Fireteam Spectre: “Options all around, Barkeep!”
It was not the sort of way he wished to spend a Saturday afternoon, but it had to be done. Emily was stable but the damage to her body was severe this time, the chemically induced coma was something the doctors needed to help her recover but it was Doctor Evans that put his hand on Jackson’s shoulder, “It was bad this time, you know.”
“She should be dead.”
“In many heroin-related deaths, morphine levels alone do not account for the fatal outcome. It’s been a year since the last episode, but she won’t survive another, Jackson.”
Jackson sighed and turned to face the doctor, an old face he knew from the Army. “Jack, I don’t know how long we can keep her, the hospital isn’t feeling very charitable lately and keeping a bed for someone that might take care of themselves.”
This time he had nothing to say, there wasn’t much for him the doctor left open. He simply let the doctor lead him back to the office the hospital kept for the visiting doctors in order to meet with patients privately. The two sat on uncomfortable chairs and Evans looked Jackson straight on in the eye, “What are you going to do about this?”
“I’m waiting to hear from the insurance.”
“And then?”
His eyes were filled with questions he had too much respect to utter, “I haven’t thought that far ahead, sir.”
“You’re not in the Army anymore; you don’t have to call me that.”
There were a thousand more things he wanted to say but the Doctor kept talking, kept distracting him from himself. But the affect would only be short lived. His phone rang, it wasn’t a number he knew but he answered anyway. “Mister Black? Jackson Black?”
“This is he,” he started, “Have I won the UK lottery from Nigeria or something?”
“I’m sorry sir, I don’t understand. This is Jolene from United Insurance.”
Jackson already had an idea what she was going to say, but he held out a sliver of hope hoping to not be destroyed before she spoke. “I’m sorry; it’s just been a long night.”
“I’m very sorry to hear, but according to our records, your wife was removed from your coverage earlier last year for an overdose of Heroin.”
His heart skipped, even though he knew the result. “I’m on my own then?”
“I’m very sor…”
He never gave the woman a chance to pretend and closed the phone in his hand and stuffed it in his pocket. Jackson’s eyes sought out Doctor Evans and he didn’t need to say a word to communicate what the phone call was about, Doctor Evans knew enough to read the frustration and sadness in Jackson’s eyes to know men like that did not deal in emotion very often to know how to cope.
“I’m sorry Jackson,” the doctor spoke up. “Listen, I have a few favors I can cash in, I can try and keep her here overnight, but I don’t know how much longer than that.”
A thunderstorm of thoughts passed through and ripped through his mind like a Kansas tornado in the bitter winter. Rage welled up inside him, but with nowhere to direct it he only looked at the doctor and simply walked out of the room. Evans knew better than to follow, letting the man leave the office. Stepping to the doorway, Evans watched as Jackson took the stairs to where he presumed would lead him down and out of the hospital.
A quizzical face peered from Emily’s room; Evans nodded to Dean and shifted his eyes to the stairwell. “The insurance said no?”
Evans nodded and the quizzical face turned to something else entirely. “Who do they think they are?”
“Businesses with a desire to make money instead of lose it on a patient with a history of overdose.”
Both men sighed loudly, loudly enough for a nurse to back away from crossing their paths. “Dean, he’s going to hurt someone, isn’t he?”
Doctor Evans’ worried expression was shared by the man Jackson called a friend, Dean Phillips knew the man better than Evans that much obvious but there was no questioning the result if Jackson succumbed to the anger that lived within him. Both men knew it.
* * *
He opted not to drive.
The most sound decision he’s made in years, but as the cabbie pulled into his drive way and Jackson pulled out the bill of fifty he simply walked away not giving a damn about the change. He could feel the eyes of nosey neighbors. The looks all pouring down on him, judging him, giving voice to the accusations that bound across his synapses. They didn’t need to look at them, he knew all their voices. Larry across the street, fat faced and high blood pressure, wheezing as he pointed his pizza stained fingers, Jill the habitual liar spending half the time to scold him about not taking care of Emily but of sound mind enough to tell her lover to run before her husband found her in their backyard. They were all the same, but they all wanted a target to project away their own guilt.
He pushed through the door, silently telling them to blow a goat.
All thirteen steps are matted down with a black mark from the gurney, it would be expensive for the carpet cleaners to get that mark out and he wondered why that was the first thought that came to mind. But it was when he reached the bedroom and found everything still in its place when he wondered why the paramedics never questioned the syringe he used, or why she was breathing in the first place. They didn’t know her, they didn’t know him. No one was looking for favors, but as he filtered through his memory it was like another job to get through.
