hellkitty

“File your battle plans,” Mattox snorted, hovering over the delete key. Right.  Only hardcore REMFs thought you could file battle plans, like it was an itinerary. First, we’re gonna do this, second, that. And then victory.  It didn’t work like that. No battle plan survived first contact with the fuckin’ enemy, anyway. 

Still, it was OmniCorp, and they signed his paychecks.  Okay, fine, Mattox could play the game.  He hit ‘reply’, then typed in: WIN. That was the plan, at least all the plan they needed to know about. He’d learned enough about these corporate assholes to know that any plan you gave them they’d turn around and use it against you, some sort of assessment bullshit, where he’d be knocked down points for deviating from the filed plan.

This was a simple enough gig: an insurgent nest, bad guys and weapons, right next to a school. Fuckin' savages, setting up next to a school. Like they thought it would keep them safe, that no one would attack that close to little kids.

Mattox and his droids were fuckin' designed for that shit. He plotted the doors, set teams, even figured a few places to walk the EDs up to to keep the bastards off the school.  Some not for kiddies stuff about to go down, stuff he couldn't settle till he got there himself: guns hot, action fluid and changing. Just how he liked it.

No one sitting back in Detroit needed to know any of it. They'd piss themselves if they knew it was close to a school, try to can the whole mission. Way to have faith in your damn product, he thought. Way to have faith in me. Assholes.

And send, he thought, just as he heard the knock on the doorframe.  He never bothered closing the door to his ‘office’. Not like he was ever even in there longer than it took to grab a nap, coffee, whatever counted as not-combat shit.  “Yeah.”

He knew the proper military response was ‘enter’ or some shit, but hey, he was a civilian contractor. Fuck those stick-up-ass rules.  Just because he was attached to the company didn’t mean he had to act like it. 

“Thought you might want to see this, sir.”  One of the interrogators, female, one of the ones who tried too hard to be one of the guys. She held out a smudgy paper, folded in fourths, which had obviously lived for a while in someone’s back pocket. 

Mattox unfolded it, looking down at a black and white of his own face, and some of the local scribble above and below it.  “Hey look, I’m famous,” he said, one side of his mouth lifting in a smirk.

“Basic translation is ‘wanted dead or alive’,” the ‘gator said, pointing to the text at the top. She seemed to think he wasn’t taking it seriously enough, her finger hovering over the part that meant 'dead'. 

He wasn’t. If he lost sleep every time some third world dipshit put a price on his head, he’d have died of insomnia a long damn time ago. “Yeah? How much am I worth?”

“It works out to be a bit over a million US.” She seemed at a loss what to do with her hands, settling them finally behind her back in a parade rest, like a good little enlisted squirrel.

“Chickenscratch,” he said, acidly.  “Taliban at least doubled it.”

“Sir.” She shifted her feet. “You don’t have a problem with it?”

“Sure, I do,” he said, turning the wanted notice around.  “This is a shitty picture. Who’s putting such goddam lousy pictures of me out there?” 

“I. I could look into it? I guess?” 

“Damn right you will.  In fact." Mattox turned, grabbing his helmet, patting his sunglasses in his chest pocket. "You busy right now?"

She looked over her shoulder, back to the hooch's main door, and beyond that, probably to the 'gator hut.  "Sir?" 

"Right. Grab a camera. We'll get some action shots."  Mattox gave one last glance at the map laid out on his desk. Yeah, he got this.  "And stop calling me 'sir'. I fuckin' work for a living."