Regrets

Regrets? He's had a few. Well, one. But it's a doozy.

Maybe I shouldn’t’ve personally slaughtered that gypsy woman’s family in front of her. I mean, I've got a ninja team on salary for a reason. What's the point of keeping a ninja team if you're not gonna use it? I should have listened to Piotr, but he’s an accountant! All he knows about is numbers. He doesn’t understand that sometimes you just want to get your hands dirty like back in the old days, back when you were young and lean and strong, back when words like “myocardial infarction” and “high-density lipoproteins” could never have found a comfortable place to settle down in your brain and start eating away at your confidence like rust spots on a car body. Of course we didn’t honestly believe we were going to live forever, but deep down, we knew that if anybody was going to, it’d be us. We sure as s**t didn’t imagine that one day we would find ourselves saying things like, “No more of that pizza, my acid reflux is killing me.”

It’s not just the way you weaken with age that gets me, it’s that you adapt to it without even realizing it, until you’ve become an entirely different person. One morning you look in the mirror in an unguarded moment and you’re staring at this wrinkled, sagging, graying, pot-bellied, limp-dicked nightmare and you think, “Who the f**k is that?” So yeah, I told Piotr to f**k off and I would handle this myself, like we used to back in the day. I did bring along Nicolai, but for a change, his role would only be backup. I didn’t even let him drive, sliding behind the wheel of the Audi myself and rolling out into the night. Just like the old days.

It was almost midnight when we pulled up to the camp, but of course everyone was awake and living it up. Nicolai stayed a steady two paces behind me as we approached their circle, the gypsy woman"mother? Grandmother? Who the f**k can tell?"sitting on a folding chair and wrapped in blankets. The rest of the group, maybe a dozen in all, glared at us with sullen suspicion. They probably looked like that at any outsider, but I’d been there before, and they all knew why.

She nodded as I approached, and Nicolai stepped a few paces back. It looks like he’s being polite when he does that, but he’s really just making sure he’s got everyone covered, a nice wide angle of fire. I stopped at her side and said, “I’m sure you know why I’m here.”

She nodded again, looking up at me from her chair, the dancing shadows cast by the fire making it hard to be sure of the mockery in her eyes, but I could feel it radiating off her. I just can’t believe these people. They live like f*****g cartoon hippies, and they have the balls to look down on me? I put my hands in my pockets, the picture of cool. No way am I letting these freaks think they’ve got me rattled. “So have I not made it clear you’re not getting a penny from me? You’re not getting a penny from my son? I don’t give a s**t how many of your b*****s he knocked up, all right? The sole exception to the ‘go f**k yourselves’ clause is the abortion, of course. We’ll pay for that, and then can tell your Monongahela or whatever the f**k her name is"”

“Magdalena,” she said, her voice like a rusty hinge. She kept pushing her lips together and outward in that way old people with no dentures do. Jesus.

“Whatever the f**k her name is that she won’t be seeing him anymore. I don’t know what kind of s**t tricks she used to get her hooks into him, but there’s an opening at our office in San Diego and if he knows what’s good for him"and I can assure you he does"Nicholas will be taking it. Am I making myself clear?”

She glowered into the firelight, chewing on her lips with her toothless gums. The rest of the crowd was getting restless, including the one my idiot son had been f*****g. Good. Not much point doing this if she weren’t here. Behind me, Nicolai stood impassively at the edge of the firelight, hands clasped in front of him. He looked like a statue, but I knew he could fill those hands in a second. Not that I expected any trouble from this crowd, but if some drunken hothead pulled a knife behind my back, it was good to know he wouldn’t make it a step closer to me.