Jackson sighed, there was nothing holding him together at the moment. His office demanded he take the week off, and with the darkness coming, his mind started to clamor about what was going to happen in the morning if Emily were removed from the hospital, he couldn’t get her the help she needed, not on sixteen and a half dollars an hour.
There were no more favors to call for her. The insurance company just spelled it out for him; he was on his own now. It was time to grow up and face what he needed to face. It was with a dark realization that locked his mind like a steel trap, he marched down the stairs this time he didn’t count them and the amount of steps that took him into his den before he kicked the door from its frame.
The electronic lock on his safe didn’t sing for the first time since he owned it, the smell of gun lubricant did not fill his nostrils with a sweet serene smell that he was used to, either. Only the end filled his mind, the end of the pain. A single round in one magazine, the magazine inserted into his Springfield Armory XD-45 and then chambered.
He sat back in his recliner, his heart slow and deliberate, fitting his lips around the barrel. He could feel a fire behind his eyes start to extinguish, just one action left for Jackson when a silhouette filled the ruined doorway to his den.
“You gonna suck on that any longer, boy? Might as well be a dick.”
He slid the olive drab and black weapon away from his mouth and placed the hammer back home and with tears in his eyes, “What the fuck am I supposed to do, John!”
“Well if you’re gonna take the pussy way out, you might as well tell me now so I can drink to your memory before I have to eulogize your sorry ass. I could be at the bar right now, but no, I gotta be here because you can’t handle your shit.”
The gun hits the ground, a solid thump against the hardwood floor before the man steps into any sort of light letting Jackson see the bearded face of another old Army buddy from another lifetime ago. “You think this is the end, Jack?”
Jackson doesn’t have an answer, John knows it. “It ain’t the end; it’s just another reason to go to the bar, c’mon.”
“I’m not you,” he almost whispers, letting out a whimper of a voice. “I can’t forget my problems at the bottom of a bottle, I can’t…”
“You can’t sit here and think you can drown your sorrows in suicide, jackass. That’s a one way street that leads nowhere.”
“You don’t know what I deal with everyday.”
John takes a seat, never needing an invitation, “Jack, you don’t deal with anything, you just let it build on you until it becomes this bad. Do us all a favor and come to the bar, I have a stool open. Its prime real estate, old dogs like us, we have our place.”
Both men stare at each other, but before a minute can pass the expression turns to an angry glare. “You son of a bitch!”
Jackson’s fist blasts down on John’s face, cracking open the skin on his left cheek just under his eye. Blood swings outward, but without any light the crimson liquid just fades into the blackness.
John doesn’t make a sound, instead pummeling his own fist into Jacksons’ gut making him vomit both blood and bile and the occasional lyric of expletives. “Boy,” he said, wiping the blood from under his eye, “you’re getting soft in your old age.”
From his hunched over position, Jackson regains his composure, spinning his body and jutting out his leg and forcing his heel against John’s chest. Kicking out and pushing down with his leg at the same time pushing the older man down to the ground just in time to vomit blood over the man once his mentor.
“Disgusting, fuck stick. That was uncalled for!” John screams, sweeping Jackson’s legs out from under him. A glass top table cracks under the weight of Jackson’s torso, but he pulls himself up, a broken rib or two no doubt.
Jackson screams, “Fuck you old man!”
“Know your place, young buck.” John climbs to his feet, staring down Jackson Black. “You think just because you pinned on First Class before we got drummed out that you mean something to your old Sergeant Major?”
“John, you were Sergeant Major for three months before they drummed you back down to Master, or did you drink away those memories too?”
John smiled, “I drank away the useless ones, maybe. Who needs the negative shit anyway?”
Bleeding and still wiping the vomit from his chin, Jackson can’t help but laugh. “What the fuck, John?”
“It’s all that hostility, fucker. Had to get it out sometime, how should I know that was a button to push?”
He stares down at the gun on the floor and the split open knuckles starting to feel sore. “What the fuck, John. What am I going to do?”
“Why do you kids keep thinking I’m some sort of shrink? I’m just older than you shitheads, ask Dave, he’s the one with his shit together.”
Jackson laughs, John always had a way with words. The both of them falling to a seat on whatever furniture was nearest to them, they sat in silence for a matter of moments as John surveyed the awards and commendations on the wall. “You don’t hide very well, do you?”
