Post by rvm45 on Jan 12, 2016 13:32:57 GMT -6
Friends,
This will probably be my next story but it insists on peeking out ahead of time.
Keep in mind:
Judas lives in a completely different world than Spoil & Co and the Martial Artists there are far less powerful.
Angel Myth: Judas in Murim
Chapter One
My father named me “Judas Iscariot O’Grady.” He meant for it to be a constant reminder that anyone—even one of Jesus’ Apostles—can be led into the foulest sort of depravity without constant diligence.
I like my name well enough but it is customary to have a nom de guerre when joining Murim. The best that I could come up on short notice with was “Angel Myth.” People who talk to me generally call me “Judas.” People who talk about me generally use my pseudonym.
Call me whatever.
I’ve always said that if you don’t want to fly the Fascist Skies then Don’t Fly the fascist skies.
Today though, I had a mission and it depended upon me being on this flight.
I walked through the metal detector and I didn’t have anything metallic on me—not so much as a paperclip. Nonetheless the Transit Authorities pulled me to one side and put me in a small room and told me to strip.
I paused momentarily to decide if I wanted to go along with this humiliation. In the end I decided to humor them for the nonce.
Of course once I stripped the jackboots could see my Murim tattoos.
My father always hated tattoos. He always used the same word: they were “Hideous.” I can’t convey the full measure of the distaste that he put into that one word. Even other’s tattoos caused his skin to crawl.
I wasn’t opposed to tattoos in principle—notwithstanding my father’s vehement loathing. On the other hand I’d never seen a design that I liked enough to have it ground into my skin.
Tattoos are much like engraving. I wasn’t opposed to engraving in principal but I’d yet to see an engraving that didn’t make a pistol look like a relic of the Victorian era. Similarly tattoos brought scrimshaw, Popeye the sailor man and salty old sea dogs who’d made a career of the navy or the merchant marine to my mind.
Yakuza style tattoos come from Japan. At one time the rank and file Japanese regarded tattoos with as much fear and loathing as my father. A tattooed man couldn’t use the public baths and they wouldn’t knowingly rent a hotel room to one. Yet the yakuza tattoo was a powerful symbol of membership.
Yakuza leave a clear spot around the neck and down the middle of the torso. A man can leave his shirt collar unbuttoned or even let a gi styled robe hang fairly open without exposing the tattoos. You can roll your sleeves up to the elbow or wear knee-length short pants all without exposing your ink.
Murim had decided to follow suit over one hundred years ago—except that some of the symbols and some of the weird inks that Murim used actually focused power to a degree.
Nowadays some ordinary folks want the yakuza style coverage—probably for the same reason that the old yakuza did. Even with modern electronic tattoo guns it takes about six hundred hours of tattooing for yakuza style tattoos.
So what did I choose for my tattoos?
I had Jeff Cooper firing a 1911A1, Elmer Keith wearing a Stetson and holding a single action, Vasily Alekseyev holding a huge weight overhead along with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, hitting his signature single bicep pose.
Putting my father on my skin would have made a travesty of his beliefs. No one really knows what Jesus looked like and I distrust Iconography. There was an image of three crosses on a hill though.
I wanted a pair of sumos—but leave out the tortured eyebrows and odd facial expressions. I wanted a koi, an arched bridge and a 1911A1 in some detail. I wanted a good English Bulldog—not the cartoon style with the lower fangs exposed and I wanted a big red oni with a big club.
What? No, a red devil would be demonic. Oni’s are ogres—legendary creatures noted for their great strength.
I also stipulated no geisha and no kabuki figures.
“What kind of tattoos are those?” the taller law asked me contemptuously.
“They’re yakuza tattoos.”
“Are you in the yakuza?” the short fat law asked.
“Do I look Japanese you dimwit? I’ve never even met a yakuza. It is a style of coverage,” I said.
