"Rive, catch!"
I grab the rifle Vince tosses me. Another day, another mission. Another massacre on my conscience. Just what I needed.
Later on, we return to 'base,' really just a run down track house in a bad part of the city. You'd think the government could afford better. But then again, as far as anyone but the top officials know, we don't exist. Our salaries get siphoned from places no one will notice, and we operate well outside the nation's juestiction. When there's dirty work to be done, we're there. And if we screw up, the government will deny our existence. Any way you slice it, the blood is on our hands alone. And it's our sleep that's haunted by the faces of our victims.
Young, old, armed and unarmed, guilty or innocent. It makes no difference in the end.
My name is Rive, as you know by now. No, it's not my real name. Please, I get enough flack for it already. The guys are always making cracks about it. "What, you think you're a hero, Rive? Come on. You're a killer." I know that. They don't have to rub it in. Still, they kid me because for the rest of them, code names are for the field, left behind when the mission is over.
Taser is Vince Van Kammen when he's not in the field. The getaway driver in a robbery gone bad. Cost two rent a cops their lives and put Vince on death row. That is until the feds stepped in. They thought his shock powers could be 'useful' to them.
And Strike is James Harlan when he's 'off-duty.' An ex-military man who was looking for some extra-curricular activities after his forced retirement. He's our resident TK. He's also the one who gives me the most trouble.
"Y'know, R, there's a big difference between what those spandex clad hero types do and what we do. Don't go confusing what we do as super-hero work."
As if I could. The piles of dead around the world speak of that plainly enough. What they don't understand is that sometimes it's more than the name itself. Sometimes it's what's behind it.
I'm Rive now, and will be for the rest of my life, unless I take a different one at some point. And it's not because I'm hiding in some delusion that what I do is good, or right, or just. Like I said, sometimes it's more than the name. To me, Cheri O'Connell is the fourteen year old from Willow Wood, Iowa who woke at five one morning, crept into her parents' room, and incinerated her mother and step-father where they lay sleeping. And she did it without a tear or a trace of remorse. She looked at the smoking remains and left the house with her half-brother bawling at the top of his lungs, an orphan at six months of age. No one really cared why she did what she did. It didn't matter that the abuse had finally been too much, and that the strange lavender fire that sprang from her finger tips gave her the power to strike back at last.
Cheri died that day, and Rive was born.
And by becoming Rive, I left Cheri behind.
~Fin