Carthago Delenda Est

XL

Thursday, 0024

Jack pulled into the small back alley entrance to Baby Doll's, turning off the engine and putting the van into park. He took a few moments, gathering his bucket of props, checking one last time that he had the Tac-14 securely in the tool box, his VooDoo tactical breacher's scabbard strapped to his belt and the side of his right leg, under his blue coveralls, and his 'IRA'-style ski mask rolled up like a watch cap, on his head. On his torso, he wore his flashback jacket under his coveralls, with only the hood poking up above the collar of the coveralls, covering most of his IRA mask. On his hands he wore a brand new pair of black, matte colored Mechanix gloves. "Time to work." He said simply, feeling his pulse surge once, then his heart began to beat strongly, slowly and rhythmically as the familiar feel of a quick dose of adrenaline shot into his blood as his body recognized the feeling of being back on the hunt.

He stepped from the van and walked through the swirling snow blowing on the wind, across the asphalt back alley, kicking the dry, accumulating snow with each step. As he approached the back door he saw the old, no-doubt black and white security camera mounted above the motion-activated security light, above the rear door. The security light began to erratically blink on and off, much less strobe-like than he'd thought it would from the drone footage he reviewed, roughly flashing every second, but at a speed that should still work with the interior fabric of his flashback jacket's hood to obscure any detail of his face for the janky camera. He walked up to the steel door and knocked three times. He held his tool box in his right hand and the bucket in his left hand. He heard the door lock's dead bolt and what sounded like an old fashioned barrel bolt disengaging before an enormous black man, wearing black Ray Ban shades, clean shaven and with cornrows on his scalp as thick as Jack's wrists, looked out at him.

"Yeah?" He asked in a basso profundo growl.

"Pipe Dreams Plumbing; you guys called about a toilet backed-up, right? You want me to clear it now, or come back tomorrow?" Jack asked in what he hoped was an exhausted working-class manner, conveying to the door guard that Jack didn't give a fuck if they let him in or not; it was their shit-covered floor.

"You said you couldn't make it until tomorrow morning." The giant rumbled, petulantly. Though he wore an enormous leather bomber-style, black jacket over a sweater and cargo pants, Jack could sense that he was getting cold from the winter storm seeping through the opening between the door and the steel frame.

"Fine, I'll see you tomorrow." Jack said tiredly, turning around and taking one step toward his van, kicking himself for not making the clog more spectacular.

"Wait! Get back here, man, this place stinks!"

Jack let his shoulders sag theatrically, as though he had hoped they'd refuse him entrance, then slowly turned around and walked back up the steps and past the surly manimal.

Jack waited with his shoulders still sagging, his toolbox and bucket in his hands while the ogre slid the locks back into place.

"Follow me." he growled at Jack, leading him past the rear, delivery entrance to the bar and toward the main floor women's rest room. The club was deserted, but Jack noticed the house lights were still swirling and flashing multicolored patterns on the wall, and the music was still playing, though at a far more agreeable 80 decibels. As he followed the giant, Jack listened and concluded that whomever had selected the music had found some decent mixes. Jack casually looked around him as he followed the huge man, and confirmed at first glance that the rumbling black titan was the only other person on the main floor, and he believed this confirmed his earlier speculation that Dante and his two other men would be upstairs in his office, exacting their due of fellatio and cash proceeds.

The giant held open the door to the women's bathroom, making Jack wince; the large man smiled, assuming it was the smell that had bothered Jack, but in fact it was Jack's sympathy for the dancers. He'd hoped it would be the men's bathroom that would succumb to the clog, but now he concluded that this likely meant that he'd inconvenienced the ladies dancing all night, just trying to earn their living, as had Veronica once. That thought troubled him. "Sorry, ladies." He thought to himself.

"Here, man. Fix that shit. And mop up all that shit on the floor, too, before you go." He said, happy to push his tasking to mop up the mess onto Jack. The giant, born 'DeTravius,' was the 'FNG,' the "Fucking New Guy," and thus the task of cleaning up the mess on the floor, and the penalty of missing out on a chance to get a blowjob from the dancers in Dante's office after they collected the take for the week, fell to him.

Jack sighed as he set down his bucket and tool box. "Can you get me a mop and a bottle of bleach?" He asked, and the giant disappeared. Jack wasted no time, but kept his movements careful, repeating to himself the professional soldier's mantra. "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."

