| Taking some time |
[Jun. 13th, 2008|09:04 pm] |
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A new child is born unto the 'havoc family. Time off is being taken... I'll pick up my thirty days tomorrow. |
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| Shanghaied (thanks, Mom... you bitch) |
[Jun. 11th, 2008|11:33 pm] |
He looked at the coldness of space and cursed his mother.
She was the one who got cozy with the recruiter... the Chief Petty Officer (or, GOD to any sailor) made sweet eyes and sweet talk, and she was more than willing to sign his birth certificate and life contract over to the Navy.
So, here he was... magnetically clamped to the outside of a heavy cruiser resurrected from the "mothball" fleet because our side was losing the war, hundreds and hundreds of tonnes of newer ship spreading silently across the void in jagged blooms of debris. No time to integrate new gun turrets to the main trunks and machinery of the ship... so, the quick, dirty NAVY solution was to attach the multi-missle launcher to the outside of the ship, on a pivoting mount that began life as a civilian heavy-lift crane.
And, no time to create a life-support environment for the "turret gunner." So, he was in a long-term environmental suit, with a tube stuck up his dick for pissing and a box taped to his ass for crapping and a straw near his mouth for "protein/vitamin enriched supplement, semi-solid," which had the consistancy of tapioca without any redeeming positive taste. Stuck magnetically to his duty station for 30 hour ship-board day shifts, ready at a moments notice to launch four nukes into the empty spaces they travelled through. |
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| Quickly |
[Jun. 10th, 2008|11:38 pm] |
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Must post a quick entry -
I knew a man,
I knocked him flat.
It was a truly horrendous spat.
The bastard went and drank my beer
A perfect pour that I held dear.
And now he's bleeding on the floor.
Screw you my friend, you'll pay for more!
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| Business Darwinism |
[Jun. 9th, 2008|10:46 pm] |
In 3 minutes and 23 seconds, Argyle will be exiting the train station and catch the moving sidewalk. At an average speed of 4 KPH (barring power inconsistancies or brown-outs) it will take him 12 minutes to reach the Financial District and exit at Front Street.
There is a plus/minus of 2.4 minutes baked into these statistics. It is with that unknown time delta in mind that I already have my sniper rifle positioned. Lodged between a duct-work vertical stack and a spinning exaust diffusor .86 kilometers from the target point, the snout of my flash-masked recoilless Shinji-Colt travrses 42 degrees of field. The ice-projectile will be travelling downward at 62 degrees to make optimal contact with Argyle's head.
And then, a quick break-down, a strip of the body glove so reveal my business suit, the explosives in the depleted uranium case to destroy the evidence... by the time a ballistics expert examines the body, the ice projectile will have dissolved, leaving only the ripped path in the flesh of Argyle.
I consider the joy of the moment: I will petition for his parking spot. It will be me that is called upon to peform the forecast analysis of margin trends, and me the field will contact during the project rollout. All the impediments to my path to the Executive suite will be remov.....
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"... don't know what happened to him, Mr. Argyle. He was just kneeling there, smiling. Bastard made it so easy for me, it was almost like clubbing a seal or something."
"And, that's the smoke I see on the top of that high-rise?"
"Yeah. We torched everything up there. He's a crispy critter now, all right. We hauled ass, no one saw."
"Great job, Ken, really great. Hey, let's get together for 18 at Champion next Saturday... what do you say?"
"Champion! Absolutely, sir."
"Great. I'll have my assistant set it up..." |
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| Running heat |
[Jun. 8th, 2008|11:35 pm] |
It was ninety degrees as he pulled into the parking lot. The teenagers fooling around on the tennis courts watched with a tolerant irration as the white minivan roll past , akin to the look they might have given to a particularly large splat of bird crap landing on the windshield while they drove.
He passed them and parked some distance away, near the entrance to the track. He stepped out of the car, grabbed his sports drink and MP3 player off the seat, eased the door shut and slowly made his way up the stairs to the chain-link entrance to the quarter-mile oval. Absently, he pointed his keys back over his shoulder and locked the car.
The heat and sun made his muscles feel much looser than usual... he did some regular dips and bends, but the pulling sensations that come with being an old bastard were much eased. He rotated his head on his neck, put the earbuds in place, took a last chug of the drink and placed it on the ground, fastened the player on his shirt and began to run.
The red-brown spongy material of the track made starting much easier than running on the sidewalk. However, it pushed a great deal of the sun's heat back at him, and he could feel the sweat start, and the not-unpleasant feeling of baked skin as his legs began to stretch around the curve of the oval.
With the help of his selected music tracks, he quickly found his breathing rythm, and began to drift away from the strenuous sensations of the exercise. He let the beat carry him forward, while acknowleging that he was being affected by the great oven of the day.
How many guys are out pounding a track today? How many guys on the other side of forty? Even those kids screwing around are sitting right now, and any of them could have been a mistake of yours from freshman year in college. The sweat was pouring down, now, and his shirt was soaked. Still, moving well.
Well, don't get too prideful, pal. All it takes is an infarction and you're nothing more than a load of meat with greying sideburns, baking in the sun, . He snorted and picked up the pace.
What the hell... the life insurance is all paid up. |
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| Russian Roulette is too easy... Part 1 |
[Jun. 7th, 2008|11:42 pm] |
"What's the run?" Murphy asked from the driver's side. He had a large Dunkin's iced coffee sweating in his fist, and the cover wasn't on tight enough so that when he tilted it, whitish-tan liquid splattered on his Red Sox tee-shirt.
