The Orla Scimitar Chronicles - Adventures And Women Warriors

Another short story with my character Orla Scimitar. For more of my writing, go to andrewhenleywriting.wordpress.com.

Orla sat on the lush green grass, her spurred boots draped over the edge of the cliff. The Japanese wind flicked her white hair back behind her ears. It threatened to take her cowboy hat, then thought better of it. None of the previous wearers of Orla’s hat were alive to talk about it.

 

Orla’s lips were painted black. A globule of dark lipstick clung to the blue biro she held in her lips, like a cigarette or lolly stick. She had a notebook open on her lap, with a list of names printed in block capitals. It was an old notebook, and the pages were foxed with age and travel. The story in Orla’s notebook changed drastically halfway through. The Old Testament was the tale of Orla’s childhood with her sister. When they were children they had written stories together. They were not fairy tales of boys and weddings and happily ever afters, but of adventures and women warriors. The stories were ridiculous, nonsensical, childish and fun. At one time Orla had looked back through these stories and read them with fondness; now she read them with the same sadness with which she read the tattoo on her right wrist.

 

 

The New Testament was tale of revenge and redemption; an apocalypse of Orla Scimitar’s creation. It was pure Revelations. A lot of people had pissed Orla off over the years. The worst offenders made their way into the notebook. It was a list of pre-emptive obituaries. The names were crossed out when they were no longer pre-emptive.

 

The page currently open was the most important to Orla. Her Gospel. Grooved into the top line of the page in blue block capitals, ‘For Ariel’. Ariel Scimitar died six months ago in a helicopter crash that was no accident. The people on the list were those Orla considered responsible for her sister’s murder. Hugo Daniels, Katarina Zovski and Stelios Nakata. An American, Russian and Greek walk into a bar; the punchline is they would all soon be dead. Daniels owned the company that made the helicopter Ariel crashed in. He personally oversaw its sabotage to ensure the crash. Zovski ran the drug racket in Moscow, specialising in Wunderdust powder. Orla didn’t know if Daniels had his finger in this particular pie, but he definitely had his nose in the powder. He was hooked on Wunderdust, and was supplied by Zovski. Daniels’ wife Esmeralda was a casual user, but Daniels did not share his premium stash with her so she bought off the streets. Orla had previously tried to kill Daniels, but bumbling wannabe hitman Aiden Albatross had gotten in the way. It cost Orla her chance at revenge, and cost Albatross his life.

 

Zovski would keep. Today, Orla was in Japan to kill Stelios Nakata. Stelios was a Greek with a fetish for all things Japanese. Not merely the women, but the clothes, the culture, the ornaments and the history. He had even changed his name from Nicapopalous to Nakata. Ariel had always been a much straighter arrow than Orla. Ariel wanted law and order, Orla wanted justice. It was a thin line. But it was thick enough to mean Ariel joined the police, while Orla was an outlaw. Ariel had worked undercover, trying to bring down Zovski’s organisation. Nakata, then just Nicapopalous, was a mole in the police that leaked Ariel’s name when she was getting close to a bust. Zovski had paid him handsomely. Men like Nakata were the reason Orla stood on the black side of the thin blue line; in Ariel’s world you had to watch out for the dirty ones; in Orla’s world at least people looked you in the eye while they stabbed you in the back.

 

Orla folded her notebook closed and stashed it inside her Wonder Woman rucksack. She usually kept the components of her Vixen sniper rifle in here, but they were not needed today. Today would be up close and personal. She stood and allowed the wind tickle her face. The water of the sea was an endless calm blue, with whiplashes of white as the waves collided with the cliff. Orla felt the same calmness inside her, with a violent, crashing tingling in her extremities that came with the time to kill.

 

Orla walked from the edge of the cliff until she came to a building as Japanese as an American sushi restaurant; it looked the part but there was nothing real about it. It had a fresh water moat filled with black and gold koi, with a red wooden bridge across it. The palace itself had terracotta slates with leaf green wooden beams. It looked like an oversized dojo, although Orla knew that Nakata’s love of all things Japanese did not extend as far as practising martial arts. Orla stood with one black booted foot on the red bridge and looked across.

 

A kimono girl was guarding the golden painted doorway, dancing in a sandpit for a non-existent audience. Orla supposed Nakata came out several times a day to watch her, and get his dirty money’s worth. She wondered how far this dirty money would take the kimono girl, but the thought of Nakata naked disgusted her. He was not, by any cultures standards, attractive. She felt better thinking that if she ever did see him naked, she would be able to cut small pieces off him with her switchblade until he bled to death. Perhaps Nakata would appreciate her effort; this form of torture was devised by the Asian’s and known as ‘the death of 1000 cuts’.

