Life as a New Hire Ch. 26

See, after we dutifully packed all our gear, the troupe got to watch Rachel's team toss everything into a cargo bin set to be loaded onto a flight to - the ticket said Banjul, Gambia. Woot! My ten ton armored long coat was going to Africa without me. It would have undoubtedly have tried to kill me in this heat. I was lured into acceptance by hoping this was going to be a 'birthday suit' flight.

Yay! (Sarcasm) We got all new undies, shirts, shoes, pants, shorts, jackets, ponchos (I was beginning to suspect duplicity on that one), and a variety of other gear - including guns. They were nice enough to replace our weapons with the exact same production models. The sole exceptions were my trusty axes and I trembled at the scrutiny they must have endured.

Meanwhile, back to my archaic, misogynistic inspiration that women shouldn't be allowed to drive: after the third skirting of what must have been a ten meter drop, I realized I was looking at this journey in the wrong light. I raised my hands over my head and began screaming like a fool. I was on the best rollercoaster ride ever!!

The hobnail boot was on the other foot. My driver really wanted to know what the fuck I was up to, but couldn't take her concentration off the terrain. One massive lurch planted us in an arroyo (that's a dry riverbed for those of us who aren't freaked out every time it rains). Rachel and I were sitting in the back. Turning around in the front seat, Pamela grinned at me.

"I dare you to surf the hood," she laughed. Sweet Mother Ishara, that was the best mixing of 'you must be a redneck'/'immortal high schooler madness' I'd ever heard. I unbuckled milliseconds before Rachel could stop me. Her look said it all. 'Please, you Moron, don't do this to me. I've been a good little guardian and really don't deserve this, now do I?'

I gave her a deep French kiss. She moaned, just not in a sexual manner. One of these days Rachel was going to start running around with a needle and fast acting sedative to keep me safe from myself. Understand, my driver was racing down this dirt... well, "pathway" was being generous. Her first warning that something wasn't right was me hand-standing on the roll bar and flipping onto the dashboard.

Considering I was up against a 70 kilometer headwind, I felt I pulled off that maneuver rather well. She grabbed my closest ankle with one hand while keeping the other on the wheel. Our eyes were masked with goggles, but my smile said it all. No, I hadn't been thrown forward, and no, I wasn't running away from something in the back seat.

I shook free, stepped over the windshield, braced my right heel against its base and leaned into the torrent of air. I was surfing a jeep. Then I was flying above the jeep, but only for a second. We'd hit a rock the size of an armadillo...or maybe it was an actual armadillo. I wasn't looking back to check. Why was I doing this? It was a tad complex. I gave Psych 101 a shot.

My life was NOT where I had envisioned it would be when I kissed Dr. Kimberly Geisler...and my last two Bolingbrook girlfriends, who had been unaware of each other until that moment, good-bye before leaving college forever. I proudly considered myself amoral. No social contract would keep me from some good pussy...and since I found all pussy to be good if you worked at it, I slept with every girl I could - married, committed, bored, desperate...I didn't care.

I held no relationship sacred. I had already proved I could do any girl's mother, daughter, aunt, roommate, childhood friend and total stranger. I hadn't cared. I knew I was going to cause multiple women emotional pain and I did it anyway. Sure, I regretted the agony I left in my wake.

I never considered myself a sadist, but I had been a pretty horrible person by ignoring the inevitable consequences of my actions. Then Havenstone. Suddenly people were doing bad stuff to people I didn't know and it mattered to me. I was talking to women without the end goal being a sexual encounter.

Hell, I had been honest to women without them using pain, or the threat of pain, on me. I didn't stop being me. I nailed four women at Loraine's, Europa's and Aya's school. I nailed Nicole while waiting for Trent to toss me his social table scraps - Libra. A whole army of women engaged in murder, slavery and infanticide on a regular basis...and I cared for them.

I cared for them in a way that confronted damnation, not sexual adventurism. I had graduated from 'Dude, don't do that to the lady' at some bar to 'do this and I'll have you killed' and meaning it...and making it happen. I hadn't learned my lesson. I'd gone on to kill Hayden and Goddess-knows how many other women who Hayden had placed on that list.