Jack unzipped his coveralls, pulling the thick, brass YKK zipper from his collarbone down to his crotch, then bent down and unzipped the two zippers along the sides of his legs, pulling the zippers up from his ankles to his mid calf. He pulled his arms out of their sleeves, pushed the coveralls down to his legs, then pulled them off and around his boots, leaving him wearing his brown cargo pants and flashback jacket. He opened the tool box, took out the top tray of tools and took hold of the 'mare's leg' handle of his Remington 870 Tac-14. He depressed the slide release in front of the trigger guard and gently pulled back the compact shotgun's forend just an inch or so, confirming that his first adapter shell holding a .22 LR round was in the chamber. Jack slid the forend forward, putting the shotgun back in battery, stepped to the left side of the door, slipped off the safety and waited.

He had just begun to tell himself once again that 'slow was smooth,' when the door opened and the giant pushed sideways into the bathroom, with his back to the door and his front to Jack. Jack did not startle, and as the man re-entered the rest room, felt this conscious focus shift from any sense of emotion to instead the feel of his gloved hands gripping the Tac-14's handle and taking up most of the tension in the trigger. DeTravius, however, was looking down at the floor in front of him, trying to avoid stepping in the puddle of shit on the floor; his right hand (his leading side), holding a large bottle of bleach while he pulled a mop bucket on wheels behind him with his left hand. Jack waited for him to clear the door and look up at him, letting the door close soundlessly behind him. When he looked up, he saw Jack step forward and put the wide, three quarters of an inch diameter "O" of the shotgun's muzzle in front of his mouth, and DeTravius stood up tall and froze.

"Oh!" DeTravius managed to rumble, raising his eyebrows above his shades and opening his mouth wide, providing Jack with a perfectly unobstructed path to the man's spinal cord.

Jack pulled the trigger and the Tac-14 barely coughed the report from the .22 long rifle round, no louder than someone might themselves cough with gusto, not at all likely heard outside the bathroom door, and certainly not on the second floor. "Thanks for the sound proofing between floors, Dante." Jack thought to himself as the brown tile wall behind the large man erupted with a splatter of tissue, blood and spinal cord where the small bullet had transected perfectly through a portion of DeTravius's 'deadly triangle.' DeTravius, the giant with so much promise, collapsed and fell forward with the grace of a pole-axed cow, just missing Jack and the surface of the two bathroom sinks as he fell. Jack heard and smelled him evacuate his bowels as he lay dead on the cheap, tile floor.

The smell of shit was nearly overwhelming, the stagnant feces from earlier in the afternoon mixing with the fresh excrement in DeTravius's pants. "Smells like Kabul..." Jack mused as he pulled back the forend and slowly removed the shell adapter from the breech, a slight whiff of gunpowder briefly giving him a respite from the otherwise inescapable smell of shit. Jack slid the Tac-14 into the breaching scabbard, forced himself to ignore the stink as he began to breathe through his mouth, and used both of his hands to carefully remove the spent .22 LR shell from the adapter and replaced it with a fresh .22 LR round, and then put it in his pocket. He now had a load of four more .22 LR adapter-shells, one of which he jacked into the chamber as he closed the breech, followed by one round of three inch magnum, rifled slug. Jack was ready to use the .22 LR shells up to four times if he needed to, in clearing anyone else from the main floor without alerting Dante to his presence. From what Veronica had told him, the normal report of a 9mm handgun was loud enough to push through the sound insulation between the club's two levels, but Jack knew, especially with the music playing, there was no way anyone on the second floor would hear the relative mouse-fart of the .22 LR cartridges.

Jack took his Tac-14 back out of his breaching scabbard and looked down once more at the corpse that had been DeTravius. What was he?" Jack wondered, "Six feet, eight? Six, nine? Gotta be at least 300 pounds..." This was the first man Jack had ever killed outside of a combat zone, and this fact and its accompanying qualification as a murder, bothered him not in the least. Whatever apprehension Jack may have once had for breaking the law in the US was long gone, and now his moral compass was rooted solely along an azimuth of protecting the woman he loved.

He pushed back the flashback hood and rolled down his IRA-mask thankful that whatever spall had resulted from his shooting DeTravius in the mouth had not ended up on his face. The mask covered his face totally, except for three holes, one over each eye, and then one more round hole under his nose, open to his mouth. It was this look that, at least in Jack's world, had associated the ski mask forever with the IRA terrorists of the 1970s and 1980s.

