Knights Templar (Sean) Read online

  At one point a local political commentator wondered if the police realized that a press statement about how the boys in blue had killed someone was negative press unless a life was saved in the process. Jen didn’t know what to make of all of it, but she did know that in recent months the enrollment to her school had increased a telling amount.

  She realized that some of it had to do with the change in seasons making the weather colder again. Sure, the sports people could be involved in grew slim in number during the cold seasons, but that didn’t mean that some of them weren’t doing it to learn how to survive in a hostile environment.

  Jen’s hands shook as she held the flyer up in front of her. She searched the sheet until she found the phone number in the top right corner. As she dug through a desk drawer for her cell phone she realized she could just use the landline she’d just been called and picked that up instead. The phone rang and rang. She hung up and tried again. Finally, after about a minute and a half of nothing but ringing, someone picked up.

  “Hello,” a male’s voice said before having a coughing fit.

  “Hello,” Jen said. “I saw your flyer for protection and I’ve got some work for you.”

  Another fit of coughing came from the other end of the line before the voice answered.

  “Really?” the voice said. “You’ve got work for us? Well that’s great news, great news. Well not great that you are having problems…well I guess that is part of it, isn’t it? That you are having problems and you need our help. Well, let me try to say that, while I am thankful that you have chosen to use our services, I am very sorry that you are in some kind of distress in your life. Have you done everything else you can to solve the problem before calling this number?”

  “Uhhh, what?” Jen said.

  “Have you done anything to fix the problem?” the voice repeated. “Have you tried talking? Do you care about the person? If you care about the person you need to talk to them. You can’t really need us that badly if you care about them and you haven’t talked to them. Have you talked to them? Do you care?”

  Jen couldn’t believe her ears that she was being asked these questions.

  “Are you high right now?” she asked.

  “Well, yes,” the voice said with some hesitation. “I’m not sure why it matters if I’m high or not. Sorry, I took my medicine. I guess I shouldn’t take my medicine and you’ll go to jail for me when I have a flash back in the mall and kill a dozen people.”

  Jen sat in shocked silence for a few moments and the person on the other end of the line had another coughing fit.

  “So you did something, I take it,” the voice said after it stopped coughing.

  Jen wiped her nose with a tissue before responding.

  “I killed a man,” she said softly.

  The other end of the line went silent for what seemed like a long time.

  “We should speak in person,” the voice said finally replied after Jen started to wonder if he was there anymore.

  Jen stood up from her chair and started to pace around the room.

  “Where should we meet?” she asked.

  “Let’s meet in a bar somewhere,” the voice said. “You ever heard of the Freemont?”

  “The dive bar north of the capital?” Jen asked.

  “That’s the one,” the voice said. “See you tonight.

  The dial tone sounded in her ear and she realized that the man had hung up the phone.

  “Well shit,” Jen said. “Everyone’s hanging up on me today. Must be something in the water.”

  Jen pulled herself together and went home to her studio apartment just a few blocks away, leaving her office in disarray—there wasn’t much she could do about the message on the wall except tolerate it until she got around to repainting the wall. When she got home she flopped down on the couch, exhausted.

  Chapter Two

  Jen woke up in her office. She realized she must have fallen asleep there and dreamed that she’d gone home. She grabbed a tissue out of its box on her desk and tried to clean her face up as best she could, using a little hand mirror she kept with the papers in her desk. After trying to make herself look presentable for the better part of ten minutes and getting nowhere, she threw the mirror back into the drawer with a frustrated sigh and stood up to head to the bathroom.

  Tap, tap, tap, tip-tap.

  A noise from outside her office but in the dojang somewhere echoed against the mirrors that lined the area between her office and the class room. She stood to find out what exactly was going on when she realized that at some point the lights had dimmed, but not gone out all the way; it was like the building was running off of a quarter power or something because there was no way the lights would be dimmed otherwise. Jen had done most of the electrical work herself so she knew its limitations and what it was capable of.

  Turning to check the breaker box she gasped and stood stock still as she starred at the message on the wall, or what had been the smear on the wall left over from her efforts to clean up the message. Instead of the read smear of paint there was a thick liquid bubbling out of the wall, for the most part it was red but in the really thick spots it was black. Jen’s nose tingled as she smelled the copper of blood as the wall’s wound pulsed out bubbles that grew and popped without sound.

  Reaching out to dab her pointer and middle finger in the ooze and then rub it between those fingers and her thumb, then bringing her fingers up to her nose to smell, she realized that it was blood coming out of the wall.

  Tap, tap, tip-tap, sounded again, this time just outside her door, as if a blind man was walking around the dojang feeling with a white cane.

  Jen stared blankly at the wall for a few seconds while terror coursed through her body. She didn’t know what was going on in the dojang but she didn’t like it, she didn’t like it one bit. And she was going to do something. Turning to her right she found the same gun safe her father had kept in the basement when she was a child, it had the same stickers and scratches from all those years ago. The door of the gun safe swung open as soon as she tried remembering the password and there, inside, the only thing in the safe, was an old Chinese rifle that her father had somehow come to posses.

