I feel like a murderer.

This edit of Apocalypse is a bit harder than I thought. I need to make our unlikely heroes more unlikely, and by that I mean they need to struggle more. They need to be less successful.

More of them, in other words, need to die. 

I don't like killing characters. Not because of sentiment; I would kill major characters if I didn't need them for the plot. I'm just bad at writing death. 

But my dev editor is very, very correct. This battle is going to have to be stacked against my protagonists and people are going to have to die. 

The darkest passage I've ever written:

From the work in progress:

From the door, I watched Lessa take out out a handsome canister of tea. “We scavenged in the town when nobody was looking," she nattered on in her childish cadences. The camping store came in handy. We got our sleeping bags there, and the stove. We should have grabbed the jerky, but we went for the mixed nuts instead.”

“I have water here. Can we boil it on the stove for the tea?”

“Oh, yes,” Lessa said. ”There’s Maura. You might want to get away from the door.” I walked toward the truck and watched a taller girl of about fifteen stalk into the building, holding another small lantern. Like Lessa, she looked a little too thin. 

“You’re not parole, are you?” Maura scowled at me after I brought the water a short distance inside the building and shifted back into the doorway to talk. 

“No. To be honest, I don’t think they come around here any more,” I assured her.

“She’s Annie,” Lessa explained. “She can’t come in because she’s afraid she’ll make us sick.”

Maura sighed. “You know how we get food around here?” 

“No,” I said warily, “how do you get food around here?”

“We eat wild dogs. We trap birds. If we’re really hungry, we eat leaves and grass, but they make us sick. You don’t look gay, but if you did, I’d offer to have sex with you for a trade. I definitely would if you were a guy. It wouldn’t matter how sick you were.” Maura popped the last piece of jerky in her mouth.

“Has anyone given you gold for a trade?” I asked, playing with an idea similar to what I had done in other places.

“Are you kidding?” Maura scoffed. “If we had some gold, we could go down to town and someone would take us into the work house. House and feed us for life.”

I was puzzled. “Why would you have to pay them to get them to take you in to make money for them?”

“They say they wouldn’t get a return on us if they didn’t. They want a guarantee against us running away. Lots of people run away from the workhouse, and then they’ve lost all that food they’ve put in the tummies.” I personally thought those people who bought into the workhouse were getting ripped off.

When the water started to boil, Lessa scooped water into each of the dollhouse cups she had set down, and put a pinch of the tea in each. She threw a bag of jerky into the boiling water and fished pieces out with a fork.

“Would you want to go to the workhouse?” I inquired as the girls sat devouring their jerky, almost too fast to chew it.

“I had to kill a man the other day,” Maura shrugged. 

I felt lightheadedness flow over me as I sat down in the doorway. “Why?” 

“He tried to strangle her,” Lessa chimed in. “They were having sex. She flipped them over and banged his head against the concrete one too many times.”

I sat too stunned to speak. 

“We dragged him into the bushes,” Maura shrugged. She took a bite from her jerky. “We’ve had to fend for ourselves most of our lives. Living like this isn’t much different.”

The Enforcer

WARNING: The story below contains swearing, attempted murder, murder, and lots of blood.

Sometimes I write short stories with little plots to help me develop characters. One of my favorite characters is the evil Archetype (immortal) who calls himself Boss Aingeal. This story is from his point of view as an enforcer in 14K, a Chinese street gang in Chicago, hence the warning above.

Two of the other characters -- the lawyer Luke and the young man with the braid, Allan Chang, show up in later stories and novels. I love all of these characters.

*************

Boss Aingeal, as he called himself, glanced around his office on the second floor of an Asian grocery in Chinatown. Sleek and austere Chinese furniture in black and red accented the textured cream walls with cinnabar stripes. A series of swords – jian and dao, straight sword and saber, hung on the wall to make a point – this office belonged to an enforcer, a Red Pole. Although he usually negotiated rather than killed, Boss figured that the pole was represented as red for a reason.

