Had another unpleasant run-in with Mr. USA this morning. I think he's starting to get the idea that we're not exactly happy to have him and his blue helmet party friends here at the Ice Palace. I don't know what could possibly have given him that crazy idea, but he chewed me up one side of the commissary table and down the other.
Or he would have, if I hadn't reminded him just how much SPYGOD hates to be interrupted in the middle of my first cup of coffee of the day.
(I stir it with a tjbang stick to take some of the non-alcoholic edge off. Trust me when I say it's nothing you want to have to resort to. Stay away from the brown bean heroin, kids.)
So, one almost irreversible intra-national incident later, and a number of The COMPANY's best agents somewhat bloodied and battered keeping one of us from doing the obvious thing under the circumstances, he's off on his side of the Ice Palace, and I'm in mine. And it'll probably stay that way until one or both of us leaves.
This is what we've been reduced to, the two of us. Squabbling children, fighting over a toy that neither of us really wants anymore.
We weren't always enemies, he and I. We knew each other before I was SPYGOD and before he was Mr. USA. Back in the war, when we had crazy patriotic codenames that had nothing to do with our ranks.
(Me not a Sergeant, he not a Captain. You know how that goes.)
Whatever we started off as, wherever we came from, and whatever background we came from, we all came out of Camp Rogers as good friends. We'd been through the crazy hell of science gone patriotically haywire, together, against all odds. And that forges a bond you don't break all that easy.
And going into action together? That just made it all the more stronger. We weren't just fellow soldiers, son. We were brothers and sisters, together.
But then I had to go and do the one thing he wanted to do.
What can I say? We were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hitler was supposed to be north of Berlin, where he was, not east, where I was.
The official story makes it sound like my unit had been tracking him for days, scrabbling for information and putting pieces together. Knocking over informants and kicking in doors, looking for the most evil person in the world. Just the sort of thing you'd expect out of the man who would one day be heading up The COMPANY.
Except it's bull!@#$. We got lucky was all.
Hitler was on his way to the Fuhrerbunker and stopped at a church. From what I heard, he was trying wheedle some favors out of the god he'd spent the last few years letting his SS pagan !@#$ friends try to tear down and replace with some weird-ass, pre-new age Viking mystery religion.
And if one of my people hadn't wanted to stop there to pay some respects, we'd have missed him completely. He probably would have wound up in the bunker, months later, on the night of the Black Pill, and we'd have had a real problem on our hands.
But we didn't miss him, and we snuck in, and then I did the deed that's made me so famous over the years. While the other guys were tangling with his U-Men bodyguards, I leaped on top of him and tore his !@#$ head right off his neck.
The guys later told me I looked like one of those gargoyles we saw in France, all smashed up and lying on the ground around a demolished church. I sat there bathing in his neck stump juices like I'd wanted to drink them, or just received some cosmic message from the gods and was taking the time to process it.
I don't know what was thinking right then. Maybe just amazed that this !@#$ little !@#$ of a man who'd caused so much trouble just came apart in my hands like a roast pig. And I had his head in my hands and didn't know what to do with it, yet.
I killed our enemy, but in doing so I made another one.
I wasn't there when he got the news but he was apparently livid. I didn't find out how livid until Korea, when we were operating on the same side under new names, and finally had a chance to have it out. I think we tore half of one town apart going at it, that day.
But I've never learned really why it was that important to him. He refuses to discuss it, even to this day. And for all my digging and all my probing, nothing concrete has ever come to light.
All I know is that's how love turns to hate, kids. One wrong move in someone else's zen garden and suddenly you're a sandbox wrecker.
Two more days and I punk GORGON, again, and hopefully get the show on the road. I don't like living in a confined space with someone I want to love again, but have to hate because he's decided that's the way it is.
(SPYGOD is listening to Terrible Love (The National) and drinking more of that nasty black bean heroin)
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