Henchmen (24 page)

Eric Lahti is a programmer, database engineer, and Kenpo practitioner living in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  He enjoys martial arts, coding, and writing.  Henchmen is first novel.  The sequel, Arise, will be along shortly.

He blogs regularly at
http://ericlahti.wordpress.com/
.  Drop by and say hello.  He’s also got a Facebook author page at
https://www.facebook.com/EricLahtiAuthor
.  His website (which hasn’t been updated for a while) can be seen at
http://ericlahti.com
.

Thanks for reading Henchmen, I hope you enjoyed it.

Where were you when
it
happened?

This is the current question of the day from almost anyone you meet.  No one needs to ask “when what happened?” because we all know what the asker is talking about.

It’s used as an ice breaker, like asking what someone’s major was or their sign is.  It can be a challenge: Where were
you
when it happened?  It can also be a straightforward question, a way to find out about someone.

People  still remember exactly where they were, kind of like a lot of people still remember exactly where they were when they found out Elvis was dead (I was six, riding in a car with my mom and asking who is Elvis?) or when the towers came crashing down.

Your answer gives you a certain amount of street cred.  If you say you were in Albuquerque, people act you’re a returning war hero and ask you if you’re OK.  I actually met someone who was in the building when it all went down and barely escaped before the building collapsed.  He was telling the story to people in some bar in Durango and was getting a lot of mileage, and drinks, out of it.  I had to leave before I laughed out loud when he told everyone how he had the beast cornered and would have been able to stop the whole thing if those damned government agents hadn’t screwed the whole thing up. 

If you say you were in D.C., people treat you like a refugee from some genocide in Africa.  If you were in Colorado, you’re less of a hero, but all those southwestern states are, like, right next to each other, right?  If you were in Texas you get to act like you could have stopped the whole thing with your trusty six shooter.  Albuquerque gives you the best props, D.C. is a close second.  You lose more and more cred the further away you were from either of those places.  If you say you were in Minneapolis no one gives a rat’s ass.

I was at ground zero, riding up an elevator with a demigoddess on one side and Dreamer on the other, hoping to hell I didn’t get shot when the doors opened.

I don’t bring this up.

Most people shed nary a tear over the death of everyone in Congress.  Someone went so far, probably someone on 4chan, to put up a picture of everyone in the House dead and dismembered with the caption “You can’t spell slaughter without laughter.”  The idea of killing Congress still brings a smile to a lot of faces, but the actuality of killing Congress still terrifies and enrages.

I still get a chuckle out of it, but I’m kind of a dick that way.

* * * *

Sometimes, I can feel Dreamer in my head.  I’m beginning to wonder if it was a mistake to let him in.  He’s not exactly there there, but he’s definitely there.  That probably doesn’t make much sense.  Oh, well.  I don’t know if I can explain it more succinctly than this: I had a God in my head and my thoughts are still kind of tainted by his thoughts.  My dreams are extremely vivid.  For about a month after we let him out, I felt like I wasn’t sleeping.  It felt more like I would go to sleep and immediately wake up somewhere else as someone else. 

Yeah.  Pretty disorienting.

It took a while, but I finally realized I was jumping in and out of other people’s dreams.  Once I got that, it made more sense and I could relax into the situation.  The end result was I got to get some meaningful sleep because I started shutting off my brain and treating the whole process as a movie, even if it was someone else’s reality I was watching.  In time, I learned to control the dream.  That was always something I’d wanted to learn to do, anyway, and the results were pretty awesome.  I found I could jump between people’s dreams and ride along or change them to suit my own needs.  It was a total rush, even if I couldn’t control whose dreams I was watching. 

Most of the time people’s dreams are pretty bland: sitting at a desk working, fantasizing about the new secretary, driving a fast car, whatever.  Every now and then I’d hit a nightmare.  There are people out there who can dream up some pretty tweaked shit.  I once came across someone who spent the night dreaming about dismembering prostitutes while she (the dreamer, not the prostitute) was dressed in an SS uniform.  I slipped into someone dreaming in North Korea and woke up devastated.  This kid was dreaming of finding ways to rat out his fellow prisoners so he could eat some more food.  You know you’re fucked when you’re dreaming about getting other people killed so you can eat a bit more gruel.  We should nuke that hermit kingdom and be done with it.  It would be an act of pity for the people stuck living there and an act of revenge for their leaders.

Of course, there is the philosophy that holds that all reality is someone else’s dream, so maybe my sleep and wake times are really just someone else’s dreams.

