Pain Case

Part VIII

My trip to New York was less than comfortable. First of all, Nome to JFK Airport is one hell of a long trip. Not to mention that getting in to NYC is like coming from carefree Alaskans to hateful New Yorkers. Yes, it's the greatest city in the world but hell if it ain't because of the people.

I took the train to Brooklyn. Odds were that the man with the eerie, green eye was holed up in the apartment above the jewelry store; it had only been a week since the article and the picture showed him coming out of a door next to the place. In addition to this, I had an uncanny feeling in my gut that he was there. It was that same feeling that you get when the person in front of you, on a crowded platform, is talking about you in a different language. As I got closer, the feeling intensified and it was almost as if my body was preparing itself for a fight.

The train stopped a block away and I felt my heart rate increase. My muscles began to bulge and spasm like an excited virgin on the wedding night. All of a sudden, my mind was racing with fight scenarios and defense strategy but I consciously could care less. My eagerness was simply to meet this man and find out more about what I am now and as I stepped up to his door, I felt that it was this resolve that caused me to control my body and calm it down.

I knocked on the door.
There was no answer.
I knocked again.
No answer.

"Now, see here, mister...."

"Boom!"
A foot came through the door, instantly crushing and breaking my nose. Now, I was mad and the adrenaline surged through me with renewed vigor.

Using the door as a shield, I pushed it into the person behind it. He retorted by using his other foot and pushing off the door to land on the ceiling and pull an FN Five SeveN on me.
Sneaky bastard.

The bullets flew and I pulled my military side arm, a Beretta 9mm, and returned fire. Shreds of paper made it seem as if it were snowing and time its self seemed to slow. I could see the bullets slowly moving around while our bodies continued to move at regular speed. I watched as two bullets collided head on as I moved through mid air to hide behind a wall.

The tiny apartment was shredded and it looked like leopard skin adorned the faded orange walls as the dust began to settle.

[Are you alive?] A voice said in my head.

I didn't know how to answer in my head, so I simply yelled out, "Да! А у меня еще два клипа , мать ублюдок !"

What the fuck? When did I learn Russian?

"Good! You know some Russian," I heard a voice say.
"No! None at all," I said.
"Then why do you continue to speak it?"
"What?" I said.
"You're speaking Russian right now, asshole." He said.

It sounded to me as if I still spoke English but to him, he understood me in Russian.

He must have heard my thoughts because in my head, I heard [you're implant works but you don't. Your self control is impeccable to silence it but how foolish you are to not use it simultaneously to detect danger. Your reflex enhancements are working but... I wonder...]

From behind a corner and then in a flash from the ceiling, he shot me twelve times in the gut.

"It hurts; I know, but your nanites will heal you. You're like a child, doughboy..."
"My name is Ron!"
"Ron, then."

The bullets made their way to the surface of my skin and fell to the floor.

"You dirty sonovabitch..."
"I had to test you, American. Your government gave you 'our' technology and told you nothing? What do you know?"

I stood and stared at him like a lost dog. In all honesty, I was lost. Was I really a glowing green eyed roboman like this guy? I had no idea what was inside me or what "we" were but I'll bet he'd pondered it to no end.

"Actually, I just started thinking about 'us' as a 'we' and please don't refer to me as some sci-fi robot monster."

I forgot the Ruskie could read my mind.

We spent the majority of the night training and discussing the potentials of our device. He told me about the nanites and how they'd fixed me in the armed conflicts I'd been in. He even shot me a couple more times and let me shoot him to see them at work. He told me about torture and a dark essence stirred in me and I have to admit I think I might have liked it. He enjoyed the soldiering tales I had but I think his years of torture taught him enough about human beings that he'd probably have made a better spec. Ops boy than me. I say boy because we both still seemed to look like boys even though we were in our 80's. The nanites kept us young as a side effect of the healing.

To back up for an instant, I found out these nanites were attached to the ocular implant; like a blood, or virtuous humor, that gave it depth when being installed and then reproduced and spread out once inside the body.

