part0007

P hysical therapy was one of the most frustrating experiences in his life. He’d spent almost a full month of his life lying on his back. Recovery from multiple life-saving surgeries always came with a price, and one of the most overlooked was muscular atrophy. His mind and central nervous system knew what it needed to do, but his body needed time to catch up.

It was beyond frustrating. He had been at the top of his physical form when he’d stepped onto that damned helicopter. While he knew that he was lucky to have walked away from that situation alive, there was still a hint of guilt that piled onto all the shitty feelings he experienced when he had to teach his body how to walk again.

Still, despite the struggle, a month and a half were enough to make his body work again. A couple of hours on the treadmill every day had done wonders, and even though the doctors told him that he would have to be eased back into the shape that he’d been in, a part of him would always push, always strive to be good, better, and best. It wasn’t even a macho thing. It was simply how he was raised. To stay in the same place all the time—to settle—wasn’t what he’d been made for. It was what had driven his wife away. When she’d brought his divorce papers, it had been what had driven him to accept another couple of tours after he’d promised her that he would stay home to help her raise their kid.

A real “type A” personality, he thought with a mental shrug. His own inclination had saved his life more than once, but it had cost him, too. Too many injuries to count, a life on the drift from one engagement to another, and a lost family. Right now, he wished he was more laid-back and could actually settle down to be a dad and a good husband. With a heavy sigh, he shook his head because he knew that like any leopard, he couldn’t change his spots, no matter how much he wished differently.

Johnson frowned and stared around the gym. On top of everything, he thought with a grimace, I’m not even Jeremiah Johnson anymore. He’d decided that he would keep the given name, Jeremiah, since that was his grandfather’s name on his mother’s side, and he’d loved that man. The old marine had gotten him in the mood to join the armed forces all those years before. It was the family name, Johnson, that would be sacrificed. He still hadn’t decided which name he would assume. There weren’t many out there that fit with Jeremiah.

He rubbed a starchy white towel over his face, neck, and arms and walked away from the weight room. As he moved, he rolled his shoulders and felt the comfortable burn in his muscles. It was good to be back in the saddle, figuratively speaking. There weren’t combat training facilities in the hospital, which was more than a little annoying, but he would get past it. He’d begun basic combat training practices in his room. It wasn’t like there was much else to do around there. The whole hospital was an information black spot, with no cell reception and all the Wi-Fi connections encrypted to the point where accessing them was nigh on impossible. And he had tried, although his knowledge of cracking encryption like that was somewhat lacking.

Jeremiah walked into his room, shucked his clothes, and moved into the bathroom. He let the shower run as hot as he could stand it before he stepped into the cubicle. The steaming water, almost to the point of scalding, rushed down over his newly healed scars and he closed his eyes and gritted his teeth against the painfully pleasant experience. It was difficult to identify why this little ritual made him feel…well, a little better. Not much, but these days, he needed to take any good he could get.

He stepped out of the shower and dried himself off quickly before he wrapped the towel around his waist and stepped into the tiny room they’d given him. Old habits had begun to reinstate themselves in his patterns, which showed him that a part of the old him had returned. Sure, the future looked bleak for a man who walked out into the world with a new name and a history of government-sanctioned violence, but it wasn’t like there weren’t jobs out there for a man of his particular talents.

The thought remained unexplored as he stiffened momentarily before he tilted his head at a jaunty angle and smiled. “You know, if they allowed me a gun in here, I would turn and aim it at you in a very menacing manner right about now.”

A tall, lean man in an expensive-looking suit sat in the chair that had been placed in the corner of his room away from all the lights.

“Well, maybe I should consider myself lucky that they don’t allow guns in a hospital ward,” the visitor said with a small smile as he pushed himself from his seat.

“Something about not trusting your average combat soldier who is hopped up on a cocktail of medications with firearms,” Jeremiah said with a smirk and folded his arms. “Call me crazy, but there’s a serious lack of trust in these parts.”

