FIVE YEARS AGO
The small get-together could not be going any better. A few officers from Mina’s unit, as well as the distinguished guests at the ceremony, were mixing and mingling with each other as the music set the mood. It was an afternoon deal, but one would’ve thought it was a semi-formal evening event given how much everyone was letting loose.
Mina looked at the punch bowl, so tempted to get a glass, but then thought better of it, opting for some lemonade instead. Just as she raised the glass to her lips, two hands covered her eyes from behind.
“You really should change your perfume if you ever plan to have me guess wrong at this game.”
The hands came off her eyes and she turned around, still keeping them closed, and reached for a hug. Then she pulled back and looked up at Lucas Simpson, boy wonder tech genius, and her very own husband of four years.
“I’m not even using the same one I normally use.”
“Mare, you use the same five. You might as well have used the other one.”
“I don’t hear you complaining though, Mar.”
“That’s cos I’m not.” She reached up to meet his lips as they shared a quick kiss.
“Did you talk to the General? Are we non-combat yet, or do we still want to be fighting in wars far from home?”
“Full non-combat. Strictly office work now.”
Lucas took her hand as they both surveyed the crowd. “My girl.”
“Lucas, do you recognize that man with the bald head, talking to Brigadier Jones by the stage?”
Lucas looked over at the spot Mina mentioned, seeing the two men. “I’ve seen his face somewhere, but I don’t actually know him. He’s some bigwig, I think. I’ll have to dig deeper to figure out where I saw his face.”
“Hmm. I feel like I know him, but I can’t work out where or how…”
“Maybe you’ve seen him at the barracks whenever you’ve had to go in.”
“Nah, I don’t think so. It’s probably nothing. He might just resemble someone I actually know.”
“Like who, Elmer Fudd? Cos that’s who he looks like. See any wabbits in sight?”
Mina shook her head and walked towards the fruit table, laughing internally.
*****
PRESENT DAY
“The Port of Stilts experienced a series of explosions early this dawn. No lives have been lost so far, but there are at least 198 injured and millions of dollars in damage. Early reports indicate that the first explosion occurred on Dock 19A, but the timing of the other explosions suggest that they were timed to happen simultaneously. The police are still working to determine the extent of the damage and identify a suspect. Meanwhile, on a brighter note, a ship containing 400 girls has been seized, and the girls have been freed. The girls were discovered on the ship at the Port of Stilts following a tip-off shortly before the explosion. The girls are suspected to have been victims of the famous Hula-Roos trafficking ring. We will bring you more details as they become available. This is the Terres Evening Recap, stay tuned for more.”
Connie wrapped the bandage around Markham’s leg as he stared straight, completely immobile yet feeling everything. “Thanks for all your help, Mr. Greene. Without your phone and your fingerprint, 400 girls would have gone undetected to some brothel or shanty, and their lives would have completely been ruined.”
Once she’d gotten that leg fully wrapped, she went on to the next one. “Now, I understand that you were an extremely unwilling participant, really one who was under great duress. But in my book, you will always be a hero.”
Connie examined both bandaged legs, then left for a brief moment and returned with a bowl of leeches. She placed the bowl on a chair, right where Markham could see. His body began to shake as his heart raced and sweat quickly started to form all over his body, but Connie went on as though nothing was happening.
She began to bandage his arms, and then his phone rang briefly and stopped. Connie paused her bandaging and looked at the phone which was beside Markham’s head. She read the text out loud.
“Missing you at the rendezvous. Mission was a no go, assets compromised. Report to provided location. P.S: Hermes is out for blood. Stay wound-free.”
Connie put down the phone and continued bandaging his arms. “Hermes. That is a very interesting nickname. I wonder who it belongs to. You wouldn’t happen to know, would you?”
She looked at Markham as his motionless body stared back at her. “Aww. Too bad. I might have let you go free. No matter, there’s always next time.”
Markham’s helpless frustration drove his heart to beat even faster, and his body began to shake the table. Connie coolly walked to her medical kit by Markham’s feet, pulled out a syringe, and carefully jabbed it in between his big and second toes. “Now now, I can’t have you going into cardiac arrest on account of an overdrive in your heart rate. Funny enough, that’s what happened to someone’s father a long time ago.”