In any case, boring and personal information aside, the dossier now set to a man named Hayao Mitzurugi. Apparently, he was the master of "our" device that held the missing links to end the limits on what we knew how to do with it.

So the torturer and the soldier sought the assassin. I may finally have a chance to feel my face again and find the department head that took my humanity and gave me this thing.

"Easy killer. We'll get there."
"Get out of my head, you Ruskie psycho."

Pain Case

Part VII

I could hear his heavy breathing from four kilometers away before he ever graced my disheveled hole in the wall.  I knew he had an ocular implant because I could feel the presence in my heart beat.  The same way a normal person senses someone standing behind them on a crowded platform.  His biological code was American and go figure they'd plop this technology into an average soldier boy.  Americans would have no idea the kind of power our kind could achieve.

Our kind.  It felt eerie to think about let alone believe in.  Who, Для черт возьми, were "we," anyway?  What set "us" apart?  It was a question I had been размышлял since doing some independent work for a powerful Yakuza named Hayao Mitzurugi (or Mitzu-Sama) for short.  He was quite into his honorifics and respect but what really got me on his case was an incident that happened in late 2002.  

The year was 2002, and I remember being drenched in the blood of some грязной итальянской, thinking about how good I felt to be torturing again.  We had taken refuge in an abandoned hospital somewhere in the New York state countryside.  Mitzu-Sama had had some run in with the Жадные Черт and had been insulted in the process.  Also insulted, however, were his group of wealthy Japanese businessmen.  For this, I had cut the man 2000 times with a piece of paper and doused him in a jug of lemon juice.  This was just the beginning as well.  Ребенка игра if you will but it pleased Mitzu-sama so much that he began to laugh uncontrollably and with such frivolity that all his associates began to laugh the same way.  It was in that moment that an overwhelming feeling of Чистое зло all of a sudden made me drop to my knees.  It felt as if someone with immeasurable power were pressing on my shoulders.  Shortly after they all got their composure back, I felt it lifted.  It was as if it never existed and I had simply lost трех или четырех секунд from my life.

The reason I even recall the story is that my apartment is now basically barren.  I have the money to buy things and furnish it, however, I do not need such things as others might and my wall paper wouldn't match anything anyway.  Across the walls, I have followed Mitzu-Sama's life since 1995 when he arrived in this country.  As far as I can surmise, from my studies, he was an assassin before coming to The States.  The unforgiving and almost ambivalent trail of bodies within the Yakuza ranks, that were the reason for his rise to power, were enough to say, and loudly I might add, that he was not afraid of people knowing he was dangerous but to what degree.  Obviously he killed people but he made it look, every time as if he had caught them by surprise and was simply in the right place at the right time.  In the underground world, the cases were solved but the police were clueless.  All of these killings could not be proven but the M.O. was always the same and he was always to benefit.

If Mitzu-Sama had come for me now, I'd have ghosted away but this Тесто мальчика intended me no harm.  After years of torturing, I had learned to recognize the instinct in a human being and the nanites that he had communicated no irrational thought besides the drive of a child to make it to the top of a hill.  It was as if the Americans had implanted this poor soldier with unimaginable technology (most likely stolen from us) and then planted him on an empty playground in order to test it.  It was obvious no one had trained him other than in the state of combat.  I know there's no manual for the potential power we reserve, but the least they could have done is told him what he was given.  It's so sad when a nation knows nothing about the art of war and only the war of it.  I'm sure it had kept him alive through several of those but the невинного ребенка had no idea what he was carrying inside him.

Please understand, the Japanese, and if my assumptions are correct, in specific, Mitzu-Sama are artists in their craft.  In addition to his assassinations, if he is able to control his visibility in "our kind's" eyes then he is indeed a master of this device instead of the other way around. Черт! He probably could see me for what I am while masking his own presence...

The American was down the street now.  I felt him as he neared me. Come, Тесто мальчика, let us see the metal of your American soldiering.

