In
flight
Sunday, August 29, 12:44
A.M.
Time Remaining on the
Extinction Clock: 83 hours, 16 minutes
E.S.T.
I’m a damaged person. I know that about
myself, and it’s part of the reason that my best friend was also a
shrink. We met because of Helen.
Helen had been my girlfriend when I was in
junior high. One September afternoon a bunch of older teenagers who
were high on whiskey and black bombers cornered us in a field near
where we lived. The boys stomped me nearly to death, rupturing my
internal organs and breaking my bones, and while I lay there
bleeding I could do absolutely nothing while the sons of bitches
raped and sodomized Helen. Physically we’d both healed from the
assault. Psychologically. well, what do you think? I got lost in
frustration and impotent rage, and Helen just went inside her own
head and got lost somewhere in the dark.
For the rest of her life Helen was under
regular medical and psychiatric care. Rudy took over her case when
Helen and I were twenty-one, and over the years it seemed like
Helen was making some progress. Then one day I went to her
apartment to check on her and she was gone. Her body was there, but
she was already cold.
What can you do when they turn out all your
lights?
Well, for my part, I learned to use the
darkness. I’d joined a jujutsu dojo a few months after the assault
and over the years learned every vicious and dirty trick I could. I
made myself get tough. I never competed in tournaments; I just
learned how to fight. When I was old enough I enlisted in the Army
and after that I joined the Baltimore cops. Rudy knew what the
attack had done to Helen and me. It had destroyed both of the
people we had been. I lost a lot of my humanity that day and lost
more of it after she killed herself. The process fragmented me into
at least three different and occasionally compatible inner selves:
the civilized man, the cop, and the warrior. The civilized part of
me was, despite everything, still struggling to be an idealist. The
cop was more cynical and less naïve-and luckily for all of us he’s
usually in the driver’s seat. But when things got nasty, the
warrior wanted to come out and play. As I sat in the noisy darkness
of the C-130 I could feel the cop sorting through the available
data, but the warrior wanted to slip into the shadows and take it
to the bad guys in very messy ways.
I knew that I should probably talk to Rudy
about what I was feeling. About Big Bob, about the firefight in
Deep Iron, and about the things we’d found in Haeckel’s bin. I
could feel my self-control slipping notch by notch. I know I’m a
professional soldier and a former police detective and a martial
arts instructor-all roles that require a great deal of personal
discipline and control-but I was also damaged goods. Guys like me
can never assume that self-control is a constant.
Rudy was working as a police psychiatrist
before he got hijacked into the DMS. It’s his job to keep his eye
on a whole bunch of front liners-men and women who have to pull the
trigger over and over again. As Rudy is so fond of pointing out,
violence, no matter how justified, always leaves a mark. I’d killed
people today, and I wanted to find more people to kill. The urge,
the need, the ache, to find the people responsible for this and
punish them boiled inside of me, and that is not the best head
space to be in before a fight.
Not that I wanted to lose my edge, either,
because the damage I owned also made me the kind of fighter that
had brought me to the attention of Church. It left me with a useful
kind of scar tissue, a quality that gives me an edge in a fight,
especially when the fight comes out of nowhere.
You see, we don’t always get to pick our
battles. We don’t often get to choose the rules of engagement.
Sometimes a nasty bit of violence comes at us out of the blue, and
it’s not always of our making. We neither ask for it nor subscribe
to it, but life won’t ask you if it’s fair or if you’re ready. If
you can’t roll with it, if you aren’t programmed to react when the
hits come in on your blind side, then you go down in the first
round. Or you can cover up and try to ride it out, but getting
beaten into a corner is no way to win a fight. The sad truth is
they won’t tire when they’re winning and so you’ll still lose, and
you’ll get hurt more in the process.
Then there are those types who thrive on
this sort of thing. If someone lands a sucker punch they dance out
of the way of the follow-up swing, they take a little taste of the
blood in their mouths, and then they go after the bad guys with a
wicked little punk rocker grin as they lunge for the throat. It’s
hard to beat these guys. Real hard. Hurting them never seems to
work out, and threats aren’t cards worth playing. They’re wired
differently; it’s hard to predict how they’ll jump. You just know
they will.
The bad guys have to kill them right away or
they’ll turn the whole thing around and suddenly “hunter” and
“prey” take on new meanings. These types don’t bother with sucker
punches-they go for the kill. They’re addicted to the sweet
spot.
I understand that kind of person. I get what
makes their fractured minds work.
I should.
I’m one of them. The killer in me was born
in a field in the back-streets of Baltimore as booted feet stomped
on me and the screams of an innocent girl tore the fabric of my
soul.
I CLOSED MY EYES and in my head the face of
the warrior was there, his face painted for war, his eyes
unblinking as he peered through the tall grass, waiting for his
moment. He whispered to me, Take it to them. No mercy, no quarter,
no limits.
It was bad thinking.
But try as I might, I couldn’t find fault
with it.
The plane flew on through the burning August
skies.