Hatchet knew all about the new vets from the local bars and his few encounters with the police. Vets who used phrases like embrace-the-suck, battle-rattle, fobbit, and death-blossom. He felt a certain pity for them. As much as they loved their tanks and their missiles and their rifles and their combat knives and bald fucking eagles, he couldn’t help but wish that by some trick of complexity they might put down the tools and walk away. Either way, thought Hatchet, I know these Guardians now. He knew how to exploit their weakness. Security at Calvary Fellowship had gone beyond awareness. They had become reactionary.
Five hundred yards of pitched prairie lay between Calvary Fellowship Church and the gargantuan truck stop to the south. Blankets of watery August heat rippled the afternoon horizons. Semi-rigs growled like lazy lions while Hatchet sat cross-legged on the open tailgate of his truck, leaning forward, peering through a zoom lens. From the scarcity of the 8am service through the last crowded rush of headlights blinking behind hundreds of scissoring legs, he surveyed the compound as it filled with knot after knot of scurrying bodies only to empty them back into the cars an hour or so later and not once did he see a corporate labeled armored vehicle. However, he did see a motorcade formation of three blacked out Suburbans that emerged from a garage at the rear of the huge split-level dome.
There’s the cash, he whispered aloud, his hands jittering the scope in the elation of discovery.
Woody had lied to him.
Lying in his backyard, Hatchet traced a falling star as it scarred the night with glittering green ash. In a barrel roll of hypnagogia, the wail of a freight train far off in the night belonged to some mythical slant headed monster dragging its tail. All worthy beasts of old gained stature in the sky, galactic reward for deeds done either in the name of the gods or in defiance of them. Then he dreamt his reckoning a natural mechanism of the mythical world like blood pumping through the veins of a body, like electricity in the brain.
Five hundred yards of pitched prairie lay between Calvary Fellowship Church and the gargantuan truck stop to the south. Blankets of watery August heat rippled the afternoon horizons. Semi-rigs growled like lazy lions while Hatchet sat cross-legged on the open tailgate of his truck, leaning forward, peering through a zoom lens. From the scarcity of the 8am service through the last crowded rush of headlights blinking behind hundreds of scissoring legs, he surveyed the compound as it filled with knot after knot of scurrying bodies only to empty them back into the cars an hour or so later and not once did he see a corporate labeled armored vehicle. However, he did see a motorcade formation of three blacked out Suburbans that emerged from a garage at the rear of the huge split-level dome.
There’s the cash, he whispered aloud, his hands jittering the scope in the elation of discovery.
Woody had lied to him.
Lying in his backyard, Hatchet traced a falling star as it scarred the night with glittering green ash. In a barrel roll of hypnagogia, the wail of a freight train far off in the night belonged to some mythical slant headed monster dragging its tail. All worthy beasts of old gained stature in the sky, galactic reward for deeds done either in the name of the gods or in defiance of them. Then he dreamt his reckoning a natural mechanism of the mythical world like blood pumping through the veins of a body, like electricity in the brain.
Edit 11.9.2018