Connie pulled a chair and sat by Markham as though he was a patient she was visiting. “The story goes that her father came home from war, all excited to reunite with his very pregnant wife, and his three-year old daughter. But then, their house was attacked by two men in black. They injected the man with something that took away his ability to move, but insanely increased his sensitivity to everything. The poor guy had to watch as the men shot his wife in every major area of her body, starting with the pregnant belly.”
Connie got up and started bandaging Markham’s other arm as she continued. “Once they’d tortured this man’s wife to death, they stood her up in front of him, stripped her dead body naked, and took turns f**cking her from behind, body still stood up.”
Connie let that hang in the air as she finished up on his second arm, and then she took a small scalpel out of her medical kit. She made precise cut marks on Markham’s neck, his wrist, the area right below his eyes, and right around his left ribcage. He began to bleed from those areas, and she picked up the bucket of leeches.
“It is said that the man’s heart started beating so hard it gave out, and he died immediately. Personally, I do not believe in a god, but someone out there definitely kept a lookout for the little girl. Lord knows what they would’ve done to her if her father was still alive after the heinous acts of these men to his wife.”
She began to put the leeches on the cuts she had made, one by one. Once she’d placed the whole bucket of leeches on Markham, she stood before him. She knew he was in unbelievable pain, and that being able to scream would actually have been a relief for him.
“I was told that it was your belief that screaming is for bitches and punks and p*ssies. I bet you wish you were any one of those people right now, so you could have the outlet. When you sent Thomas Soumane to kill my father and he refused, you chose to do something worse; you chose to trap my father in his body and f*ck my dead mother just to make him feel useless as a man.”
She held up a picture to him. Despite the pain he was in, his eyes managed to look at the picture. It was a little girl with a man and a woman smiling together. Once he saw who the man and woman were, his eyes widened, his heart rate began to beat hard enough to vibrate the table he was on, and tears started streaming from his eyes.
Connie watched for a while as the leeches sent Markham to the heights of hell on earth. She could see the pain and pleas in his eyes, but she simply smiled with all the kindness left in her each time. Eventually, all the leeched swelled up and fell off. Once enough had fallen off, Connie took the can of gasoline she’d placed at the foot of the table. She began to walk around the table, pouring the gasoline on the floor.
Then she poured some on his chest in the shape of a cross, and held up a lighter.
“Pegasus, say hello to my parents in heaven on your way to hell.” She light the lighter, dropped it on the floor, and walked out of the warehouse.
*****
FIVE YEARS AGO
Mina tossed and turned but sleep clearly wanted nothing to do with her. It’d been five hours since she and Lucas turned in for the night, and as always, he’d fallen asleep immediately he hit the bed, while she was still waiting on the train to take her as well. She turned and looked at him, soundly in dreamland, and resisted the urge to kick him back into consciousness out of spite. How that man could sleep but she couldn’t, after all the talking and mingling at the party earlier, was beyond her.
Her mind began to ponder the articles on her parents’ deaths. She’d gone over them a lot over the last three weeks. Her father died of a cardiac arrest, her mother of multiple gunshot wounds. It was a home invasion gone grotesquely, fatally dark. Everything appeared in order, but somehow it wouldn’t leave her alone. She was out for most of it, so she couldn’t remember anything except the moment she felt a sharp pain in her neck and then fell off the couch. She figured looking over the articles one more time wouldn’t hurt any more than it usually did, so she got out of bed and went downstairs to the family room.
As she looked over the articles, she thought about how she’d been denied the police reports of the incident each time she’d requested them. Something about them being sealed, which made no sense. A newspaper knew more about her parents’ demise than she did, and it drove her nuts.
The thought had her blood beginning to boil, and she had halfway crumpled one of the articles when something stuck out to her. There was a man standing at the podium in one of the articles. It seemed like he was holding a press conference in front of what looked like Mina’s childhood home, which she recognized from pictures she’d seen of herself and her parents. The face looked eerily familiar, but how?
She stared, and stared, and stared, and then she finally saw it. He had a lot more hair in the picture, but the weirdly shaped jaw was unmistakable. The shape of his head, its size.
“Elmer f*cking Fudd.”
She looked at the caption on the picture. “Detective Jonas Joseph Jenkins. What did you have to do with the investigation into Ken and Lily, I wonder.”
Umm, so who’s Connie? And how did Mina’s investigation go? So many questions arising as we go along. But we’ll definitely get answers…
