Post by The Evil Biscuit on Feb 4, 2010 0:11:49 GMT -5
I'm bored, so I thought I'd vomit up some vignettes for my current characters.
______________________________
Weekend Warrior
My name is Daniel Huckabee. I'm forty-six years old. I have gout in my right foot, and every so often it'll flare up and cripple me, like shoving a cactus spine into my instep. I teach tenth-grade Honors English at Chester Arthur High School, in a quiet little Virginia know about, my soon-to-be sixteen year-old son smokes pot and hates my guts, and to top it all off, I found a gray hair in the sink this morning.
No need to mention I'm one of the world's most notorious and sought-after mercenaries, right?
My superintendent doesn't give a shit about me. He looks past the fact that my classes have had a 16% increase in overall test scores in the past two years and instead bitches to the Board of Regents about the fact that I skip all of my inservice days, I leave town on the weekends, and have one of the highest absence rates in the district, even though I'm still present for 75% of the school year. If only he knew why I take so much time off. He's a little shit of a man, bald and squatty, and his face is so greasy it smells. I would know; he has a habit of getting nose-to-chin with me when he's angry. I could slit his throat so fast, he'd finish his sentence before he realized he was dead.
My wife... heh. She thinks I'm too inept, too jaded to the fact that our marriage fell apart ten years ago, that I don't know she's putting the hump to Jim Phelps down the street. I invited that guy for beer and barbecue once. He told me n*gger jokes and couldn't hardly finish them without stifling bouts of unbridled guffawing. I wanted to slam his head onto the grill and watch the skin peel off his cheeks. Maybe one day I'll show her how I bugged his house, show her the tapes of them copulating on his bed, on his weight bench, in his kitchen, on the antique, authentic Persian rug he claims to have bought in Kibek but really ordered from a Canadian wholesaler specializing in imitation rugs. I tracked down his credit reports for that little gem. Maybe if I showed her what he REALLY bought on Pay-Per-View, she'd rethink where she lets him stick his business. I know more information about Jim Phelps than his lawyers, but she still thinks I'm too stupid to program our VCR.
My kids. My class. You've never seen such a great group of kids. Brilliant students. They soak up knowledge like a great dry sponge. I suppose that's one skill I have that doesn't involve killing people; I can teach. These kids are engaged, they love my class. On Fridays we talk about world affairs, politics and wars and the like. For tenth-graders, they're surprisingly attuned to the issues. For all their wild hairdos and bizarre slang, there are moments where I see their true colors, their real intelligence. They're smart. They ask me questions about being in the Special Forces. They ask if I killed people. I say yes. They ask if I enjoyed it. I lie.
My kid... my son... I tried to raise him right, but the job got the better of me. Some things you just can't balance. Leaving him with his mother was one of my worst mistakes. She was too busy rutting with Neighbor Jimmy to keep him in line, so he went and learned on his own. Now he listens to this horrible music, hangs out with horrible kids, wears horrible clothes, smokes that pitiful weed - and then comes home and tells me I'm the one who's f*cked-up. He watches reruns of Lancerow the Detonator on TV; you know, that old syndication about the 'mercenary for justice' who fights crime, beds the most beautiful women, drives a fancy sportster with missiles and lasers, and spits off hackneyed one-liners as he does it. I want to sit him down and tell him that's not what it's really like, but I'm not supposed to know what it's really like, so what can I do?
And what is it really like, you ask? I gave ten years of my life in the Rangers, worked my way up from a pimply-faced runt to a stone-cold killing machine, transferred into companies that didn't exist, went places I've never been to, did things I've never done, and at the end of the day, I went home with a paycheck that couldn't even cover my house note. So I retired, signed my muzzle order, and walked out the door... right into the waiting arms of Joyeuse Anti-Insurgency Services.
In two months, I was back in action, doing the same things I did in the service, but this time I was getting paid, and finally I felt like I was getting somewhere. This was my calling, my purpose in life. I was... I am... good at killing people. I'm an artist. I do other things, too, of course - specialists don't make as much as handymen, you know. I can fly a chopper with the best of them, and I've done my fair share of espionage as well. But Joy, they had other plans. They already had their fair share of soldiers-for-hire; they wanted someone for the really nasty stuff, things they couldn't be caught messing with. So they sent me back to Virginia and told me to get married, because that was a good cover for a top-shelf contract killer. They'd call when they needed me.
That's the story, really. Last week I shot a diplomat between the eyes from eight hundred yards and was back home in time to feed the dog and write up my lesson plans for Monday's class. The week before I quelled an uprising of seditious rebels who were poised to topple a major government with incriminating pictures of one of its party heads. I can't say which one, but if you've seen the news, you can probably guess. I left Friday at 3:30 and was back in the door at 8:00 Sunday night. If there's one part of my life I can make work, it's that. I was raised to be punctual. I do a job, I clean up, and I'm home in time for dinner, even if it is cereal in front of the TV while my son is toking up in his room and my wife is 'jogging' around the neighborhood.