“It is time for a body cavity search—teach you to keep a civil tongue in your head,” the taller one announced gleefully.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
************ **************** *******************************
“You can bench press over nine hundred pounds now,” Sensei had told me. “Such strength is largely superfluous. You will almost never be braced enough to exert that kind of force unless someone chooses to assault you while you’re lying on a weight lifting bench. It is a more accurate gauge of your usable power that you can bench five hundred and fifty pounds for twenty or thirty repetitions,” Sensei said.
Yeah, our endurance increases out of proportion to our strength.
“You could lift that much after a couple of sleepless nights, at the end of a four day fast, with a bad case of the flu or badly hung over. Even that much strength is probably overkill.”
“So how hard can I punch?”
Sensei had me study Mike Tyson’s fights. He thought that the style largely suited me.
“Consider Tyson giving the heavy bag his hardest shots with no concern with an opponent’s evasions or the need to defend. Now increase the power of his best punches at least ten or fifteen percent. Then have him take his gloves off and put on a pair of custom fitted ergonomic brass knuckles on each hand. That’s an approximation of your striking power. Except that you could go full-speed five or six times as long as Tyson in his prime without getting winded,” Sensei said.
“Good Lord! That kind of punch would kill a mundane,” I said.
“That is true. If necessity ever forces you to strike a mundane, you must use extreme care. Even then you may still kill or permanently damage him. On the other hand there are people in Murim who would shrug off a dozen of your hardest punches the way that you’d shrug off the punches of a toddler,” Sensei said.
************ **************** ******************************
I was considering my chances of rendering these two brain dead, donning my clothes and escaping from the airport.
Just then the door opened and another law walked into the room.
“What is going on here?” he demanded.
“We were just going to give this smartass a body cavity search,” the short law said.
“Do you see this man’s tattoos? He’s Murim and you were about to get your asses handed to you,” the new law said.
“What is Murim and who are you?” the short fat one asked.
The newcomer showed them a badge that proved that he was a big wick-swinger in Homeland Security.
“Get out!” he told them.
“Hurry up and get dressed,” he said when both of them had left. “We’ll hope no one noticed your detention. It may clue them in. I’ll walk you through security.”
In the mean time he showed me his palm. That mark only shows when you consciously route chi through it. He was Murim too.
“Do you see my rosary?” I said.
“Is it important?”
“Yes!”
“Here it is along with your billfold and your nail clippers,” he said.
“Since you’re a fellow Murim member how about turning me onto a pistol—even a snub-nosed .38 Special would be O so fine!”
“Sorry brother. How do you use a rosary as a weapon?” He asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I said.
***************** ******************** ***********************
We were a couple of hours into our flight when the hijackers made their move. There were four of them. They had four pistols and one coach style double-barreled shotgun—everything was exactly as I’d been told that it would be.
I was supposed to stop them or die trying. I didn’t know how they smuggled their guns on to the plane. I didn’t know who they represented or what their objective was.
The Powers That Be cannot possibly be blissfully unaware that Murim exists. I’m not playing some sort of plural pronoun game. I don’t know exactly what powers be—but they are—more of them than you can shake a kanabo at.
Mostly The Powers That Be let us coexist in the modern world but not of the modern world. I suspect that a fellow who’d climbed high enough up the scrotum pole to investigate all over the country—but not high enough to be read in—would get a kinda “X-Files” vibe if he tried too hard to discover Murim. He wouldn’t probe for long though.
They had to keep the main characters alive and investigating to keep the show going on the “X-Files.” A real life investigator would find himself dead or canned, framed for something and sent to prison or sent off to Antarctica to police penguins.
And occasionally there is a quid pro quo. It is not terribly disillusioning to realize that there are double agents both in governments and in Murim.
Suffice it to say that the word was passed down to the lowest level of Murim—meaning me—to stop the hijacking.
This was my first mission and of course I had to go into it with no weapons but the ones that God and extensive training had given me.
The training, the herbals—and in the modern world, the nanites—speeded the action of my retina and optic nerve up about 5x—never mind that I could also see more detail with far more resolution. The optic processing part of my brain worked at about 3x. The messages to my muscles to move and the feedback that assured my brain that I was indeed moving went about 2x.
