No Man's Land

November 21^st.

O’Hare International Airport, Chicago.

14:23.

“And please take the time to enjoy some of our in flight facilities,” said Captain Snowball’s voice, rustling through the PA system with a refined sense of authority about it. “The flight attendants will only be too happy to select a film for you, if you are struggling.”

Arching back into his seat lethargically, Trent Luciano gazed out of the port-hole to his right and watched the luggage attendants scurry around like squirrels, picking up suitcase sized acorns and tossing them into one of the lower compartments of the plane. The defenceless suitcases seemed to squirm a little under the intensity of the treatment they were receiving; each bag bumped, jolted and let out a silent moan of protest as one of their peers was ceremoniously dumped on top of them.

“Good thing I didn’t pack that bottle of whiskey after all,” he muttered under his breath, attracting the attention of the behemoth sitting to his left.

Wriggling like an elephant stuck in a hedge, it was clear that the fat man simply couldn’t achieve a state of comfort in the confined spaces that the economy class provided. Every now and again, the hairs on the end of his nostrils would flare up agitatedly as his posterior tried to acclimatise to the impossible. It made for great viewing or, rather, it would have done had he had not continually barged his elbow into Trent’s spine on four separate occasions already.

“Sorry,” he continued to mumble, almost undetectable to the human ear. It was one of those apologies that fell flat in the air; the type that is triggered impulsively by some internal agent controlling manners yet never really conveys any remorse.

Of course, Luciano didn’t particularly mind. It just left him wondering why the government couldn’t muster up enough cash to upgrade him from economy class.

One of the several blonde flight attendants on board wiggled down the gangway with one of those completely fabricated, ‘lust-for-life’ smiles that instantly attracted his attention. Her uniform looked absolutely immaculate. No creases, no stains, nothing. Projecting a plastic sense of perfection out onto the world, Trent found himself daydreaming about what her world was really like. Everyone has problems. Flight attendants are no different, no matter how convincing their disguises might be.

Life sized Barbie dolls.

“Mr. Luciano,” she said, startling him from the world of make believe and staring at him with boundless enthusiasm. “Would you like to select a film for the journey?”

“Ah,” he roused. “Yes, please.”

Feeding his fingers over the behemoth to his apparent displeasure, Trent reached for the assortment of cassettes laid at his mercy by Barbie.

“Why don’t you let me select one for you, Mr. Luciano?” she interrupted, leaving his arm in limbo just above the fat man’s sizeable gut. Throwing her a slight glance of confusion, Trent paused for a second before surrendering to her demands.

“Sure.”

Instantly, Barbie flipped out a small, grey cassette with some form of strange insignia scrawled across the front of it that stood out from the crowd, almost begging to be chosen. Nodding with a pleasant grin, Trent thanked the attendant for her help and threw the cassette into the machine that sat in front of him. He reached for the headphones.

“Good afternoon, Trent,” said a familiar voice. It was his superior, Colonel Bridge.

The mission briefing followed the same format that it had always carried; deny all knowledge in the event of capture, leave no evidence of your presence, etc. On face value, this seemed like your average intelligence gathering escapade. However, little did Luciano realise just how far this particular rabbit hole would go.

“This message will self destruct in five seconds,” added the Colonel.

And with that, a large cloud of smoke shot up like a polluted phoenix rising from the ashes.

The behemoth to his left saw the smoke. He winced awkwardly and his heart fluttered against the wind. Carefully, Trent reached for his coat pocket and pulled out his best pair of Ralph Lauren sunglasses. Black for added effect.

“Sorry about that,” said Trent, nudging the fat man, with a smile across his face. “I had a bad curry last night.”

“Shit, man, I’ll say!” he replied.

Once more, he rocked back in his chair. The sound of the plane’s engine roaring into action thwarted any further chance of a conversation with the behemoth. That suited him. Slowly allowing his eyes to droop down, Trent embraced the blackness and prayed that it would envelop him for a good several hours.

Maybe he’d have been a little more tolerant of the white had he known what was to follow in Seoul.

----

December 2^nd.

South Korean Border.

06:34.

“Why didn’t I become a lawyer or something?”