“I said, am I making myself clear? Do you want me to go over it again?” Why did they have to make s**t like this so hard? This city was filled with idiot men who’d be more than happy to let some Gypsy s**t sink her claws into them in exchange for regular nookie. And when the rest of her family came around with their hands out, well, I guess you should have thought of that earlier, huh? What the f**k made my son so special? They didn’t seriously think I’d allow him access to my money if he were to get seriously involved with her, did they? Not a chance in hell. He’s lucky I still employed him, didn’t just kick him loose to go become a rap star or whatever the f**k it was he wanted to do this month.

“There will be no abortion,” she finally said. “We do not condone the taking of innocent life.” She put a snarky little emphasis on innocent, trying to get in a dig at me. Well, lady, if I gave a s**t about being innocent, I wouldn’t be so f*****g rich, so boo-hoo.

I threw a quick look at Nicolai, who nodded ever so slightly. “So, that’s it, then? You think you’re gonna give me a little Gypsy grandson and join the family, come to the holiday parties, sit around the Christmas tree opening all the presents my f*****g money can buy?” I kicked her chair, and a couple of the bigger men started to stand up, but Nicolai suddenly had a pistol in each hand, and they slowly sank back down, muttering and staring daggers at me. “Well, guess what, lady, that’s not gonna happen. I got a guy downtown can take care of this problem for me no sweat, and that’s what we’re gonna do. Me and my man Nicolai and your s**t daughter are gonna go for a little drive, and when we get back, you and I will no longer have any business together and can go on our merry little separate ways.”

The look on her face was pure rage, but unless she wanted Nicolai to start putting little holes in her happy little freak family, there wasn’t anything she could do about it. I pulled a knife from my belt, a beautiful kukri knife, bent like a boomerang, very heavy and very sharp. In India they ritually decapitate cows with one swipe using the larger version, and even the small one is very effective at making people bleed. I’m not normally a theatrical man, but damn does this knife motivate people. I waved curtly at Magdalena with it. “All right, kid, stand the f**k up. We’re going for a ride.”

Eyes wide, she looked at the woman, who shook her head. “Goddammit, I am not f*****g around here! You tell her to stand up or there will be some serious trouble!” I twisted my hand in her scraggly gray hair, hauling her head back and putting the knife to her wrinkled throat. “Are we understanding each other here?”

This time all of the men leaped to their feet, but she barked something I couldn’t understand and they stopped. Lucky for them, because they were about a second away from receiving a bullet in the head from Nicolai. They muttered to each other, looking between Nicolai and me.

The Gypsy woman, as calm as if she were sitting by the fire drinking that murky tea they love, said, “I do not want there to be any violence here. Our people do not love violence, for far too often in history has violence been used against us. Let us instead embrace each other as friends, and settle our differences in peace.”

She then said something in that Gypsy language of theirs, that creaking voice droning into my ears. How the f**k did they stand to listen to her? It just kept going, like really loud crowd noise, filling your ears from all directions. I suddenly realized my head was drooping and I was lowering the knife, my arm relaxing. I snapped to attention but it was too late. Two of the men were taking down Nicolai and another was headed right for me. I just barely got the knife around and, as he barreled into me and took us both to the ground, I jammed it up under his chin and the impact when we landed drove it right through his skull. His eyes rolled back and his mouth sagged open, blood spilling out. I could see the blade glinting behind his teeth like a secret he wanted to tell.

Nicolai was wrestling with the two men while the others split up, some crowding around him and the others heading toward me. I braced my foot on the fallen man’s head and with adrenaline-fueled strength wrenched the knife free. Behind the men and women advancing on me I could see Nicolai writhing while one man, kneeling on his chest, rained blows on his face. He tried his best to ward off the punches with one hand while shoving the other behind his back, gradually working it through the grass.

