The following may stay just the way it is today. OR it might become nothing more than a short, short story. If that happens the entire short story will probably be posted here.
HOWEVER.........If it turns into any kind of book only the first 50% or there a bouts will be posted here on the forum, the rest will be included in the book that will be sold at some whopping, huge, humongous, stratospheric price.
One last time! It is entirely possible that at some point only a portion of the following story will be FREE!!!!!
Additionally, as is always the case, this draft is rough, or rrrruuuuffffff, take your choices. Yes there will be misspelled words, yes there will be too many comas, too many run on sentences, and most certainly problems with syntax and grammar!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Folks I feel terrible having to write what I did up above! I am forced to come off as some kind of jackass. You all have my most sincere apologies for having to coming off like some idiot.
Just as an aside, I am not in the best frame of mind right now, so if I am offending anyone, please cut me some slack.
Choices
Chapter 1
As a teenager I had been forced to read Moby **** by Herman Melville. It might have been because it was written in old English or maybe because I was a shallow teenager but the book didn’t impress me all that much.
What did impress me and stuck with me over the years were the first few opening lines; “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago- never mind how long precisely- having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.”
Every once in a while when I was introduced to someone or some group, even if I was using a bogus name for security reasons, the back of my mind wanted me to say, call me Ishmael. The more dangerous or tense the situation the more I wanted to say, call me Ishmael. I can’t tell you why, because I don’t know why.
By the time I was twenty-nine I had seen some of the watery world mentioned by Melville, but I had seen far more jungle, desert or urban settings than watery ones.
I know how it sounds. It sounds like the cheese may have slipped off the cracker a little. Considering what I had been doing with my life since high school, and particularly the last few years there is ample justification for that thought. Not only had the cheese slipped off the cracker it had fallen to the floor with a splat.
It had been pounded into me that to succeed you needed to go to college. I won’t dispute how true that is. But it didn’t take much of a genius to see that paying for that education had some draw backs.
I wasn’t lost or directionless, I was middle class and afraid of spending twenty years of what amounted to indentured servitude paying back all that money.
I can’t really blame anyone for what happened, it was my own fault. My dad had a younger brother named Mike. Mike was only ten years older than I was and he was quite the character. He had done a 6 year contract in the military and then went into some private sector organization. He was a lot of fun.
My dad and he took me hunting and fishing from the time I was old enough to walk on my own. Somewhere my mom has a picture of me sitting on my dad’s shoulders while he was fly fishing for trout. In the back ground, Mike was making a funny face.
Mike encouraged me to join the JROTC in high school so I joined. For a retired Marine E-8 my instructor sergeant Schubel was a pretty good guy. I wouldn’t say he was recruiting for the military, but he was never slow in pointing out the value of serving.
As my senior year approached I still hadn’t been able to pin down exactly what I wanted to do. One day sergeant Schubel asked if I would like to take some psychological testing that could show what my aptitudes were.
That made sense to me. If I found I was good at something or had a leaning toward a certain career then I might be able to pin down what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
The first testing was more like a social event. There were a couple hundred teenagers being tested at the same time and the atmosphere was more party than anything else. The testing itself was easy enough. I was told to answer quickly and honestly, and that’s what I did.
A week later I was called back for some further questions. I was the only one there that time. This time it was a lot more complicated but the two guys doing the testing and interviewing were friendly and I didn’t feel pressured or anything.
With graduation on the horizon I was invited by the same people who did the testing for an all-expenses paid weekend in Florida to do some follow up testing and a possible job interview.
I wish I could say I had some sense of foreboding or a feeling of monumental changes in my life, but I didn’t. I suppose I was too dumb and full of cum to be worried.
As it turned out, the testing showed one very valuable linchpin fact, or trait. The trait? They called it a “certain moral flexibility”.
One thing led to another and now at twenty-nine I was adjusting high tech night vision and a listening device. Next I pulled a flexible tube attached, and wand to a valve and screwed that onto a canister from my pack. The canister was the same color and printed with the logo of a common self-sealing fuel canister for backpacking stoves that contains two pre-pressurized gases: isobutane and propane.