The sound of flesh scraping against a dirty concrete floor bounced around the solid walls of the bunker, forcing even the darkest of nature’s creatures to close their ears momentarily. Desperately trying to shut out the overriding sense of pain that had consumed his entire body, Trent Luciano snatched his teeth together, gritting them and wielding them completely shut.

“Give him the treatment, boys,” said The Leader.

Three unfamiliar figures hovered over his motionless carcass like vultures waiting for the kill. They all shared the same sadistic smirk as they took turns smashing their knuckles into the spy’s mutilated face. His cheeks had already swelled up like blood drenched balloons, almost daring to be popped. It was a far cry from the suave, sophisticated figure that usually propped up bars in high class establishments. This was Trent Luciano out of his element, stripped of all dignity and powerless to stop… anything.

“What do you know and who sent you?” screamed the ugliest of the three henchmen, thrusting his face against Luciano’s and peering straight through his eyeballs. He had a distinctive scar that occupied most of the left side of his face, running in a zigzag from eyebrow to lip.

Conceived by hatred and defiance, a small, squishy, green ball appeared out of nothing deep inside of Luciano’s stomach. Suddenly feeling the need to be unleashed upon the world, the green ball exploded upward and jumped from his mouth, splattering all over the ugly man’s face. The saliva clung to his face desperately, lingering for a few seconds, before dripping down his chin and ultimately dying on the floor below.

An unrivalled glare of contempt followed from the ugly persecutor.

“You think this is funny, Luciano?” he roared, slapping the mute across the face with a malicious right hand.

Silence continued to bellow around the room, reminding the persecutor of his constant failure to break his adversary’s will.

Gripping Luciano’s bloodied head, the ugly man slammed it into the trough of water that lay in front of him and held it down for several seconds. The spy felt the liquid gushing up through his mouth, attacking his will to live from the inside like a watery cancer methodically eating away at his head. Luciano tried his best to persevere as he reached inward and drowned out the water with memories of happier days. Snapshots of beautiful beaches, luscious lakes and the company of his loved ones ensured that he emerged from the trough with a bewildering grin, much to the ugly man’s disgust.

“I’m not going to talk. We both know it,” croaked Luciano, his long, brown hair left soggy by the ordeal. “You’re going to have to kill me.”

Banging his fist against the rim of the trough out of frustration, the ugly man stared at his nemesis for a good few seconds, pondering over his weaknesses. He was met with a rebellious look of determination that forced his spine to shake just a little.

Suddenly, Trent began to grin.

Pushing Luciano’s face into the water once more, the persecutor let out an almighty cry of resignation, stood up and kicked his wooden chair into the wall at the other side of the room. The spy once again surfaced from the depths of the trough, panting for breath, but still with that same fixated grin on his face. It was this look of granite that enraged the ugly man more than anything else.

“Fuck!”

“It’s alright, Jackson,” said The Leader, placing a comforting right hand on the big lug’s shoulder. “I know someone that can pry this runt’s mouth open.”

A door in the corner of the room opened, flooding the area with an illuminating yellow light. The sound of high heels clicking against the concrete reverberated around the room and forced Luciano’s bloodshot eyes to widen. A small brunette with long flowing hair, emerald coloured orbs and a certain commanding presence about her person entered. She strolled into the centre of the room and gazed in Luciano’s direction with eyes that seemed to wander to yesteryear.

Even the classically trained Luciano struggled to maintain a poker face.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it, soldier?” she said.

Who said Romance is dead?

The unfamiliar sound of weary feet grinding away on a seemingly never ending bed of pebbles echoed around the hillside for miles around. Militant-like in their timing and never failing to deteriorate in stature, the assortment of twenty-two toes continued to scamper up the rocky terrain enthusiastically. It had been a long climb but, at the end of it all, the view would certainly more than justify it.

She didn’t seem to think so though, but that didn’t matter.

Forcing my lungs to deflate to an almost critical point, I inhaled the mountain breeze and embraced the newfound molecules of oxygen that danced around in my system like a long lost brother. The monotony of working in the rectangular prison that most upstanding citizens labelled ‘the office’ for forty-five hours a week for the past twenty eight years had left me as a corpse of a man. No lust for life. No gusto. Nothing. However, as I stood like a Roman Emperor peering out from his balcony and towering over the several picturesque villages, I suddenly felt alive again.