I lunged forward, swinging the knife in a wide arc that caught the nearest man in the throat. He staggered backward, head thrown back and his throat yawning wide, blood jetting from the severed arteries, his trachea gaping like a cut radiator hose. Two women behind him caught him as he went down, but he would be dead in seconds. I flipped my grip on the knife, holding the blade upward, and charged the remaining man. I went in low, head thrust forward, one arm thrown up as a block, the other holding the knife well back. As I had hoped, he focused on “man charging at me” instead of “man holding very sharp knife,” and as we went into a clinch, I drove the knife into his belly and ripped upward. It didn’t stop until it scraped against his sternum, and he froze in our embrace, blood pouring onto the ground, intestines bulging from the hole like a bag of snakes with a rip in the bottom. I shoved him back and he dropped heavily to his knees, lingering for a moment before falling onto his face.

A series of shots let me know that Nicolai, his face a bloody mess, had managed to reach the snubnose .32 he kept in the small of his back. As I approached the two howling women, covered with the blood of the man who throat I had laid open, he killed the man who had been pounding on him and then another one turning to flee. I yelled for him to just hold the others, “others” being in this case a teenage boy, two older women, and Magdalena. He nodded and grinned, blood dripping freely from his nose.

I pulled out my own gun and ordered the two women to join the group by the fire. The old woman was still sitting in her chair, but she seemed to have shrunk somewhat. She stared into the fire, mockery no longer dancing in her eyes.

Gun in one hand, kukri knife in the other, drenched in her family’s blood, I stared at her for a moment. She stared right back at me, and I confess it was a bit of an effort to hide how disconcerting that was. She was one seriously tough board, I’ll give her that. She was just used to people who played by the rules. A lot of people have made that mistake with me.

I finally broke the silence by asking, “Are there any other people here besides you?” Ah, finally"a flicker of fear in her eyes. She tried, you could tell she tried very hard indeed, but her eyes twitched to the right, just a fraction, toward the largest of their trailers. I told Nicolai to go check that trailer out, first making the group of six survivors lie face down by the fire. Keeping one eye on the old woman, I walked closer to them and shot each one in the back of the head, the last few writhing and shrieking in terror by the time I got to them. I saved Magdalena for last, since this whole goddamned mess was her fault.

I walked back to the old woman and hesitated in my steps, trying to disguise it as a stumble. She no longer looked shrunken; she might even have grown some. She huddled in that chair with hatred burning the air around her. It looked like she was sitting in a shadow with no source; darkness almost pooling around her chair. Her eyes looked up at me from under her liver-spotted brow, cloudy and pale, but there was nothing weak about them. I was grateful when Nicolai returned from the trailer, shoving three groggy children, all probably under the age of ten, before him. They shrieked when they saw the carnage around the fire, and ran, but instead of trying to escape, each ran to one of the fallen figures, hugging the corpse, crying and wailing. I waved my gun toward them"the old woman gasped as if she hadn’t seen this coming"and Nicolai shot each one of them.

The old woman’s pale, arthritic hands were clenched painfully tight on the arms of the chair now, and I believe that if she’d been even a little bit younger, she’d have launched herself from that chair into my knife and my gun and done her level best to tear me apart with those same feeble hands. She closed her eyes tight and began mumbling something to herself. I called over to Nicolai, standing placidly by the fire and mopping carefully at his face with a handkerchief, to roll Magdalena over and take the fetus, since it was the only thing that could connect us to this mess.

The mumbling chant behind me slowed but didn’t stop at those words, then resumed its steady flow. Like whatever it was she had done to distract us earlier, the drone of the words insinuated itself into my ears, seeming to come from nowhere in particular. I was just about to order to her stop, or simply make her stop, when she screamed. Even Nicolai was visibly perturbed, so I’m not ashamed to say that it gave me chills. It was a wrenching, searing blast of sheer despair and agony, like a concentrated reaction to everything she’d seen that night compressed into a single cry. It went on until I was sure it would tear her throat apart and chunks of lung would come sliding wetly out her mouth. When it stopped, it took several seconds for it to stop ringing in my ears.