  It had a short stock, a drum magazine and a heat shroud over the barrel to help keep the user from accidently burning themselves when the weapon glowed from heavy use. Jen picked up the gun and tested the weight in her hands; it was definitely loaded and when she pulled the bolt back a fraction of an inch to check the chamber she found a round in the chamber ready to go. Tilting the firearm to the right she found the safety and flipped it to full auto.

  Jen thought back when she remembered her father calling it a “sub machine gun” and thought maybe it had looked a little bit different; maybe a lot a bit different; suddenly Jen was having a hard time remembering if her father had ever had a gun at all.

  Suddenly she remembered that her father had hated guns with a passion and hadn’t even allowed her to play cops and robbers with the neighborhood children. That’s one of the reasons that he’d pushed her into Tae Kwon Do, he had said, so that she would never feel that she needed weapons. Jen felt glad to have this one now, though.

  “Oh papa,” Jen whispered. “I wish you were here now.”

  Tap, tip-tap sounded from the front of the dojang on the other side of the classroom. Jen held her breath and listened hard for any further sounds. Just when she was about to exhale she heard a creak come from the back room of the dojang, past the locker rooms. The back room was a room she used sometimes when classes got extra big, but as of right now it was locked up so no one could get in or out. The creak started out as a high pitched sound but then turned into a drawn out groan as something very heavy shifted its weight in the back room. Jen’s blood ran cold.

  Tap, tap, tip-tap, came from the back room.

  I’ve got to do something, Jen thought. I’ve got to do something now.

  Before she could have second thoughts she strode forward, throwing the door o
f her office open so it hit the wall with a SCHWACK and stormed out of her office. She found the area students used for stretching dim and smoky, like someone had just doused a fire with water. Jen squinted her eyes to peer through the dark when she heard the creak come again from the back room, this time sounding like it was coming from just behind the door. And then the door began to swing open.

  BRAT-AT-AT-AT-AT, Jen swung the machine gun in small back and forth arcs in front of her, perforating the door with quarter-sized holes, filling the room with flashes and staccato thunder.

  The door stopped swinging forward and came to a standstill; for a second Jen wondered if the door had somehow opened on its own, but then a dark pool started to spread out from the crack between the door and the carpet. Then the door flung open and a body fell forward to land face first in the pool of blood.

  “Fuck,” was all Jen could manage to say as she sprinted forward and rolled the body onto its back.

  The man at her feet was someone she’d seen before. His neck was cocked funny to one side and he had a grimace on his face that she remembered seeing from somewhere, but she was having a hard time placing it. His hair was fire engine red and he had a crimson flush to his cheeks. It all came back to her in a flash, how a month before she had broken his neck with a kick and left his corpse in an alley leaned up against a dumpster.

  He’d looked better then, not that he had decayed or anything like that. Jen had never seen how people looked shot up, the closest she’d ever come to violence with a firearm was hearing some of her students that were veterans of the conflicts overseas talk about how insurgents looked doing their “Swiss cheese impressions.” Now, she had not only seen someone shot up close up, but had been the person who had done the shooting.

  “How in the hell did you come back to life,” Jen asked the corpse as she moved her foot forward a little bit to toe his face, leaving a blood smear on his cheek like war paint. Jen realized she was standing barefoot in a pool of another person’s blood and thought she was going to be sick. It took all her will power to stay calm, turn, and take a few steps out of the pool toward the classroom. When she stepped forward she looked behind her to see the foot prints she was leaving on the floor. Jen knew it was morbid to want to see what her own bloody foot prints looked like, but she couldn’t help herself.

  Tap, tap, tip-tap.

  Jen started, yanking the muzzle of the machine gun to point at the dark hall that was to the right of the classroom. The sound seemed to come from the tiled part of the hall at the front of the dojang. She listened close and heard a scraping sound making its way down the hall. Gripping the gun for dear life she tried not to panic. She knew she needed to hold her ground.

  Although none of what was happening made any sense, Jen had the strange compulsion to hold her ground to the bitter end. This was her school and she wasn’t going to let anyone or anything scare her out of it. The scraping sound was getting louder as it made its way down the hall. There was a click-clack sound that came with it. Jen wondered what kind of thing would appear out of the hall and knew she wouldn’t have to wonder long. When the thing did appear, she didn’t believe her eyes.

  The thing was the knight from the flyer, with a purple plume sticking out of the top of its helmet. A strange snuffling was coming from inside of the helmet’s slatted visor. As it stepped forward Jen realized that the scraping sound was coming from the sword that it drug on the ground, its tip digging into the carpet and tearing it up; it was as if the knight didn’t have the strength to handle the sword correctly and with no scabbard to put it in the knight had to drag it along. Besides the sword the knight also carried a shield with bubbling red slash on the front.

  “Oh my god,” Jen said.

  BRA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA.