It suited him well, the Chinese provenance of the furniture reminding him of the only woman he had ever loved.  He knew she was likely still alive – as an Archetype, she could have survived the damage he had done. As an Archetype, he could survive otherwise fatal damage as well – or had thought he could.

The evil he had done in his lifetime had caused him to crumble like the façade of an ancient building. The man in the mirror was a hideous parody of the proud Celt he had once been – pale whitish-pink hair that hung like hags’ hair, sagging cheeks, and bags under his eyes. The wages of sin, he thought, were truly death.

He heard a knock on his door, and he wondered if it was one of his compatriots in the Triumvirate. The Triumvirate didn’t transport to Chinatown often -- when not in InterSpace, as Archetypes should be, the others in the Triumvirate played with power and influence in high places – in banking, in the courts, to skew the odds toward those already with money and power, who could be trusted to wield control. No blood on their hands, but no less evil. No less deadly. They, too, had aged for their evil.

He strolled over and opened the door; a tall, chubby liaison with shaved head and western business suit stood there. Boss recognized him as Nua Li, a lower ranked messenger for the gang. “Red Pole,” the man in the role of Straw Sandal said, and nodded.

“Sit, sit. Let us have tea,” Boss welcomed.

After the preparation of tea in the ornate Gong Fu style, which Boss had developed some skills in, the liaison said, “May I speak to you of business?”

“Of course,” Boss responded, steepling his fingers, “What business shall we speak of?”

“We have a loose cannon among the 49’s. Big mouth. Talking about our uh, -- more shadowed business in the gambling den and how he’s so important in it.” The man, Boss noticed, fidgeted with his teacup.

“That could get us in trouble with the garda, no?”

“He brags that he deserves your job, especially as you are lao wai.” The liaison spoke in a hushed voice.

Boss chuckled, “But I am literally lao wai – I am old, and I am Caucasian, and I am most certainly an unusual hire in this business. He did not call me ‘lao wai’, most certainly?”

“He called you gao bizi, ‘high nose’.” Boss thought that the man’s words certainly weren’t too insulting, but only because Boss wasn’t one to get insulted easily. And the only way for the man in question to get the job of enforcer was to kill the current enforcer, which was Boss.

“Ah, a bendan, then? If he can kill me, he certainly deserves my job.” Boss sipped his tea thoughtfully. If it was the man Boss was thinking of, he certainly was a bendan, an idiot, for thinking he was a match for a killer like himself.

“It is not the bragging itself that we are worried about.” A long pause from the liaison.

“So, Straw Sandal, because you visit me, I assume there is a sanctioned hit on Chang Li. Does this come from the head of the gambling den or from Mountain Master himself?”

“You know these things do not trickle up from the foot of the mountain. I bring an official sanction by the Mountain Master himself.” The liaison took out a piece of thin paper, written in Cantonese and English, and placed it on the table.

“Really? For bragging?” Boss raised his eyebrows, and then read the paper before him. “Ah, the truth will out,” he murmured. “Screaming and beating people in the gambling den. That could lose us customers. He should take that to an alley.” Boss consulted the list once more – “Bragging about beating his wife. Has anyone told him about his culture’s belief in mianzi?” Mianzi, or ‘face’, was the key to Chinese character, meaning status, prestige, and the like.

“Chang Li wants to be a big shot, but other than that, buyao lian.” The words the liaison used, buyao lian, meant ‘does not want face’. Boss suspected that the hierarchy tested him with Cantonese words to see if he really understood the language or not – little did they know he spoke fluently the Cantonese he had learned 150 years before. Boss kept his little secret, and he learned much about 14K he perhaps wasn’t supposed to.

Boss could not ask the Straw Sandal why he fidgeted with his cup, or the man would lose mianzi. So he mused, “What’s the catch?”

“You must kill him by Monday, before the divorce becomes final.” Divorce? Ah, the Lis. How considerate to give the long-suffering wife a survivors’ package with the bank account and possible insurance policies.