“The shit is locked up, fuck you.”
John shrugged and wandered into the kitchen, only to scream a minute later, “What the fuck is this Zima bullshit! You got sand in your clit these days or what, pansy?”
Jackson sighed, “Buds in the garage, gotta hide it from Emily.”
“Good man, keep those priorities straight.” His voice vanished into the garage, the sound of bottles replacing the noise of the older man’s voice and John reappears with two handfuls of beer bottles and a bottle opener clenched between his teeth. “Like the old days!” He mutters between gritted teeth.
Jackson decides to go for a low blow himself, “How’s Wilma?”
“Fucked in the head, with nowhere to turn. Who fucking names their daughter Wilma anymore? It’s like her hippy parents got too stoned watching the Flintstones.”
Jackson laughed as he shook his head and grappled a bottle of beer from John. Smacking the metal cap against the wooden end of his coffee table, the cap breaks loose, “you’re getting soft old man, a bottle opener for just a beer? What’re you civilized now?”
“You watch your mouth you suicidal pussy.”
Both men laugh loud enough to drown out the sound of John’s phone for the first few rings, “Yeah, what?” He barked into the mouth piece. “Yeah, he didn’t do anything stupid, I told ya he wouldn’t. Oh, right you told me? I don’t think that’s how it went, I coulda sworn I said, fuck it, who cares, what do you want?”
Jackson tried his best to follow what was going on but admitted to himself early on he was more than lost, John wasn’t ever easy to follow, one had to just go with the flow when he was around. Generally meaning going with the flow of the keg he kept in his backyard on a giant brick of ice at all times. “Dean?”
“Yeah, the mother hen, always worrying too much.”
Jackson sipped down his beer, “Everyone is always worrying too much.”
“Shit, fucker, with you around, how can we afford not to?”
They share a quiet conversation with nothing much glaring from the obvious, mostly John ribbing Jackson about his cleaning habits and how a boot looey might have his ass if he saw his house like this. They shared laughs at the fresh face lieutenants they trained for the Army, stopped laughing when they recalled the brothers they lost. It was a roller coaster of emotions when the two of them started drinking, no matter the even that lead to John coming to Jackson’s rescue, the day always returned to normal when one was around the friends that would never falter or judge him.
* * *
John left Jackson an hour after he was sure he was over the thought of harming himself for failing to help Emily. Jackson set on the task of cleaning up and reattaching the door to its frame shortly after John left, no matter the situation Jackson was still left alone with his thoughts, though his mind was clearer it was still unfocused.
A feeling of helplessness was not worth anything to him, it wasn’t worth much to anyone in the slightest but he left the nature of Emily’s chaos control him for a moment and in that weakness a clouded mind made a decision for him, at least John was there to return the favor and slap him out of his hopelessness just as Jackson had done a year before for John.
Almost funny how cyclical life could be sometimes.
There was a small part of their discussion that left Jackson thinking long after John left his house. If there was anyone to blame for the predicament it was his inaction. As it always did, the problems in his life usually came down to his inability to act on reason and try to solve a situation in ways he did not fully understand on his own. The psychology books always said to try and find common ground to reach Emily, the self-help books told him to confront the issue or let it burn itself out if he couldn’t control it.
Both options were a total wash.
But there was an option he hadn’t explored. As he paced through the shattered remnants of his den, he pondered what he could do. One of his plaques had fallen from the wall and just as the coincidence he didn’t believe in, he read the brass and inscription:
“Man is not the creature of circumstances; circumstances are the creatures of men. We are free agents, and man is more powerful than matter.”
–Benjamin Disraeli
The Springfield forty-five caliber in hand there was an entire option he’s been missing. It was so simple, why hurt himself, why let Emily lay damaged in a hospital anymore. If anything it was time for him to grow up and admit it to himself, there was always an option and giving up was furthest from the right course of action.
The confusion was gone now, only the rage and color red filled his heart. Not sadness, not depression, but anger which he needed something to focus on, and inside the bedroom where Emily had almost died — again — he saw it. The syringe that had ultimately saved her life, thanks to Doctor Evans, but it was the stuff that leads to her near destruction that ultimately caused all of this, not his inability to act.
Or maybe it was a combination?
It was all so clear now. He stared and tapped the pistol against his leg and everything suddenly made sense, for the first time in almost a year. It all made sense in what he had to do now.