Pain Case

Part VI

The night caresses

the moon rises to meet me

one purpose alone

I hear the wind rustle through the trees and my country's call come at last.  I have killed 245 people world wide since my induction into this sacred order.  It's been 45 years that I have faithfully served my country and my empire with this device and it has been upgraded and enhanced over the years as well as granted me an eternal youth.  I have been most honored by my divine leaders.

They've informed me, however that tonight ends my necessity and with this, the end of my assignment and usefulness.  My last target is my maker who is now 83 years old and has also lived a wonderful life due to his involvement in this program.  It is said that he has been ordered to keep his honor by burying this program with his body, however, he is a coward and refuses to die with dignity.

"不名誉な," I mutter aloud.

In any case, I will give him the honorable death whether he wants it or not.  I think this as I watch him from the branch of his maple outside of his window.  He sleeps soundly with the lights on and using my enhancements, I can even hear him snoring.

I enter his room through the window and make no sound.  I raise my sword to end his life...

ためらい

What holds me back from my duty and honor?  What is this feeling in my soul?  A mix of programming perhaps?  A subroutine written in by him?

"お父さんを目覚めさせる!" I say with impatience.

He wakes up slowly and barely coherent.  I tell him that I want to give him the opportunity to accept a noble death.

"死は恥ずべきである,"  He said to me.

The anger and shame towards him built with in me.  My rage began to burn my soul and my clearheaded became clouded.  With one swift cut, I sliced through his neck.  The cut was so clean he managed to say one last thing before he died.

He said, "私は私の息子、あなたを愛しています。"

My heart might have sank but I was committed to what I did next.  I plunged my 脇差 into my chest.  Without the assistance of a second, I would have to wait to die.  I felt the blood leave me and imagined my marks.  As the light slowly left, I felt at peace in the darkness.

絶望

I awoke to feel what was not living and was not death.  The machines within me had brought me back to life but I no longer felt the pumping of blood.  I no longer felt my heart.  I no longer thought of memories besides the ones I'd had tonight.  I can not remember my mother's face and barely remember what mother or father means.

They took my life.  There is no honor anymore.  I have been programmed to kill and torture.  I did this for my country but I feel no sympathies anymore.  I feel the need to burn down the world.  Damn them for this emptyness.  Damn them for my lost soul.  Damn them to the hell I will send them to when I have made a plan.

I leave for New York City tonight.  It's time to make a plan to destroy their power and hurt them completely. 

In death my soul left

my nightmare awakened me

complete destruction.

Pain Case

Part V

I've been following the news for weeks and hardly slept a full night. Jesus Christ, have I really lost it.

Anything that could explain this odd conversion of mine.  The military discharged me after the mid 70's when they saw that I wasn't aging.  Something about, "We've played god and now it's up to you to right our wrong."  They still won't tell me what that wrong is but I'm going to find the mother fuckers that did this to me and make sure they get theirs.

The mid 80's were a hoot and gave me some time to cool off.  Designer drugs were kind to me as the cocaine era of the 70's only agitated my condition.  Often times I'd find after a coke binge that I had become covered in someone else's blood while the bodies would just vanish.  My wife left me during this era.  She said I wasn't the man she'd fallen in love with any more.  She said I was almost machine like and had some how drastically changed since that fateful blackout in 1965.

Luck was on the horizon though through a man named Shultz.  Shultz was a military shrink and had been with me since '68.  Sometimes I thought he might have been the reason I was covered in blood but he seemed to know how to... well... program me; if that makes any sense.  The horrible things I must have done in that man's name and couldn't remember a damn thing had me up late reading news articles from thousands of sources, some, simultaneously in my head.  I knew I would find something; some one; maybe even another with this bionic eye type device who was having similar reactions to me.  It was the mid 90's before I finally got a hit.

I remember I was scanning photos and then there it was.  In the background of a local jewelry shop opening, there was a man whose left eye seemed to glow a little that was too preternatural to be a glare.  On what little I had, I shredded my military issue debit card and bought a one way to New York City.  I left a note on  old Shultzee's desk telling him that I thought I might have found purpose.

I didn't know it then but he had apparently phoned HQ that night and told them I flew the coop.  I was doomed before I started but not if I could get to them first.  The assault would be much grander with two of us with this purpose.  I was ready to fight.

Pain Case

Part IV:

I imagine that if there are any others in my position, they very likely ask themselves what a new found sadist does with himself after vengeance?  Well, I'll tell you what he does, exactly what his фигня country tells him to do until his фигня country decides to retire him and he becomes a ghost.

I imagine many ex KGB feel the way I felt when they told me my job was over and that I was scheduled for execution due to the danger factor of keeping me alive.

"мудак!" I shouted over and over again to no avail from my cell.

For years, I had done things like calculate the depth of an incision to slowly remove skin from a persons body, in varying sections; I had calculated the exact position of nerve endings so as to cut every one so quickly that a person would experience indescribable pain before telling me and my government everything they needed to know before I disposed of him anyway.  Not many people know what it is to cut out a voice box with frightening speed and accuracy while denying the person the quick, "bleed to death" courtesy.  Better still, not many people know what it's like to have electrical impulses screwing with your moral compass to the point you enjoy said activities.

It was a Wednesday when they came for me.  Hump day.  Oh did I have fun with that one.

The guard was a педик.  I could tell from his intonation and the way he carried himself.  He didn't know that I knew and he made himself that much more macho in order that he might disguise his perversion as he dealt with me and my rather handsome form each day.

"Эй педик! Приходите дать мне минет!" I taunted from my cell.

He now knew that I knew and I counted on that.  In his fit of rage, he came to beat me and called for back up to hold me down.

"Собираетесь ли вы попробовать и ебать меня, педик?" I said.  I taunted more because the more pressure he applied to me, the more pressure I had to break the cuffs I had on and flick the metal at the light in the enclosed cell to do my work.

As the light smashed and went out, I grabbed his night stick and impaled the other guard from the bottom of his chin and out the top of his head.  I made sure I hit as many nerve endings as I could and also to miss the major arteries and veins so he might have knowledge of my act and even a little pain in the few seconds he had as he gargled his last breath.

In that same instant I had rapped Маленькая фея on the head so he had now passed out.

As I watched them both with night vision, the silence and darkness gave me an idea.  I tilted the impaled guard's head back and drove the stake into the wall. With his cuffs, I cuffed the other guard behind his back and pulled down his pants.  With his utility knife I cut off the impaled guard's phallus and ran it through with a pointed, whittled down night stick I grabbed from his utility belt.  I then rammed that into the анус of the passed out guard.

With their blood, I wrote on the walls, "For god and country.  I am your best.  Now I am free, Мать Россия ..."

That night, I would travel to America and let them know of what had been done to me and perhaps gain use and freedom through the defection.

I was wrong. America is no freer to the weaponized killer and ex compatriot that the Russians want for war crimes.  I was like the toy in the common phrase, "Мальчики и их игрушки ..."  

Fuck it.  It wasn't like this old Ruskie didn't know how to hide...

A Devil's Raid

At the top of a hill, we descended from land toward the small bay of the city built into the steppes.  While our warships waited in the harbor for a quick getaway; as catapulted heated rocks with flaming pitch at the poorly built defenses.  There was no military importance to this town.  The whores were none existent but the aristocratic women were more exquisite than any whore and were far more pleasurable as well.  There's no corrupting a whore but an eloquent girl of 15 from a finely adorned enemy's nobility?  Well, there's no joy greater than his pain.

I remember the whites and blues of those walls.  The steps toward the ocean were made of marble and my sword cracked open so many skulls, leaving fragments of bone and blood on the walls.  My men were the immoral lecturers but I on the other hand took greater pleasure, sexual and other wise, from turning a man, woman or whoever happened to cross my path, into a corpse.  War is hell, or so they say, but I could not help but enjoy the empowerment of causing death.  From this raid, we would get much gold and food and in the process, we would kill pagans who had no right to his good graces in the first place.

