This site provides writing advice. If you're writing a superhero novel or comic book, please also read our superhero writing articles.

Would you like to subscribe to our RSS feed?

Ryan was staring intently at the security monitors, looking for a threat that wasn’t there.  Right now, he clarified to himself.  There might have been more security than the project needed, but he hadn’t been fired yet.  It was still his job to watch and wait.   Word had it that Security actually got off the emergency budget cuts pretty light, even though everyone had lost a lot of hours and there was much griping about (temporary) pay-cuts.  He didn’t know what everyone was complaining about.  Pemetex still paid far more and demanded far less than the Marine Corps.   He wasn’t sure what South Africa or Belgium, say, paid their soldiers, but the foreigners probably increased their wages even more at Pemetex than he did.   The downside, of course, was that he worked with a lot of foreigners whose main military experience was maintaining apartheid or apologizing for their existence.  Once a Marine, he thought…

His phone rang.  He picked it up and said only “Hello.”

“Oliver, is that you?”  The voice sounded like he might have heard it before.

He gave a non-committal response, “Who is this?”  He wasn’t sure who was calling, or why, and giving away anything before knowing at least that much was not safe.

“Jim.  Jim Brannigan, from the Army.”  He didn’t add “you do remember me, right?” but his tone indicated that he was thinking it.

“This is Oliver.  What’s it been, eight years?” He was pretty sure he had worked with him in Iraq or Afghanistan, not Iran or Somalia, but the hell-torn sandpits blurred together after a while.

“Five,” he said with a bit of sourness in his voice.  “We did patrols in Isfahan.  Iran, remember?”

Isfahan… Isfahan… he strained to think about what he had done and who he had seen there.  Every recruiter did some ground patrols, to maintain a cover and learn what their caped partners and regular soldiers did.  It was probably a good thing, too… no one became a Marine to put “recruiter” on their business card, even though it meant working with interesting (and often deranged) individuals that exposed themselves to far more power and stress than anyone was meant to have.  His tasks ranged from deadly serious (helping a caped Level 0 overcome a Level 3 capekiller), to  strange (obtaining three tons of eucalyptus for a Martian birthday celebration), to downright bizarre (explaining football to an alien whose only idea of sport was giving prey ten seconds to run).   It took a lot of painstaking work to avoid the problems that would otherwise arise from having super-powered individuals (and aliens, especially) in an otherwise conventional military.

“Yeah, I think I remember being in Isfahan.”

“Definitely.  I remember seeing you because it was right after the Blue Persian decimated the east side of the town.”

“That definitely rings a bell.”  That attack precipitated a hunter-killer response.  Two days, one body.  It wasn’t the most distinguished point of his service, but it mattered enough to the survivors of Isfahan.

“Are you still in the Marines?”

“Retired, three years ago.”   He didn’t feel he needed to elaborate further– he hardly knew Brannigan, and everyone thought recruiters were whiners anyway.   Anything short of a full explanation would definitely sound like whining, and there was no damned way that anyone but a Marine would get the whole story first.  The Army grunt didn’t deserve the full truth, but he also deserved betetr than the standard b.s. leg injury story he told to explain the apparent end of his three decades of military service.

“How’s the Army working out?”

“They kicked me out after I lost a leg to an IED.  It’s too bad… I had at least another tour in me, maybe two.  The prosthetic works pretty good and the ladies go wild for it.”

“Amen.”

Oliver’s supervisor walked past.  “I’m sorry to cut this short, Mike, but I’m at work now.  I’m going to have to let you go.”

“Sorry, but this will just take a moment.  I work at a place that puts foreign students up with host families.  I was wondering if you’d be interested.”

The abruptness of Mike’s change caught Oliver.  He didn’t think that he had ever received such a roundabout sales pitch.  He didn’t want to waste Mike’s time, but it wasn’t his fault Mike beat around the bush.

Although his house was big enough for a student, he already had a guest (a goddamn alien living in the guest bedroom).  Then there was Rusty.  He liked strangers well enough, but living with one might give him some crazy ideas about what was expected of a gentleman and officer-in-training.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think I’d be interested.”

Oliver expected him to make another pitch.  Salesmen never gave up.  But he didn’t say anything for a while.

“Please, Oliver.  You don’t know how much this means to me.”  He sounded pretty desperate, almost like he was about to cry.  His tone was an astonishing admission of weakness, what with the Marines-Army rivalry.  Oliver knew of a few soldiers that hadn’t adjusted well to civilian life, but going to pieces over a missed sale was a sign that something was seriously wrong.

“Alright, I’ll do it, but…”  He looked around with nervous eyes and dropped his voice conspiratorially.  “…you had better not give me some Eurotrash.  I’m already up to my eyes in them here.  And… you’d get help if you needed it, right?”

*********

The entire conversation had left a bad taste in his mouth.   Brannigan had sounded far more cheerful after Oliver agreed to host a student.  The difference was so remarkable that Oliver decided he had been expertly conned.

Another problem was that his cover may have been blown.  Brannigan somehow got his name and phone number, and he certainly hadn’t given them out loosely.  It was possible that Brannigan had just noticed his name off a list of prospects (victims).  But it seemed that he remembered him too well for a passing acquaintance.  People tend to remember the impressive and strange… Jim probably remembered Oliver because he knew that he was a recruiter.   At least, Oliver mused, Jim wasn’t a scheming supervillain plotting his excruciating demise.  Christ, he was in the Army.

He tried thinking more about it as he drove home that night but couldn’t get much further.  There was this nagging feeling that there was something he was missing.  He found himself snapping his fingers as he drove back, thinking of details that might help.  Nothing.

He missed two exits and got caught in massive traffic.  His radio helpfully explained that the traffic was caused by damage to an overpass done in an attempted bank robbery.  The radio didn’t have to mention that the robbers wore masks.  Seriously, who else would blow up a street robbing a bank?  Damn amateurs.    It was unfortunately an open secret that St. Louis was pretty much free for the taking during daylight hours.  Only a plastic surgeon who worked long hours and an extraterrestrial dragon with a pathological disdain for sunlighthad tried to rule the streets.  Well, others had tried, but those two survived.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS