Naskie World

By Joe Jeney

Single mom Blondie Bing works for Naskie World. She reads the execution sentence, and AJ, her partner, pulls the trigger. The world is minus one more killer who thought he could beat justice.

At Naskie World, everything follows a strict protocol, except on one night when AJ leads Blondie deep into the underbelly of Carrington City and kills three people and misses the fourth, the Right Honorable Payne, City Prefect.

AJ acts without orders, without execution sentences, without apparent reason.

Blondie wakes to a changed world. The lawless violence she tried to escape her entire life returns in the shape of Trailey, a convicted killer, now free, now working for the broken system that is swallowing her whole.

Masks, guns, and law – they don’t work anymore. Blondie needs to save her son. She needs to stay alive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Light River Books
• Release date: Jan 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780994436429

Joe Jeney

Joe has practiced law and worked professionally in legal education for many years. During his early working life, he worked in building, engineering, and agricultural fields. He has spent much of his life writing stories. Joe also writes under the pen name "JJ. Co."

Book preview

Something is wrong, and not in a way that makes it right. AJ and me are walking through Hotel Town, off Downtown. It’s night, middle thereof. We’re a long way from home. In the old days, theatergoers, writers, artists, and singers lived in Hotel Town and had some fun of it. Now washed-up filth lives here, together with their drug dealing pimps. Neon lights blaze everywhere. Does the moon exist anymore? Every car I hear drives away in the distance. Nothing moves around us, not even broad-leafed weeds growing from each crack and crevice in the pavement, slow and indifferent. We see Czar Palace, a male hooker joint, at the end of a dark one-way street lined with twenty-level apartment buildings. AJ pulls me up.

My name is Blondie. I’m the smaller the two. Woman too. Yes, my hair is blonde, white blonde, with spikes. Pa named me Blondie long before I ever discovered hair dye.

I’m wearing dark denim jeans, boots with a heavy tread, a leather lace around each puny bicep, and a high vested leather waistcoat, my arms loose and free and capable in the heat.

It’s my disguise for the hit.

AJ is big. He’s not tall, but he’s big. He’s got tatts over his arms and on his fingers. Tatts rise from his chest to his throat. He’s wearing a black T-shirt. His hair is thick and black and cut above his ears. He’s got no sideburns, but he has a black goatee. Beneath his coat, he conceals a utility belt. A.K.A. a gun belt.

You could pick him from a lineup of two hundred men, and almost know his name before you formally ID’d him to a cop. But that won’t matter soon.

Him and me wait beside a still fern silent, silent as. He quickly looks at me. He knows me. And I know him.

Me and AJ work together, tight.

It’s time.

I reach for my naskie, and he reaches for his. We move again, the only thing moving in the night.

AJ and me work for Naskie World. We kill people.

Naskie World follows more rules than you find in a lawyer’s library, even if Naskie World doesn’t exist in the public eye.

Me and AJ don’t exist, not in the public eye, and when we wear our naskies, our nano masks, we don’t exist anywhere. Naskies confuse people when they look at them. People see what they want to see when they look at naskies.

They see what they wanna see, but they don’t see me and AJ.

Only me and AJ see each other when we’re wearing naskies because they counter each other.

I stifle a cough. My naskie is doing it, you know, making me cough. AJ too, sometimes. The nano things, they creep through my skin. They stick in my throat. AJ says it ain’t true about the creepy things we breathe. I beg to differ.

Czar Palace has a big wooden door, with black steel bars, like a drawbridge to a medieval castle. It’s so out of place. But what isn’t nowadays?

Beady eye cameras stare at us from fake castle walls, insects with digital currents for blood. Not human. But even they see what they wanna see, which means they can’t see AJ and me, not while we wear naskies.

AJ gets his gun ready, a specially cut down semi-automatic assault rifle, which he nestles in the crook of his elbow. Usually, one bullet does it.

My job is to formally identify our targets and read the execution sentences. Then I witness what follows and report it to Naskie World.

Sometimes AJ steps in for me, and he reads the longer sentences after I identify the targets. It’s hard, you know, reading and shit when the heat is on. Words on my wrist computer can make my head dizzy. Words, they don’t always behave right with me.

In return, I would step in for him, AJ, if I had to, though I’ve never had to step in for him. I’ve never rolled a man or woman down the hill.

Words make me dizzy sometimes. But right and wrong don’t make me dizzy. Ever.

And that’s why I know that tonight something is wrong, and not in a right way. I doubt whether me or AJ will be reading an execution sentence tonight.

Unsanctioned naskie hits just don’t happen like that.

Unsanctioned naskie hits just don’t happen.

I think one’s happening tonight.

The cave door opens an inch, automatically, like for any guest wanting to screw little boys. Nanoparticles itch my face like mad. My naskie is the only thing that stands between me and chaos of the variety that would defy literal or figurative explanation. My naskie makes justice happen.

Me and AJ look so much like what the security doorman wants to see that he doesn’t even ask what we want here. He just stands back like we’re the one, like it’s his job to say nothing and just let us right in.

Inside, gold-framed mirrors and pictures of naked stags with tits and dicks hang everywhere from the walls. The carpet is brothel red, and the walls are brothel pink.

AJ walks in front of me. His shoulders are so broad that they fill the little hallway wall to wall.

Thump, thump, thump. He’s heavy as he walks up the brothel red stairway. AJ knows where he’s going. He always knows where he’s going, like he has a GPS wired behind those brown eyes. Maybe there’s more information in his orders than in my orders. Because I ain’t seen no orders tonight. I follow AJ anyway, because he is AJ.

Some guests glide around us. When they look at AJ and me, they see what they wanna see. I don’t hate them. I hate what they stand for in this place.

