With Malice Aforethought

Just a quick story to get my feet wet with the process of posting here.

I understand chapter 01 was a bit incomplete and started in the middle hopefully this one will clear things up.

Technically there was a reason chapter 01 was so incomplete but we will see if I am able to pull it off correctly. I am not sure if I have the proficiency for that yet, that I can put the idea that is floating around my head down in words, so it makes sense to you. But I understand that is the essence of writing.

Yes, the characters are a totally unbelievable, it is fiction after all, and free fiction from an online web site. You want good prose and believability? Try a library they have plenty of classics. There is a reason we write fiction and unbelievable characters, it is called escapism. Don't believe that try the garbage coming out of Hollywood.

All the usual restrictions apply. Copyright 2018 It could still use some polishing.

And I could use an editor if anyone wants to apply.

No real sex in this one. Again, feedback is helpful, but I won't change how I write based on it. At the end of the day I realize I only write for myself and my own enjoyment and sharing the story is incidental to that. Not so much to thine own self be true but more I just don't care all that much what others think, unless of course it can help me to develop, but I'm not writing for the audience. I think my earlier comment on feedback was misunderstood. I wasn't asking for validation that I should continue writing, I will do that anyway. Only if anyone wanted to read it here.

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It is sometimes said you only have one true love in this world and, if that is so, my one true love is death. It wasn't a relationship I chose but rather that death picked me to be intimate with. To this day I don't know the reason she set me apart as her favorite, the one she chose to embrace and take into her arms as a lover, and not a victim, but she did. It also, like many relationships, was a one sided one in that she took all from me and left me little in return. Yes, I was her favorite, her lover, and in return for loving me she let me use her power, to deal death to others, but at the cost of my humanity. And she was a jealous lover, something I didn't understand at the time but learned later in life, as she would accept no rival for her love.

Our relationship started before my birth, several weeks before if truth be told, when my mother clinically died in the ER from a drug overdose. Somehow, they kept her body alive, brain dead as she was, for 15 days, on a ventilator, pumping it full of nutrients, anti-biotics, and who knows what else, to give my body just that much more time to develop. Medicine was not as advanced in 1980 as it is today. Even then, I understand, it was touch and go and I spent the first three months of my life in the hospital. It wasn't like I had a home to go to, my mother was an unknown teenage junkie who was picked up near death in a back alley, and my father also unknown. But death had had her arms around me and chose to let me live so live I did. I don't know if it was the chemical's they pumped her with or living for two weeks attached by an umbilical to a dead person, but from that point forward I was now death's favorite, and besides, who wants to adopt a premature drug baby with eyes so dark blue it appeared at times I had no iris? Even at this stage of my life adults were leery of looking me in the eye.

After the hospital I grew up in a succession of foster homes, some better than others. Despite the challenges of my birth my body grew to mostly normal size, not overly large, but not too small either. Aside from my eyes, which appeared dark blue at times and black at others, there was little to set me apart from my fellow man except for a freakishly enhanced body strength, that wasn't apparent unless I demonstrated it, and what I later determined was a complete absence of emotion and empathy. From my reading I have learned that I am, technically, a psychopath, in that I feel none of the emotions that others feel. But I am unique psychopath in that I feel no reason to hate my fellow man, to harm them, or to inflict pain on them. I feel neither love, nor hate, sorrow, nor joy, elation, nor depression. Death loved me, in her own unique way, but all I could return to her was obedience. I was unable to love death, and unwilling to do so, and the one time I did feel love she destroyed it for me.

As was to be expected I made no friends in school, but no enemies either. A succession of schools, based on what home I was in at the time, passed before my eyes. I was intelligent enough but saw little need to prove it, being content with passing grades. Occasionally, especially in a new school, I was challenged, but my strength combined with a complete lack of fear meant fights were usually short and often bloody. Yes, I lost on occasion, especially when outnumbered, but won more, and even losing the winners paid a price they had no desire to repeat. I never sought revenge but understood, early on, that putting my opponent down hard and fast created an object lesson no one wanted to chance again. I existed in my foster homes, forming no attachments, developing no feelings for the paid caretakers that provided the room and board around me. The psychiatrists the state provided, and insisted I see, found nothing wrong with me, claiming that I was completely sane, even alarmingly so. There was no neurosis, anxiety, psychotic behavior, in short nothing they could point to except a lack of demonstratable emotions that they simply bypassed when determining I was harmless. They assumed my emotions were bottled up inside and never noticed, or cared, that I didn't have any. Nor did I enlighten them. I recognized the obligations I owed to those that cared for me and I met them with the obedience and respect that their actions deserved, at the level they deserved, but created no lasting relationships. They were in, and then out, of my life, in a never-ending stream of faces. I was passed on frequently, not due to any actions on my part, but that my mere presence was unsettling.