  Jen opened up with the machine gun and the knight suddenly became quick, crouching down behind the shield and walking forward a little at a time with all the grace of a duck out of water. Jen kept firing on the knight, shooting its plume in half and sending sparks from its shield into the air. When the knight had crept within ten feet the sword reared up and back, held above its head in a ready position.

  BRA-TA-TA-TA-TA-TA.

  Jen squeezed the trigger and held it down until the drum magazine went dry and the bolt locked to the rear, the chamber smoking like a chimney as the barrel glowed red.

  “FUCK!” Jen screamed as she threw the gun at the knight and charged.

  Taking a few steps she launched herself into the air, turning her body and lifting her leg to do a flying kick to the knight’s head in a desperate attempt to break its neck. Just before Jen got there the gun bounced off the shield and the knight swung its word. A blinding pain overtook Jens entire body, then the pain turned to a vibrating sensation. The whole room shook and shook. Jen wasn’t sure what had happened if she was ok or….

  * * * *

  Jen sat up on her couch in her apartment and dug her cell phone out of her pants. The alarm she had set for herself was buzzing, letting her know that a few hours was passed and it was time to wake up, shower, and get to the Freemont to meet with the group. As she looked at her phone to turn off the alarm she realized she was completely covered in sweat. She’d had a night terror, something one of her students that worked as a therapist had told her about.

  Night terrors were a person’s fears and stress manifested in a dream release of trauma. Jen’s clothes were wet like she’d fallen in a swimming pool. When she stood up and inspected the couch she was greeted by a big wet spot shaped in the form of a person just her size. Running a hand through her hair she realized she was definitely going to have to shower before she went out in public.

  Jen stood in the shower for a long time, until her skin wrinkled and looked like a prune. She didn’t know what to expect from her meeting at the Freemont. The guy who she’d talked to on the phone hadn’t given anything about himself away except that he smoked weed, and she wasn’t sure that was going to get her very far since she didn’t, and it hadn’t sounded like he’d had much of a problem finding his own.

  Whatever the guy was like, he was probably going to take some extreme measures, or at least that’s what it had sounded like. It dawned on her, while the warm water and suds cascaded down her body, that she’d told a stranger on the phone that she’d killed a man. That had been reckless of her. Jen knew that it had been because of how shook up the message scrawled on the wall had made her. Hell, she was still shook up over the entire thing or else she wouldn’t be having dreams about what had happened.

  Waking up in a cold sweat wasn’t something that was fun and it hadn’t happened in a long while. When Jen got really stressed it happened sometimes, but it was fairly hard to really stress her out.

  As Jen ran her hands down her body, stopping to cup her breast and slip her fingers over her nipples, she wondered how long it had been since she’d gotten laid. One month? Two months? Leaning her head against the side of the shower she thought back to the last time she’d gotten lucky. It had been three months before, if not longer, and she’d had stooped low enough to call up an old ex who had been driving through Des Moines on his way from Omaha to the east coast.

  From what she remembered it had been a good lay up till the point when her ex had come and then started bawling his eyes out about how he still loved her and she must love him as well since they had just had sex. Jen had tried to explain that what she had said over text had been very frank and upfront: she wasn’t interested in getting in a relationship with anyone, or rekindling a relationship, all she wanted was a good, deep dick’in (she had actually used the word ‘dick’in’ to be funny).

  Her ex must have completely ignored everything she said she wanted besides the part where she light-heartedly said she wanted to get laid. That had been over nine weeks ago, and looking back now it hadn’t been worth the two weeks of texting after the fact.

  Shutting off the water she toweled off and blew her short hair dry. Jen put on some make up but didn’t want to overdo it and come
off as someone that needed to be validated. After slipping into a little black dress and some heels she was out the door and in her car, on the way to the Freemont.

  Chapter Three

  Some people in Des Moines referred to the Freemont as being on the “east side” and it cracked Jen up. Shaking her head as she thought about it while maneuvering her way down mostly empty streets late on a weeknight, she couldn’t help but find the people of Iowa quaint. Most of them meant well, but she thought it was funny that most of the city looked down on the east side because it was full of meat packing plants and the people that worked at them.

  Sure, there was more crime on the east side but there were more people as well. What didn’t make a lick of sense to her was how people were adamant about saying the Freemont was on the east side even though the bar was a few blocks due north of the shining gold dome of Iowa’s capital, just across interstate 235 that cut Des Moines in half. This meant that the Freemont was just a few blocks from Des Moines proper, but this didn’t stop the average person from saying that the Freemont was on the east side.

  Jen wondered if maybe it had something to do with the people that frequented the bar. Sure, they were a little rough around the edges, but most of them were decent enough, if not sometimes polite just for the sake of a peaceful night at the bar. It stood to reason that the person she would be meeting might have crossed paths with her in the past at some point since Des Moines was on the smaller side. It was hard to tell though, since Jen didn’t really spend a whole lot of time at the bar besides going out maybe once every other week.