The man chuckled softly. “I read your psych profiles, Jeremiah…no last name at the moment. Every man who made an analysis of you said that you had an interesting sense of humor. I’m pleased to see it wasn’t exaggerated. It gives me a good feeling about the rest of your psych profiles.”

“Yeah, there were a lot of them,” he admitted. “Those folks always insisted that I needed to be brought in to inspect my feelings after a mission to see if I was ready to get back into the field.”

“My guess is that you don’t look forward to the profiling that’ll be mandatory with your release from this hospital, then?” the man asked. He took a step forward and placed a piece of paper on the bed. Jeremiah moved in closer to pick it up. Release papers, he realized, merely waiting for his signature. He turned to face the man, who had returned to his seat in the corner of the room.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked and put the paper down.

His visitor wore a small smile. “A potential employer.”

“Jeez, your parents must have hated you,” Jeremiah said with a chuckle. “I mean, judge not lest ye be judged, but that borders on child abuse.”

“What?” the man asked, tilting his head.

“Your name, genius,” Jeremiah snapped. “John Doe? Come on, I won’t make any deals with someone who isn’t up-front with me about who they are and what they want from me. I think I’ve been around long enough to know a military man when I see one, so why don’t you do us both a favor and cut the crap? One pro to another.”

The man nodded. “Fair enough. My name is James Anderson. Formerly a full-bird colonel in MARSOC and an operative before that. I’ve since gone into the private sector. Due to some…hostile circumstances, I find myself in need of a man with your particular talents and disposition.”

“I’m not an assassin for hire,” he responded. “You can find more than enough of those working in the private sector.”

“I know.” The other man nodded. “That’s actually the point. While I was still with the Pentagon, I oversaw operations run by a company whose people…well, they don’t have the morals God gave a goat, and we eat goats.”

An odd metaphor, Jeremiah mused, but he didn’t comment and simply let the man continue.

Anderson narrowed his eyes as he watched him closely. “Tell me, Jeremiah, what do you know about the Zoo?”

The now former sergeant took a deep breath and tilted his head as he circled the man in front of him. “Officially? It’s a military experiment gone bad, with all the pros and cons that come with it. It’s called Kudzu by the locals and nicknamed the Zoo. No official word was shared, of course, which means that I ‘officially’ don’t know that the source of the damn jungle that has begun to cover the Sahara Desert is some goop that was found on a meteorite or missile that may or may not have alien origins. Remind me, what is the government’s official stance on aliens again?”

Anderson smirked. “The jury is still out on that one.”

He nodded. “No worries, I merely want to make sure that our stories match on this one. But I digress. You were talking about a company that I assume has made a metric fuck-ton of cash on the riches to be found in this enigmatic Zoo-place.”

“That’s a good guess, and through some…less than pleasant means, an acquaintance has recently taken over a majority share of the company in question,” his visitor continued. “It’s called Pegasus and trust me, these guys are not the kind to take an aggressive takeover lying down, which is why she brought me in. It’s also why I need someone like you to watch my back for the duration.”

Jeremiah sighed and scratched his jawline. “That seems like the kind of job that doesn’t have an end date, especially if you don’t want me killing these assholes pre-emptively.”

Anderson chuckled. “We want to bring the company down, but it won’t be an easy task. The people who run this have connections all through the military, which makes it a very risky, very dangerous job that will take longer than any of us can anticipate. We need muscle on our side.”

“And that’s where I come in. Your muscle, as it were.”

“Look, I’m not usually this kind of guy. I was only retired to the Pentagon because one of the jobs I was on went badly. While they knew I wouldn’t be much good in the field after that, they put a lot of money and effort into training me. I was willing to still serve my country when it came down to it, so they sent me to the Zoo to oversee and handle weapons testing that this company, Pegasus, was running.

“At first, things weren’t too different than what we were doing at the Zoo. But they used the soldiers they brought in as guinea pigs, dressed them in half-tested suits, and sent them out into dangerous locations to be killed. After a while, they stopped even trying to pretend that it was about testing. They brought stuff out of there—untested—and it was all for profit. And people died for it, good people. Well…not all of them were good people, I guess. Either way, I plan to take them down with my dying breath or all my money, or both. I’ve hooked up with a team from the Zoo that’s committed to helping, but I still need someone on my side to make it happen.”