And that was something I’d not felt in a long time.

“Can you smell that, Bill? I think one of the cows has left us a present over there,” mumbled Rita with a splutter.

It had been exactly twenty-three years since my last venture up the mountain side. On that occasion, two young lovers had fled the aches and stresses of daily life to enjoy a picnic lunch at nature’s leisure. The way in which Rita offered me perhaps the purest and most genuine smile I’ve ever received in this world as she laid out the immaculately kept checkered quilt will always stand out in my memory. People might think that one smile is as good as another smile – but that’s simply not true. There’s something about the impulses given off by smiling that opens a door to the soul. A smile is the single most honest thing that the Gods of this world ever created.

“I’m starting to itch all over, Bill. These stupid little flies keep biting me!”

Peering out at the bright lights of the microscopic villages below, I thought about the thousands of people readying themselves for another ‘action packed’ edition of their daily lives. They hadn’t yet decayed and realised that there was more to life than growing old next to the fire. Still, I always found it funny that people described the maturity process in a positive light – it’s clear that the only people that are truly content with life are children, so where’s the sense in growing up?

“Can we go back now? I’m starting to get cold. I knew I should have put another layer on underneath.”

Rita’s voice had changed over the years. Her degeneration from the sparkling songbird to the cackling old crow was now complete. I didn’t particularly blame her though. The sands of time seem to have this uncanny knack of draining an individual of all zest for life. Now, as I gazed over at the shadow of the woman I married all those years ago, I realised that her animated exterior had vanished and had been replaced with a shell of granite.

“Why did you bring us up here anyway, Bill? We’re getting too old to be hiking up mountain sides, you know. Linda Carmichael was telling me just the other day about her husband damn near having a heart attack when he was out jogging around the neighbourhood! He’s not in bad shape for a man of his age either,” ranted Rita as a case of verbal diarrhoea seemed to overcome her. “Are you even listening to me, Bill? Bill?”

Rita’s insistent chanting of my name over the years was undoubtedly one of the main reasons behind my suggestion of taking a walk on the mountain side. At first, she thought it was a fantastic idea and couldn’t believe that her husband of nearly twenty-five years actually cared enough about their relationship to try and re-kindle some sort of lost romance. Naturally, her enthusiasm towards the cause began to turn me away from my original reasoning for taking the walk. The idiotic part of my brain that had glided through life on auto pilot for all those years actually believed that perhaps she understood that our marriage was now nothing more than a thing of ‘mutual convenience’ rather than a sacred union. Even at the end, my naiveté continued to shine through. That was the most depressing thing about it.

Pacing towards the cliff edge, I began to reminisce over the ‘good old days’ – it even sounded like a cliché in my head. I remembered the way in which Rita’s hands would flow over my skin like a surge of water igniting my sense to life. Her every touch brought about an explosion of goose bumps across my naked body. It was almost as if I could taste her sense of adventure. There, we lay, entwined as two free spirits exploring the subtleties of life without a care in the world and then… we simply grew old.

“Bill, what are you doing? Come away from the edge.”

“Rita,” I began, ensuring a cast iron grip about my tone. “You must understand that what I do here today I do for both of us. I’ve always loved you more than life itself and that will never change. I hope that one day you will see why I did this. One day you will see what we have become. Goodbye.”

The blue sky above cringed as it took cowardly refuge behind its cloud cousins and peered away from the situation. Nature couldn’t bare to watch an innocent man plunge to his death with its naked eye. Instead, the Heavens pressed an ear to the floor and waited for the inevitable ‘thud’ that went hand in hand with any suicide jump.

However, it never came.

Grinding its ear firmly against the floor and almost crushing the cartilage in the process, nature finally heard some form of sound arise from the scene. Of course, I knew that this sound wasn’t that of a man plummeting several thousand feet to his death. No.

The sound was in fact the gagging noises that one would associate with a woman being strangled by a chequered quilt.

Rita had died years prior to this event, mind you. This was simply my way of putting her out of her misery. As I stared down at the lifeless carcass that lay at my mercy, I struggled to comprehend the fact that this body had once contained the woman of my dreams.

And so, I set off down the hillside certain of the fact that euthanasia was indeed a noble cause.