The Drifter's Swan Song

In the last four years I had made everything to avoid hunting in the vicinity of our hideout but after tonight's events it was more than compromised and I had no reason to refrain myself.

Over the last years, I had filled up the gas to our different vehicles in a small gas station at the edge of the next town. Over the hood of the car I had a magnificent view on a small house in which lived a magnificent and lonely woman. Now the time had come for me to pay her a proper visit.

By sunrise, I went to sleep my arm almost healed and my dick still covered by the dry juices of the woman. As I fell asleep I could hear the bleached hair girl digging in the woods to dispose of the remains of my dinner.

The next evening, the woman in the basement looked much worse than the night before. She spat at me again and once again I left her alone. I spent the evening listening to the whore's life story. For ten days, we waited prisoners of a strange routine. I would wake up, go see the woman in the basement and get spat at. I would them come up and talk with the whore. Sometime before dawn we would fuck and I would go back to sleep. The last of the crystals had been gone for a while but the girl didn't seem to mind anymore. She looked better, some meat had piled up in her hips and her face was losing the chalky grayness it had when I had picked her up.

On the eleventh night I felt that the woman in the basement was almost ready. Her wounds had started healing but due to the blood depravation her body had to consume itself to close the wounds. I went down and emptied a clip of dumdum bullets in her gut. She screamed in pain until sunrise. We left her alone the night after.

For what I'd had to do I needed a clear mind so the next night, I went up north to a small Canadian university town and raped my way through an old woman's house who rented rooms to girl students. The first one was asleep, I only took her blood covering her lips with my hand; the second one was taking a shower, the hot water on her warm body made our primal embrace much pleasurable, the third one was painting her foot nails in front of TV, this one I made her scream. I finally crucified the old woman in her cellar. My appetites had been satiated.

The news hadn't caught up with my previous killing but this one would most certainly make the headlines in a couple of days. I didn't mind as my prisoner in the basement was now ready to talk and I would soon move on.

This time I took the whore with me. The heap of pain and blood in the basement was unable to take her eyes off the girl. I made the whore take off her clothes. With this last days diet of clean air and good food, she looked quite desirable. I took my knife and slashed a large cut between her tits. Under my control, her pain turned to pleasure. I was rock hard but my previous night's feast allowed me to keep focused on the task at hand. At our feet, the blob of despair and suffering chained to the floor wasn't so lucky.

"So are we going to talk now?" I asked.

"Fuck you."

A net progress, but we were still not quite there yet.

I took out my dick forced the whore to bend. I penetrated her violently from behind. My fangs brushing against her neck, my glowing red eyes pinned into the creature's. With each thrust, the whore's blood splattered the floor in front of my captive's feet, barely out her reach.

I unloaded, took the knife and made another incision on the whore's belly making her blood pool with my sperm and her juices between her legs. I had her seat on her ass touching herself in front of the prisoner.

"Where are the girls?"

She growled but her resolve was almost dead.

"I will repeat myself one last time, if you don't answer I'll leave and I'll burn down the house. I doubt you survive but if you do I'm pretty sure you'll rot in here for years before anyone comes by."

Her eyes weren't on the whore anymore, they were on me. She knew what would be the outcome of tonight session.

"Where is my family?" I asked one last time.

After a very long pause she finally answered: "La Havana, Hotel Nacional, Malecon."

"Thanks," I said.

I took out my glock and severed her head from her shoulders thus ending all this unnecessary suffering. I sent the girl upstairs to gather our things and poured gasoline on the corpse.

When I got out of the house the girl was showering with a bucket of cold water by the small shed where the hunters used to hang the carcasses. We had a long drive ahead of us so I got into the car and waited for her. She sat by my side and looked at me.

"Are you going to kill me too?"

I didn't answer, lit two cigarettes, one for me, one for her and drove on the small road away from the refuge that was burning down.

6.

The dynamic of our little trio had changed over the years. In the first months, my mistress taught us of our condition. She taught us to fear the sun, she taught us how to bend the will of humans, she taught us that our cravings where different than our needs, she taught us how to hunt, how to kill, how to take pleasure out of it, she told us that our condition would grant us powers, that they would come with time, that each of us had different powers.

But my mistress had been born to a privileged French family in the beginning of the XVIIIth century and she had never actually struggled for anything. My mistress lacked the killer instinct that had made me one of the best at what I used to do. So I took Mary under my wing and started training her. I took her away from our nest, unfed and naked threw her in a deep forest and left her come back to us. She did. I gave her a target, a dangerous drug lord from Detroit, and told her to bring me his head. She did. When we finally settled I taught her about guns and explosives, I taught her about counter intelligence and interrogation techniques, I taught her about traps and sieges, I taught her about the real internet, the networks under the network, I taught her about all that I knew and she learned well. My mistress looked at my efforts with apparent disdain but I knew she was secretly proud of me.