Jeremiah wanted to crack a joke about what else Anderson expected when he got into bed with a corporation. They were filled to the brim with psychopaths who cared a hell of a lot more about quarterly figures than the lives it would cost to get them there. And yet, it didn’t seem like the kind of thing someone should joke about. There was too much blood involved to make it a laughing matter.

Well, I might need a few hours to settle into it, but I’m sure I can make a joke about almost anything the world throws my way. I’m simply a little out of practice.

“So,” he said finally, suddenly very aware of the fact that he was still dressed in only a towel. “You were in the Zoo, huh? I’ve heard a lot of rumors coming out of that place. Lots of bad, some good, but very little that’s been officially confirmed. The only guys I know for a fact went there always come back with a horde of NDAs to sign and a different look in their eyes. I’ve been around long enough to know that there are only a couple of places in the world that make that kind of change in a man, and none of them are good. It wasn’t like we needed any more of them, but hey, here we are.”

Anderson chuckled. “I hear you there. Have you ever been to one of those places?”

He nodded. “Never the Zoo, obviously, but there are places that you can’t get out of your head. I can’t say where exactly, but there were drugs and a lot of money involved.”

“Right.” His visitor nodded knowingly.

Jeremiah narrowed his eyes. “Are there bugs in the room?”

The man smiled and reached over to the bedside table where he’d put his hat. He lifted it to reveal a small piece of tech that he’d dug out, presumably from the lamp. “A friend of mine gave me some tools that will make sure nobody is able to listen to what we talk about. Or see, for that matter.”

“Still, better safe than sorry,” he responded with a smirk because he’d known about the bugs. He’d swept the room a couple of times when they’d moved him there from the ICU, and each time, he’d found at least one that he’d missed. Finally, he’d come to terms with the fact that his every move while in this hospital—and probably afterward—would be watched and recorded for posterity. He wasn’t sure why they were doing it, but at this point, it was very, very low on his list of things to care about.

“Right,” Anderson said with a chuckle. “Still, I think I trust my friend.”

“So, if this interview goes badly, I won’t suddenly come down with a nine-millimeter cerebral hemorrhage?” he asked cheerfully.

“Don’t worry, nothing happens to you if you say no.” His visitor laughed. “I had help locating you and then pulled all kinds of strings to get in here to talk to you. No one wants those at the top to know that I’m here. A dead body in your room would leave too many questions asked by all the wrong people.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I think.”

“How much do you remember of the fighting that got you here?” Anderson asked.

It suddenly felt harder to breathe, and a wave of vertigo swept through him at the sudden question. “It’s all buried right now,” he said and dropped onto his bed. He took a deep, steadying breath and continued, “I remember most of my team had died. I remember that I didn’t really feel the wounds that I ended with until afterward. Other than that, it’s all…fuzzy.”

Anderson studied him for a moment, and his light-blue eyes softened. Then, he nodded, pulled a phone from his pocket, and opened it to a video he’d already lined up for Jeremiah to watch. It was the recording from his HUD camera during the mission, although it was cut to something that he very vaguely remembered doing. He watched himself scramble up a ladder as a head appeared through a small hatch at the top. A knife was in his hands and he cut the man’s throat and dragged him down through the opening. A pistol—not his assault rifle—came up and eliminated a couple more.

He cleared the hatch and shot three more men in an equal number of strikes that made him feel a little pride. There was nothing like showing off the kind of training that had taken him to the top of the food chain to make him feel like he could go ahead and achieve it all over again.

A survivor had dropped to his knees, his hand raised in the air, and he muttered something as he dropped his weapon. Jeremiah felt the same sense of guilt he’d felt that fateful night and bit his lip as the video spooled his actions. “Sorry, can’t risk it, asshole,” he heard himself say in a hoarse voice, and with two shots, the surrendered man fell.