* * * *

Hesperus, Colorado was gorgeous this winter.  We got the kind of snow that buries all the evil in the world and makes you think there’s nothing wrong.  It was the perfect place to dream. 

It’s spring now, so the worst of the snow has melted off, but there’s still plenty on the ground.  The snow isn’t so deep that you can’t travel, but it’s deep enough that the tourists stay away.  The air is crisp and clear in the mornings.  It’s so quiet I can hear someone breathing from across the room so I don’t even have to open my eyes to know I’m not alone and it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest when a familiar voice says, “Good morning, sunshine.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” I reply.  “I need some coffee before I deal with you.”

Wilford Saxton is sitting across the room from me, holding my gun.  He’s wearing his traditional business casual attire: suit, no tie, semi-dress shoes.  The last time I saw this man in the flesh he was lying in a pool of someone else’s blood with a whole whack of tiny arrows in his head.  That was the second time I’d shot him in the face.  It was also the second time someone had dropped a building on him.  Yet, here he is, not a scar on him.  Not a hair out of place or a wrinkle in sight, either.

“What makes you think I’m not here to kill you or arrest you?” he asks.

“If you wanted me dead, you would’ve shot me while I was still sleeping.  If you were going to arrest me, you wouldn’t wait patiently for me to wake up.  You’re alone in here and not wearing your ID badge.  You want something.  Let me get some coffee and we’ll talk.” I tell him.

“Well, well, well,” he says and then sighs.  “You’re still a regular Sherlock Holmes, aren’t you?”

“Can you go somewhere else?  Really, anywhere would do.”

I slide out of my nice warm bed.  It’s not freezing all the time anymore, but it’s still damned chilly in the mornings.  When my feet hit the tile floor it’s like sticking them in a freezer.  Damn.  I need to invest in heated floors one of these days.

“So, Captain Willard, why aren’t you dead?” I ask.

“How many times do I have to tell you?  I’m not a captain and my name’s not Willard.”

I sigh and look around for some socks and a warmer shirt.  I find some socks that don’t match – left is red, right is gray - and a sweatshirt with a three-eyed smiley face and “Mutants for a Nuclear America” written on it.

“That looks like a hell of a party you had last night.” Saxton says.

“What party?” I ask.

“Really, Steven, I’m not an idiot.  You’re a neat-freak and there are beer cans all over the floor in your living room.”

“You’re the neat freak.  I’m organized.” I say.  “What beer cans?”

“The ones all over the floor downstairs.  I always thought you were one of those snooty bastards who only drank small batch beers made by hippies.  I may have to adjust my opinion of you up a few notches.  That was no small amount of MGD you put down last night.  What was it, almost a case?”

For the record, life is too short to drink mass produced beer.  It doesn’t necessarily need to be made by hippies, but good beer needs to be made by people who care about beer.  I don’t think Miller Genuine Draft counts, and I’ve never cared for or bought the stuff. 

Also for the record, Wilford Saxton is an ass.

“Can I have my gun back?” I ask him.

He tosses it to me and I check and make sure it’s still loaded.  My little buddy the .45 Detonics Combat Master still has rounds.

“What’s going on, Steven?”  He can sense that I’m nervous and he’s got his own gun out now.  We may not always get along, and I did once swear to take his head, but we worked together for a long time and have learned to read other.  To be fair, I was peckish when I swore to cut off his head and I get pretty grumpy when I get hungry.  Also to be fair, I’m going to take his head.

“I don’t know, but I do know I don’t drink Miller.  Someone else is in here.” I tell him.

When I hear the toilet down the hall flush and the sink come on I relax a bit.  People may be crazy and violent, but they usually don’t waste time flushing the toilet and washing their hands when they break into your house to kill you.

A seven foot tall woman saunters down the hall and stops to stare at us.  She’s wearing a pair of men’s sweats that barely make it to her calves and a Ministry T-Shirt.  The opposite pair of my socks cover her feet; red on the right, gray on the left.

“Two questions: why are you guys holding guns and where’s the coffee?”

Eve’s eyes are red rimmed and her hair is mussed up.  Apparently a case of MGD has the same effect on demi goddesses that it does on everyone else.  It may taste like ass going down, but the hangover is spectacular.

“Hi, Eve,” I say, lowering my gun.  “You remember Wilford Saxton, you slammed his face into jail cell and I shot him in the head.  We dropped a couple of buildings on him.”

Eve peers at Saxton and recognition slowly penetrates her stupor.  “Oh.  Hi,” she says and punches him.