I staggered a little in place, and turned to Nicolai to say, “What the f**k was that?” He shrugged, verbose as ever. I looked back at the old lady. Her head was sagging to her chest, and I couldn’t tell if she were breathing or not. I grabbed her hair to hold her head up, and felt a shock, like static electricity magnified a hundredfold. One time as a kid I stuck a paper clip in an electrical outlet because I was an idiot, and it knocked me across the room and left my arm numb all day. This was a whole lot like that. I yelled something incoherent and leaped back, shaking my hand like it was covered with fire ants. Nicolai rushed to my side, gun trained on the old woman, but I held up my other hand to stop him.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Just, static or something. I think she’s dead. Check for me.” He was professional enough not to hesitate, just check her throat for a pulse. After a moment, he agreed that she appeared to be dead. I put a bullet through her head just in case. We packed up my grandson-to-be in a plastic bag, threw it in the trunk, and got the hell out of there. On the way back, we stopped in an area with no security cameras, tossed the fetus in a Dumpster along with our bloody clothes, doused it all with gasoline, and torched it. No DNA evidence there, so sorry, Detective. Fresh clothes in the trunk, quick change, good as new. The guns, unregistered drop pieces, went into a weighted bag in the river.

That was that. Problem solved. Idiot son soon to be on his way to Dallas, where he would surely find new ways to cause me trouble but at least I wouldn’t have to talk to him face to face. Above all, it felt great to be handling things myself, just like back in the old days, even if only for one night. I went to bed ready to greet a lovely, untroubled day in the morning. Too bad it didn’t work out that way.

Goddammit, I wish I’d sent the ninja team. Piotr was so right. So I don’t handle things myself anymore, big deal. I worked my a*s off for decades so that I wouldn’t have to handle things myself. The whole goddamn reason I worked and slaved and cheated and stole and busted my a*s in a thousand different ways was so I could have things like a personal jet and team of accountants and a penthouse suite and, of course, a goddamned ninja team. They’re not actual ninjas, naturally, just four incredibly highly trained specialists"ex-Spetznaz"who have dedicated their lives to the art of creating mayhem without leaving any traces. They would have rolled onto that Gypsy camp like a black fogbank, swirled and eddied for a moment, and then drifted away, leaving nothing behind but death.

But no, I had to do it myself. The arrogance of youth in an old man’s body. So I went to bed that night, and I dreamed. I dreamed I was sitting in a circle of my family, and friends who were as close as family. Grandmother was in her chair as usual. My whole life, she’s sat in that chair when we’re all around the fire. When I was little, I used to think she’d been born there, and it was where she’d grown up. Suddenly outsiders arrive, Nicky’s horrible father and one of his goons. I haven’t seen Nicky for at least a week, and I guess this is why. He’s probably going to try to buy me off. He doesn’t understand anything but money. We could give him a grandchild and a family, but all he can think is that we must want something from him. I honestly believe he thinks that everyone on Earth is just as venal and greedy as he is. What a horrible world he lives in, and one of his own creation.

That’s what I’m thinking as I watch myself, my waking self, yelling at the woman I know as Grandmother. Suddenly there’s fighting. Blood. He’s killing people, people I’ve known all my life. That awful man he brought with him kills Uncle Vaclav and cousin Peter. Why is he doing this? Oh Lord, no, he’s going to the children’s trailer! He makes us lie down by the fire. Please, God, please, make him go away. Give him whatever it is he wants and leave us alone. Now I hear measured gunshots, one at a time. I look over and Nicky’s father is killing everyone. I bury my face in the grass and pray fo"

 That’s when I woke up, the final gunshot ringing in my ears. I could smell the dirt and the cordite, I ached in my heart for my family. It was over an hour before the vividness of the dream faded and I could forget that Uncle Vaclav was the one who carried me on his back over a mile when I twisted my ankle playing in a field, or that Grandmother seemed to know a special song for every imaginable occasion. I was cranky all day and snapped at everyone, but by the time evening rolled around, I had shaken it off. I poured myself a generous helping of vodka and retired to bed. Tomorrow I’d be back to normal.