A real weekend warrior, right?
______________________________
Weekend Warrior
My name is Daniel Huckabee. I'm forty-six years old. I have gout in my right foot, and every so often it'll flare up and cripple me, like shoving a cactus spine into my instep. I teach tenth-grade Honors English at Chester Arthur High School, in a quiet little Virginia know about, my soon-to-be sixteen year-old son smokes pot and hates my guts, and to top it all off, I found a gray hair in the sink this morning.
No need to mention I'm one of the world's most notorious and sought-after mercenaries, right?
My superintendent doesn't give a shit about me. He looks past the fact that my classes have had a 16% increase in overall test scores in the past two years and instead bitches to the Board of Regents about the fact that I skip all of my inservice days, I leave town on the weekends, and have one of the highest absence rates in the district, even though I'm still present for 75% of the school year. If only he knew why I take so much time off. He's a little shit of a man, bald and squatty, and his face is so greasy it smells. I would know; he has a habit of getting nose-to-chin with me when he's angry. I could slit his throat so fast, he'd finish his sentence before he realized he was dead.
My wife... heh. She thinks I'm too inept, too jaded to the fact that our marriage fell apart ten years ago, that I don't know she's putting the hump to Jim Phelps down the street. I invited that guy for beer and barbecue once. He told me n*gger jokes and couldn't hardly finish them without stifling bouts of unbridled guffawing. I wanted to slam his head onto the grill and watch the skin peel off his cheeks. Maybe one day I'll show her how I bugged his house, show her the tapes of them copulating on his bed, on his weight bench, in his kitchen, on the antique, authentic Persian rug he claims to have bought in Kibek but really ordered from a Canadian wholesaler specializing in imitation rugs. I tracked down his credit reports for that little gem. Maybe if I showed her what he REALLY bought on Pay-Per-View, she'd rethink where she lets him stick his business. I know more information about Jim Phelps than his lawyers, but she still thinks I'm too stupid to program our VCR.
My kids. My class. You've never seen such a great group of kids. Brilliant students. They soak up knowledge like a great dry sponge. I suppose that's one skill I have that doesn't involve killing people; I can teach. These kids are engaged, they love my class. On Fridays we talk about world affairs, politics and wars and the like. For tenth-graders, they're surprisingly attuned to the issues. For all their wild hairdos and bizarre slang, there are moments where I see their true colors, their real intelligence. They're smart. They ask me questions about being in the Special Forces. They ask if I killed people. I say yes. They ask if I enjoyed it. I lie.
My kid... my son... I tried to raise him right, but the job got the better of me. Some things you just can't balance. Leaving him with his mother was one of my worst mistakes. She was too busy rutting with Neighbor Jimmy to keep him in line, so he went and learned on his own. Now he listens to this horrible music, hangs out with horrible kids, wears horrible clothes, smokes that pitiful weed - and then comes home and tells me I'm the one who's f*cked-up. He watches reruns of Lancerow the Detonator on TV; you know, that old syndication about the 'mercenary for justice' who fights crime, beds the most beautiful women, drives a fancy sportster with missiles and lasers, and spits off hackneyed one-liners as he does it. I want to sit him down and tell him that's not what it's really like, but I'm not supposed to know what it's really like, so what can I do?
And what is it really like, you ask? I gave ten years of my life in the Rangers, worked my way up from a pimply-faced runt to a stone-cold killing machine, transferred into companies that didn't exist, went places I've never been to, did things I've never done, and at the end of the day, I went home with a paycheck that couldn't even cover my house note. So I retired, signed my muzzle order, and walked out the door... right into the waiting arms of Joyeuse Anti-Insurgency Services.
In two months, I was back in action, doing the same things I did in the service, but this time I was getting paid, and finally I felt like I was getting somewhere. This was my calling, my purpose in life. I was... I am... good at killing people. I'm an artist. I do other things, too, of course - specialists don't make as much as handymen, you know. I can fly a chopper with the best of them, and I've done my fair share of espionage as well. But Joy, they had other plans. They already had their fair share of soldiers-for-hire; they wanted someone for the really nasty stuff, things they couldn't be caught messing with. So they sent me back to Virginia and told me to get married, because that was a good cover for a top-shelf contract killer. They'd call when they needed me.
That's the story, really. Last week I shot a diplomat between the eyes from eight hundred yards and was back home in time to feed the dog and write up my lesson plans for Monday's class. The week before I quelled an uprising of seditious rebels who were poised to topple a major government with incriminating pictures of one of its party heads. I can't say which one, but if you've seen the news, you can probably guess. I left Friday at 3:30 and was back in the door at 8:00 Sunday night. If there's one part of my life I can make work, it's that. I was raised to be punctual. I do a job, I clean up, and I'm home in time for dinner, even if it is cereal in front of the TV while my son is toking up in his room and my wife is 'jogging' around the neighborhood.
A real weekend warrior, right?