You want to be ass deep in some junkie den, shooting up zombies and rescuing a scientist who might respect your degrees. Instead everyone's all huddled around outside the hangar waiting for the contact to show up with a van. Everyone's in their own personal coma. Barney decided to take the time and do something that would help the mission greatly, elaborating on what exactly we're up against and showing the layout of the property. Just kidding, actually he's taking you aside and is going to chide you or do whatever he's gonna do. Accepted back into the group or not, after that thing with Yin, everyone but the little gook and Hale is on your tail. The only reason you're here is because you're a loose cannon and they'd rather have you pointed at the enemy instead of fucking up their own plans.
The actual name for the liver spots which are probably cropping up on his back and hands, that's hyperpigmented lentigines. When a dermatologist or a plastic surgeon talks Barney through the latest procedure, they probably use the word rhytide instead of wrinkle. The creases in his skin that he irons out with facelifts and botox, that's dynamic wrinkling, hyperfuctional facial lines, years of movement of the face muscles fuck up the skin underneath. Static rhytides, those are called by the flaming ball in the sky and years of gravity pulling his face down. Any of this ring a bell? Does it matter?
The only time you've ever made a difference in this team is when you've been working against it. Maybe making a difference is better than nothing. Barney's standing in his shapeless flannel shirt so you can feel his hot breath on your chin. It's cold enough so that you can see it if you look down, billowing out of his mouth. Can you feel this?
"You good, Gunnar?" he asks, as if you're not. The hangar is suddenly a hospital room and Barney is the annoying secretary. The only thing that's missing is the paperwork.
"Fine." you practically grunt. You're not the most emotionally mature man at the age of 55, you still act like you've got a chip on your shoulder when you do. You see it as not being emotionally dead enough to bury your feelings; the team sees it as a liability.
Either way, they can go fuck themselves. After that shitstain Billy died, you're the only sniper they've got. You only use the term shitstain because that's what you saw on the back of his pants after he kicked the bucket. He was writhing on the ground, doing some ugly dance in the Ukraine wind, "I'm dying" he said while he was dying. What a fucking numbskull.
It takes a fire of at least 1600 degrees lasting 7 hours to consume a human body. You wonder why you all didn't at least attempt to burn the kid.
Then again, when you thought you were dying, you fucking asked Barney. There's still a circular wound on your chest where he shot you with his pop pop pistol. Difference is though, you're still here, and shitstain was probably dug up from under them rocks and torn apart by huge Russian bears with their heart shaped heads. You smile at that, the thought of the bears coming out of the woodwork as soon as you left. You've also been spacing out, by the way, Barney's looking at you with that concerned look, like he thinks you're not all there or you're gonna see red and try to snuff a member of the team again. Or it might be gas.
"I didn't want to take this job, not with you here. I'm trusting that nothing's gonna go bad with you here." he says earnestly, again, though, that could be gas. He's 5' 9", eight inches shorter than you are. You're positive you could beat the shit out of him and the 11 years he has on you wouldn't work. His exposed forearms are criss-crossed with these huge fucking veins, because he works out so much. Well, not entirely because he works out so much, more or less because he's so fucking old and he insists on working out. His muscles need more oxygen and his regular veins and arteries just weren't doing the job, so the roadwork crew of his body decided to turn side streets into super highways so the lactic acid wouldn't build up due to the replacement of an aerobic process with an anaerobic one. The effect is gruesome and makes you slightly uncomfortable.
(The old saying, how you always kill the one you love, well, it works both ways)
If you stuck a pin into those veins, would the side of the plane look like a Kill Bill set? Pressurized blood spewing out onto your face? Needles into veins, it's something that you'll always been enthused by. It took months for the mosquito bites to fade from your inner thigh, were you shot up. Shooting up into your arms is fucking stupid and you didn't
(don't)
do it. It's like broadcasting to the world that you're a junkie and proud every time you want to roll up your sleeves. Plus, it makes you think of that movie with Jared Leto, the one where his arm gets cut off. Ass to ass, ass to ass! It would have been good wanking material if the crazy mother wasn't getting electrocuted and Leto getting his arm prepped to be sawed off at the same time. You're thinking about editing it, but then you realize you haven't edited a video since 3/4 film was still the best you could use.
Gunnar, stop looking at his fucking veins and say something.
(He would do the same to us!)
You look into his droopy eyes and say "Aye Aye, Captain" with a fake salute, one where the middle finger isn't even touching your eyebrow. The forefinger is slapped across it and the effect is comical, you think. Barney grimaces at the pirate jokes, the breed that you've been pushing on everyone. Your own voice is still ringing in your ears "It's good to hang pirates!" Why did they want you to let the last one go when they've killed all the other ones? What difference does it make that one more scum of the earth is dead? Why the FUCK did Yin think that hitting you with a steel toed boot was warranted? You had to get stitches for it, there's a small scar on your left eyebrow, the opposite of Barney's over surprised one.
Barney had said everyone hated stitches, but you think that he likes them more than he might say. Check out that scar running parallel to his hairline. He cuffs you on the shoulder as if you're the tiny guy wearing uppers on his boots.
We all get old. It's just a matter of time.
When you rejoin the other four men, the contact still hasn't shown his mug. You're tempted to sit down, but the old proverb or whatever the fuck is right. A body in motion stays in motion, and sitting down will only make you stiff and uncomfortable when you get back up.
"Call the client?" Yin suggests in broken English, still at your side. Hale has dropped down and started doing push-ups, evidently the tension and excitement too much for him to take without expending it on something. Christmas whispers something to Barney, like he always does. If you didn't know better, you'd say they were butt buddies; as far as you know everyone's getting the same pay, but Christmas is definitely the second in command.