I woke up when someone kicked the door to my bedroom open. The lights came on all of a sudden, and blinded me. I could barely see that a stranger was standing in the doorway, a big tall man covered with blood and holding a gun. He was really scary. I thought he was hurt at first but now I think it must be blood from someone else. He made me and Florence and Lavinia get out of bed. He was really mean. He kept pushing us even though we were walking as fast as we could. When we got out of the trailer I saw that everybody was lying down around the fire. Another stranger was standing next to Gramma and he had blood all over him too. Then I saw there was blood on everyone and I screamed. I ran to mama and I tried to help her but she wouldn’t get up. I think she was hurt really bad. Then the first man came over to me and pointed his gun at my face and fire shot out of it and everything went dark.

I woke up terrified, tangled in the covers, the image of faithful Nicolai shooting me in the face burned into my memory. I paced back and forth for god knows how long trying to shake off the images, and the emotions. I’d never given two s***s about my own mother, and she returned the sentiment, but now I yearned for my murdered mama, taken from me by two strangers for no reason I could understand. Again, it was over an hour before the intensity of someone else’s emotions began to fade. By that time it was 5 am, still to early to head into the office, so I burned off some energy on the treadmill for a while, then just paced aimlessly through the house. It seemed like forever, but I finally decided it wasn’t so early that my showing up at the office for no special reason would seem suspicious.

On my way in, I passed Nicolai heading for the security office, and my heart almost stopped. He’d been a loyal employee for over ten years, I trusted him with my life, but when I saw him, I almost shouted for security to arrest him. I hurried on, hoping he hadn’t noticed my reaction, but that man noticed everything.

I went through the motions of business all day, but left the second I had a decent excuse. Back at the penthouse, I tried watching TV, tried running on the treadmill until I was exhausted, tried everything I could to distract myself from the gradually sinking sun. Eventually, I couldn’t fight it off any longer. I took a couple of sleeping pills that normally knock me into a deep and dreamless sleep and lay down, heart pounding.

You can guess what happened. I awoke a scant hour later, still seeing the vivid picture of myself swinging a kukri knife in a vicious arc that sliced my throat wide open, my blood gushing hot and wet into the air. The pills had me woozy, making it even harder to understand what was going on. After just a few minutes, I fell back onto the bed and plummeted into sleep once more, awakening an hour later feeling the burning sting of a knife that had been driven up through my jaw, my tongue twitching against the steel. I tottered out of bed, toppling to the floor where I passed out again, awakening with the taste of grass and a scream in my mouth, hating the man who had stood over me with his gun, killing my family one by one like he was swatting flies. I moaned piteously, feeling more bewildered and lost than I ever had in my life, not even during my binge-drinking days in college. I fought like hell to stay awake, until I was so groggy I couldn’t even remember what I was trying to do, and slumped against the wall.

This time there was no abrupt awakening, just a gradual transition. This time I had been cousin Peter, whose skull Nicolai’s bullet had only shallowly penetrated. It happens sometimes. I lay on my back, a lead slug embedded in my slowly swelling brain, the increasing pressure gradually squeezing the life out of me. I lay there, semi-conscious, unable to move, listening to my family be murdered. I heard that b*****d father of Magdalena’s boyfriend order his little guard dog to cut the baby from her womb, and burned with hatred. I would have done anything, anything to stand up and fight him one-on-one. But I couldn’t do anything but lie on my back looking at the sky. The firelight got dimmer and dimmer, the sounds around me grew ever quieter, and I slowly faded into nothing.