It sickened me how the blue banners flew from their window sills and how opulent this trade city had become from the ignorance to death and pain.  I remember slitting the throat of a boy no older than twelve to stain a banner adorned with a pagan god for the simple sake of turning it red with blood.  As the angel of death did with the first born of Egypt, so too did I do to these people that day.  Their door frames were painted red with their own blood as lambs to the slaughter.

The thick black fog swirled around in the half circle shape of the town that led to the bay.  It stunk of hell but cleansed like heaven.  God's judgement on these people was swift and absolute and we had no problem with their slaughter.  "Pirates," they called us; "Barbars!" They said.  And each one who uttered such blasphemy was put to the sword one by one and God saved no one.

I felt the heat as we neared the ships and smelled the stink of the pitch burning live bodies who struggled to get it off them.  It is pathetic to see a grown man screaming to have his skin scraped off rather than burned off as it were.  In my mercy, I slaughtered many who the fire licked with arrows and simple cuts from my sword.

The walls were blue and white, now they were red; The town was alive up and down the houses built into a hill that from far off, more than likely represented the stadium seating of a Greek theater. Now it was dead.  With confidence and the wretched love of the slaughter, I breathed in the smell of death and lived a little before the hunger began to lap at me like a ragged mange.

I ran back up into the hill and found survivors until behind a corner, I felt a knife drive deep into my chest.  I turned around and laughed.  I began to laugh heartily at the boy of seventeen who now backed into a corner in sheer terror until he began to grab for his knife as if to stab me again.

"What's your name, boy?" I bellowed.
"iben tal-bniedem," He said.
"Today, you've met the devil and I've brought hell with me."

I removed the knife from my chest and licked the sweet blood.  My head began to shift into that of a dog resembling a doberman.  I ate the boy and chewed on his flesh in that tiny little room, on the island nation.  I used his collar bone to pick my teeth as I descended the steppes and climbed aboard the boat.  I noticed a few new troops aboard my boat and I noticed that many of the men we looking a bit lifeless.

"Captain!" I said, summoning my head of the guard, "Throw some of our oldest soldiers to the waters when we get far enough out.  Only enough to cover the replacements to our horde.

The Death of the lucky rich

At the end of the rainbow, there's a place where the Leprechauns meet to discuss the future of wealth and luck. We've all heard of the pot o' gold and the luck of the Irish but those are both metaphors for the wealth that this council of little green men control. It's from this table at the end of the rainbow that they decide who gets the wealth and the luck and who does not. Recently, I feel that the council has lost sight of the good they used to do. Something had to change.

Leprechaun’s are fae (fairies) and fae are gods: creatures in charge of something just as Hestia was in charge of the hearth and Thor was in charge of thunder. They guide such things and control them through means beyond that which any human can understand. God? One thing that created the universe? It's mythology for the gullible. What people don't understand is that many things made the universe and many things control it. It's not as simple as an umbrella figure but fuck's sake if it were only that easy.

Most of us know about the others or are at least aware that something else could exist, but we differ in our responsibilities and reasons. Some might view me as a god of dogs because I am immortal and all dogs directly descend from the canis lupus or the wolf, but I am not as lucky as all that. God or no God, I have never been as lucky as the movies portray my kind.

The vampires, descended from aristocracy and humpers of their own family, were cursed by the gods for their wretched concentration of power and wealth (not to mention greed beyond comprehension to the point that their blood thinned and it was a fitting and almost biological punishment that they should have to drink to keep their blood strong. However, do to the royal money and greed, they do not suffer the common man's eyes over the centuries like I do. A Were in a movie seems to never worry about money. Somehow they all have it and they're all educated and the immortals have amassed enough wealth that they never speak of working at a corner store for minimum wage. HA! It's right where the Leprechaun’s would want me. It’s bad enough that they can barely control the vampires over the centuries by toppling the monarchical system.

I drone on about my pathetic little world, so I suppose I'll get to the night it happened. The gatherings are always after a full hearted rain when the air is crisp with moisture and a cool breeze blows to clear the clouds. At the end of the broken sunlight trail, in a clearing in the same place as always, there's the rainbow's end and a pot of gold that never runs dry. Within this pot is all the wealth in the world that ever was or ever will be. Each coin represents pieces of a fortune monetary or otherwise that the council will bestow on certain people. They are outside of time and space and therefore they could review everyone in the world at the same time and nobody would be able to tell that meetings take place at lengths of days or weeks or sometimes years. Wolves can't enter their realm unless one of them has been caught and we have the key.