He knew his actions that night were brutal, but most of his men had already perished and he was damned if he would grovel in disgrace for acting on his aggression. The video came to an end and he bared his teeth in an over-jolly grin. “Damn, the dude has still got it. Ten points for dexterity right there. Did you see that stab? And the three shots? They had the drop on me, every one of them, and I still got them. Three yards, three seconds, three shots.”

“You killed an unarmed man who was surrendering,” Anderson said. An odd twist of his lips to the right made it difficult for Jeremiah to read the man’s thoughts behind the statement. Still, his temper rose.

“They had just dropped a grenade into a room that killed two of my boys,” he snapped. “We were in the middle of a hostile situation where we couldn’t leave someone behind to shoot us in the back. We couldn’t take prisoners. There was only one tactical choice to make there, Anderson, and you know it as well as me.”

“True,” his companion agreed with a nod. “But from hearing you describe it and hearing your words in the video, I’d say that you had fun there. Even with all the bullets flying and all the danger that you and your men were in, you enjoyed the challenge of being in a situation where all the rules went out the window and every choice made was the difference between life and death.”

Jeremiah looked down and toyed with the fabric of the white towel he wore around his hips. “What can I say? I’m not a man of cultivated tastes, Colonel.”

“I’m not a colonel anymore, Jeremiah,” Anderson said and leaned forward in his seat. “I’m not even in the military now. But I need to clean up a place that has some wicked and powerful people involved. I don’t need a man of cultivated tastes. I can find those all over the damned country and anywhere in the civilized world. In fact, I suspect that there are many cultivated assholes, both male and female, whom I plan to squash like so many roaches. What I need now is the man on that tape.” He pointed at the phone Jeremiah had put down. “What I need is a savage, do you understand?”

He looked at the device, picked it up off the bed, and stretched to place it on the bedside table alongside the man’s hat. Something inside him needed to click into place when he was in a situation like Anderson described. He’d been in this business long enough to know exactly what was needed for him to go into that dark, furious place in his heart.

“Are these bad guys, Colonel?” he asked.

Anderson opened his mouth to remind the man in front of him yet again that he was no longer a colonel. Then again, he remembered that for people like Jeremiah, you could leave the service, but the service never really left you. In the ex-sergeant’s mind—and the minds of those like him—Anderson would always be a colonel, whether he wore the wings or not.

“Loosely defined, yes.” He answered the question as honestly as he could. “It could be that they’re merely self-absorbed assholes looking out for their own interests irrespective of whether it hurts their fellow man, nation, or the world. I hate to use a phrase from pop-culture, but it fits here. It’s about deciding whether you want to take the red pill and learn about shit that will make you question your own beliefs, or the blue pill, where you turn the other way and forget about what’s right but get a new name, a new life, and a few hundred thousand to squash your own conscience.”

“Well, Colonel, I don’t have much in the way of beliefs,” Jeremiah said with a small smile. “And…the Matrix—shit. I only watched that twice. Well, three times. Twice in the theater and once on cable. But I suck at remembering which color was which…what did Neo choose again?”

He nodded. It had been a while since he’d watched that movie. While he hadn’t quite liked how preachy it was, he had first seen it when he was in his teenage years and back then, it had been the coolest thing he’d ever seen, bar none. As a result, it would always pull at the nostalgia strings in his heart.

“Well, I think I’ll take that damned red pill, Colonel,” he said with a grin and pushed off the bed. Anderson matched his movement to stand and extend his hand to grip Jeremiah’s.

“Welcome to the team then, Jeremiah Savage,” Anderson said with a smile. “The snacks aren’t great, but the money’s good enough that you can get some gourmet stuff of your own. Good to have you aboard.”

Jeremiah laughed. “Savage. I like that. Did you think that up yourself?”

“Nah, that was my friend’s idea. We’ll need you onboard before Monday. Finish your therapy as best you can and sign that paper. The day it happens, someone will be here to pick you up and take you where you need to go. Before Monday, you got it?”