Chapter 1
The Old Man
Gotta find the boy before I bleed out. For 50 years I’ve been trying to pass on this burden, to find the right person to protect it. I’ve failed that mission. My time is up, I have to give it to someone else before the Cabal gets me, and they will get me. The Cabal has killed everyone I have ever called brother. I don’t know how they found me this time, but it doesn’t matter. They underestimated me. They underestimated the old man. I may look old, but I stay in good shape and I have a few tricks up my sleeve that they aren’t expecting. The pain in my side just flared up, ow. I’m using my hand to try to stop the light but steady blood flow. It would be nice to pull over and pressure wrap it, I think as I feel the precious blood seeping between my fingers, no time for that now though. I’m old enough to be honest with myself. Real self-honesty that can only come with age and hard-earned wisdom, and I can tell no amount of pressure is going to fix this wound. None of that matters now though, gotta find the boy.
I’m careening through traffic in a stolen Cabal truck trying to get to the grocery store where the boy works… The boy’s name is Oliver. The only one to pass all of the tests... Well, all of the tests except for one. The test that some of my brothers considered the most important: The intelligence test. He truly failed that one, and then some. Oliver is as dumb as a bag of rocks, I’m not even sure why I screened him. Something about him just always felt right. He was old fashioned, sincere, and honest. He truly wanted to help people. The only thing holding him back from being amazing was his IQ, which was a very low 69. An IQ of 69 meant he had a mild mental disability. If he didn’t have that disability this kid could have been a world leader. Instead he was a bagger at a grocery store. Cursed by some congenital mistake. Day in and day out helping people out to their car with their groceries, and all with a genuine smile on his face.
I had screened so many young men and women… So many… All of them, one by one, had failed. Petty, jealous, greedy, mean spirited, cracking easily under pressure, eventually they all showed their true face. The times are changing. It used to be easier to find candidates when things were simpler. People use to just be happy to have a home and a family, not anymore though. Now people can’t even stand in line to buy a pair of sneakers without attacking each other like rabid beasts. Hell, I had seen people attack honored friends and family just for having different political beliefs. Don’t get me wrong, greed and malice have always existed, they were just… rarer. If I couldn’t have the perfect candidate, I would take the loyal one, the one that should he ever falter and use its twisted power… He would at least try to do something good with it, I doubt she would let that happen, but he would try. I could feel it in my own bones, he would try. Oliver is far from perfect, but he has a good heart, and that is what the world really needs, more people with good hearts.
The grocery store is coming up now and I can already tell I’m going way too fast. I yank the wheel to the side to try and avoid the curb and the stop sign in my path, but the blood on my fingers makes the wheel slip in the opposite direction, and inadvertently barrel through a few signs, some bushes, and finally into a parked car. I would be pissed if this truck was mine, ha ha oh well, the Cabal can afford a new one. Gotta get to him, it’s 11am on a Thursday so I know he is working. I know his schedule like the back of my hand and the boy is like clockwork. The boy is a dam in a flash-flood of malfeasance, he would rather fall on his sword than miss a day of work, I know he is here. I have the package wrapped in a towel that is getting bloodier by the second under my arm. I need to make sure no cameras see it. I have to pretend the only reason for the towel is to stem the flow of blood. I can’t leave any clues for the Cabal.
As I’m running across the parking lot I hear squealing tires behind me, damn the Cabal is fast and efficient, I’ll give them that much. On the other hand they were just outsmarted and defeated by one wily old man, HAHA! As I enter the grocery store and look around for Oliver people start screaming. Probably because I’m leaking blood all over the place and I have a 1911 combat pistol dangling from my right hand. My left arm and hand are busy holding the towel to my wound, the towel with the package tucked neatly inside of it.
I spot Oliver on his usual lane, bagging groceries like any other day. That boy is a sentinel. No, that’s not right. Oliver is 25 now, he is no mere boy. He is a man. A man of honor, and soon the man who will defend the most dangerous item in the world. Everyone starts screaming and running as I head towards Oliver. Not Oliver though, he keeps doing his job, bagging the groceries that come down the conveyor belt. I don’t know if he continues despite the screams because he is doggedly determined or just too stupid to notice. Either way it doesn’t matter, he is the rock in the storm.
I jump on top of Oliver, my entire large frame knocking him to the ground. I may look like a feeble old man but I’m a warrior, I’m dense. I make sure to cup my hand behind his head as we fall so I don't accidentally give him a head injury. Once we both hit the ground I carefully unwrap the towel between us, wary of the cameras in the store. I know where every camera is because I have surveyed this store a thousand times. I carefully remove the lamp from inside the confines of the towel and tuck it into the pocket on the front of the boys apron. I have planned this maneuver hundreds of times, I was just praying and hoping I would have never have to use it. I was hoping to have died with my secret. I was hoping to be buried with the lamp so eventually it would be forgotten with the passing of time. The Cabal have forced my hand though.