One of them was caught alright; one of them was torn to pieces as I had intended to do with the rest. Mankind had become so formulaic that bestowing wealth was far too easy and the council had to be stopped. I remember running in wolf form, with the key draped from my jaw, towards the edge of a cliff at the edge of the world in the grassy plains of Ireland. The conditions were perfect and the rainbow ran right off the edge. As the dew and mist stung my face like thousands of tiny pine needles, I ran with the speed of the Windigo and leapt from the cliff towards the rocks below.

The next I noticed, I was in the forest next to the pot of gold and I was naked and back to human form. Ahead of me were shrubs that grew as tall as redwoods and made two almost covered paths to the table of gifts. The meeting had already begun and they had gathered the water vapors to the center of the table to peer in on the world of the humans. The Leprechaun’s liked to pretend like life was "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" and thus they designed this dungeon of real power to resemble the idea that what they did was only following the natural course of human free will. The wrong path would take you in circles, while the right one took you to the table of gifts. Ironic that the right path turned out to be literally the right path. It was designed that way to show you that there is definitely a wrong path; self-righteous, arrogant, pricks.

I walked into the meeting with stealth so that I made no sound and announced absolutely no presence but they knew I was there and what I was the moment I entered. This was their realm and they showed no fear. Why would they fear? They weren't warriors; their weapon was fortune. Lucky me that fortune favors the bold. As if to prove my wretched boldness, I moved with speed the human eye could not perceive but with speed that they could almost match. Almost but not quite. As I said, they're business men, not war lords and wolves are hunters, not business savvy purveyors of wealth. The advantage to assassination was on my side.

As I finish wounding them to incapacitate movement, I began my address.

"Thousands of years I've watched you shape the fortune of this world into its oblivion. I have never had your luck on my side and never cared to as I carry my own like all preternatural creatures. However, I have seen the greed of the wealthy grow, in some cases, beyond even your control and as you are no longer needed and your 'balance' is proven to be broken, it has come time that you all be retired."

"Ya dannae what ya do, boy," said a Leprechaun. "We be the last line of defense against the most corrupt of your world."

"I know that's what you say and we both know immortality. Beyond that, I'd say the playground has us both as children grasping at straws. There was a point that they were not but mortals who depended on us but you lost control as did many of the higher realms."

"There's a way for everything to..."

Their cries barely echoed for an instant and in that moment, incapacitated and unable to use the powers they had, even the basic ones like accelerated movement, I feel like they knew what it meant to be powerless to your fate, just as I had seen in the humans of the day. Those who they had doomed because they had given gifts to a CEO who had the course of his life mapped out till he took control from them and began wrecking all those in his way. I had watched it and now they could feel it: helpless and now headless.

There is only one way to kill an immortal. That way is to decapitate him. Anything less is only going to make him mad. There are some out there that even decapitation doesn't work on but everything is cleansed with fire at the end. It's difficult to set a fire with dew all around you but I came prepared and along with burning their table, I burned all of them in the center of it.

It's a beautiful thing, Justice. That's what happened that day and it felt wonderful. It felt vindicating: holding the leprechaun heart in my hands. The bloody limp organ like a diminished ego dripping with gold flakes. Ha! How pathetic and cliché that in our world, a stupid saying like "Riches are in our blood" would be literal. The last sigh of a dying creature comes so much quicker when its gargling its own blood. I'd so hoped it would be more dramatic: this death scene but it was quick and brutal and over in the blink of an eye.

It was fitting. The end of money married to luck was over in an instant but outside, the walls began to fall. countries fought wars and within the states, anarchy ran rampant. The wealth staggered and everyone became nervous. That nervousness lead to civil war and the war led to the end of capitalism as we know it but that's a story for another day.