now speaking to an older white guy with a black t-shirt and blue jeans claiming he is an author and not looking like he will buy anything.

  (My wife wants to shoot, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we purchase something – but I’m not going to offer that as a possibility unless it is a more solid chance than I think it was at the time.)

  On top of this, I came in carrying books like I’m on a religious door-to-door proselytizing yahoo and wanting to convert him to the Church of the Damned. That he didn’t kindly wave me off and escort me with a gentle (but firm) hand to my back until I was out the door was a blessing.

  The further my speech went, the more relevant and intelligent questions he heard, proving I wasn’t totally ignorant. His first question had to do with why I didn’t just look this information up on the Internet.

  A very good question, actually. The short answer was, I could have, but all that would have done was give me facts, not the wisdom to know what to do with the data. I have shot guns, but very rarely in my life. At fifty, I don’t believe I have shot more than seven times in my whole life.

  (I did try to shoot fish in a small stream with a .22 … Hitting those sonsabitches was impossible.)

  Further, once I explained the issue with the metal, and my proposed solution (just spraying the metal onto the outer sides of the bullet) he was quickly able to point out the mistake in that idea.

  Score one for the author!

  I know when asking an expert is the right thing to do. (I am fully cognizant of my ignorance in this area. After writing over thirty books myself, I’m also cognizant that one needs to add talking about guns to sex, religion, politics, and chili as subjects that can garner very annoyed fans if you get something wrong.)

  Then, John went onto explain hydroshock and the relevance of hollo
w-points. He effectively provided the professional advice I needed in five minutes, and then further explained the medical reasons for the justification of hydroshock theory (I later found out some do not hold to the theory) and why hollow-points are used by police (John is or was a policeman. I have a request in to find out as I’ve forgotten that detail.)

  Then, John was kind enough to edit chapter seventeen for accuracy. DAMN! That was amazing, and I really appreciate his support of that crazy author who just showed up unannounced. I was trying to be very respectful.

  I just didn’t realize how crazy I must have seemed from his vantage point.

  Fans are happy!

  DAMN (or is this DAMNED?), this set of stories has blown WAY up, and while we are appreciative, I think I can admit that our mouths are open in surprise as well. Although my Kurtherian Gambit series took off, it didn’t do this well in the first month.

  One of the reasons I happen to enjoy this series is, when you take a look at Pandora, she is the most open-minded, non-racially prejudiced, non-biased entity in the book.

  I mean, she doesn’t care if you are black or white, gay or straight, religious or not…she is willing to hate everyone and take advantage of each person equally and generously.

  Well, she might not be pleased with incredibly hot gay guys, but that’s more to do with her chances of (not) getting something from them rather than anything else, and that hurts her ego. In her opinion, she is sure that if she had the right opportunity (torture comes to mind in Hell) she would be able to get them to at least fake it with her. One of the most liberating aspects of writing this series is that Pandora can say just about anything. She’s a demon. She just points out the hypocrisy of humanity from time to time. Most of us readers (should) understand that just because she says something, it doesn’t de facto make it true.

  She’s a demon. Look up the word ‘self-centered’ in Wikipedia and it should have her picture by it.