 

The kimono girl wore a purple silk robe with blue waves stitched around the hem. She coyly covered her chalk dusted face with a red paper fan as she moved in serene, repetitive movements. Her hair was dark, tied up in a bun and held in place with two chopsticks. The only colour on her face was two ruby dots on her cheek and the red lip shape, painted on top of her own lips but much narrower. A nightmarish doll. There was a glint in her eye that suggested she was not just an ornament/stripper/prostitute. Something undefinable about her, like the crashing of the waves that betrayed the calm of the ocean. Under the purple silk of her gown, there was the unmistakable shape of a samurai sword.

 

Orla reached into her pocket and removed a tube of bubblegum. She pushed one, two, three soft capsules into her mouth, chewed them and blew a pink orbed bubble. It popped loudly, and the kimono girl looked up. The glint in her eye became more prominent as she frowned, dropped the fan and glared at Orla. She was daring her to approach. Orla spat her fresh bubblegum out and volleyed it towards the kimono girl. It landed in the sand at her feet. Orla took a step closer on the bridge. The kimono girl ripped of her silken robe, and her entire body underneath was wrapped in tight fabric strips in a midnight black colour. Her breasts were convex, her stomach concave. Orla’s stomach was bare between the open zips of her red leather jacket, revealing the tattooed tribal thorn bush that grew there.

 

The kimono ninja drew the samurai sword and held it in front of her face. She crouched with her legs flexed, jumped impossibly high and backflipped around the sandpit. Orla walked across the bridge, unperturbed. The kimono ninja began to swirl the sword in choreographed movements, and walked stealthily and slowly towards Orla. As the kimono girl jumped and flipped with Japanese grace, Orla drew her Moulton pistol from the holster under her armpit and shot her in the head.

“You have to buy me a few drinks before I’ll dance with you like that, sugar.”

 

Orla stepped over the dead body over the kimono girl and slotted her pistol back into its holster. The gun felt warm and alive. Inside, there was very little security. Orla Scimitar was probably the only person in the world who wanted Stelios Nakata dead, but she was a bad person to have a grudge against you. It seemed as though the ninja part of the kimono ninja was only hired to offer and extra slice of Japan; her services as a bodyguard were never seriously considered. It was a pity. If Nakata had hired a better bodyguard, Orla could have had more fun on the way in.

 

Making her way through Nakata’s house, there were Japanese paintings, Japanese statues, Japanese plants. Japanese paper doors Orla could see through. When she came to a large room on the third floor she could see a silhouette of a short fat man, a Christmas pudding on stumpy legs, she knew she had found Stelios Nakata. Two shadows guarded the door on Nakata’s side. They may not have been guarding the door at all, just standing there. But they were in the way. Orla dug her switchblade through the paper door into one of the shadow’s neck, and simultaneously shot the other one in the back of the head with her still-warm pistol.

 

As Orla jumped through the paper door, blood continued to fountain spray out of one of the guard’s forehead. Stelios Nakata looked terrified, although not because of his dead guard, nor because of Orla. A woman with glowing red hair was standing over him, brandishing a machete.

 

Somebody had interfered again, but at least unlike Aiden Albatross, this one seemed capable of getting the job done. But this was Orla’s kill. She still had the pistol in her hand. She popped up from behind the woman’s shoulder, and shot the man in the head with her pistol. This was becoming a habit. Pistols lacked the elegance, finesse and personal touch of a blade. She made a mental note not to use her pistol the next time she crossed out a name in her notebook.

 

The woman spun around. Her hair had been blonde when Orla knew her, but then so had Orla’s. Her face looked so different, but it was the same. There was no disguising her bright eyes. But her nose had been chipped into something sharper, her jawline altered, and her subtle blonde eyebrows had been shaved off, replaced by dark and angry tattoos.

“Ariel?”

“Orla?”

“I thought you were dead.”

 

It couldn’t be Ariel. This woman with enflamed red hair, a machete in her hands and a vengeful streak as long as Orla’s own. Ariel was a good girl. She believed in due process, not slitting people’s throats.

“The crash didn’t kill me like it was supposed to. But it changed me. You were right sis, if you want things done, you have to do them yourself.”

Ariel dropped the machete and hugged Orla, lifting her off her feet. It felt strange to Orla, to share a moment of such love by somebody she had lost forever.

 

Ariel told Orla how she had spent the last six months getting reconstructive surgery, and now she was ready to track down the people that had tried to kill her.

 

The two pools of blood on the floor gathered together between their feet. As they stood in the red river, they planned their revenge together.