Mike
Boris stood there and smiled at me. Not a nice smile, but the kind reserved for serial killers and politicians. It scared the hell out of me, but he didn’t move, instead he continued to smile, savoring my fear like a fine wine.
A tonfa lay on the floor near my feet, probably dropped there by the Sicarii in their rush to pursue me. The club had been stained dead black and didn’t really look like much, but in the hands of an expert, it was a deadly weapon. I knew just enough about its use to hurt myself.
When I picked it up and held it in one unsteady hand, Boris’ smile grew wider, which frightened me even more. Slowly, sure I couldn’t interfere; he reached under his suit jacket, drew forth a 9 mm pistol and shot me in the leg.
The bullet tore into the outside of my left thigh, through pants, skin, fat, muscle and out again, flinging blood and tissue out the back. It felt like being hit in leg with a baseball bat.
Next thing I knew, I was tasting carpet as screams tore at my throat like shards of glass, the hot pounding of my heart pushing more and more blood through the hole in my thigh.
Oh, Lord, it hurt so much!
My hands became warm, red and slick as I tried to apply pressure, to keep myself from bleeding to death. Not the first time I’d been shot, but on top of my other injuries, the beating I’d taken earlier, it was all too much. I lay there, sobbing.
A voice emerged from the depths of Boris’ chest as he walked toward me, holstering his weapon. “You knock me down and make me much angry. Mr. Julian does not need you anymore, so he give you to me.”
This just kept getting better and better.
“Don’t do this Boris, please,” I moaned, trying not to sob. “You don’t have to do this.”
“You are right. I want to do these things to you.” One of his size twelves lashed out, catching me in the chin, and I saw stars.
Just as he drew his foot back again to give me another taste of shoe leather, the world decided to come apart around us.
A violent lurch had Boris on his butt in an instant. All I could do was curl up in a ball as the floor rippled, tossing me up and down, from side to side. A dull, deep, bone-rattling roar that I could feel in the roots of my teeth bounced around the suite.
A rush of bitterly cold wind bellowed through the room as windows shattered, tempered glass fragmenting into thousands of shards before falling out into the night air. The deep cold ate at me like a cancer, numbing my nose and fingertips. It also reinvigorated me, giving a jump-start to the old circulatory system.
With my leg hollering at me, a multitude of aches and pains plaguing me, and the floor rolling and humping, I still managed a one-legged frog-jump. My chin hit carpet I don’t know how many times; only dogged persistence allowed me to hop and crawl on over to Boris through the snow of powdered plaster that fell from the ceiling while my nails scraped, scraped, scraped across the floor.
Through the surreal nightmare of popping light bulbs and heaving floor, the tonfa was an anchor to the reality of my escape, that and my faith. God had brought me this far, so I reckoned he still had a plan or two left for me.
Boris had his own plans. A white haze obscured my vision for a split second as a scarred fist clipped my cheek, splitting skin and spilling more of my precious blood. His other hand, grasping a 9 mm, swung about, ready to put a round between my eyes.
I swung the tonfa, hitting the gun hand below the thumb and sending the 9 bouncing away across the mat. My bloodied hands fastened on his arm, holding it steady long enough for me to sink my teeth in.
A warm salty flow of blood slid across my tongue as my teeth clamped down hard on the bones of Boris’ wrist, worrying, tearing. Again and again his other fist smashed into my temple until finally he tore loose from my grasp in a gout of crimson.
Before I could roll away, the shaking stopped, leaving nothing but an eerie silence, broken here and there by the occasional pop and groan.
A big patent leather sole found my left hand and stamped down hard. Amid the gut-wrenching agony, I heard the crack of my own bones breaking like matchsticks. When Boris’ clodhopper moved away from my hand, I saw pinkish gray sticks poking through my flesh.
And I thought the gunshot hurt.
Boris’ shoe slammed into already my broken nose and that was lights out.
The Dreaming City Lounge was full near to bursting and I felt uncomfortable as hell walking in wearing civilian clothes. Five dollars cover charge! I felt like a rube for paying, but did anyway, attracted by the lure of a Def Leppard cover band.
Damn I felt old, shoving my way through writhing bodies and cigarette smoke. My time in Iraq was starting to feel like a dream … a dream of a brotherhood I wished I hadn’t left.
Muscling between two beefy types with pop-collar rugby shirts, I arrived at the bar and held up a hand, a sawbuck between my fingers to flag attention.
“Whatcha need?” Yelled the pretty little bartender with teased hair and too much lipstick.
I hollered back over the raucous crowd, “Draft!” pointing to a tap.
“Light beer?”
“No! Real beer!”
She smiled and reached into a cooler for a frosted mug.
The band came on stage the same time the pretty bartender came back with my beer. The lights dimmed and “Rock of Ages” slammed out of the speakers. Too loud, not even Def Leppard would subject their fan to that kind of auditory overload. People drifted onto the dance floor to gyrate to the beat.
As I stood there, drinking ice-cold beer and listening to music through what felt like bleeding ears, the incongruity of me being there while many of my men were laid out in private lots or Arlington made me want to cry. It didn’t seem fair that blood still thrummed in my veins while theirs had been spilled onto desert sand.
Damn, I was uncomfortable. My polo shirt and khakis felt prickly on my skin and, while I loved the music, the people there put me on edge … too carefree, blithely ignorant of the horrors the world had to offer. Or maybe they did know what lay around the corner, what lurked beneath the bed late at night waiting to strike. Maybe that’s why they partied so hard, drank so much, treated sex like a sport instead an intimate act.
I didn’t belong. Not there, not with those happy, desperate, dancing people, drinking, shouting, flirting, sweating, and cussing. That place was, those people were, too loud, too … too … lost.