Yep...dead, dead, dead and it was all on me. Worse, I would do it all over again because deep down, tearing up my insides, was morality. To me that boiled down to caring about someone else without reward. And all that led me to surfing the hood of a jeep on my way to meet my lodestone of this transformation, Aya.

My laughter was drowned out by the noises of the engine, tires, rocks, wind and sand. It resonated all the more. The driver didn't slow down. I sincerely doubted she understood my lunacy. That was okay. Pamela did and Aya would. She'd want to go jeep surfing too. Man, for a jackass and dastardly betrayer, I was accumulating a sizable heart-load of people I could honestly say I loved.

Kimberly had once told me that the pain of knowledge is never being able to forget it. Good, or bad, it is an affliction for which there is no cure. That was where I was, pained by the creeping advancement of my soul and unable to turn back now that the door to familial affection had been opened.

My thoughts of Dad dying and of a thunderstorm burst in my noggin weren't being terribly helpful to my mental state either. The horn blew and I snuck a quick peek back. The driver was making a sharp, forward jabbing motion with her right hand, then thrusting to the left. We were getting ready to exit the arroyo and that probably required some hellish footwork far beyond my ability.

I made a hasty, less dignified, yet safer return to my seat. Rachel quickly buckled me in before a rapid turn up and over the bank of the river bed had us heading for another forested area.

"What was that all about?" Rachel asked once we were back into the tree cover. She'd have asked earlier but she was too busy clenching and unclenching her jaw in frustration.

"I am trapped in an existence that is a repudiation of what I held dear, at any moment my mind may cease to be my own, and I don't know why it hurts me so much to care about any of you," I shouted over the sounds of the jeep crashing through the brush.

"I don't understand," Rachel replied.

"I want to hold you, Rachel. I want to make love to you. I want to hold up our first daughter the moment she is born so you can see what beauty we have created...and I want to put a gun to your temple and blow your brains out because you are a cancer that feasts on sane, normal reality," I said as softly as possible into her ear. "I want it both ways and that is what is tearing my spirit apart."

Rachel had no instant comeback to that. My words ran contrary to her belief system. She was SD and leader of my personal security team. Life growing up as an Amazon had not prepared her for me. Amazons weren't robots; they were indoctrinated to a certain way of thinking. The problem at hand was whenever you put up barriers to certain ways of thinking, you limit your ability to understand and empathize with those ideas.

Cooperation, duty and loyalty were childhood virtues Rachel was immersed in. I wasn't blathering to her about being angry, or feeling caught up in a feud. This was a fusion of what she endorsed and an alien philosophy. I wanted to cleave to her, create and raise children with her. I was also driven by a belief system that repudiated her lifestyle.

Confidence collided with adaptability. Generalization refused to conform to experience. Rachel had no doubt I would risk my life for hers. I held her as my equal and for the first time, and beyond her expectations, she was fine with that. Every aspect she expected from any of her sisters, I exhibited. All that made my mystic affliction all the more troubling.

I was not sane according to the Amazon metric, but I was utterly reliable in my bravery, honesty (when it mattered), and modesty. 'A' did not equate to 'B'. She would take me into battle. I wanted to help her bring the next generation of Amazon young into the world...and I felt letting her live was a moral failing on my part.

All of that cumulated in me beating up our driver once the jeep was safely parked in a large space carved out of the base of a mesa that sheltered the Amazon camp. See, Rachel was mentally hammering a square peg into a triangular hole at that moment. Pamela corralled her because my life path dictated Rachel's loyalty being more important than a few scratches to my flesh.

The fight was pure Amazon. I dismounted over the side of our ride. The camp counselor stepped out of the driver's side and launched a savage spinning kick at my left knee, aiming to unsettle my balance, bounce me off the jeep and result with me going to the ground - most likely on my knees.

Her motivation was my unwarranted, asinine stunt being something 'one of the girls' wouldn't do. Give me a blistering reprimand? Oh no, not in this woman's army. They went straight to the 'you are going to regret that' disciplinary stage. An Amazon-Amazon wouldn't have been treated this way, but then an A-A wouldn't have acted like a cretin either. She attacked.

Flash back four days and me being on enforced sick leave from my internship. I diluted my frustration, depression and frantic energy by working out. Sounds pretty normal until I noted how much I was exercising - twelve hours a day, counting multiple encounters on the sparring mats.

