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Red Moon: Revolution: Chapter 33

"My name is... My name is..." The man thrust his fingers into his hair, pulling at it in utter frustration. "MY NAME IS..." Again, the words wouldn't come out of his mouth. He couldn't remember. He had remembered all other times, but not this time. He was losing it. For once, he was entirely losing it. Everything had fallen apart now. Ever since Caughey, that old fool, that god damn old man who should have died so long ago, but still clung to his life for all it was worth, that old man figured him out.

It was not long ago that feelers were sent out to test the strengths and weaknesses of all the adversaries, everyone that would pose a threat to the new world, now nothing more than a dream. If even.

The feelers had scoured the Earth, all of her countries and had reported back with precious information. It was this information that made the world go round. It wasn't money, power, no. Everything came back to information. One couldn't have money or power without knowing how to get it. Who to double-cross. Who to trust. It was all because of information, and as soon as that information stopped flowing, the world stopped, and everything came to a crashing halt. Toppling over from its own inertia. That was what happened to the Coordinator.

Most of the feelers, the last few remaining individuals that were still loyal. Most had abandoned him, leaving him to rot away like most of the biomatter of the thick Amazonian rainforest. They had taken the boats, the cars, the jeeps, everything. He was stuck here with nowhere to go and limited supplies. If the adversaries knew this, they could have left him there to die, but they didn't, and the Coordinator knew they didn't: because of information. They had no idea that he was ready to roll over and die like the cornered beast he was. They didn't know, but he did.

It mattered not. They would come anyways. They wanted to see him die. Caughey was a mistake. The Coordinator had sent out one of his best in the hopes of killing the last Director, who had any chance of opposing him, but the old man was crafty. The assassin never got to him. Her fate was still unknown, but the Coordinator was sure she was dead, but not before Caughey let his own people drag her down into some dark pit to torture her for information. Who knew how long she would have been down there being beaten and possibly worse. She would have last a while, but Caughey would have made it last as long as it took. He was crueler than the Coordinator. He loved the violence. She would have spilled all she knew at some point and then given the mercy of death. They would know where he was at the most, nothing more, she had left before the mass exodus that left the Coordinator and some thirty people in some backwater outpost with more weapons than it needed in the middle of the Amazon. They would be coming.

He wasn't ready for them. It was a shock to himself to admit it. He had always prided himself on preparedness. He always knew what to expect and how to prepare. It was how he was raised. How his old handlers in the KGB and CIA would scorn him now, if they were still alive. Loose ends from a time past. They would be proud of that at least. No loose ends ever. Loose ends, loose lips as they liked to say at the time, led to lost secrets and there couldn't be any of those.

He wasn't prepared, and he was genuinely scared. He sat, often for hours at a time, in one of the basement rooms of the main bunker that would hold weapons from artillery shells to small arms. He would find that one empty room in the back with the leaky ceiling and the bright lightbulb dangling from a loose wire and he would pull up a chair and sit there. He would just sit there and try to contemplate what had gone wrong.

He had been able to survive and adapt to so much before, but somehow this had all gotten out of hand. He used to be the person who knew everything about everyone with his thousands of contacts. His fingers were in everything from Russia's secret nuclear program that produced weapons-grade plutonium in case of a new cold war. He was well aware of the United State's program to bury nuclear warheads under major Russian and Chinese cities. He had even helped put them in place. He was integrated into the world, but those connections had faltered and were gone. He had no idea anymore, everything and everyone had cut contact with him. All he knew was that it was raining outside from the increased amount of water dripping in the corner of the room. It only did that when it rained. Otherwise, it was a very slow drip from the humidity condensating on a set of water pipes that ran above the room. He knew that and that Caughey would be coming with his new allies.

He had expected Caughey to turn against the werewolves, but instead he had allied with them, and all indications showed that he had no plans on backstabbing them. It was all because of that man's son. Was it Ron? Ryan? Rob... It was Rob.

The Coordinator shook his head, clearing the fog that had made itself ever more present recently. He dug greedily into his chest pocket of his off-white cotton shirt and pulled out a sad looking pack. He looked down at it. There were only two cigarettes left. He used to smoke a pack a day. It wasn't healthy, but that was something that the Coordinator didn't worry about. If he didn't smoke, he got the shakes. He couldn't think straight and would lose focus. He couldn't lose focus, couldn't afford it, but his stores of cigarettes were running out. He had nearly a thousand packs of his specially made cigarettes on the boat he had arrived on, and that should have lasted him a very long time, but they had all been stolen, now he had just one more full pack after these two.

He held up the cigarette. Maybe, just maybe he could hold off a little longer. He was so hungry. He craved it so much that he had to suck in spit. Just a little longer. Make it last until tomorrow. He thought this even as he shoved the unfiltered end between his thin lips and was already lighting it, sucking on the sweet metallic smoke that flooded into his lungs. Instantly he could think better. The fog was fading.

He took another drag and held it in his lungs for as long as he could, feeling it burn and tar his insides bit by bit with each passing moment before letting the smoke drift out of him rather than breathing it out. He felt at peace for a moment, letting all his troubles fade for a moment.

"My name is..." Still, he couldn't remember. He had gone too long without his smoke, his precious, special smoke and he had already forgotten his own name. It was lost to him. But maybe it wasn't so bad. He could think of a new name in time. He could be whoever he wanted to. For the time being, he would remain as the Coordinator. That was what everyone called him, but once everyone who knew him was dead.... Could he kill them?

The false bravado faded, and reality set back in. He had nothing to kill them all with. They had everything. It scared him more than he would ever dare let anyone see. He had built up this image of invincibility around himself for so long. He couldn't let them know that he was afraid. Sure he was beaten back, but so were the Russians at Stalingrad. They were pushed all the way back to the Volga, but they held fast against the torrent. They turned their cheek to the beating they took and in time, once the Germans were tired, they surrounded them and struck. All the Coordinator had to do was wait for his own winter. Let his enemies come at him and he would outlast them. Him and his... thirty men.

He had taken another long puff of the special cigarette, but now the high and false sense of security was fading again.

Damn things. He plucked the two inches left out of his mouth. How much of a crutch was it? How much of his failure was because of his reliance on it? He wanted to flick it into the puddle of water in the corner of the room, let it die out like everything else in his life, but he couldn't. He had the thing back in his mouth again. He was afraid of what would happen to him without it. It had been so long, so long that he couldn't remember a time when he didn't have those cigarettes. They were as much a part of him as he was a part of them.

He finished the last of the cigarette, leaving nothing but ash that collected at his boot. He thought about smoking the last one of the pack in his pocket. It would feel so good to do that, but he didn't. He needed to ration it out, rely on the sanity that he had no to carry him on now. He would only use the next one once he began to slip again, not before and most definitely not after. He had never fully slipped, let the fog take him entirely; he had been careful. He didn't even know if he had ever slipped away, even for a moment for he had once been told that he would not remember it by a very skilled the doctor who was now dead. Loose ends, his handlers in the CIA and KGB would be proud of that, but not of anything else.

Why couldn't things be like how they were in the Cold War. Life had been so simple then. He had worked both sides while setting up his own spy empire off the backs of the United States and the Soviet Union. It had been almost too easy to blind each side with what they wanted to hear, to feed them some good information but mostly bad. They never saw the difference. They never suspected as long as they got what they wanted to see. So simple. It was no longer so simple now.

They were coming now, and the Coordinator was trying to figure out how to hold them off. Until what? There would be no last minute cavalry charge to save him. Why fight and spend so many lives?

To bleed them. He wanted them to hurt until he very and then some after. He wanted to remember him for the rest of their lives. He wanted to be the boogie man for their children and grandchildren. It was what he was afraid of. To be forgotten. Long ago, he had started this all for different reasons that were lost to him. Something about the werewolves, that much he could recall. They may have spited him, or something. They did something that he knew he couldn't forgive. That was the reason then. Now, with his head not so clear anymore and his mind failing, he was just afraid of fading away and being forgotten. They would remember his name, they'll remember...

Still, couldn't recall his own name. The name his mother gave him all those years ago. She was dead. Not loose ends. Time had taken her away, or so he told himself. He never says her after leaving her to go out into the world. He didn't even remember her face it was too long ago. So much lost from his past that he wasn't sure who he was himself at times. He could be sitting in his damp room that leaked and suddenly he would think about who he was, what kind of person he was. It would last for a moment before he would take in more of that sweet, special smoke that drove the fog away and kept his mind clear and human and then he would go back to trying to think of a way to survive just a little longer. When he came to the conclusion that there was no survival, he began to think about how to make them bleed.

How would he make them suffer as much as he had, to feel the same fear that he was hiding from everyone? They needed to feel it, to have his legacy imprinted on their minds to keep him image alive long after he had gone. He could only think of one way, and it scared him even more, but it was the only way. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the last cigarette of this pack and lit it without hesitation. Until then, he would enjoy these last few smokes.