I didn’t go in to work that day. I called my doctor, begged him for something that would keep me from dreaming. He advised me to try the same pills I’d taken last night, but I’d already flushed them all. I called some people I know, looking for something stronger, but there’s not a lot of demand for falling asleep without dreaming on the recreational drug circuit, and they were no help. As a last resort, I tried drinking myself stupid, because I don’t recall waking up from many dreams after a truly epic bender. That just meant that I was still drunk when I woke up screaming for my mommy. I’d been shaking her and shaking her while the bloody man shot my brother and sister. My emotional reaction was amplified in my drunken state, and I bawled like a baby for a long time.

I decided I could fight my way through this, whatever this was. I had no idea why I’d suddenly decided to grow a conscience, but I would hammer it back down where it came from if it was the last thing I ever did. I feigned a severe illness, told everyone I’d be out of the office for some time. I was sure they could handle things in my absence. I’d recently begun making preparations for early retirement anyway, so it wasn’t too much of an adjustment, at least not for the short term.

The dreams just kept coming, though, relentlessly. I began to truly hate the man I saw in the mirror, that wretched, arrogant, scary, scheming b*****d who’d murdered everyone I’d ever known. It took longer and longer to rid myself of the alien points of view I was saddled with in my dreams, and the memories I temporarily owned began to seem increasingly real.

The worst is the old woman, and not just because she felt the most loss, seeing her entire extended family die. No, it’s how she and I see me. A swaggering, hateful, evil b*****d who loves no one and has nothing. He spurned his own flesh and blood, even when given the priceless gift of a grandchild. She pitied me, that useless f*****g hag pitied me. She knew things about me, too, things she had no business knowing. She knew just from being around me that back in college I got a girl pregnant, and when she insisted we get married, I hired a couple of guys to beat her into a miscarriage. I saw myself through her eyes and it made me sick.

I saw Nicolai through her eyes too, and after a few weeks I finally invited him over to the penthouse to discuss a complication relating to a certain matter. As he walked in the door, I hit him with a stun gun, and again, until he was flopping helplessly on the floor. It took a long time, and made a hell of a mess, but I think I finally worked out my feelings about him. I expected to feel at least a little bit bad about what I was doing to such a faithful employee, but I really can’t help but feel that he deserved every bit of it, if not worse. He disagreed, of course, and I’m sure he was baffled by the way I kept accusing him of killing my family or my mommy or my husband, but by now, it’s all starting to blur together. The funniest part is that sometimes in the dreams I’m me, except this time I know the name of every person I kill, their histories together, their loves, their lives. I know all that, and I still slash their throats and shoot their children. The last time it happened, I spent the entire time trying to shoot myself to stop me. I strained and screamed and cursed and raged inside, but outside I just carried on, implacable, murdering my uncles and cousins and sons and daughters simply because I was too proud to let my son do something I disapproved of.

Now that I’m awake, of course, I don’t have that problem. Nicolai is starting to go bad in the master bedroom, and there are just too damn many pieces to pick up. No, I’m just going to end this now. I left a letter of apology to my son, which will hardly make up for everything I’ve done, but there’s not much else I can do. I didn’t apologize for murdering his girlfriend and his unborn son, of course, just for being a cold, distant a*****e who never treated him like he had any value at all. I wanted to do the same for everyone else I’ve wronged, but I realized there isn’t anyone else close enough to me to warrant it. How’s that for a life well lived, huh? Nick is the only person in my life who isn’t an employee. Anyway, time to go. No more goddamn dreams for me.

 

Florie? What... who turned on the lights? Vinnie? What’s going on? Who’s that man? Oh my... is he hurt? He’s all bloody! Vinnie?

Author's Note

This is another one written as an exercise. I had the first two lines, and I just sat down to write whatever followed. Four hours later, I got this, which I actually rather like. I'm gonna wait a while before revising and such, but here's the first draft for you to enjoy. Or not.

Reviews

[Remember Courage]

Not many people do Stories or books like you do. I love how your forte is writing stories. This is very good and the beginning was really eye catching. I also love the whole gypsy theme it is really cute and original. Even though i really didn't notice that many grammar issues. It was awesome! Thanks for a great read
-Courage