But, he needed to prepare. Dying wouldn’t help Emily, he knew that now.
* * *
Two hours worth of cleaning and a forty-five minute drive later, Jackson found himself at the hospital. Sitting at Emily’s bedside.
The sound of the hospital staff mumbled on the other side of the two way mirror, Jackson hardly paid them any mind as he held his wife’s hand, whispering prayers of strength that she’d likely scream over. She was borderline anti-religious, almost anti-Semitic at times, but that hatred he was sure came from a disbelief in the idea that she was worth saving anymore. At least these were fights they had during her short periods of lucidity.
Those periods came less frequently these days.
“One more day, baby. It’s all I have, and if you were awake I don’t think I could say that to you.”
“Say what?” Doctor Evan’s voice came across as disbelief.
“John said you found a way to keep her another day.” Jackson spoke, though it meant to sound as a question. “Or was that to keep me off the deep end?”
“No, Jack, I found a way.”
“Thank you, Doc. I’ve found a way too.”
Evans didn’t speak a word, letting the man walk past him one more time. Though he knew it in his heart, ethically as a doctor he shouldn’t know where Jackson intended to go, but the curiosity was too much, “What do you intend to do?”
“Don’t worry, Doc. Everything will work out, you’ll see.”
And with that, Jackson stepped out of earshot, drowned out by the activity of the hospital and disappearing down the same stairwell that he vanished from almost six hours before. Doctor Bill Evans stood silent, not wanting to speak a word, not wearing an emotion on his face. Only knowing what a man of Jackson’s caliber could do when provoked. And someone just prodded Jackson Black with the wrong end of the cherry hot poker and burned themselves without knowing it.
* * *
The Honda’s trunk was remarkably adequate for the job, it was rather surprising. He thought about renting something for this but it was too much effort and he hadn’t enough time to go through the trouble. The dark end of the Flor-Mart was all he needed for the moment, the location and a flat-head screwdriver. The time of night kept things quiet at the discount retailer long enough for business he needed to finish as he pulled five license plates from random cars around the parking lot and tossed them with the rest of the gear in his trunk.
It was stuffed to the rim, almost. He made a mental note to get rid of the trash after he was finished, there was no telling the last time he cleaned out the trunk, it was always out of sight and mind for his tastes to give too much a care.
But at least he was confident that hadn’t been seen by either prying eye or inconvenient camera and made off like a bandit to the wrong end of town for a law-abiding citizen. Stopping nearly a block before where he new Elizabeth would be staying the night, he pulled off his own license plate and replaced it with some poor saps’ piece of metal. It would be just enough to throw off any onlooker from taking down information to use against him. His stepsister would be the least of his problems tonight, it would be the prying eyes that would hurt him most and only the most prepared are the ones that shall be victorious on nights such as these.
Three streets to the right off the main drag three-digit highway takes him into a place where he didn’t feel comfortable entering during the day. The tinted windows kept people on the streets from knowing him as an intruder, driving such a common car kept his ruse in place much better than he’d hoped. Counting four cars of the same model and different colors and years of make as his own put a smile on Jackson’s face just before stopping at the yellow house with trim he couldn’t quite make out in the darkness.
The GPS on Elizabeth’s phone said she was inside, but even that was no guarantee. His stepsister brought Emily into this mess, it was fitting that she’s lead him to the place where he would end it for all three of them. Once and for all, it was his turn to do the hurting and take the control away from the dirty bastards that kept themselves hidden away from the law under the guise of hardcore gangbangers.
They were just kids, kids with no parents, no direction, and best of all, no leadership. It was the best sort of war; fight the untrained man looking for glory with no one to share his story after he died. He dies for his rep, the gang-banger, totally ignorant that his death would end that tale.
These were not the days of mythical heroes and freedom fighters.
These were the days of violence and taking back what another man had stolen.
Despite it all, Jackson Black hadn’t too many cares in the world at this juncture. There was Emily, John, Dean, and Dave, no one else mattered to him. There would be another job, or there would be prison, but at least he knew he would be doing something that mattered, something that most men would only think about and wish another man to do.
He sighed, staring through his binoculars. Counting at least ten men inside, two more stoned and passed out on the stoop and three keeping lookout on the streets. They were definitely the sort of soldier that didn’t live long. The obvious sort, reckless, and not at all stealthy he was an enemy that lived to die at the end of his barrel.
* * *