I'm always busy. Here's a bit of an introduction I penned a few months ago for a project I've had in mind for a long time. Until I finish THE REZ, it will have to remain in waiting.
THE REVOLUTIONARY
By James Robert Smith
And if there's any
hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a
revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.
Phil Ochs
I look at the face in the dingy mirror. It’s a good face.
Different from the others I wear, but a good one all the same.
Simon B. calls it the Hyde-Super-Jekyll Effect. But others
don’t call me that. The folk call me The Revolutionary. As if I’m the only one.
And that’s okay. I suppose I’ve been called worse. And it’s
not entirely accurate. I didn’t start out wanting any kind of revolution, or
much in the way of social change of that sort. All I was after—and all that I’m
still after when you get right down to it—is justice. If the result of my
efforts is a mass revolution; well, they had it coming.
My Mr. Hyde face is gone. I stand before that grimy mirror
in that filthy bathroom and gaze into the water-spotted, rust-pocked surface.
If I ever showed this face, none would be likely to forget it. The dark hair,
almost black, is not long: barely touches my ears and the back of my neck. The
nose is strong and was formerly aquiline; but it’s obviously been broken a few
times—three that I can recall. These lips are like thin, darker lines drawn across
that square chin, below strong cheekbones that look born of some Navajo
chieftain. And the eyes—piercing as any, black like polished jet.
A pity that no one ever sees that face—other than myself and
Simon B. and a few who find themselves targeted by me. Everyone else—all
everyone else sees is the mask. Not this flesh and blood mask, but the one that
I wear made of synthetic cloth, shatterproof plastic, plexiglass lenses.
I’m a sight all dressed up in my outfit of black cloth.
The underground rags say I’m a superhero. The real deal.
Fantasy come to life. Kids apparently adore me and draw pictures of me in
notebooks. There would probably be posters of me for sale in comic book shops
and toy stores if the authorities allowed those images to be marketed. But they
don’t think I’m a superhero, or any kind of hero.
The media, and their puppet-masters, call me a terrorist.
They say I am, at best, a super-villain made flesh and blood. They say that I
am a criminal and they scream for my head. They’re right, too. I want my
enemies to think of me that way.
I want them to live in fear, to be terrorized. I want them
all to piss their pants every time a board creaks in their Victorian mansions.
I want them to shit their britches each time an unexpected movement enters their
peripheral vision when they’re in their penthouses.
And then I want to kill them all.
I’m very good at that.
*
Bernard Sommers had been hearing rumors for some time before
he got any actual information from security. It would have to come up during his
trip to Costa Rica with Sandy.
Sandy was a worldly 19 years old. Perfectly built, perfectly
blonde, and perfectly obedient—everything his wife was not. He had been
expecting a couple of weeks of non-stop fun with the girl. Since he’d met her
some months before, he’d thought of her as nearly sexually insatiable. They
matched that way. Of course it could merely have been that his green-eyed
shiksa was acting, but he rather doubted it.
The thing was, he’d been hoping for days and days of being
lost in the pleasures of her flesh—and now this.
“You need to listen to this, Mr. Sommers. This is serious.”
The man delivering the information was indeed serious. Sommers had rarely seen
him crack so much as a hint of a smile. He was, like Sandy, blonde. But where
she was perfectly feminine and delightful, Armin Fields was disconcertingly
masculine and genuinely menacing.
Sommers nodded his great, bushy head, knitting his dark
brows. “I know perfectly well that you mean what you say, Fields.” He made eye
contact with his faithful employee. Fields’ hair was buzzed military style, his
gaze steely, his gut flat, long of leg, broad in the shoulder, arms bulging
with more than an adequate complement of muscle tissue. He probably had a huge
cock, but Bernie didn’t want to know. It was enough that his hired blue-eyed
Aryan protector was to be physically respected.
“There have been exactly twenty-four attacks, now. Because
of the fact that the first six deaths were of men retired from the corporation,
and then others were men who were involved in other lines not directly tied to
you, we were delayed in making the connection.” He placed his finger on the
printout that he’d placed on the disk in his employer’s rented palace.
Sommers had to look at the slim stack of papers again. “Jack
Pierce, third Baron of Trentwell,” he said.
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