Given a J-Frame .38 Special or even a .25ACP I could almost certainly put a bullet through the eye socket and into the brain of all four before they could react. I didn’t have a gun though.
I was stronger, faster and had far more endurance than any normal human. We refer to the normal as “Mudane.” I only had four or five genuine jutsu though. Two of my jutsu were mostly trash jutsu—for most applications. One of my jutsu was of more use in pursuit or evasion and only one was an out-and-out fighting jutsu.
One of my jutsu was called “Windbag”. I could expel a breath hard enough to have about the same amount of impact as a good stiff left jab delivered while wearing those huge padded “Pig Gloves” that children box in. It would move the head back a bit and it might very well cause a momentary blink. The reload time for Windbag was only four or five seconds—but once your opponent knew you had it then it would have almost zero utility.
It is never too early to start deviating from the script though.
What if I poured a handful of steel BBs into my mouth and used the huge blasts of wind to propel them? The BBs were travelling fast enough to put the proverbial eye out. I could get minute-of-eyeball accuracy across a fair sized room. I could get five shots for a single Windbag blast since it only took a very short blast of wind to expel a BB.
I’d very reluctantly decided that BBs might very well cause too many questions if I was searched.
My rosary—it had thirty caliber beads of the very heavy yellow leaded glass that they use for viewing ports in nuclear reactors. They’re about 80% lead by mass but you can see through them.
They won’t penetrate a skull—at least not at the velocities that I could currently launch them at. They will ruin an eye, break a finger or bust a forehead enough to let beaucoup blood run into the eyes.
My rosary was designed to be modular and easy to break—and five beads came loose every time I broke another segment of line.
I hadn’t told anyone about the new use I devised for a trash jutsu. No one needed to know. It was quite possible that I wasn’t intended to complete this mission or to survive. I wasn’t the most trusting of souls.
I spit one bead at the back of one gunman’s head. That ought to distract him momentarily. I spit two-beads—one at each of the shotgunner’s eyes. Thus far I was working inside their reaction times. I rose from my seat and fired one more round at one more hijacker’s eye as I tumbled out onto the aeroplane’s aisle.
They’re reactions were way too slow for them to be Murim. That was reassuring.
A couple of fast handsprings took me down the aisle toward the shotgunner. No mundane could have executed that maneuver well enough for it to be even remotely practical but I could. The unconventional movement made me hard to get a sight picture on.
As soon as I got to the shotgunner I grabbed the shotgun and rolled for cover.
Two quick shots and the man that I hadn’t struck with a glass bead at all and the fellow that I’d only hit in the back of the head were both deader than a politician’s conscience.
The shotgunner was blind and neither of the other two could see well enough to aim. A couple of bounding jumps and I’d broken the now unloaded shotgun across one of the two remaining gunman’s face. It was a shame to abuse a perfectly good shotgun that way.
The last fellow had a high capacity 9mm. He was holding his left eye with his left hand and shooting all around him one-handed. If he’d have even pointed the pistol in my general direction he might have gotten lucky. The thing is, damaging one eye very badly causes the other eye to fill with tears.
I spat my last bead at his forehead as I closed with him.
I cleared his pistol and used it as a hammer while grasping the slide and I hit his head three times. I felt the skull give way with the third blow so I let the bloodied pistol fall to the carpet.
His unaimed and unprofessional barrage had struck four or five passengers and I was not full of the milk of kindness towards him.
I grabbed up the barrels of the stock-shattered shotgun and walked over to the shotgunner still holding his eyes. I pile drove the barrels into his head hard enough to shatter the skull.
Why did I kill him when he was helpless? It was for mercy’s sake. If he’d lived he’d have almost certainly have been blind. That’s a fate worse than death.
“Hold it right there!” Someone shouted. “Air Marshal, drop the weapon!”
If he’d been one of the hijackers he’d have simply shot me in the back. I dropped the shotgun barrels and slowly turned around. I’d already placed another five glass beads in my mouth just in case.