Barney's on his older than dirt cellphone, a Motorola razor. It's been smashed on several occasions and still Barney buys a new one. It satisfies him to hear it slap shut between his fingers when he's done calling someone, but that doesn't stop it from breaking in his pocket every other mission. You don't have a cellphone, because in the words of Hewie Louis, it's Hip to be Square. Barney's coming towards the group with his hands crammed in his pockets.
"Change into regular clothes, we're doing some surveillance then going in." he says, cracking his knuckles. You noticed years ago that when he makes a fist, his knuckles are completely flat. You assume they were punched from mountains to flat desert plane somewhere along the line. It makes his hands look anything but intimidating.
You're yanking on worn clothes and a jacket and everyone else is too. This is baby back bullshit. You're the first one done and Yin and Hale follow you out.
"You already worked up a sweat, huh?" you ask the black giant, raising an eyebrow. It doesn't even look like you have eyebrows, it never has with your blonde hair. It used to be something that bugged you a little bit. Hale nods and smiles, sort of. He's wearing that baseball cap turned backwards, without the goggles that are usually plastered there. Next thing you know everyone's walking with their guns up a fucking trail. No one's told you anything, you and Road are just carrying up the back of whatever fucked formation this is supposed to be. It's November and the wind here is cutting through your jeans.
You want to ask what s going on, but Barney and Christmas already look all testy. It's a 7 mile walk to the small village where this junk house is and apparently there's going to be some surveillance followed by infiltration to locate the guy, then the extraction.
Barney pretends to be some grizzled
(how can you be grizzled if you keep dying your hair?)
merc who only cares about a paycheck, but you know he's going to end up putting a stop to the entire operation rather than just getting the target out of there. Maybe it's his short man syndrome; he needs to be a hero or something. Of course, Yin is suffering from the same thing and he doesn't feel the need to be Mr. White Knight all the fucking time. Then again, Yin is about as important to the group as the duct taped seats of the plane. If you'd been fighting Toll road you probably wouldn't have held him over those spikes.
You refuse to think that you wouldn't have won if it was Toll Road as opposed to Yin Yang. You won't even entertain the idea. Sometimes it s easiest to deal with things if you're lying to yourself. Hell, Barney does it all the time and he's supposed to be the leader, right? He's like the pimple on your ass that hurts before your fingers even find it while itching.
After less than a mile of walking with guns out, everyone's squabbling over those stupid Bourne movies, yourself included.
"The fourth one was bad because there was no character development, no protagonist." protests Hale, his big gun slung over his shoulder absently.
"The shaking camera was not as bad." says the Asian midget in his broken English. While everyone else is trying to decode what the hell he just said, reply, agreeing with Hale.
"The new guy wasn't as deep as Bourne."
"As if you know about depth." Christmas mutters in spite of himself. Until now he'd been pretending to be alert. It's obvious no masked men are going to come tumbling out of the sparse brush around the trail, no matter how interesting that might make things.
You can't think of any witty one liner to shoot out, so instead you just look at the snow as if it's interesting. Toll seems amused by this and you don't care. For years you've been viewed as the reject, degrees or not. Before Toll there was some high and tight marine with a record of misdemeanors and public drunkenness. He got blown away 2 years before Toll showed up, but before that, it was Marty who played the role of the team fool. Someone had to step into the shoes. If you make people think you're weak, you can come back strong in the end. Or, something.
You like to pretend like it's not an accident that you act like an idiot. Just like you liked to pretend that you could control your heroin addiction, just like you liked to pretend selling out the team for 100 thousand dollars was something you were actually capable of. The team either views you as a sociopath or a-
Just like that you smell the village, before even seeing it over the ridge. The junk house is facing the cliff; you and the rest of them are on a cliff leading to it.
When the smell of iodine fumes makes your eyes water, take a drink. If you can't do that, at least pull your scarf up over your nose.
The house is a decaying old duplex that looks like something you'd see in Tennessee. There's that undertone of wafting urine that reminds you of the bathroom at the Old Point Bar, except what it really reminds you of is your grandfather. More often than not, in his later years, there would be daubs of urine on his pants. Now, that image has turned into something you fear more than death itself, that budding incontinence that is sure you grab hold of you, more specifically the muscles of your bladder, and turn you into a laughing stock. You feel sweat coming down your face, the smell that makes your pupils dilate. Suddenly you notice you have to pee. After gruffly saying it and turning away as the rest of the guys probably exchange looks of question, you plunge your hand down your pants. Dry, it's alright, you piss and shake extra hard. Everyone has that fear that comes from seeing another person. When you're related to someone, that fear pumps through your blood, is in every bit of genetic material.
You picture little daubs of pee in every 12th chromosome of your DNA. You're no biologist, but you know enough. The guys probably think it's because of memories you have of doing heroin. That's definitely for the better.
Smell is the sense that works best when the world decides it wants to hurl you into shitty memories.
"You good, Gunnar?" Barney asks for the second time today, as if you're someone who needs to be handled with kid gloves. You see red for an instant and then nod. This isn't the time to fuck everything up. Minutes later, everyone s on their goddamn bellies looking at the house, seeing what goes on. When you move back from the barrel of your rifle to relieve the pressure on your neck, you'll see your own reflection, distorted by the lens and darkened by the tinted glass. When you look in the mirror, your eyes shut off, it's a sight they've seen so much that there's no reason to reprocess the situation.
Big Barney Ross keeps looking at you out of the corner of his eye. Maybe his face would be thoughtful, or chiding, or something, but considering the fact that it doesn't move much, it's more or less a flat expression.
Botox, it s the perfect poker face. It's the perfect way to see something new in the mirror.