Boss burned the contract in a candle flame, showing his acceptance. Inside, however, he felt his stomach had knotted.

Four and a half days to kill Chang Li, Boss considered as he walked the few blocks to the river. He could have transported to the river in another life, but now his energies needed to be conserved to give him more time. As he looked up the street, he saw a midsized man with straw-blond, almost white hair, wearing a pale-grey suit and looking as young as he had 5000 years ago. “I have four days to accomplish the impossible, and Luke Dunstan shows up,” Boss muttered.

“Need some legal help?” Luke inquired as he sized Boss up. Boss seethed – Luke Dunstan, the Saxon male Archetype, was his nemesis, as well as protector and probable father of the chaotic Lilith. Lilith who set off thousands of years of chaos and wantonness just by showing up at a ritual and getting Boss’s fool son to choose her over Eve.

He would settle that score soon. “Dunstan,” he said, peering down. “I’m working on a job.”

“I know. Li Chang.” Dunstan, Boss noted, used the American form of the name. “Your liaison Nua Li can be made to talk. Don’t fault him; he has a wife and kids, and I’m the only one he talks to. I’m his lawyer.”

Boss tried not to sputter, although he knew who had more face in this conversation, and he hated it. “Could you slow down the paperwork for Li Chang’s divorce? Or better, could you pull it?”

“Can’t do it. I put the papers in the pipeline, and it’s set to be settled first thing Monday.”

Boss realized that he didn’t have four days – he had three days. Two days to plan, and Sunday to execute. “Can’t you transport in and grab the papers for me to hold?”

“No can do, don’t want to break any rules.” This from the man on the side of chaos. Boss simmered as Dunstan strolled away, calling over his shoulder, “If you need me, just drop in.”

Boss stood there for a moment shaking as Dunstan strolled off. Then he took two deep breaths – it wasn’t good to lose one’s cool if one was the highest-ranking Caucasian in Chicago’s 14k Triad.

Boss decided to catch the water taxi at Ping Tom Memorial Park at the pagoda. It stood, a one-story open structure of wood, unpainted. It did not look like any of the pagodas he’d seen in China. Perhaps it was Japanese, or Vietnamese. Maybe someone made a joke at Chinatown’s expense. Maybe modern Chinese pagodas were minimalist, he considered.

The loop through Chinatown would allow him to survey the riverside for a good spot to kill Chang. He decided Chang’s demise had to look like an accident. It could not look like suicide, or Chang’s life insurance would not pay. It could not look like murder, or Mrs. Chang would be considered the prime suspect and the estate might get tied up.  And maybe attention would focus on him.

There, in the heart of Chinatown, not far from where he had started his excursion, he saw the perfect place – a metal sign pole six feet tall, holding a sign for boaters, advertising Lawrence’s Fish and Shrimp. It would be construed as an accident if Chang slipped, hit his head on the pole, and fell into the river. As long as Boss could time it such that the taxi would not be passing by at that moment, it would work fine.

His time on the boat now free, he considered how to attract Chang Li to the site. Chang wanted Red Pole, and the only way to become Red Pole was to kill the current one. All Boss had to do was pass a note to Chang insulting his manhood. It was an open secret Chang had sired no children, and that another man sired his wife’s son. The finishing touch would be suggesting that Chang would never beat Boss Aingeal in a duel to the death. That would work well, of course, unless Chang Li was a coward or a man of at least minimal intelligence. The former might be true, not so much the latter. At the same time, nobody ever died overestimating his foe.

Boss looked in the other direction to see a young man sitting, with long dark hair in a braid, bare dusting of facial hair in the shape of a goatee, almond-shaped eyes. He wore a black tank top and jeans with ripped-out knees. The man looked straight at him.

The man scrutinized him and said, “I think I saw you ‘round here years ago. You were younger then.” His voice spoke of years of drugs, years of vice – but he smelled clean, like a little babe.

