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ROCK
CHAPTER 18
“We all knew it was coming.”
The guys are quiet.
Not because they’re pissed off or remorseful, but because we’ve been given an assignment.
Correction.
Offered an assignment. We don’t have to take it, just like you don’t have to save someone you see getting mugged on the street. It’s all situations with false choices, the obvious one always staring you in the face and always surrounded by land mines and pitfalls. With the mugger, he could turn his gun on you. In our situation, it’s exactly what we do, or more specifically what we’ve done, that could be turned against us, even often times the mission itself.
Either way, we’ve created a prison for ourselves, one we’re working on getting out of. Hopefully that’ll happen in this lifetime.
It’s this very reason we live the way we do. No attachments, just decadence and indulgence and selfishness.
Because at any moment it could all be snuffed out.
That was until Summer.
Wanna know the real kick in the balls?
We love this shit, each of us. I can still see that fucking glimmer from the thrill in each of the guy’s eyes, their mouth’s salivating at the prospect. We’ve been sleeping for a few years, we thought we were done after the last assignment. We’d each sworn we didn’t want this shit anymore, couldn’t do it again. The last one was a fucking fiasco. Somewhere, somehow things got fucked up. We’d been set up. When we got the assignment, we were not given all the details, we thought it was a clear cut mission. How goddamn wrong we were.
The Program must have known it because they left us alone after that to do what we want the past few years. They allowed us, (that’s right, allowed, because they fucking own us), to set up house and live in a make believe world of white picket fences and jobs we go to and grocery shopping with the local church members, letting us think we don’t have a care in the world. They gave us just enough time to get bored with normal life and society and beg to get back in the game.
Hasn’t ‘the call’ been coming up in conversation lately?
We all knew and were all waiting, very much aware that we were biding our time knowing full well that guys like us, machines like us don’t do normal, don’t do white picket fences and Sunday ball games, and bowling leagues, and cable sports packages.
We do fury, we drink adrenaline, we gorge on danger, and sometimes we have to drink from the cup of violence. And we’re fucked up because we love how it all tastes.
Because we’d been created to be this way. Every conditioning, every aspect of our programming was a meticulous calculation for the end game. The evolution of the perfect machine, they made us capable of killing without remorse, they gave us a level of intelligence to unravel highly complex problems, and we’d developed the ability to engage in normal situations without question. They created us, made us do shit in the service no human being should ever be witness to. Then sent us out into the world with all this crap and all this programming, we were all fucking messes.
We’d tried to survive; we did our damndest to be normal.
But we aren’t normal. And it was killing us.
That’s when The Program contacted us, pulled us out of the turmoil that we were drowning in. They offered us the best of both worlds. They gave us an opportunity to feed that need in us that our programming demanded while allowing us to exist in society as regular people.
It had worked for a while. That was until the assignments got darker and bordered on mercenary and hitman.
Like the last assignment.
We left the army with so much blood on our fucking hands, we knew we were bound for hell. But we still had to live with ourselves while we’re alive. We didn’t want to be any part of that shit.
After the last time, we said no fucking more.
But we can’t fight the goddam need for the fix The Program gives us.
I don’t know if I’m strong enough.
I might not have been, until I met Summer.
Three years. It’s been three peaceful years. Just enough time for us to not fight against an assignment.
It’s here.