Three days after my high school graduation I was on my way to boot camp. I had enlisted while still in high school, dependent on my graduation, and saw no reason to delay. I hadn't requested a specialty, or made a deal, my goal was to be a combat marine. There wasn't a war going on, but I knew one would come somewhere. Unlike school, in the corps my goal was to excel and excel I did, in unarmed combat, in armed combat, in conventional and unconventional warfare, in everything. I learned how to parachute, went to sniper school, spent time with explosives. With my body strength, and inner discipline, I excelled in unarmed combat. I never got angry, or flustered, or scared. I felt no empathy for my opponent, or rage towards him. If he bested me, I learned from it with no need to revenge, I felt no insult, as I had no pride to soothe. If I won, which was often, I had no need to humiliate my opponent, so I simply beat him in the most efficient manner with the minimum of effort required. That others took this as a sign of my maturity, or benevolence, would have amused me if I felt amusement. I did learn how to laugh, attempting to provide cover for my emotional lack, but for some reason it only frightened others.

I had been in for three years when 9-11 hit and a week later I was alone, riding a horse, deep in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. I specialized in single missions, working alone, without a partner or team. It wasn't something the corps liked but there were occasions that required it and when it was necessary, they often called on me. I reupped for four years and spent them in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, and Iraq. Then another four years where the corps lent me to the CIA and I bounced from the Middle East to South America. Wherever they needed someone killed I was there. Everywhere I went death was with me, embracing me, protecting me, loving me. She didn't need me to kill for her, she had so many ways to kill without me, but she seemed to take a special joy in my kills. I think it was Stalin that said the death of one man is a crime but a million men a political act. To her the death of a million men was blasé so she focused on the individual kills I had. When faced with an overwhelming buffet, or an overabundance of sensations, it is often best to focus on just one or two items to keep the taste buds from being overcome. Too many sensations dull the senses and too many experiences overpower the ability to process them. She learned to savor my kills, to bask in their warmth, to take delight in an act that left me unfeeling and cold. I was the single item on the menu she chose to consume, the one she had selected before the menu was even written.

After twelve years I had had enough and was tired of it. My contact at the company seemed surprised when I told him I was not reupping. He suggested I take a few months break, but he misunderstood. I wasn't tired of killing, just killing for minimum wage. I wanted to go into consulting with only one client. He immediately saw the benefits to the company which included me not being a marine, so they could use me on jobs that the marines officially frowned on, plus not being on any government payroll, so they had plausible deniability if anything I did became public. Also, I could now do domestic jobs which I had been banned from before. I formed a consulting company, chartered in a foreign country, which only existed to launder payments to other bank accounts in other countries. I was the sole employee. My needs were simple, having no desire for a home or family I lived from hotel to hotel, acquiring possessions and discarding them as each job required. I formed no identity of my own, carried no possessions, had no individuality, but developed each persona as the assignment required until I discarded it for the next one. Perhaps I was still a psychopath but as far as the company was concerned, I was their psychopath, one they could point at their enemies. I didn't kill for fun, or pleasure, but only for profit, and lived by a code of right and wrong I developed myself.

Sex was, to me, a commodity, one providing neither emotional or spiritual fulfillment, but simply a form of physical release I found beneficial. Oddly enough I found my almost complete indifference to sex, and to the physical attraction of women, to act as a form of aphrodisiac to many of them. I wasn't attracted to men, of that I was sure, but neither did I find one girl more desirable than another, except in the broadest terms. I wanted them simply for sexual release and found, to my surprise, that many were attracted to the cold, clinical, style of sex I provided. My only mistress was death, she still held me in her embrace, she jealously guarded my interactions with women, and would brook no breach in that wall. But she allowed me dalliances, either amateur or professional, as long as no commitments were formed. She fed off the fear I created in others, not in the pleasure I provided to a few.

I had accepted an assignment in NYC, to eliminate a socialist professor from a South American country that was in self-imposed exile from the new leadership there. He had come to raise money among the darling of the academic set, so he could go home and stir up more trouble, and the job took some time to set up as it was supposed to be an unimpeachable accident. It was on this assignment I met Tracy. She was a peripheral player on a political campaign for a local politician who was shortly to move into office and was aligned, at least superficially, with my assignment.

I met Tracy at a cocktail party that had been arranged as a meet and greet for the visiting professor and felt an immediate attraction to her. Yes, felt, for the first time in my life I felt love for another human being. Emotions were as foreign to me as my world would be to her, if I had told her truthfully of it, but I knew she needed to be a part of my life from that moment on. I wanted to possess her, to own her, to protect her, to keep and love and cherish her. We defined the word whirlwind romance in that within a month I had married her, having arranged with a contact in the company to have a federal judge perform the ceremony, in secret. Although I wanted her, and needed her, my assignments kept me away from her, except for the odd times I was able to spend with her. I had disposed of my current assignment shortly after the wedding and was immediately sent to South America for another job. After that I detoured through Iraq, to dispose of a tribal leader who was giving us trouble, then home to Tracy for a week's rest.