I was lost, too.
“Hey, Sergeant.”
Sergeant? I hadn’t been a Sergeant for three months. Turning around, cold beer sloshing over the rim of the mug onto my fingers, I smiled in pleasant surprise at the short, stocky man in desert gear standing not more than three feet away.
“Hi, Corporal, what are you doing here?”
“Question is, Sergeant, what are you doing here?”
Strange, I didn’t wonder why an armed and geared man was standing in a rock-n-roll bar smack dab in the middle of Omaha. Nobody looked at the Corporal, no one even came close to him and the place was packed elbow-to-cheek.
The truth came to me slowly, easing into my mind as if through osmosis. “You’re dead, Corporal.”
He smiled. “That’s right, Sergeant.”
Goekenhauer. That was his name. Ben Goekenhauer. “You took a round to the neck, Ben,” I said slowly, almost in a stupor.
“Right again, Mike.” The desert gear was gone, replaced by a navy blue Van Hagar t-shirt and ripped blue jeans.
“Am I dead?”
“Are you?”
The beer slid past my teeth and I gulped at the brew as if it contained the answers I needed. “Don’t feel dead. Feel fine.” Physically I felt great.
“Well, then, Mike. That’s your answer.”
“What are you doing here, Ben?”
The Corporal gently took the cold mug from my hand and took a drink, then gave it back. “Ah, that’s good. I missed beer something awful.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I came to see you, Mike.
A girl bumped into me, a soft hip against my thigh. An innocent looking strawberry blonde in white shorts offered a sweet smile of apology before moving on. The band started up with “Let’s get Rocked.”
“That girl. I know that girl.”
“Yeah, Mike. You met her here and went home with her when the bar closed.”
I smiled. “That’s right. Jenny … She was so sweet.”
“You dated her for about three months before you realized the calling you felt was for the Church.”
My voice became distant as memories slowly bobbed to the surface. “She cried when I told her. I think she really cared for me, maybe even loved me a little, but she said she understood.”
“She did, Mike, although it broke her heart. A couple of years after you two broke up she met a man named Herrick and married him. They had three kids and, for a while, were happy. She died of breast cancer last year.”
Oh, damn. I felt a lump in my throat for a woman I’d only known for a few months but had cared deeply about-only not as much as I cared for the Lord.
“It was at St. Frances Cabrini Catholic Church near the river where I heard my calling for the first time,” I mused, mind skipping and jumping like droplets of water on a hot griddle. “Tuesday. Yes, a Tuesday when the traffic was light and the sun was bright. I was fixing to head to Council Bluffs, but I saw that old building and it sang to me.” The memory moved sluggishly through the cotton that shrouded my mind. “I just parked the car and walked in, lost in a world of emotions and thoughts I couldn’t articulate. Pews, the carpet of the nave, nothing registered except the altar and the image of Christ on the cross.” My voice grew thick. “I think that before I even made it to the altar I knew. I knew-the way I knew the feel of desert sand in the palms of my hands-that service to the Lord was my calling, my truth … and I was no longer lost.”
“I like that Sergeant. I really do.” Ben was now dressed in denim shorts, a green t and Converse sneakers.
“Am I dying?”
“Didn’t you just ask me that?”
“No, earlier I asked you if I was dead. Dying is a whole different deck of cards.”
“True, true.” He snagged a cola-drink from a passing waitress, who ignored him just as everyone else did. “No, Sergeant, you’re not dying.”
“Then what is all this?” I gestured to the bar, the people, to the band that was playing “Pour Some Sugar on Me.”
“I don’t know. This is your place, your construct, not mine. For some reason this place holds significance for you.”
“Hmm. Strange.”
“Listen, Sergeant, I’m here to tell you something. Something important.”
“Is it urgent?”
“Nothing is urgent in this place. Here we are between tick and tock of the clock.”
“Good. Good.” I took a long pull from the still-cold mug. “I want to listen to the music.”
“Sounds good, Sergeant. Sounds good.”
So we listened to classic ’80s rock while drinking cold ones, feet tapping to the beat. The band did a credible job and the crowd was relatively well behaved. It was nice, standing there amid a sea of people who just wanted to have a good time and relax. As for myself, the thought of the real world didn’t intrude on my consciousness, almost as if it couldn’t. There was no urgency, no pain, no Boris.
The house lights came on, the band left the stage and the bartenders hollered out “last call.” A momentary spike of pain, like a flash headache, ran from temple to temple and I knew my brief moment of piece was at an end.
Ben tapped my shoulder. “Ready, Sergeant?”
My heart sank. It was time, I guessed. “Yes, Corporal.”
“Scream, Sergeant. Scream loud and long.”
Scream? “What d-“
Pain, blinding and harsh in my side, a digging, slicing, and hot sear that brought me full out of whatever la-la land I had been in.
Boris’ nasty face was inches from mine and he smiled into the teeth of my agony, enjoying every nerve-twitching moment. “I give you pain you don’t believe, God-man.”
I looked down and nearly gagged. Hands bound behind my back, I was once again in that damn ugly chair placed in the center of the exercise mat that dominated the main floor of the suite. Cold air from the broken window froze the sweat on my naked skin and my Danzinger’s shirt had been torn from my body so I was naked from the waist up. The capper to this whole situation was my left side. Boris had sliced me open a treat and had jammed a pair of pliers into the wound, grasping a rib with the filthy metal. I could feel the ragged ridges of the gripping appliance tearing at the bone.
Boris laughed at the horrified look on my face.
“What you say, God-man? What you say now?”
A voice of a comrade came through the fog of pain in my side. Scream, Sergeant. Scream loud and long.
My eye rolled to meet Boris’ mad gaze and I screamed.
Loud and long.