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Hunting Nightmares
The rat on Seong “Snake” Kim’s screen looked wildly over his shoulder as he darted from one camera to the next. The program was working flawlessly to flick between the surveillance footage to keep track of him. Seong couldn’t possibly lose sight of the bastard. That had been an important upgrade to their hunting. Brutus was still healing from the bullet to the shoulder from the third rat they had tracked down for the Clovers. Seong wasn’t going to allow another rat to enter a blind spot.
In his headphones, Seong could hear Felinus whistling the tune of an Irish drinking song as he strolled through the same path. Elsewhere in the maze of storage units, Bat’s metal bat clanged against doors.
“He’s heading for the loading dock,” Seong reported as the man dashed madly for the opening.
The whistling paused. “Do you have it,” Felinus asked him.
“You insult me, Gatto,” Seong scoffed, typing in the command and watching as a second video popped up to show the metal doors slowly lowering. “He’ll have just enough time to watch his freedom vanish before him as he tries to close the gap.”
A cold laugh sent a shiver directly to the base of Seong’s skull. The same laugh Felinus had used five years ago when Seong had walked into his apartment to find the man waiting for him. “Have I told you lately you are my favorite, Snake?”
“You can’t fool me, Gatto,” Seong scoffed, tugging the headphones away from his ears. On his screen, the man was running faster. The doors ahead of him rattled as they closed. He threw himself forward, twisting with the practice of a baseball player. “We all know your favorite is the German twink you have waiting for you back home.”
Felinus hummed at the mention of Issac. “You aren’t wrong th-” He paused as the crash of flesh against metal filled Seong’s headphones. “Trouble?”
“No.” He put the headphone back in place now that his ears were safe. “Babo tried to do a home plate slide to freedom. It failed spectacularly.”
“Sometimes I envy your view of the world, Snake,” Zeno “the Bat” laughed, hitting a pole as he passed to send the sound echoing out. “One day, I’m going to convince you to make a gag reel for me.”
“The Hell you are,” Seong told him. “That’ll be how you get arrested and the charges stick.”
“Focus, gentlemen,” Felinus said mildly. “Snake, how’s our rat?”
“He’s trying to get up, but he’s not as fit as he was when he learned how to do that slide.” Seong glanced at a screen as Tiger seemed to materialize out of a shadow behind the man. “Tiger has eyes on him. Can I mute you now? You know I can’t stand the wet sounds.”
“You know, you never answered my question if the cracking sounds are better,” Bat commented.
“Go ahead, Snake,” Felinus told him. “Just keep us connected and watch our backs.”
“Again with the insults,” Seong scoffed. “You know I never take my eyes away. Muting now.”
“Wai-” an unfamiliar voice shouted as Bat and Felinus entered the loading dock.
“Ah, sweet silence,” Seong sighed, reaching over to pick up a can and gave it a shake. Empty. Without taking his eyes off the screens, he tossed the can into the trash and pulled another one out of the mini fridge in the corner of his desk.
It was always fascinating to Seong how no one ever seemed to notice the six foot ten black man until they tried to escape. The child poacher’s mouth was moving desperately as he pleaded with the Cat for mercy, backing away from the Italians as they herded him away from the door towards the shadows where Tiger was waiting patiently.
Tiger could have easily killed the man himself before Felinus and Bat had appeared. Tiger’s story was one massive trauma out of a spy novel, having no memory of a life where he wasn’t treated like a living weapon until he fell into their group. It was coming up on the third year since Felinus, Bat, and Brutus brought in a ridiculously tall but silent child assassin and the Zoo collectively adopted him. Tiger was still a fairly quiet man, until he started talking to Issac. Their shared language of German had formed a friendship none of them had really expected. It was clearly welcomed and needed for the two men who had their childhoods taken by cruel men.
He turned on music. Not as loud as he would normally play it in case he needed to reconnect in a hurry but enough to silence the buzzing that started to form in his head. To drive away the thoughts about another man who deserved the same fate as those men, too.
He winced as Tiger dislocated the man’s knee to send him down. Cracking open the energy drink, Seong shook his head as the man’s face twisted from pleading to rage. “They always go the same way,” he sighed, letting his eyes flick around his three screens as he sipped his drink.
It had been three months since the combined hunting party of the Zoo and Adrian Volkov’s crew entered the Irish Ring for a combination rescue mission and open season on one of the original Clovers. Finnegan O’Riley’s decision to go after Issac Maus had been a mistake. How exactly he thought he was going to keep Issac’s mouth shut to Fergus O’Hare, the leader of the Clovers, or keep Fergus from looking into anything Issac might tell him, was beyond Snake. No one would get those answers.
Finnegan O’Riley was killed before the Zoo could get their hands on him— killed by one of the boys he had been grooming into a Clover— an act against every rule and law of the treaty; a treaty that made the Three Rings the most powerful mafia run city in the country, perhaps the world.
Snake went to take another drink, only to find that the can was already empty. Tossing it aside, he made himself get a water instead of another energy drink.
Fergus O’Hare had found out that night that he had a much bigger problem than one of his Warlords going rogue and breaking the Off Limits on both the Russians and Italians. Finnegan had been twisting the very systems O’Hare had put in place to try to help the youth of the city. Issac wasn’t the first child who had been “caught” shoplifting by a corrupt cop, and he was only the beginning of Finnegan honing his system. Dozens of young men over the last decade and a half had been manipulated into thinking that they needed Finnegan and the Clovers.
It had been poetic that the most recent kid had pulled the trigger when Finnegan threatened to murder Issac. It was frustrating that it was literally a kid and that the shot had been so good that Finnegan didn’t see it coming. He had been dead before he hit the floor.
Snake’s eyes flicked to the video feed and he winced. Some of those frustrations were being taken out on the men who had been using similar methods to take advantage of the youth in the Irish Ring and no-man’s land.
“That’s just gross,” he muttered, swallowing bile with another mouthful of water.