“We were all younger then,” Boss grumbled at the man. “What is the point?”

“14K,” the other said. “You work for them.”

“Do you think a man like me would run around a dirty gambling den and break knuckles to facilitate collecting debts?” Boss asked, indicating his pristine black suit, subtly Asian in cut and expensive.

“You need to get out,” the man said. “That work’s gonna kill you.”

“You are correct, young man.” Boss turned to watch the riverfront.

The exit lay ahead at the pagoda. Boss climbed off the boat as it moored at the dock; the man with the braided hair climbed off ahead of him. He noticed a blackwork tattoo peeking out from under his sleeveless shirt. Brilliant work, but not Chinese, he noted. Especially not gang Chinese – no dragons. Boss wondered idly if his lack of gang tattoos set him up for potential challenges.

Boss walked up the walk to the sign he had identified as his crime scene. He noticed that the man with the braid and the tattoo walked ahead of him. As he got close, he saw that Chang Li stood at the post, examining it closely. The young man stopped to talk to Chang. He looked nothing like Chang, so the youngster with the braid wasn’t the son. His voice sounded flat and terse; Boss wasn’t close enough to hear the words. As he approached, Chang broke out in his legendary fury and tried to push the other man into the river.

“Good try, but I can swim now. You can’t do that twice to me,” the younger man said in a defiant tone that suited his gravel voice. He then walked off, dodging a grab from Chang. Chicken, Boss considered, using the common slang for a young male prostitute. The young man’s swagger looked right. Maybe Chang liked chicken.

Boss strolled up, his hand clamping hard on Chang’s shoulder, and hissed in his ear, “Sunday. Six AM. Be ready to die.”

“You be ready to die.” Chang hissed and tried to grab for Boss as he had the younger man. Boss dodged – for all his aging, he had lost none of his agility, speed, or strength.

As Boss walked back to his apartment, he considered that maybe the Chinese were correct about the stars aligning. He had done two days of preparation in one day.

Boss’s apartment was no less pricy than was his office, but the décor skewed toward the Celts he represented – handmade bobbin lace curtains, rough-hewn antique table from the 1700’s, tweed pillows on a new, but rustic green couch; ornate meerschaum pipes and Waterford crystal in a display case. It was a man’s apartment, despite the crystal and bobbin lace – it was an apartment for the man he had passed as before he started rapidly aging. The apartment depressed him now.

InterSpace, his true home, depressed him worse. He considered the uneven black-on-black pebbledash walls that should have comforted his Celtic roots but didn’t. His mind wandered, and reminded him that ‘pebbledash’ also meant diarrhea in Irish slang, which sounded about right. He thought of the white floors and the eerie lighting that showed only in the immediate vicinity of an Archetype. He thought about the lack of sound, the lack of Archetypes to visit, as they were solitary creatures. He thought of the lack of humans, who were at least amusing to watch.

Boss took a deep breath and thought of how he could refine Chang’s death. There were different types of death, he thought, the main ones being deaths that are not suspicious-looking, and deaths meant to send a message. Chang’s was one of the former, and although it would be tempting to give him a showy death, as he had declared himself a rival for Red Pole, it would cause problems for the widow and, thus, his assignment.  Innocuous deaths took no less time and effort to enact than did ornate ones.

It was fortunate that Boss had chosen six AM on a Sunday. That eliminated the interruption of passers-by and water taxis. He would prefer a foggy morning, which would be hard to come by in July. The site he had picked was far enough down from the park that he’d be unlikely to be disturbed by the Sunday morning tai chi crowd – not that he expected those ancient fellows to interrupt him.

All perfect, serendipitously. Ordained by the stars.

Still, he felt his stomach knot.

Sunday came, and Boss was ready. Archetypes did not need sleep, but he had meditated to calm the knot in his stomach. Then he reviewed the plan, over and over, until it became a pattern in his head. He wanted to do Chang’s death right, because he had the odd notion that Mountain Master tested him.