Once I have the lamp inside of Oliver’s apron I look down at his fierce face, he is confused but not scared. My left hand is still cupped behind his head so I crank his face next to mine and whisper the most important thing he will ever hear, “Keep it secret, Keep it safe. Tell no one, never use it.” Now that my arm isn’t holding the towel to my wound my blood is flying all over Oliver. There is so much more I want to tell him… I wish I could tell him that I’m proud of him, that he is the son I never had, that he has impressed me every day, that despite his disability he is a beacon of the human spirit, but I don’t have time for that. The cameras are watching me and they can’t know that I have entrusted Oliver with this burden, they can’t know what he means to me.
Strong hands grab my shoulders and lift me upwards, and a second pair of hands rip the pistol away from me. When they lift me up I close my eyes and play dead. I barely crack my eyes open enough to see two members of the Cabal wearing black suits and I’m sure they have fake law enforcement credentials on them. I let my legs out a little bit on purpose and they have to both grab me before I hit the floor, amateurs... They’ve just made a fatal mistake, you never grab a rattlesnake by its tail. I grab the closest ones bicep gently and pretend I’m barely coming into consciousness, and that I’m just grabbing him for support. I push the sleeve of his suit up and expose the flesh of his forearm and then I do something they don’t expect. My body comes alive, straining every muscle I have I yank my body towards him, his body towards me, and I take a bite. My teeth shred the man's skin like so much paper and his blood rushes into my mouth.
A tiger is always most vicious in his death throes and I know I don’t have a lot of time left. The other agent grabs my head to try to dislodge me so I turn my face towards him and spit out the blood and chunks of flesh from my mouth right into his face and eyes. I don’t know if he is blinded or just disgusted but he fully lets go of me to try and wipe the gore away, another mistake. I feel my strength waning with the blood loss but I still have enough in me for a haymaker of epic proportions. I dump 50 years of hatred and fear into my punch and deliver it right to the bloody agent’s face. He falls down and the his head bounces off of the tile floor of the grocery store making a sound like a gunshot. By god I may have killed him! I’ve still got it whew-hoo!
Fighting isn’t always about who the best fighter is, or who has the biggest muscles. Sometimes it’s about who wants to win more, and who is willing to do the darkest things. Today that man is me. Time to make a hasty escape, I have to lead the trail further away from Oliver. I look to the front of the store but there might be more Cabal agents out there, better take the back route. I glance at Oliver one more time as he is rising to his feet but I’m well past out of time, so I have to run. I’ll miss you Oliver. I make sure to grab my trusty old 1911 before moving on and head towards the back of the store. I have to enact the last part of my plan to throw off the Cabal. This plan should set them back years of searching, maybe forever.
I head to the back of the store and into the storage area, I’m passing by scared employees everywhere. Maybe they think I’m here to shoot the place up, I don’t know, not my concern. Once I get to the very back of the store there is a box truck there that has just backed into one of the truck docks to unload produce. The driver is just getting out and sliding the rear storage door of the truck up. He doesn’t know what’s going on at the store yet. The unfortunate bugger turns around to find me, the bloody old man, pointing a 1911 combat pistol right at his face. “Hand over the keys if you want to live” the truck driver is too stunned to move, “NOW!” I shout. He hands me the keys and I swish my gun to the side indicating that he should go and he takes off running.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
I hop into the cab worried it might be a manual transmission, I haven’t driven one of those for over 30 years but it’s just an automatic. I slam the truck into gear and gas it, I feel weird movement and notice the back of the truck is spewing heads of lettuce and bundles of carrots everywhere. Whoops I forgot to close the back, haha, oh well. Maybe it’s the blood loss but watching the vegetables fly all over the road as I swerve back and forth is really making me laugh. As I’m watching the vegetables in my rearview mirror I notice at least ten black SUV’s following my trail, that has to be Cabal operatives. Fuck it, let’s leave some more bread crumbs! I keep jerking the wheel back and forth to spew more vegetables all over the road. My destination is only a few miles away.
As I careen into the worst neighborhood in town a hobo with a grocery cart is a little too slow to get out of my way. I try to jerk the wheel away from him but I wasn’t quick enough to miss his cart which goes airborne. “HAHA, TWENTY POINTS!” I’m not sure where I got this point system from or why a hobo’s grocery cart constitutes twenty, but I won’t argue with myself. I have to do things to stop myself from passing out from blood loss, and playing a fun game might help. The house I’m looking for is just ahead so I swerve the truck hard and pull the emergency brake. The truck spins sideways and gets on two wheels for a moment before falling back down onto all four tires and finally stopping.
