It ain’t hard if you got the stomach for it. Walk ’em out.

If you don’t want to hear talking, you can use a gag. Me, I’m interested, Sometimes they want to talk. Funny, most of them don’t beg or bargain or nothing. By the time they get to me, it’s pretty obvious what’s going to happen. They know what they did to land themselves here and there’s no going back.

Funny thing I realized is that they know it’s just business, and being business it will be a professional job. Maybe they take some comfort in that. Maybe not.

“You get him fixed up?”

“I put so much tape on him he looks like a whatsis. A caterpillar.”

“Where’d you put him? Not in the building, right?”

“You think I’m fucking stupid? No. He’s lying in a car in parking lot. It’s parked far enough away that he should be fine.”

“Should be? Or will be?”

“He might get a little hot. That’s okay. Boss will like that part.”

“You got that gas can? Good. Pour it around the base of the stove, there. I’ll get the rags.”

“Sure is a waste. All this great booze.”

“Yeah, well. Rules.”

My father was obsessed with nuclear war and knew all about it. He knew the effects of radiation, the half-life of the various types of detonation. The other neighbors had a pool, but we had a shelter of reinforced concrete sixty feet below the ground with provisions enough for five years.

When it came, it wasn’t like we expected. Many of the cities got hit, but not ours. It was over pretty fast. Then the rains came, weeks of rain that flooded the shelter and made them all sick. I’m all that’s left now, I guess. Why, I don’t know.

Kevel slung his leg over the crossjack yard and peered into the fog. It was thick as cream. He could see nothing.

The Master called up from the deck, the disbelief evident in his voice. “Well? What do you make?”

“Nothing but the damned fog.”

Kevel was confident in his reckoning. He could feel the loom of the land, though none yet could smell it.

And then, as though Neptune himself commanded it, the fog vanished in an instant. The glittering harbor was full of strange craft none aboard had ever seen the like of before. They had no sails.

“That’s just fucking great,” said White. His hands were tight on the wheel, jaw muscles rippling with repressed rage. “Sheep on the goddamned road.”

“It’s supposed to be a highway. The map must be  wrong,” said Black. He jabbed at it. “See for yourself.”

White closed his eyes, shaking with the effort  to control himself.  So much was riding on their timing. “The map is not wrong. The clock was not wrong.”

“Well,” said Black. “We all have our opinions.”

White’s annoyance eased after he began to plan how to get rid of Black’s body once this job was finished.

Friday Fictioneers

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I must fly across the rooftops, making no more noise than a beetle crawling on the desert sand.

Hadiq was lucky to have been admitted to the  Guild at all. He knew this. Clumsy, obvious, far too nervous. He came seven generations of brigands, burglars and assassins, but the talent that made his name feared and respected throughout Turkey seemed to have skipped him altogether. Failing for a third time to pick a pocket, the Master had given an assignment usually reserved for children and dolts: to bring an unsuspecting tourist to the Alley of Thieves and then quickly vanish.

Hanly, full of fury, threw in his lot with the brigands despite the odds. After the oaths were sworn out proper, I got him aside and asked what had pushed him over the edge. After all, at one time he had led the dissenters who said that opposing Earl Haethelmar was akin to self-murder.

“Well,” he said, wiping his mouth, “the thing that done it was the snow. I passed on the edge of his land, freezing and hungry.  I saw his face in the window, fat and sleek, watching me for some offense, eager as a dog to catch me.”

Mehmet was astounded how lax Gatwick was once he had passed through the airport security. As he’d been trained, everything he needed was available in the duty-free shop.
For propellant, he’d purchased five three-ounce cans of a pungent men’s cologne. The materials from the lithium-ion battery would ignite once the condom of water burst over them, the chemicals’ reaction astonishingly explosive.
He’d assembled the bombs in the family restroom, using the diaper station for a workbench.

Mehmet smiled. By far his favorite part had been his choice of shrapnel, the sawn-off spikes from the crowns of miniature Statues of Liberty.

Friday Fictioneers

Jeffus took me and Petey-pie down the kitchen stairs into a basement that smelled like wet cardboard.  Petey-pie was acting smartass like he does when he gets nervous.

“You ain’t gonna show us your dick room, are you Jeffus?” he said. “Your Temple of Terrible Porns?”

“Fuck you, PP,” said Jeffus. “You don’t want to see this shit, go home to your drunk mommy.”

Jeffus flicked on a light.  The room looked like it hadn’t even been stepped in since the 70s. Gold carpet, warped wood paneling, a beat-up tiki bar in the corner. Petey-pie went over and picked up a bottle, popped the cap and swigged it.  “Cat piss! Or, as it’s commonly known, Cutty Sark.”

He tried to hand me the bottle, but I was watching Jeffus unlock a metal cabinet in the corner. He got it open and flung the door wide. He bent to grab something, turned around and held out a Jap flag, waving it in front of him like a matador.

“Holy shit!” I said. “Is that real?”

Jeffus nodded. “Pops was on Okinawa. One time he got drunk and told me how he killed a Jap come into his foxhole by sticking his finger into his eye until he poked his brains out.”

“That’s bullshit!” yelled Petey-pie. “Impossible!”

“Oh yeah, smartass? How do you explain this?” He reached to the high shelf and took out the skull.

“Is that real?” I asked.

Jeffus nodded. “Pops cut the Jap’s head off with a Kabar. Then he paid a cook to boil off the flesh. He carved the scrollwork on the ship home.” Jeffus held it out at arm’s length like the guy in the play. “His most valuable possession.”

Moments can be burned into your mind forever.
You ever see that wall in Hiroshima, the one with the shadows of the people standing there when they got vaporized?

It’s like that.

When the bomb went off, it was like everything turned slow motion.
What had been a peaceful market was transformed into something hellish and surreal.

No fire, just people blown asunder.

Those who had lost something like a foot or arm walked around, looking everywhere for their missing pieces.

One little girl found she was still holding her daddy’s hand, but her daddy was gone, blown in half.