I took her down to Baltimore for the weekend, to eat crab cakes and visit the inner harbor. The second night we were accosted by three muggers when taking a late-night walk and the casual efficiency with which I dispatched them seemed to horrify her. Unarmed I had killed three men in about ten seconds and then steered her away from the scene, leaving their crumpled bodies for the police to find. We checked out early the next morning and drove back to NYC, but she sat quietly at a distance from me in the car, thinking. I didn't like her sitting apart from me and slowly calmed her back into my arms after we returned to her apartment.

This set the pattern for our lives for the next few years. I would spend a few days, or a week or even two, with her in NYC, then back on assignment for a month or three. I'm not sure she liked the life style, but we never discussed it. I had made my feelings for her plain, she was the one I loved, and this is how our life would be, and she accepted it. Complaining, at least to me, was not in her nature, and I am sure she would have told me if she was unhappy. She was still the only one that could look me in the eyes although I noticed she did so less often as time went on, as if something she saw there troubled her. But for my part the time I spent with her, limited as it was, was the only time I had felt true happiness in my life. Her home was the only place I could let down, feel free to be me and not the persona I put on for each job, although underneath it all there really wasn't a me anymore. So, with her I played the part of loving husband, pretending that was the real me. I did tell her, in passing, that I would kill any man that touched her as she aroused in me another emotion, jealousy, that had been foreign to me.

Of course, I had her under surveillance when I wasn't home, if only for her own protection. I had killed too often, for too long, not to have acquired enemies, enemies which could go at me through her. My employers arranged it, just another perk of the job, although that did allow them to filter what I was provided. It's not that I suspected Tracy of cheating on me, she loved me too much for that, but I only wanted to protect her. Was I blinded by my love of her? Did I mistake her growing fear of me for love and devotion, her willingness to please my every whim when I was with her for a sign of affection, and not a growing innate terror of who I was and what she was married to? Perhaps I did but who or what was it that placed that fear in her? It wasn't me, not by word or deed did I in any way harm or threaten her, but showed her nothing but loving kindness, gentleness, and grace when I was with her. It was my old mistress death, raising her vengeful head, planting in my angel the seeds of doubt that forced her to look elsewhere for protection, protection from her loving husband that she didn't need, instead of relying on his protection and his alone. I was in Beirut when I received the tapes from the company, tapes which shattered my world. To the company, Tracy had become a liability, it was one conversation that sealed her fate. But they couldn't act against her without engaging my enmity and, unlike Tracy, thy had too much respect for my abilities to do so.

I returned immediately, unlisted, as freight on a military cargo plane. Using one of my many aliases I retrieved some clothes from a storage location and rented a room to rest and change. Then I took the train into the city and spent the evening with my wife's paramour, Mr. Hall, before returning to Tracy's apartment. She had left for work so again I rested until her return. I had another snippet of conversation I hadn't played for Mr. Hall on my recorder, one I intended to play for Tracy alone. I listened to it again.

"He's a monster, he isn't human. I once saw him kill three men and he walked away like he was putting the trash in the bin. He has no feelings, no remorse, no emotions. And his eyes, when he looks at me, I get so scared. He tries to show love but what comes out is unearthly."

"Nothing can hurt you, Tracy. I can protect you if need be. We can file a restraining order to keep him away from you, even put some protection on you. If, as you say, he killed thee men we can have him put away, for a long time, where he can't hurt anyone anymore. I have a lot of connections among the local police."

"You don't know him like I do, you don't know what he is capable of. You have never met him, never seen him. He just plays at being human, tries to imitate it, but he isn't. I don't know who he works for, or what he does, he just says a company employs him and he leaves for months at a time. He has scars on his body, from bullets or knives, I don't know. When he touches me my skin crawls."

"Your trembling. Come sit here on the couch with me and let me hold you"

I couldn't listen to the rest. He seduced her, defiled her, besmirched and sullied her body. But she had already turned against me. He paid, not for seducing her mind, for turning her against me, but for corrupting her body. Tracy would pay for her betrayal as well.

She returned home and acted happy to see me, but I knew it was an act. We went to dinner, had a late walk, just holding hands and talking, two lovers in the city, both of us acting our parts, in love, and returned to her apartment. I found couldn't confront her. I loved her too much to cause her pain. We made love and I held her in my arms as she fell asleep. I pressed the injector pen to the top of her neck, where the hair would cover the mark of the injection. The poison was fast acting and mirrored a brain aneurism. Perhaps it would be a few days before she was found and it left the body quickly.

I was still needed in Lebanon and left that night.