Damned if the man wasn’t pointing an old Star 9mm at me. Of course I couldn’t tell if it was a BM or a BKM. How did I know that it wasn’t a Star PD? As I’ve said, my visual speed and acuity are off the scale. The hole in the barrel was too small to have been a .45 caliber.
I spit three beads at him. I hit right above each eye and once in the center of his forehead. I grabbed his pistol with my left hand—pushing the slide slightly out of battery as I did so. My right hand came around in a hard roundhouse slap. Then I gave him another.
“How dare you point a pistol at me you cretin? Didn’t you see that I just saved this plane from being hijacked?” I demanded as I slapped him again.
“You just executed those last two men,” he sobbed.
I poised a claw hand over his eyes.
“Do you realize how easy it would be for me to kill you or worse yet, to rip your eyes out and let you live?” I demanded.
Truth be told, I was sorely tempted.
************** ***************** **************************
I got on my cell phone and dialed the sole number in the phone’s registry.
“I’ve neutralized the hijackers. There was an Air Marshal on board. He tells me that he was placed on this flight randomly and at the last minute. What? He’s sitting here restrained with his own handcuffs. He’s stark naked for anyone that wants to gawk at him. That’s how he’s disembarking. He pointed a gun at me—that’s what he did,” I said.
“Now listen to me: I am walking off this plane armed. I won’t consent to either surrendering my weapon or to even the most momentary arrest. If you don’t want one Hell of a body count—handle it!” I told my contact.
“What are you? Some sort of kill-crazy super-elite warrior?” He asked.
“Something like that,” I told him. “Right now I’m the man who just inherited a Star BKM in mint condition from a candy-ass who was too cowardly to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“What did you just shoot me and those fellows with?” he asked.
“4mm Flobert Long,” I lied.
“I didn’t even see any sort of weapon,” he said.
“You weren’t supposed to.”
That ought to give him some serious brain cramps.
Right before the plane touched ground I cleared the Star and placed it in his handcuffed hands.
Thou shalt not covet.
“I fancy that pistol but I don’t feel good about keeping it. Take a tip from me though. A fine old pistol like that one deserves bright nickeling and stag grips,” I told him.
.....RVM45
This will probably be my next story but it insists on peeking out ahead of time.
Keep in mind:
Judas lives in a completely different world than Spoil & Co and the Martial Artists there are far less powerful.
Angel Myth: Judas in Murim
Chapter One
My father named me “Judas Iscariot O’Grady.” He meant for it to be a constant reminder that anyone—even one of Jesus’ Apostles—can be led into the foulest sort of depravity without constant diligence.
I like my name well enough but it is customary to have a nom de guerre when joining Murim. The best that I could come up on short notice with was “Angel Myth.” People who talk to me generally call me “Judas.” People who talk about me generally use my pseudonym.
Call me whatever.
I’ve always said that if you don’t want to fly the Fascist Skies then Don’t Fly the fascist skies.
Today though, I had a mission and it depended upon me being on this flight.
I walked through the metal detector and I didn’t have anything metallic on me—not so much as a paperclip. Nonetheless the Transit Authorities pulled me to one side and put me in a small room and told me to strip.
I paused momentarily to decide if I wanted to go along with this humiliation. In the end I decided to humor them for the nonce.
Of course once I stripped the jackboots could see my Murim tattoos.
My father always hated tattoos. He always used the same word: they were “Hideous.” I can’t convey the full measure of the distaste that he put into that one word. Even other’s tattoos caused his skin to crawl.
I wasn’t opposed to tattoos in principle—notwithstanding my father’s vehement loathing. On the other hand I’d never seen a design that I liked enough to have it ground into my skin.
Tattoos are much like engraving. I wasn’t opposed to engraving in principal but I’d yet to see an engraving that didn’t make a pistol look like a relic of the Victorian era. Similarly tattoos brought scrimshaw, Popeye the sailor man and salty old sea dogs who’d made a career of the navy or the merchant marine to my mind.
Yakuza style tattoos come from Japan. At one time the rank and file Japanese regarded tattoos with as much fear and loathing as my father. A tattooed man couldn’t use the public baths and they wouldn’t knowingly rent a hotel room to one. Yet the yakuza tattoo was a powerful symbol of membership.