In my canisters the isobutane and propane had been replaced with a combination of gasses that wouldn’t cook your meal but did a good job of cooking a person’s brain.
This particular operation was just challenging enough to make it interesting. I had a fondness for paragliding and always liked to include my personal passions in my assignments when possible.
Of course the description of paragliding found online at the Wikipedia sight; “Paragliding is the recreational and competitive adventure sport of flying paragliders: lightweight, free-flying, foot-launched glider aircraft with no rigid primary structure.
The pilot sits in a harness suspended below a fabric wing comprising a large number of interconnected baffled cells. Despite not using an engine, paragliders flight can last many hours and cover many hundreds of miles, though flights of one to two hours and covering some tens of miles are more the norm.
By skillful exploitation of sources of lift, the pilot may gain height, often climbing to altitudes of thousands of feet.” Left something to be desired.
The description was true and accurate as far as it went. What it couldn’t convey was the experience of doing it on a moonless night and landing on the roof of a building a few hundred feet from its neighbors. It sported cameras that were monitoring all around the property. In this case all the cameras were pointing out away from the house and not up at the roof.
My pride in making a whisper quite landing was diluted considerably when I landed and was almost blown off the roof by AC/DCs - Highway to Hell played loud enough to vibrate the shingles on the roof.
No way was I going to let it spoil my feeling of accomplishment in hitting such a small target in the dead of a windy night!
A quick turn around a vent pipe with my climbing rope, and I dipped over the side. The rope was securing me upside down and I could look into the bathroom through the window from above.
It was dark inside with just enough light from another room for me to be certain it was empty. The window was open and inch. I suppose for ventilation. I pulled on my respirator and held a canister with a valve that was activated by pulling a trigger. With my other hand I extended a long thin wand with a nozzle on the end inside the bathroom. I kept a slow count until I had enough gas pushed into the room.
I pulled the window the rest of the way open. It was just big enough for me to ease through. At the doorway I bent the wand and let it peek into the hall in both directions. I cleared the back of the house the same way. Standing in the darkened hallway right outside the party room I pulled the trigger and let the gas quietly permeate the whole room. A quick peek showed me everyone inside was taking a little nap. At the doorway to the kitchen I did the same thing. Soon the whole house was asleep.
The gas didn’t knock people out instantaneously. In the first few seconds they felt drowsy, with a tremendous feeling of wellbeing. Then it made them very drowsy. So far I had used the same gas on half a dozen missions and it pretty much did the same thing to everyone. A couple of whiffs and you felt tired but great. Then if you were seated you just drifted off to sleep. If you were standing you just eased down onto the floor with a goofy smile and fell asleep.
I was cautious and made sure everyone was breathing slowly but regularly. If someone seemed only half out of it I gave them another dose right from the nozzle.
When I was sure no one was going to wake up any time soon I pulled my pack off and spread the contents on the kitchen table. I took the photos I had been given and made sure I knew who was who. Soon I had fingerprints on all the parts and pieces that needed them. Next I hid various items in out of the way places. Some were duct taped under the sink out of sight. With the appropriate fingerprint and even a hair caught on the glue side of the tape. When I had everything planted, I carefully bagged up the other items with the appropriate finger prints on them.
I cleaned up and checked the area twice before easing back through the bathroom window, closing it down to an inch.
On the roof I stowed the rope and began laying my fabric wing out to make sure nothing was tangled. It took another ten minutes for the wind to gust hard enough for me to launch off the roof. I couldn’t get much altitude, but I managed to get well beyond the property boarders before I was on the ground folding my fabric wing up and stowing it in my pack.
Pulling down my night vision gear I did my best to make sure I left no foot prints or broken twigs or turned over rocks as I left the area. Walking away I had to grin. The party crowed was going to wake up slightly more hung over than usual.
When I was far enough away I pulled out a ground cloth, wrapped it around me and slept to false daylight. I had a twenty mile hike ahead of me but it was pretty country, and a gorgeous morning so I didn’t mind. Munching a granola bar, sipping water, I caught myself humming the music, then singing John Denver’s version of Take Me Home, Country Roads in a low voice.
Choices
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire