Second That Emotion

Second That Emotion

by Latikia

Chapter 9

Boot Camp was easy. For the most part. All you had to do was follow every order you were given, as soon as you got them, read and remember all the rules and regulations they told you to, and hustle at all times. Oh yeah, you had to yell a lot. That’s where I ran into trouble.

The physical stuff I could do easy, as long as I was well supplied with sun blocker. The mental stuff was so easy it was laughable. I even managed to fake the teamwork part they loved to endlessly talk about.

But I couldn’t muster up enough emotion to yell, and that drove the D.I.s absolutely crazy.

So, on top of everything else, I had to undergo a serious barrage of medical and psychological testing. Come to find out I was just fine, except for not being emotional enough to yell on command.

Apparently red flags went flying up all over the damn place.

I had just finished basic training when I received word my mother had died. I was granted emergency leave and I went…home.

Mom was buried in the family plot, next to her parents. They’d died just after Ivan was born of some viral infection they’d contracted in South America while boating down the Amazon.

It was a nice little cemetery, cool and quiet. Granddad was a few feet away, next to his wife and Dad’s older brother. When the time came Dad would be between Granddad and Mom.

I realized that there was plenty of room there for those of us who remained. I guess it was as good a place as any, but I’d still be alone. Carlie and the baby would be a couple of thousand miles away. I couldn’t go to them and they’d never be coming to me.

Dad was there, with Ivan and Svetlana flanking him. There were a few people from Mom and Dad’s work and some friends that I didn’t know or remember. And a step away stood Isabeau, looking beautiful and forlorn. I stood on the opposite side of Mom’s casket in my dress greens, with my close cropped snowy white hair and emotionless face.

I guess it was a nice service. I wasn’t listening. I was remembering all the times my mother had held me as a child, all the hugs and kisses. The times she’d tickled me, tucked me in to bed and read to me. All the times she’d said she loved me.

I looked across into the eyes of my brother. He flinched and looked away.

I looked into the eyes of my father and saw relief and fear. He looked away slowly.

I looked into the eyes of my sister and saw streams of tears.

I looked down at the casket before me and I sagged a little. I was tired.

“I love you Mom.” I said tonelessly over the voice of the pastor, turned on my heel and walked away. Out of the family plot and out of the cemetery. I got into my rental car, drove back to the airport and got a flight back to Camp.

I had gotten a guarantee prior to enlistment that my MOS would be Intelligence. But I still had to pass a few interviews and some preliminary training.

So that’s what I spent the next couple of years doing. I learned about gathering intelligence, analyzing data and coming to useable conclusions based on that data. It was just puzzle solving. They made it seem more complicated than it had to be, but I’ve learned that all occupations do the same thing. Self justification and validation. What the fuck, right?

I learned to do ground recon, read satellite photos and plots, how to interview prisoners…I even spent some time with the CID learning how to conduct an investigation.

None of this was normal. Like I said before, red flags had been raised all over the damn place. The recruiters were still after me. Rangers, Green Berets, Delta Force, CID and a few folks who didn’t want to tell me what their groups were called or what exactly they did.

I found that I liked the interviewing and the investigating more than any of the rest of the things I’d done, so I decided on CID.

I did my testing and got promoted a few times, and then found myself working like a plain clothes police investigator.

I wasn’t happy, I didn’t have any friends, no private or social life to speak of and there was still the unending cycle of pain and suffering and death going on inside me. But hey, life goes on, right?

And then one day a couple of random events conspired to take me out of my carefully prepared isolation and put me squarely into the middle of a fucking war.

It was a Tuesday morning and I had been ordered out to follow up on an interview we’d done with a first louie accused of child molestation. I pulled up outside his Maryland apartment building to find four police cars blocking the street and cops crouched behind them trying to get as much cover as they could.

I got out of my ‘unmarked’ military vehicle (they really aren’t that hard to spot if you know what to look for) and dashed for what looked to be the ranking cop.

I flashed him my credentials, and asked what was up.

“An army lieutenant went nuts I guess. He’s up there in the building with a rifle shooting at passers-by. So far he’s wounded two people. There’s also the possibility of hostages. His wife and son.”

Fuck.

Fuck!

“Do you have a SWAT team on the way?”

The civilian cop, a mid thirties looking sergeant whose name tag said THOMPSON, shook his head. “My captain told me they’d take at least twenty minutes to get here. Something more important came up, I guess.”

“Yeah, something always does. Which floor is he on?”

“Seven.”

I checked my notes. My guy was in apartment #723. What were the odds it’d be some other Army lieutenant?

I looked up at the building. It was one of those old early sixties apartment blocks, tall and slightly crescent shaped. To get into the apartment you’d have to climb up and assault from the doorway inside. There wasn’t even another building in the area tall enough for snipers to get good line of sight to the seventh floor.

The shooter popped out of his open balcony doors and stood at the railing, rifle pointing down in our direction. He fired off two rounds and then ducked back inside. I got a good look at him. He appeared to be strung tighter than a G-string on a four hundred pound stripper. Fortunately no one was hit, but one police vehicle’s roof got ventilated.

“Okay, here’s what I’d suggest; you and your men keep this entire section of street clear of pedestrians and tourists. I think this guy is probably the one I was sent here to see, so let me take care of him.”

“You’re going up there after him?” The cop was confused, and he looked it. “He’s got hostages maybe. You can’t go up there!”

“Don’t worry; I’m not planning on it.”

He turned aside to call the other officers when our shooter jumped out onto the balcony and started to take aim.

I reached inside my jacket, pulled my 9mm Glock, linked to the sonofabitch with the rifle and sent one round up the link. The hollow point slug hit him in the left eye, flattened when it smashed thru the eye socket, and mulched his fevered brain as it bounced around inside his skull. His head snapped up and he dropped the rifle, which banged off a couple railings below before it spun away from the building and landed in the hedges that lined the front of the building.

I watched as he sagged, and then slid down to lay unmoving. I tucked my weapon back into its belt holster, bent down, scooped up the expended casing and put it in my jacket pocket.

“Christ on a crutch!” said Sgt. Thompson with something approaching awe.

“We can go get him now. And see if there were hostages.”

There had been hostages; Lt. Robert Brady’s wife and three year old son. The stress of being charged with molesting children added to his wife informing him at breakfast that she planned to leave and take the boy with her had caused him to snap. I called the incident in to my dispatcher, so they could send a supervisor to interface (run interference) with the local civilian police about the shooting.

I wrote up my report, in long hand, in my notebook and waited for the fun to be over.

Oddly enough there was precious little noise or fuss made over the shooting, except for the Thompson’s continued expressions of admiration for my skill with a pistol. Unfortunately for me, I had to go to their precinct house to leave a couple of fired rounds from my weapon for their ballistics people, and to be formally debriefed (the Army usually calls this kind of thing an “After Action Report”, civilians have many other names for the same thing, depending on whether or not you were going to get hammered for the shoot.).

My CID liaison, Agent Mike Watters, and I rode with Thompson, went to their ballistics lab and I popped two rounds into the barrel, then we all went upstairs where the debriefing was going to be held.

We had just gotten to the top of the third floor stairway when all hell broke loose and the second random event occurred.

Some cop on the far side of the floor wasn’t paying attention to the guy he’d been doing a booking report on, and the ‘alleged’ perpetrator got hold of the cop’s pistol and locked his free arm around the cops neck and started demanding his freedom, a lawyer and a box of condoms. The place had already been loud and noisy and it rapidly got worse.

“Drop the gun!”

“Fuck you! I’ll blow this fucker’s head off!”

“Drop the gun!”

“Bite me! Where’s my rubbers?!”

And on and on…one freaked out, pissed off, fifty time loser with a gun and a hostage and a room full of cops with guns all pointed at him and all pretty much yelling the same damn things over and over.

Some rocket scientist near me was on the phone calling for a negotiator. I leaned over to Thompson.

“Do you want him alive?”

Thompson glared at me. “The ‘perp’ Sergeant. Do you want the gunman alive?”

“If we kill him, even like this, the civil liberties people will be all over us.”

I looked across the large room, filled with desks, cubicles and scared, angry people. The distance was probably only a couple of hundred feet, but bodies kept moving in and out of my line of sight.

I glance at Agent Watters. I didn’t know him. He didn’t know me either. The problem was that I wasn’t supposed to be doing this kind of work. We had people whose job it was to shoot other people. I was an interviewer, an investigator, an analyst.

“Are we allowed to get involved in these kinds of situatitions?” I asked him.

Watters gave me a very strange look.

He was on older man, probably in his forties, and if I had to guess he was an officer. Most CID Agents wore civilian suits and you rarely knew for sure what official military rank anyone had. You knew your boss out ranked you and you assumed that his boss outranked you too, but outside of your immediate chain, it was anyone’s guess.

Watters may have been twice my age, but he looked like he still spent a lot of time in the gym, and his eyes were cold, calculating and observant. Right then he was calculating.

“How much collateral damage, if you involve yourself?” he asked.

“None. One shot, one kill. He’ll never have time to fire the weapon.”

Watters looked around at the mess in front of us that was on the verge of turning into a modern version of Little Big Horn and did some quick calculations.

“You’re authorized. Kill him.”

I turned my attention across the room to the man with the choke hold on a cop, and linked to him.

Oh, yeah…this guy was messed up. He was seriously paranoid, panicky, delusional, aggressive, disorientated and he was high on something. He was also drooling on the inside. This guy was getting more and more turned on by the second.

I released years of focused pain and death down the link into his addled mind. Fire burned his brain, his skin was torn from his body in long thin strips, blood leaked from every orifice he possessed and the only way out was the gaping maw of oblivion. As he screamed and tore at his eyes, trying to get the emotions and sensations out of his head, he released his choke hold on the stupid cop. The cop with no gun, dropped to the floor. I stepped up on the nearest desk, which gave me a bird’s eye view of the scene and a clear line of sight.

He wasn’t very old, maybe three or four years older than me. About five feet ten, one seventy, with brown eyes (now empty bloody sockets) and dirty blond hair, he could have been Watters’ son.

I drew the Glock and fired one shot. I don’t approve of jacketed bullets. Cops use them because they’re less likely to kill. Nice clean holes in and out, for the most part. The military uses them for the same reason. Wounding and maiming over killing. The downside though is that a round that goes in and out can keep going into someone else. Hollow point rounds go in and almost never come out again. So I only carry hollows. One shot, one kill no more.

I held the link and felt his heart rupture when the hollow point round punched thru his chest, reshaped and continued on into the pulsating muscle mass. I listened while his body shut down and the emotions tried to fade away into nothingness. Before they could, I grabbed them and pulled them into me, adding them to my personal Hell. The link was gone.

The floor was silent as I stepped down off the desk, tucking my weapon away. I looked at Sgt. Thompson.

“Are you gonna want a couple more rounds for ballistics?”