Yakuza leave a clear spot around the neck and down the middle of the torso. A man can leave his shirt collar unbuttoned or even let a gi styled robe hang fairly open without exposing the tattoos. You can roll your sleeves up to the elbow or wear knee-length short pants all without exposing your ink.
Murim had decided to follow suit over one hundred years ago—except that some of the symbols and some of the weird inks that Murim used actually focused power to a degree.
Nowadays some ordinary folks want the yakuza style coverage—probably for the same reason that the old yakuza did. Even with modern electronic tattoo guns it takes about six hundred hours of tattooing for yakuza style tattoos.
So what did I choose for my tattoos?
I had Jeff Cooper firing a 1911A1, Elmer Keith wearing a Stetson and holding a single action, Vasily Alekseyev holding a huge weight overhead along with Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, hitting his signature single bicep pose.
Putting my father on my skin would have made a travesty of his beliefs. No one really knows what Jesus looked like and I distrust Iconography. There was an image of three crosses on a hill though.
I wanted a pair of sumos—but leave out the tortured eyebrows and odd facial expressions. I wanted a koi, an arched bridge and a 1911A1 in some detail. I wanted a good English Bulldog—not the cartoon style with the lower fangs exposed and I wanted a big red oni with a big club.
What? No, a red devil would be demonic. Oni’s are ogres—legendary creatures noted for their great strength.
I also stipulated no geisha and no kabuki figures.
“What kind of tattoos are those?” the taller law asked me contemptuously.
“They’re yakuza tattoos.”
“Are you in the yakuza?” the short fat law asked.
“Do I look Japanese you dimwit? I’ve never even met a yakuza. It is a style of coverage,” I said.
“It is time for a body cavity search—teach you to keep a civil tongue in your head,” the taller one announced gleefully.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
************ **************** *******************************
“You can bench press over nine hundred pounds now,” Sensei had told me. “Such strength is largely superfluous. You will almost never be braced enough to exert that kind of force unless someone chooses to assault you while you’re lying on a weight lifting bench. It is a more accurate gauge of your usable power that you can bench five hundred and fifty pounds for twenty or thirty repetitions,” Sensei said.
Yeah, our endurance increases out of proportion to our strength.
“You could lift that much after a couple of sleepless nights, at the end of a four day fast, with a bad case of the flu or badly hung over. Even that much strength is probably overkill.”
“So how hard can I punch?”
Sensei had me study Mike Tyson’s fights. He thought that the style largely suited me.
“Consider Tyson giving the heavy bag his hardest shots with no concern with an opponent’s evasions or the need to defend. Now increase the power of his best punches at least ten or fifteen percent. Then have him take his gloves off and put on a pair of custom fitted ergonomic brass knuckles on each hand. That’s an approximation of your striking power. Except that you could go full-speed five or six times as long as Tyson in his prime without getting winded,” Sensei said.
“Good Lord! That kind of punch would kill a mundane,” I said.
“That is true. If necessity ever forces you to strike a mundane, you must use extreme care. Even then you may still kill or permanently damage him. On the other hand there are people in Murim who would shrug off a dozen of your hardest punches the way that you’d shrug off the punches of a toddler,” Sensei said.
************ **************** ******************************
I was considering my chances of rendering these two brain dead, donning my clothes and escaping from the airport.
Just then the door opened and another law walked into the room.
“What is going on here?” he demanded.
“We were just going to give this smartass a body cavity search,” the short law said.
“Do you see this man’s tattoos? He’s Murim and you were about to get your asses handed to you,” the new law said.
“What is Murim and who are you?” the short fat one asked.
The newcomer showed them a badge that proved that he was a big wick-swinger in Homeland Security.
“Get out!” he told them.
“Hurry up and get dressed,” he said when both of them had left. “We’ll hope no one noticed your detention. It may clue them in. I’ll walk you through security.”
In the mean time he showed me his palm. That mark only shows when you consciously route chi through it. He was Murim too.
“Do you see my rosary?” I said.