I reach into my jacket pocket for one of my final surprises that I can leave for the Cabal: a medium sized piece of Semtex, a plastic explosive. I’ve already jammed a pre-programmed five minute detonator into it. I stick it up under the console of the truck so it won't be visible upon a quick inspection and flip the switch to turn it on. All someone would have to do to turn it off would be to flip the same switch that I just used, but they will never find it in time, I hope. I left the truck parked right across the middle of the road horizontally so the Cabal following me will have a hard time getting around it, and I head towards the house, my future tomb.
The home is large and dilapidated, a two story home with many bedrooms. It hasn’t looked good in over twenty years, and I’ve made sure of that. I own the home through a shell company that occasionally gets sued over the status of this very house, but greasing the right palms can make anything happen in the legal and political world. The house has peeling paint, broken and boarded up windows, and visible graffiti all over it, and the last I checked is an active drug den for crackheads and dealers. I’m really getting woozy now from the continued slow but steady blood loss but I don’t have much further to go. As I walk up to the front door I notice the front yard is absolutely littered in cigarette butts, used syringes, and even the occasional brass casing from a fired round.
The front door is cracked open, the occupants don’t even bother to lock it. Why would they though? No one in their right mind would enter this door uninvited. When I enter the dark house it takes a second for my eyes to adjust. There is minimal light in here, it’s coming through in slants and shafts through some of the boarded up windows. The inside is much like the outside: disgusting. There are sleeping drug addicts everywhere curled up on dirty sleeping bags. I hear the sound of feet shuffling coming from the back of the house as one of the dealers comes to see who just opened the front door. I still have the 1911 in my right hand and I don’t want to scare the young pup just yet so I put it slightly behind my back.
He comes barging into the entry room like he owns the place, I suppose in his mind he does. He is going for the imposing look. I guess that look helps him keep his usual customers in line, or maybe it just makes him feel good about himself. He looks like you would expect, covered in tattoos, white ball cap slightly slanted up, baggy pants, some stupid t-shirt with shit on it that I don’t care to understand, and a track jacket with a hood which he has up, resting on top of his ball-cap. “Nigga, you done walked into the wrong fuckin house. You don’t look like you here to buy my shit, so you best get steppin” he says and sneers at me as he grips the handle of a cheap pistol that has been hastily stuffed into his waistband. I can’t help but laugh at his pejorative, seeing as how this particular pretend tough guy is white. “Actually young man, this is my house” I say calmly. “Old man, you lost as fuck, this is Rooster’s territory, and if he comes out here he is going to cap your ass.” Young people give up information to freely, he just let me know there is at least one more drug dealer in the house and the second drug dealer is armed. “Actually I’m going to cap him” I calmly say, and bring the 1911 out from behind my back.
When the drug dealer sees my pistol he starts to draw his but he isn’t quick enough and I put a few rounds through his chest. The gunshots wake up some of the crackheads and they scramble out through the door behind me, but most of them are too high to notice or care. Maybe some of them are even hoping this is the time they get put out of their misery. I walk over to the downed drug dealer who is busy choking on his own blood “Young man, it isn’t nice to deal drugs. Also FORTY POINTS!” I’m still confused as to where I’m getting these point values from, but if a hobo’s grocery cart was twenty then a gangster drug dealer is at least forty. Time to clean up the rest of the riff-raff, the last thing I need is to get shot in the back by some drug dealer while I’m finishing up my life’s work.
I head towards the back of the first floor and start hearing heavy rap music so I head towards the noise. The noise leads me to the farthest room from the front of the house. The door to the room is closed all the way and the music coming through it is still loud. I bet good ole Rooster didn’t even hear me shoot his doorman. I try the handle but it’s locked so I start banging on it. “GO AWAY” a female shouts through the door. I keep banging until I hear the music turn off. “This better be good” the same female says. A young woman who looks maybe 18 but is probably younger opens the door which actually opens up into quite a nice little office. There are lavish rugs overlapping all over the ground, a pile of car stereos in the corner, a leather couch with a brand new gaming system in front of it, and a large cherry oak desk in the corner. Behind the desk sits an African American man dressed in what can only be called ‘modern pimp clothes’. The young woman has gone back to stand by his side and by the look of her pupils she is high as hell.