Jack looked at himself in the mirror and smiled as he said, in a cheezy, Lucky Charms-quality Irish accent, "Marquess of Queensbury rules apply." He pronounced 'Marquess' as 'Marcus,' channeling the SOF operators he'd seen in Iraq, as they rolled their own IRA-masks down before their missions. He'd always wanted to say that, and now there was no one around to roll their eyes or call him out for being a poseur.

Jack pulled open the door slowly and with his Tac-14 raised, began scanning each angle, or "slicing the pie," in front of him before he emerged from the bathroom. He confirmed his recollection of where the security cameras were, from when he'd cased the club on Sunday. It was as he remembered, there were no cameras covering the area he'd planned to walk from the bathrooms, along the East wall of the main floor, nor the approach to the stairs. Jack knew from his earlier casing that the cameras in the club were trained on the two exterior entrances, the bar (and specifically over the cash register), the stage and outside Dante's office. The first time he'd be within the coverage fan of a surveillance camera was not until he began to breach the plane of the second floor, and by that time he planned to sprint from the top of the stairs to Dante's office.

He made his way to the stairs and paused on the landing between first and second floors. No one had yet appeared at the top of the stairs nor made any sign they knew of his approach. Jack removed all of the adapter shells with the .22 LR rounds and replaced them so that he now had five, three-inch magnum slugs, putting one in the chamber, before assaulting the second floor. He felt his adrenaline spike once more for the moment his body recognized as that final pause before the pandemonium of assaulting an objective. But it passed quickly and following his same routine, he calmed his thoughts and held his breath for just a second, and then sprinted up the stairs, stopping outside and to the left of the door to Dante's office. He was directly under the camera, and forced himself to slow down enough to be methodical and careful. He knew he likely had only seconds before they saw him on a monitor connected to the camera outside the door. "Here we go." He thought to himself.

He stood with his back against the door, and carefully pointed the muzzle 45 degrees downward and 45 degrees to his left, toward the lock on Dante's thick, beautifully stained, white oak door. Jack had seen the outside of the door's surface as he ascended the stairs with LaChyna on Sunday, and recognized it as the same type of door to the room she'd taken him for his lap dance and drug deal. He'd studied the door as she let him in and while she'd fiddled with the music, recognizing the thick, quality oak as perfect for keeping out angry people armed with only their fists, but useless against a 12 gauge rifled slug, from six inches away. Jack closed his eyes and turned his head away from the angle of fire, pulled the trigger, and blew a solid hole into the door, to the right of the lock, obliterating the deadbolt holding the door closed. Jack turned back to face the door quickly and mechanically pumped the forend, slid another magnum slug into the chamber, and just as he heard screams coming from the room, kicked the door, swinging it inward on its still attached, solid brass hinges and saw what he'd largely expected to see.

Before the raised muzzle of Jack's Tac-14, two of Dante's thugs stood frozen, naked from the waist down, but still wore long, black leather trench coats, and were just beginning to remove their hands from their ears over which they'd instinctively put them, upon the first shot as Jack had blown the lock and breached the door to Dante's office.

LaChyna sat naked on top of Dante's crotch, screaming, her eyes wide with shock, and then she suddenly, violently shifted to her right, toward the far wall of the office as Dante tossed her off of him. Two other women screamed and were covering their heads as they kneeled in front of Dante's two minions. Jack had caught Dante 'in flagrante delicto,' laying on his back, upon an expensive looking "Persian" (but really, Turkish) rug while LaChyna rode his cock; now Jack understood why she'd been unwilling to offer him full service, Dante had reserved her cunt for himself. Meanwhile, the two other women had each been giving blow jobs to the two thugs when Jack had intruded upon them. The men looked ridiculous as they came to their senses and began to fumble in their coats for pistols, their still erect penises protruded from under their shirts and looked shiny and wet from the women's saliva. Their pants were pooled around their ankles, and as a result of this, they could only awkwardly turn toward the door and were desperately trying to retain their senses of balance while reaching under their coats for their sidearms when Jack shot first one, and then the other with the solid impacts of the three-inch rifled slugs before jacking another shell into the chamber and training the shotgun on Dante. The slugs had hit each of the men just after the shockwave from each of the rounds Jack fired from the Tac-14's short muzzle exploded around the room, feeling like a slap across the face to everyone in front of Jack in the small, confined space of the masonry office.