Pamela hit the nail on the head - I was cultivating my frighteningly extensive muscle memory. My basal ganglia had gone from an unicyclist to a motocross daredevil. That might sound cool right up until you find yourself in conversation with Wiesława of House Živa while strapping on a pair of hip holstered Smith & Wesson Model 29s you can't even recall picking up in the armory.

"You are an American cowboy?" she asked as she gave the underside of my chin a sexy fingernail scrape.

"What?" I blinked. I looked down and, low and behold, I was packing two leg-irons, Joel McCrea-style. Historical shootists would never wear the kind of rig I had put on, much less real cowboys. Naomi came up.

"What are you doing?" she scolded me.

"This!" I declared. I drew and fired both guns, quick-draw/rapid-fire.

Had I torn out the head, or heart, of the target it would have been a slice of sweet for the bitter aftertaste in my mouth - you know, the 'doing a task without a clue what you are doing' feeling.

I did manage to hit the paper with eleven bullets, nine scored points and two were possibly fatal. Had I foregone my normal lethal accoutrements? No. My body was okay with lugging four pistols, a Personal Defense weapon and a combat shotgun around...Oh, four tomahawks and two knives as well. Yeah, anyone who knew me could tell something was wrong.

In a normal society, a man feeling it natural to carry enough hardware to equip a microscopic guerilla army gets committed. In urban Amazonia? How did I balance the weight? Could I swim with that ironmongery? They tossed me in the pool, and after a few seconds of indecision, I decided on dropping the UMP-40, struggled out of my body armor then retrieved the USAS-12 before it hit bottom. (With the 'US' in the name, it just had to be made in South Korea).

I did it because swimming with two 'bigger than a pistol' sized weapons is a real bitch, plus I had my armored jacket on, which turned swimming with weights on into trying to tread water in pudding. I was polite enough to admit that my downward progress when they dumped me off the diving board...the 7.5 meter one - they claimed to be looking for authenticity - was halted by hitting the bottom of the pool, not buoyancy.

Since that was so much fun, we - I mean the SD training staff - decided on a few more near suicidal tests to subject me to. I didn't die. After 37 straight hours of activity at home and Havenstone, I was back in New Jersey. The hospital's specialists had good news. My brain cyclones were developing definitive patterns.

To top that off, my 'me' brain patterns were increasing their activity. The experts hedged their bets, but did suggest that my brain was counter-acting some of the alternate neuro-electrical surges. Plus they now had both a baseline and advanced model to work with. The rest was bad. The 'good' was also 'bad'. The last thing my cerebellum need was an escalating brain race.

My 'native' activity increasing was heaping scorn on the basic neural activity that made me 'normal'. The other two patterns: worse news. They were organizing, re-mapping old areas and mapping new ones. My temperature was acceptably elevated, my brain wasn't oozing out of my ears and, due to general hygiene, I didn't have a zombie odor.

On the third day they stumbled upon a bizarreness to add to the menagerie at the top floor. There was a submerged fourth pattern they hadn't spotted before. How had this escaped their hawk-like scrutiny? Pattern four put sections of my brain to sleep. By using micro-regulation, it was tapping the hypothalamus to keep me cool as well.

To make sure no single pathway over-extended its chemical stockpiles, large sections shut down for short, but intense breaks and I kept cruising along okay. The down side being this fourth active agent could possible cause me to lose the ability to speak. Or shoot a gun, or even stand-up, walk, or crawl. Their best theory was that pattern four was finally emerging from the backfield for that very reason - it was figuring out what functions were necessary given certain stimuli.

So, if I lay down in a dark room and shut my eyes, in theory it would learn to shut down my optic and visual memory sections of the brain. They still wanted to cut open my head. I kept on refusing. Back to me and my pissed off driver; languages weren't the only things I was picking up.

My fighting styles were increasing in detail and depth. I wasn't going to make Pamela tap out anytime soon, but my knowledge of martial movements was increasing. I still couldn't pull off the moves, but my brain was screaming the directions and my muscles were trying - to remember things they'd never done before.

I compared it to learning the foxtrot, then not putting a foot on the dance floor for thirty years. I was being called on to sway to the music once more and my body was struggling to meet the challenge it should have already mastered once. So, when the Amazon began winding up her kick, my brain began kicking into overdrive.