“Is it important?”
“Yes!”
“Here it is along with your billfold and your nail clippers,” he said.
“Since you’re a fellow Murim member how about turning me onto a pistol—even a snub-nosed .38 Special would be O so fine!”
“Sorry brother. How do you use a rosary as a weapon?” He asked.
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” I said.
***************** ******************** ***********************
We were a couple of hours into our flight when the hijackers made their move. There were four of them. They had four pistols and one coach style double-barreled shotgun—everything was exactly as I’d been told that it would be.
I was supposed to stop them or die trying. I didn’t know how they smuggled their guns on to the plane. I didn’t know who they represented or what their objective was.
The Powers That Be cannot possibly be blissfully unaware that Murim exists. I’m not playing some sort of plural pronoun game. I don’t know exactly what powers be—but they are—more of them than you can shake a kanabo at.
Mostly The Powers That Be let us coexist in the modern world but not of the modern world. I suspect that a fellow who’d climbed high enough up the scrotum pole to investigate all over the country—but not high enough to be read in—would get a kinda “X-Files” vibe if he tried too hard to discover Murim. He wouldn’t probe for long though.
They had to keep the main characters alive and investigating to keep the show going on the “X-Files.” A real life investigator would find himself dead or canned, framed for something and sent to prison or sent off to Antarctica to police penguins.
And occasionally there is a quid pro quo. It is not terribly disillusioning to realize that there are double agents both in governments and in Murim.
Suffice it to say that the word was passed down to the lowest level of Murim—meaning me—to stop the hijacking.
This was my first mission and of course I had to go into it with no weapons but the ones that God and extensive training had given me.
The training, the herbals—and in the modern world, the nanites—speeded the action of my retina and optic nerve up about 5x—never mind that I could also see more detail with far more resolution. The optic processing part of my brain worked at about 3x. The messages to my muscles to move and the feedback that assured my brain that I was indeed moving went about 2x.
Given a J-Frame .38 Special or even a .25ACP I could almost certainly put a bullet through the eye socket and into the brain of all four before they could react. I didn’t have a gun though.
I was stronger, faster and had far more endurance than any normal human. We refer to the normal as “Mudane.” I only had four or five genuine jutsu though. Two of my jutsu were mostly trash jutsu—for most applications. One of my jutsu was of more use in pursuit or evasion and only one was an out-and-out fighting jutsu.
One of my jutsu was called “Windbag”. I could expel a breath hard enough to have about the same amount of impact as a good stiff left jab delivered while wearing those huge padded “Pig Gloves” that children box in. It would move the head back a bit and it might very well cause a momentary blink. The reload time for Windbag was only four or five seconds—but once your opponent knew you had it then it would have almost zero utility.
It is never too early to start deviating from the script though.
What if I poured a handful of steel BBs into my mouth and used the huge blasts of wind to propel them? The BBs were travelling fast enough to put the proverbial eye out. I could get minute-of-eyeball accuracy across a fair sized room. I could get five shots for a single Windbag blast since it only took a very short blast of wind to expel a BB.
I’d very reluctantly decided that BBs might very well cause too many questions if I was searched.
My rosary—it had thirty caliber beads of the very heavy yellow leaded glass that they use for viewing ports in nuclear reactors. They’re about 80% lead by mass but you can see through them.
They won’t penetrate a skull—at least not at the velocities that I could currently launch them at. They will ruin an eye, break a finger or bust a forehead enough to let beaucoup blood run into the eyes.
My rosary was designed to be modular and easy to break—and five beads came loose every time I broke another segment of line.
I hadn’t told anyone about the new use I devised for a trash jutsu. No one needed to know. It was quite possible that I wasn’t intended to complete this mission or to survive. I wasn’t the most trusting of souls.
I spit one bead at the back of one gunman’s head. That ought to distract him momentarily. I spit two-beads—one at each of the shotgunner’s eyes. Thus far I was working inside their reaction times. I rose from my seat and fired one more round at one more hijacker’s eye as I tumbled out onto the aeroplane’s aisle.