In return Mary taught me how to care and love again. Her juvenile figure would crawl by my side in the dawn's early lights and she would lay there still until we both fell asleep cold body against cold body. She managed what I hadn't done in all my wanderings: she gave me peace of mind. Her candor and raw joy of life brought me back to my youth, to the sweet moments of father daughter bonding I had enjoyed as a young man still in love with my wife. With my new family I could finally put the old one to rest. I learned to live again.

That's what families do, they learn from each other, even the most dysfunctional families as our own.

7.

Like Japanese Kamikaze aiming American destroyers during the last days of World War II, squadrons of mosquitoes flew one after the other into the blue light hanging over the door. On the bed of my hotel room, I opened the small package my contact had given me earlier that evening. A glock, six regular clips, four loaded with specially made incendiary ammunition, a pair of binoculars, a bullet proof vest, eight concussion grenades and a GPS tracker. Everything was there. I adjusted the vest under the guayabera, I checked the gun one last time before hiding it in my back making sure that the large white shirt would hide it and threw the rest of the stuff into a small blue backpack. The man looking back at me in the mirror looked like a regular tourist, good. I called reception to have them call me a taxi and left my room.

"A donde vamos?" the driver asked me.

"Hotel Nacional, por favor." I answered in my limited Spanish.

"Okay sir," he said in an even more limited English.

It was my first time in Havana and so far everything had gone according to plan. I leaned back looking out the window of the old Cadillac, young and desirable couples walked down the large seafront avenue. The island had been a paradise for the wealthy and a nightmare for the poor and despite forty years of Castro rule and US embargo things had come back to the same point with the wealthy replaced by the tourists. But people seemed careless, ready to dance as soon as some music would hit their ears.

Getting here hadn't been as complicated as I had feared. After bitching for at least fifteen minutes about my ten years of silence, Mike had arranged my trip and a contact to get me what I needed.

"Okay John, I don't know who you're waging a war against but if you get caught you're on your own, old friend. I know I'm a deputy director but I'm pulling a shit load of strings to get you all this. Since the Bay of Pigs you can understand that we have a small issue with any king of operation on the Cuban soil."

He seemed to be waiting for an answer. As I hadn't anything to say to that I waited.

"Anyway if you get out of this alive, I'd love to pay you a beer someday," he finally concluded.

"I'll keep it mind. Thanks Mike."

"Canadian?" the driver asked pulling me out of my thoughts.

"Hum," I answered.

"First time in Cuba, sir?"

"Hum."

"I can show you around, if you want?"

"Hum."

"I have a cousin, she really nice, if you want I can call her, she really good company, she studying medicine..."

I looked at him in the rear view mirror and made him shut up.

The hotel Nacional had been built at the beginning of the last century by the Mafia to serve them as a front for their semi legal activities on the Island. Apparently after the fall of Batista, management had changed. The council of five had settled here by the end of the fifties. This is where my mistress and Mary where behind held captive.

A fully uniformed bell boy opened my door. I paid the taxi and entered the hotel. A small man approached me.

"Mr. Jack?" he asked with a strong Cuban accent.

I nodded.

"My master is waiting. Please follow me."

He turned around walking towards one of the large elevators in the hall. He stopped a fat old couple of tourists from getting in with us and pressed the button to the last floor. When the doors opened, we were expected by two large gorillas. The one to my right tried to approach me to frisk me but the bullet that ended between his eyes convinced him otherwise. The other one tried to reach for his gun but the smoking muzzle aimed at his face stopped him.

"I don't need to kill you, don't force me," I said.

But after a moment of hesitation, he did. I turned around to point the gun towards the small man that had greeted me.

"Please sir, I can't..." He started.

"Where are they?"

"At the end of the hall, but sir you have to relinquish your weapons, it's protocol..."

I wasn't here to chat. I grabbed him by the collar and used him as a shield against the bullets that started pouring from down the hall.

"Mr. Jack," said a voice coming from behind the heavy wooden door, "that was a really stupid thing to do. We had to call the authorities; they should be here any minute now."

I threw the cadaver away and jumped behind a corner.

"It won't take me that long." I answered grabbing a couple grenades.

They rolled into the room and the guns went silent.

I ran towards the smoke. Eight thugs were laying in pieces in a large conference room. On the opposite side of the gigantic table occupying the center of the room, three men and two women were looking at me. Despite their very old age, they seemed terrified. I took a second to observe them.

"Mr. Jack," the tall blonde woman presiding the council said, "we can perfectly reach an agreement."

"No, we can't," I answered.

And methodically I took out the head of the so called council of five.

8.

Twenty minutes later I was seating in the back of a small black speedboat leaving Cuban territorial waters.

I had known that my mistress had been killed the moment I had stepped on the island. The link between us had been broken. In a way, their deaths had made my work a lot easier, I wasn't anymore on a rescue mission, I was here to make a point.

The bleached haired girl holding the helm turned around and looked at me. She was wearing her hair in a ponytail. The two bite marks on her neck were nearly gone.

She smiled.

The loss of my mistress and Mary hadn't affected me as much as I had feared. After all, maybe I wasn't a family man, maybe I was just a killer, a drifter.

I smiled back.