The Retirement Party
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A rising, gold sun gleamed off the steel chassis of a speeding bullet train as it zipped through the snowy Hungarian countryside at 200 kilometers per hour. On board in compartment number eight, a man and a woman sat a half-dozen seats apart, both blankly staring out the window at the blur of snow-covered trees and shrubbery.
Jade Nguyen dressed warmly in a dark leather coat with brown-white fur trimming the collar and wrists. A thick, grey turtle-neck poked up from underneath the coat, while black leggings clung to well-muscled thighs.
Shane Lehman dressed in a neat, charcoal-colored suit with a blood-red necktie, a black pea coat, and black leather gloves. Short blonde hair lay straight and flat on a square head and a thumb-length, crescent-shaped scar traveled down his left cheek.
"I remember you, you know?" She pulled her coat tighter around her shoulders. "A few years back. Thailand. The Fi Luk Khun decided they no longer needed to pay protection to the Shadows. Ra's sent me to institute a... regime change." She spoke behind a silk curtain of straight, black hair. "He sent you to assist."
"I remember."
She frowned. "I didn't like your methods. Thought you were too brutal, your ways too draconian. It's funny when I think about it, now, after everything I've done. Anyway, we fought. I lost. Badly."
"I remember."
"But you didn't kill me."
"And that was selfish of me. I wanted to see what you'd become."
A cockroach skittered past her feet. She crushed it with the heel of her boot. White and brown mush mashed into the creases of the floor. "And what did I become?"
"Interesting."
They sat in silence for a while, listening to the click-clack of the train rushing along the tracks.
"By the time we parted ways, I remember thinking that I'd have to be as brutal as you in order to survive in this business."
"And?"
"And I was."
"And now?"
"Now I don't want to anymore."
He left it alone and they sat in silence, both of them staring straight ahead. Tension filled the air like fog. I just want to be free, she thought.
He finally let out a rush of air. "You're supposed to be dead, Jade." His voice poured out thick with sadness. Genuine or feigned, she couldn't tell.
"I am." She shook her head as she heard the pleading in her own voice. "All you have to do is let me rest in peace."
He climbed to his feet, shaking his head, his face suddenly hard. "I can't do that."
His hand disappeared in his coat and came back with a knife: black-bladed, four-inches long.
She stood up, pulled her coat off and let it hang in her left hand. A memory flashed in her mind of the last time she saw him use a knife...on the children of the Fi Luk Khun bosses back in Thailand. She set her jaw. "I am not a child," she whispered.
His eyes narrowed. "What?"
That's when the attendant, a tall, gray-haired, jowly man pushed through the door behind Lehman and asked for their tickets. Lehman wheeled around and plunged his knife into the attendant's carotid artery. When he snatched the blade out, a fountain of red came with it.
Jade rushed him just as the attendant's body hit the floor, hands clutching his neck wound, life fading from his eyes. Lehman spun back to face her just in time for her kick to knife into his midsection and send him staggering backward, where he slipped in the attendant's pooling blood and crashed to the floor.
As she stalked after him, he rolled away from her and popped up with a slash of his knife. It bought him enough time and space to rise to his feet and go on the offensive. In an instant, his blade flashed down from left to right and she used her coat to entangle the knife, before using her free hand to hammer it loose.
The knife clattered to the floor and bounced under a seat, and he fired a hard left hand at her head. Pain exploded along her right cheek and she barely managed to get her forearm up in time to block a second and third blow.
After the third one, she snaked her right arm around his neck, brought his head down, and slammed a knee into his sternum, before shoving him to the floor and spinning to face him.
Slightly dazed, she approached him, unaware that he'd palmed the knife from under the seat. "I don't want to kill you," she said, "but I'll do whatever it takes. After all...you deserve it."
She launched a kick at his head, but he blocked it and, to her great surprise, buried the knife in her other leg. She screamed in pain and fell back.
He bolted to his feet and slammed a fist into her face that sent her crashing back into the steel door.
She winced in pain and managed to throw up a block just as he brought his elbow slashing down.
With the knife still stuck in her leg, he shoved her head into the window to her right, shattering the glass.
The cold air crashed into her like a tidal wave, and for a heartbeat, she lay in the seat, insides twisted in anger, spirit humbled by the pain of looming defeat. You are a weakling and a coward, she could hear the memory of Lehman's voice scold her as his rough hands wrapped around her throat. But you will not QUIT!
She struggled to breathe, but the wind didn't come; like trying to sneak breath through a brick wall. At the sound of her strangled gasps, his grip tightened. The edges around her field of vision ran black, but before she lost consciousness, she grabbed one of his fingers and pulled back as hard as she could until the bone snapped. His eyes barely twitched, as if the finger meant nothing to him. Didn't even feel it, she thought as he squeezed harder.
Light-headedness crept in as he clamped her carotid artery, and she felt her time on this earth begin to slip through her clinched fingers like sand. She tried moving her leg, but her nerve-endings screamed in protest. That's when she remembered the knife, and fighting through the pain, she snatched the blade out of her thigh with a wet thunk and a trail of blood, and drove it into his heart.
His eyes widened in shock and his iron grip melted away. Jade coughed and gagged as the air rushed back in through her semi-crushed windpipe. "There's a good boy," she said, finally able to breath. "Felt that one, did you?"
He staggered away from her, his hands gripping the handle of the knife, a look of surprise on his face. Instinctively, he pulled it out and fell back into a seat, blood blossoming on his chest and escaping his body in spurts as his heart fought to pump around the wound.
She stood over him and watched as the light faded from his eyes. Then, with the wind from the broken window whipping at her back and blood leaking from her head, thigh, and nose, she limped back to her original seat like nothing had happened and plopped down on the leather cushion. "Happy retirement party, Jade," she said as she pulled her coat tight around her shoulders. "You deserve it."