“Hello there, are you Rooster?” I ask him in my most pretend fragile old man voice. “Who da fuck is asking?” he says back in a deep voice. “I’ll take that as a yes” I say, I swing the gun around and Rooster’s hands fly below the desk he is sitting behind, probably to try and retrieve his own firearm. I pull the trigger first, before he can grab whatever he is going for. His brains paint the young woman next to him and the wall behind him. “ONE HUNDRED POINTS!” Minor drug lords are worth at least one hundred points, right? I look at the scared young woman covered in blood, and bits of skull and can’t help but feel bad for her. My sympathy wins out and I go over to her and lift her chin up “Stop doing drugs and letting men like this use you. You are someone important. Go to school, get a job, raise children, and teach them to be good. Now run away or I’m going to shoot you in the head.” The woman runs off, out of the house, good.
I reach under the desk to see what Rooster was looking for and come up with a sawed-off double barrel shotgun, sweet. I head back to the front of the house to peek out the front door and see exactly what I was expecting to see. The Cabal SUV’s are all pulling around the truck I left in the middle of the road and starting to surround the house. I look down at my watch, any second now. The Semtex I left in the truck explodes and flips two of the Cabal SUVs over onto their sides, men get out screaming and on fire. The inside of one of the vehicles is painted in blood. “FIVE HUNDRED POINTS!” The rest of the vehicles in the Cabal convoy barrel through the downed cars and start spreading out, they won't bunch up again.
Next to the door frame I knock on the moldy drywall in a few places, slowly moving my hand back and forth and knocking until I hear the hollow space I put there years before. Once I find it I lean back and shoot one of the barrels of Rooster’s shotgun at the wall with my eyes closed. Sharp pieces of wood cut my face and chest but I’m too tired to care. I reach into the hole I just made and pull out a metal box. I pop the clasps on each side of it and reach inside to find my prize: An exact replica of the lamp I just gave to Oliver. Once the Cabal see this thing they are going to go crazy.
I get close to the door frame again, and lean my head slightly around the corner. The Cabal are out of their trucks now, taking cover and ready to fire on me. I push the nose of the shotgun around the corner and then pull the trigger, firing blindly. The barrel is probably too short to hurt them at this range but might as well keep them honest. Then I stick my hand out the door with the lamp in it and yell “HOLD YOUR FIRE!” I walk half my silhouette into the frame of the door and look out, with the lamp still held high in my hands. “If you want it, come and get it!” Then I duck back inside and rounds pepper the door frame where I was just standing. Normally I would be dead in a situation like this, high velocity modern rounds would fly right through the low quality wood and drywall and shred me up something fierce, but when I had this house built I had a thick piece of steel embedded into the drywall that I’m currently standing behind right now. So instead of being shredded I hear the comforting sounds of bullets dinging off of steel.
Once the incoming fire stops I start walking towards the back of the house. As I walk I turn around and fire my 1911 through the open doorway to stop any Cabal agents that might be thinking of entering. At the back of the house, around a turn in the hall is a small closet for the water heater which hasn’t worked in decades. I pull the panel off of the water heater which has a keypad underneath and I type in the password. The water heater starts making a strange noise and then it pulls itself back into the wall behind it and exposes a stairway that leads down into a hidden basement.
I march down into the room and lights automatically turn on, “Authorization Black Sky” I say out loud and a small pedestal in the center of the room starts rising from the floor. Once it rises about four feet up it stops, and a loud hiss emits from it as a small metal door opens on the front of it. I reach my hand inside and pull out the dead man detonator sitting on a charging station, and I clamp my hand over the trigger. All I have to do now is to let go of this trigger, and the whole house is going to blow. I’m going to wait though and take some Cabal bastards with me. On one of the sides of the room, a portion of the wall slides up exposing 8 older model televisions, they all have different views around the house from hidden cameras, and two of them are black. Some of the cameras must have gone out during the years since I had them installed.
I can see Cabal soldiers armoring up and preparing to raid the house. Some are heading to the back and side entrances and some are stacking up at the front door. They are communicating via radio to each other to synchronize their entry. I watch all three teams throw flashbangs into their respective entrances and wait for them to pop before rushing inside. On the front lawn four additional different Cabal teams begin to rush up to the house to join their cohorts already inside. At the back of their vehicle barricade I see a distinguished looking Japanese man, something about him gives me the creeps, and makes goosebumps form on my flesh. I look back to the screens and see one of the Cabal tactical entry teams has almost found the entrance to my hidden basement.
I back up a few steps and face the stairway as the heavily armored men come bursting into the room and surround me. I have the lamp in one hand now and the dead man switch in the other. “There are so many Cabal soldiers on this property right now, you guys are worth at least ten thousand points” I say as I show them the dead man switch. The lead Cabal operative notices what it is and tries to key his throat mic to warn the others “EVERYONE GET BAC------”. Then the world went up in flames.