They’re reactions were way too slow for them to be Murim. That was reassuring.
A couple of fast handsprings took me down the aisle toward the shotgunner. No mundane could have executed that maneuver well enough for it to be even remotely practical but I could. The unconventional movement made me hard to get a sight picture on.
As soon as I got to the shotgunner I grabbed the shotgun and rolled for cover.
Two quick shots and the man that I hadn’t struck with a glass bead at all and the fellow that I’d only hit in the back of the head were both deader than a politician’s conscience.
The shotgunner was blind and neither of the other two could see well enough to aim. A couple of bounding jumps and I’d broken the now unloaded shotgun across one of the two remaining gunman’s face. It was a shame to abuse a perfectly good shotgun that way.
The last fellow had a high capacity 9mm. He was holding his left eye with his left hand and shooting all around him one-handed. If he’d have even pointed the pistol in my general direction he might have gotten lucky. The thing is, damaging one eye very badly causes the other eye to fill with tears.
I spat my last bead at his forehead as I closed with him.
I cleared his pistol and used it as a hammer while grasping the slide and I hit his head three times. I felt the skull give way with the third blow so I let the bloodied pistol fall to the carpet.
His unaimed and unprofessional barrage had struck four or five passengers and I was not full of the milk of kindness towards him.
I grabbed up the barrels of the stock-shattered shotgun and walked over to the shotgunner still holding his eyes. I pile drove the barrels into his head hard enough to shatter the skull.
Why did I kill him when he was helpless? It was for mercy’s sake. If he’d lived he’d have almost certainly have been blind. That’s a fate worse than death.
“Hold it right there!” Someone shouted. “Air Marshal, drop the weapon!”
If he’d been one of the hijackers he’d have simply shot me in the back. I dropped the shotgun barrels and slowly turned around. I’d already placed another five glass beads in my mouth just in case.
Damned if the man wasn’t pointing an old Star 9mm at me. Of course I couldn’t tell if it was a BM or a BKM. How did I know that it wasn’t a Star PD? As I’ve said, my visual speed and acuity are off the scale. The hole in the barrel was too small to have been a .45 caliber.
I spit three beads at him. I hit right above each eye and once in the center of his forehead. I grabbed his pistol with my left hand—pushing the slide slightly out of battery as I did so. My right hand came around in a hard roundhouse slap. Then I gave him another.
“How dare you point a pistol at me you cretin? Didn’t you see that I just saved this plane from being hijacked?” I demanded as I slapped him again.
“You just executed those last two men,” he sobbed.
I poised a claw hand over his eyes.
“Do you realize how easy it would be for me to kill you or worse yet, to rip your eyes out and let you live?” I demanded.
Truth be told, I was sorely tempted.
************** ***************** **************************
I got on my cell phone and dialed the sole number in the phone’s registry.
“I’ve neutralized the hijackers. There was an Air Marshal on board. He tells me that he was placed on this flight randomly and at the last minute. What? He’s sitting here restrained with his own handcuffs. He’s stark naked for anyone that wants to gawk at him. That’s how he’s disembarking. He pointed a gun at me—that’s what he did,” I said.
“Now listen to me: I am walking off this plane armed. I won’t consent to either surrendering my weapon or to even the most momentary arrest. If you don’t want one Hell of a body count—handle it!” I told my contact.
“What are you? Some sort of kill-crazy super-elite warrior?” He asked.
“Something like that,” I told him. “Right now I’m the man who just inherited a Star BKM in mint condition from a candy-ass who was too cowardly to shoot first and ask questions later.”
“What did you just shoot me and those fellows with?” he asked.
“4mm Flobert Long,” I lied.
“I didn’t even see any sort of weapon,” he said.
“You weren’t supposed to.”
That ought to give him some serious brain cramps.
Right before the plane touched ground I cleared the Star and placed it in his handcuffed hands.
Thou shalt not covet.
“I fancy that pistol but I don’t feel good about keeping it. Take a tip from me though. A fine old pistol like that one deserves bright nickeling and stag grips,” I told him.
.....RVM45