Boxing really isn't the martial arts style for dealing with kicks. Brazilian jujutsu is good, but there are others that do it even better. Added to that, I had been working against the unique Amazon martial art for a while. Every factor, but one, was working against her. Her sole advantage was initiative and she threw that away at the start.

She looked furious at me and that meant only two things - a slap, or a kick. I couldn't stop her from kicking me. I could block it and launch my counterattack. My left leg came up, bent at the knee and leaned into the kick, stopping it before she could building up enough force to really hurt. My right hand lashed down, not out. Her arms were prepared to divert torso and head blows.

My hand gripped her raised, right thigh and used that to throw her to the ground with me on top. Amazon striking power was primarily in the legs. The arms were more for blocks, locks and diversions. Upper body strength became critical. She couldn't keep me at bay. I grappled, twisted her left arm behind her back then began beating her head against the hard packed dirt floor.

Situational awareness caused me to summersault off her, twisting back to my feet facing what had been coming up behind me - Caprica and two of her buddies. The woman I had just thrashed pushed up onto all fours, shaking her scattered wits into some cohesive instrument.

"What happened here?" Caprica menaced.

"We..."

"Shut up!" Caprica snarled at me. "I wasn't talking to you." The other woman didn't respond until she was back on her feet. Her forehead was bruised, but not bleeding.

"This jackalope climbed onto the hood of our jeep and stood there for nearly two minutes...while I was driving," her gaze travelled from her leader to me.

"Why?" Caprica was clearly addressing me. She'd already stolen her one honest answer for this trip. She shouldn't have been so greedy.

"It seemed like a fun thing to try," I grinned.

"You could have been badly injured, or killed," Caprica's eyes narrowed.

"That's what made it fun," I kept up the positive vibes. Pause.

"What you did was wrong," Caprica glared. Hierarchy versus democratic discourse. Had she behaved more like an impartial leader and less like a biased vice principle, I would have found it easier to kowtow.

"Why?" I beamed mischievous joy. "You didn't tell me not to do it. In fact, you've been about as useful as a stuffed moose head in a bazooka fight. Your pompous presumptiveness may resonate with the locals here, but we independent-minded women are less than impressed." That meant I was an Amazon, but not one that worked for her. Status: guest.

Had Caprica accepted my place - allowed me to explain my actions instead of jumping on the side of one of her own - she wouldn't be facing a showdown now. Had she ask me to pitch in; say 'take this 20 cm stick and go out and locate some landmines', off I would have gone. Amazons were team players.

I was an unassigned Amazon and it was her right as a higher ranking member to give me a task I had some chance of completing, no matter how slim the odds. The proper Amazon way was to ask who swung at who first. Since the driver and I were equals, she didn't have the right to discipline me. She attacked without good reason and I had defended myself.

I hadn't endangered her life, or that of her other passengers and none of them were complaining. No, the driver lashed out first because I was a guy. The leader backed her because I was a guy. Problem was, I didn't want to be treated as a guy. I wanted to be treated as an Amazon. Amazons do not walk around hitting other Amazons.

That way lies madness, as Caprica was about to figure out. Caprica putting her FN P90 aside so she and I could fight was not okay. I hadn't been charged with an infraction, given an opportunity to explain myself before Caprica rendered her judgment. In theory, I could appeal. That would have labeled me as a crybaby Jerk though.

The closest two 'Campies' joining in was a colossal mistake. It was the whole Amazon gang up thing and in their heart of hearts, they saw me as nothing but a male. Caprica should have come at me alone; that would have been acceptable. By ganging up on me, all bets were off. Three on one odds looked good to the Camp crowd. Three on two was a disaster.

Why? That loyalty bonding went both ways and I hadn't come alone. Pamela took pride in her role as an educator. She felt obliged to let Caprica get my measure as a warrior. But, if someone was going to get an embarrassing beat down, it wasn't going to be me. Pamela believed it to be so and hers was the mind that mattered most.

I was pretty sure the first back up dancer didn't even know what hit her. Pamela was very sneaky and silent. Caprica was busy matching me blow for counterblow; driving me back. She had more experience, was better trained, accustomed to the dry heat and used to fighting on rough, uneven surfaces. I was bigger and faster (by a smidge).