Boss arrived at the sign fifteen minutes early, to make sure that Chang did not have the same idea. No, Chang had not arrived. Boss reviewed his moves – clock Chang on the head, throw him in the river, first putting grease on the pavement and shoes to suggest he slipped on some grease. He even had the bottle of peanut oil to break at the scene to give it veracity. He would not bother with gloves – Archetypes had unrecognizable DNA.

Boss waited, his irritation growing. Chang Li, as always, was late -- half an hour late. Typical for Chang.

Finally, Chang Li swaggered up, carrying a baseball bat. China had designed the most elegant martial sword arts Boss had seen, and Chang had brought a baseball bat like a street thug. Thugs did not become Red Pole.

Chang started the fight by brandishing the baseball bat as he charged Boss. Chang tripped and fell headfirst into the pole. Boss deftly removed the baseball bat from Chang, so that any question of another party was obliterated. Boss watched in amused horror as the blowhard with a possibly fatal head wound groaned and staggered backward into the river.

This did not just happen, Boss thought. This total oaf did not take my kill away from me.

As he stood shaking his head, he felt a presence beside him. He turned to find the young man from the boat ride, his dark eyes burning. “I’m sorry you didn’t get your kill, asshole, but my dad’s always been a bit of an idiot.”

“Your dad?” How did Boss miss that?

“Stepdad, actually.” Oh, yes, Boss remembered – the self-styled general fired blanks. Chang’s son was not really his, hence the wider eyes and the stronger nose. If Boss had missed that, what else had he missed?

Boss glanced up the river and spotted the elders fashioning the flowing movements of tai chi in ragged rows. Had they heard the commotion?

“Watch out,” Chang’s son yelled as he ran from the scene.

Boss looked up to see the liaison Li Niu walking up to him. He saw a glint of metal to Li’s right side. A Dao, short saber, was likely what he tried to conceal. “Cac”, Boss muttered in his native Gaelic. “Shit.” He sensed a betrayal here – did it go as far as Mountain Master himself?

Boss had no time to contemplate, and no weapon but a baseball bat. “Plá ar do theach!” he screamed, which played as well in Chinese as in Gaelic, as it cursed the man’s house.

Boss swung the bat to meet Li’s swing, and sword cut into bat. The sword stuck in the wood, and Boss wrenched it out of Li’s hands and threw it in the river, destroying his pristine accident scene. “Why?” he yelled at Li, all suavity gone.

“I’ll say it in English,” Li sneered. “Because you are old. Because you are white. Because you have no home, no mianzi. Because Mountain Master promised me Red Pole if I could kill you.”

“My friend, you do not understand. I am over 5000 years old. Don’t assume you’d be the first to try to kill me, Nua Li, nor the last to fail.” Boss grabbed the other man by the shoulders and transported them to the Mountain Master’s office, which he had been to only once, leaving the peanut oil bottle behind.

This would be a splashy death, Boss decided as he teleported two swords from Mountain Master’s near-priceless collection, and threw one to Li.

As Boss battled the seriously outmatched man, he felt an unaccustomed twinge of pity. A waste of a good man, Boss thought, who had likely been talked into ambition by the Mountain Master. Li Nua might have lasted two weeks until the next contender for Red Pole challenged him – probably the Master’s plan as well. Finally, inevitably, Li Nua fell, killed by a slash to the abdomen followed to a mercy stroke to the neck.

As he hacked Li’s limbs and head off with the Master’s 600-year-old heirloom sword, painting the ornate room with blood, Boss remarked it was a shame that powerful men used good people like Li Nua as pawns. He considered the number of men like Li Nua he himself had used as pawns himself over the years.  

Boss carefully arranged the body parts into the rough outline of a body, with the exception of Li’s right hand. He ended his gesture with a resignation letter written in blood and in Cantonese. He weighted it to the desk with Li’s right hand, middle finger raised. He sensed this was over the top, childish even, but he was so weary.

He turned his back on his work and transported to InterSpace, there to go into exile.