"Billerica... headin' out to see the 'Ricans, man..." Saad replied, while continuing to remove CDs from the holder strapped to the visor above him. He'd give a cursory glance across the artist and title, and then throw the disk over his shoulder into the back seat. "Dude, you've got nothing here..."
Murphy removed the GPS from the compartment between the seats. "Fuck you, 'nothing.' You better not have tossed the Dropkick Murphy's, you dick."
"Haven't found them yet, Murph." More silver circles arced across the seat backs.
"Yeah., they're there." Murphy typed onto the screen of the GPS, and got a distance to Billerica. "The run is forty seven miles, man." He stuck the elbow of his coffee-bearing hand on the door armrest and raised his large posterior, easing a faded tan wallet with "Guiness" embroidered across it from his torn back pocket. "I think I still got $20 from that last landscaping job... yeah, there it is. My $20 says we get there in... ah, say thirty five minutes."
Saad paused, then stuck a thin finger out and hit the eject button on the car stereo. "You dumb ass!" He started to laugh. " The fuckin' Murphy's are in the player already!"
"So what? What's your call on this."
"What did you say? Thirty five? I say... forty two. You good for gas?"
"Yeah, three quarters should do it."
"Hit the music."
The sound of bagpipes screamed out of the huge speakers filling the back window of the black '95 Monte Carlo. Saad raised his paint-splattered work boots and rested them on the dashboard. He grabbed the community pack of Marlboro's, tapped the filter on the back of his hand and snapped a match into flame. He lit the cig, whipped the match out and let the wind from the open window drag the sliver of wood out of his hand and out of the car.
Murphy sucked contentedly on his dripping coffe as he navigated through Weymouth, heading to Rt. 95 North. "Call your old lady, man." He said suddenly, eyes shifting to his passenger.
Saad scowled. "Why?"
"Because this means you're going to be fucking late, and I don't want to hear your goddamned pissing and moaning whan you call her from Billerica and tell her you're not gonna be able to pick up your kid from fucking daycare." Murphy paused to spit out the window. "That's fucking why, you goddamned Portugese prick."
Saad raised his eyebrows and frowned, considering. "That's a pretty good reason, Murph." He nodded to himself, and took out his cell.
"Goddamned right, it is." Murphy belched self righteously. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 13th, 2006|03:46 am] |
*untitled* Short story exercise for Dragonmount.com WritersChapterhouse
It was the cold Kapi despised the most.
The old man had led them high past the tree-line to a cave. Within the cave, far to the rear and just visible as a gleam against the darkness of the stone, was a vein of amber that seemed to glow with a light separate from the mundane illumination of the torches.
Bonestone.
But, Cursed Eye, it was cold… even in the piss-water sunlight of the ever-long days at this forsaken edge of the world.
Kapi shivered and wiped at the raw underside of his nose with the mucus-crusted edge of a rough-woven sleeve. His other hand rested on the leather-wrapped hilt of his scabbarded sword and he sniffed through his blocked nose at the necessity of removing the fingers from the glove on that hand. He noted the bluish tinge to his nails and he flexed it absently.
He closed his eyes for a moment in resignation and pivoted in place. Instead of the far dim flicker of the campfire visible at the center of the encampment at the mouth of the cave, and the wan memory of flames that unfortunately failed to convince his mind it was any less vulnerable to the temperature, the steady wind began to gnaw at his face with icy teeth.
He opened his eyes, seeing the blasted field that ran sloping gradually down from his position, a long bare patch of rock and thin soil that supported gray-green scrub and orange lichen as it rolled to the sheer and abrupt drop of the mountainside. On the day they had arrived, panting at the thin air and sweating torrents despite the cold, the old bastard had raised an eyebrow and pointed to a startlingly blue flower seated in solitary majesty on the bed of lichen.
“That is us,” he said, cryptically. “Rock-blossoms.”
“That is us,” Zuro mimicked in a sing-song falsetto, his face red and melting and his black eyes sharp. “Pieces of dung mountain villagers who marry their sisters.” The other rough men of their party shared crooked grins and breathless chuckles. Kapi felt his own lips twist in an automatic mimic of his fellows: their acceptance of him was his only path of survival. Zuro paused in his climb, puffing like a bellows with one hand on his hip and the other grasping the scabbard of his long knife.
Zuro’s long knife, bladed with translucent amber, which would be the death of them all.
Following that first hard sleep after pitching camp, Kapi had carefully walked back to visit the blue flower. The image of its single and autocratic bloom had struck a chord within him. He found, however, the plant slumped over in death, proud azure petals blackened and scattered across the orange pad of the lichen.
The old man was calmly rinsing the blood from his mouth after a morning “talk” with Zuro when Kapi found him. The seams of his bruised mouth lifted slightly at Kapi’s description. “Rock-blossoms live for a day, bandit boy.” He spit more blood, then rose slowly from his crouch and went to get food.
Kapi’s eyes regarded that some spot, now, then flicked up at the thin belt of red-orange glory just visible beneath the swirling gray clouds which marked the final retreat of the sun for the day. The wind began to rise and its invisible jaws seized more and more of his exposed skin. He sighed and wrapped his black scarf around his nose and mouth.
Cursed Eye, it was cold.
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