Jack shot the first underling, who must have been the fat-fuck Veronica had named as Laquan, solidly in his center mass. The slug hit him hard enough to knock him backwards, off of his feet, as it traveled through him and into the hard masonry wall of the office's rear. Jack had hit the other man in the left side of his chest, blowing a single massive hole into him near the heart and which bled prodigiously from the slug's progress. The second man fell slowly to his knees, dying from the massive trauma of his wound.

"Lie down on the ground!" Jack bellowed, his voice ululating in the close confines of the too-small-for-seven-people, tastefully wood panel over masonry walled office. "ON your faces, NOW, mother fuckers! NOW!!" He yelled. LaChyna and the two other women stopped sobbing and were hyper ventilating as they complied. They kept their hands raised, shaking, at the level of their ears even as they lay on the floor. Dante glared at Jack and looked like a tall, and very fat white or Hispanic man who played at being a black character right out of central casting for some mid-1990's urban crime movie. Jack recognized Dante instantly by his size, his pencil thin mustache above his lips, curled as they were into as sneer, and his light brown (possibly hazel or even green) eyes, which glared at Jack with naked hatred.

"You. Stand up." Jack said simply to him. Dante refused, shaking his head and smiling slightly.

"Fuck you!" Dante snarled defiantly.

Jack sighed and shook his head, lined up the small bead on the end of the barrel with Dante's head, then shot Dante between the eyes, from six feet away. The slug quickly penetrated and then exploded Dante's head and the result was sickeningly conclusive, and once again the three women were screaming hysterically.

Though the report was particularly loud, framed as it was by the gap in time between the three earlier, rapid fire shots Jack had lit off in the vicinity of the women, Jack couldn't really blame them for feeling terrified that Jack would now kill them, as he had the other half of the people he'd found in the office.

Pausing to catch his breath and sliding his four, loaded .22 LR adapter shells back into the magazine of his shotgun, Jack took out two of the thick, black zip ties he'd brought with him and tossed them in front of the first woman, one of the felatrices, the one on his right, and told her gruffly to tie together the other women's hands and ankles beginning with LaChyna (whom Jack identified by pointing). When she either couldn't process what he said or refused to do so, Jack swallowed hard and yelled at her, hating himself for what he said and how he spoke.

"I said tie her up, you worthless CUNT!" Screaming at her as had Jack's father at his mother, copying the tone and the hatred Jack remembered his father using against his mother. He kept his thoughts tightly compartmentalized, but knew that when he was clear of the club, he'd have several days of self-loathing for channeling from his own mouth the words and spirit of that stain on humanity.

Jack's shouted invective did the trick, snapping the woman out of the terror or reticence which had caused her to hesitate. Jack tossed her two more zip ties, and told her less harshly to tie up her compatriot, which she did. Finally, Jack told her, almost in a civil tone and conversational level of volume, to get face-down on the floor and to put her hands behind her back and to cross her ankles. When she did so, Jack holstered his Tac-14 in the breacher's scabbard along his right leg, then quickly secured her ankles, before moving up to secure her wrists. When that was complete, Jack checked the zip ties on LaChyna, then the other woman, tightening each woman's set of ties, but not to the point of cutting off their circulation, and then carefully picked up all his ejected shotgun shells, accounting for each one. ("I should have used a revolver..." Jack chastised himself).

As was the scene Veronica had described in telling Jack about Dante's office from her last time there, the desk was covered in cash. Mostly $20 and $100 bills, but several handfuls of $50's. Jack stopped himself from imitating Veronica and instead took a cushion off the loveseat in the office, opposite the desk and to the right of the door. He unzipped the cushion and took out all the stuffing, hating himself as the women began to cry again, and at least one of them uncontrollably urinated all over herself and on the floor. Jack gritted his teeth through the wave of nauseous self-loathing he felt, reminding himself that they would be, at least physically, fine. He knew it would take years, if ever, for them to recover, however, from the experience of watching him kill the three men, and especially from the after effects of laying on the floor as it filled with the corpses' blood, clotting and thickening from the heat loss and making the whole office begin to reek from the sickening mix of gun powder, aerosolized blood and tissue, and now urine.