I don’t want to discover boys here tonight; I mean child boys, ten-year-old boys, six-year-old boys, fourteen-year-old boys. Naskie World is all formality. We hit people the law won’t hit. But we hit them by the rules. Doctors who kill babies when they don’t have to, truck drivers who wipe out families because they didn’t look for a stop sign, drunk cops who rape and beat housewives and then leave them in muddy canals, too dead and beaten for weeping relatives to claim. Naskie World fills our work card with straight up psychopaths also. The state will hold an innocent man five years if he argues about his electricity bill. But it lets a murderer back onto the streets following an eighteen-month sojourn in a prison woodshop. We, we naskies, we get him, the woodshop psycho. We find him in places the prison woodshop can’t help him. The naskie system is oiled, totally straight, totally formal. Orders, sentences, a single bullet and no more, and a witness bringing it back home to the administrator. But, I swear, if I see a six-year-old kid here tonight, I might just freak. I might reach for my gun.

AJ inches open the door to Apartment 606. His gun is out. I ought to ID the target. I ought to read a sentence. I ought to report back what I witness to the administrator. But this is what I mean. I don’t have orders. But there’s not even time for what I can’t do. No thump, thump, thump, but just bang, bang, bang.

Inside Apartment 606 I see three dead people.

Clean. Two foreheads and an eye socket.

Blood flows like it never wanted to be behind skin in the first place. Then it’s gone, the flow, leaving only red stains.

It’s always like this. But not usually in threes.

Without orders, I don’t know what I’m witnessing.

My eyes are tied to AJ.

The apartment is big, big enough for an internal staircase, and a mezzanine, which AJ leaps to, nimbly, light on his feet, like no big man should be.

I follow, but not without first turning back to stare at three dead people. They’re suited, professionals. It’s not unusual. I won’t say professional people make up the bulk of our hits. But they have made up some of our hits. What makes these three dead guys unusual is that the two men are dressed all the way to their buttons and ties. You’d think they’d be naked, being where they are, namely a pay-to-fuck joint. And the woman, well, she’s a woman in a steer brothel, which is unusual in itself.

One of the dead guys clutches a briefcase. Paperwork spills to a coffee table. A few sheets don’t have blood on them. On a night of wrong things, I do something else wrong. I scratch together the few sheets of paper that blood doesn't cover.

Maybe they will explain why I’m here tonight.

I fold them into the bosom of my leather waistcoat

I snatch ‘em quick.

This job is all about quick.

Mere seconds, if, pass before I reach the top of the staircase behind AJ.

No one’s dead, because it looks like no one’s up here.

Then, we hear the creak of a closet door.

Peering from the bleak, dark hole of the wardrobe is a naked boy with big round doe eyes, shivering, crying, frightened. Maybe he is ten, or maybe he is twelve. I reach for my gun.

We hear a commotion downstairs, and I suspect that the cavalry has arrived.

They got no right to keep a kid here, and that kid’s leaving with me.

Then I see what AJ is looking at, who he’s looking at.

The man in the wardrobe hasn’t seen us yet. Or if he has seen us, he’s seen a long-lost-aunt, or maybe a childhood friend in the nano blur of our naskies.

He’s naked except for a toga strap over his shoulder, and a loose bedsheet trailing from him like a snakeskin.

The man slowly reaches for the boy’s throat and places one hand around his mouth. He wants him quiet. And dead’s the best sorta quiet.

I recognize that man, but I don’t have a name for him.

Footsteps fall upward on the staircase.

AJ holds my gun arm. Whatever AJ wants to achieve tonight, and I suspect it has something to do with killing the man in the cupboard, he fails.

It doesn’t matter who the cavalry sees in our naskies. If they see an actual killing, they won’t let the shooters just walk free.

AJ turns.

I stay.

I want that kid.

I look back.

I can’t see him anymore.

AJ yanks me by the arm, and we walk down the staircase, passing the security contingent along the way, the doorman its S’nA. We do everything short of handing them each a Christmas card. The only things they see in us are pleasant memories and fond expectations. The dead bodies, they can’t explain.

At the doorway of Apartment 606, a woman waits. She is blonde like me, but her hair is long and straight and pushed up high and pushed back, like an Egyptian chick in old pyramid pictures. I’ve seen her on TV. She’s Donna Around, and now I know where I’ve seen the pedophile upstairs. He’s the Right Honorable Payne, the Prefect of Carrington City. The City’s primary guy.

She sees something, Donna Around, as me and AJ walk past her and out of Apartment 606.

I don’t know what she sees.

I don’t know a lot of things that happened tonight.

The paper under my waistcoat might tell me something yet.

Something else I remember: my naskie never vibrated.

It’s another thing that’s meant to happen when we follow the rules.

SOCIETY’S RULES KEEP some people rich and some people powerful and some people poor and some people weak, and that’s all they ever do. It hurts when you can do so much if it weren’t for rules telling you what you can’t do. It hurts women more than it hurts men. Whatever rules do, they don’t keep you safe. Eyes in your head keep you safe.

I work for Naskie World because society’s rules don’t work. But I’m not sure if what AJ followed last night had any resemblance to Naskie World’s rules or anyone else’s rules except his own.

I’m a teetotaler who gets out of my bed like a liter-of-vodka-a-day-woman who went cold turkey the night before.

It’s midmorning, and I look around for my family, because my family gives me a reason to live, and I’m the one who keeps my family alive.

Fate decided to temper me with two men in my life, my boy and my pa.

And AJ at work, to make three of them in total.

Last night drags at me, my arms, my eyeballs, my legs, everything inside me, and then everything inside me again. I end up where I don’t want to be when I think about me and AJ did last night.

Before I leave my bedroom for the lounge room, I see three sheets of paper thrown to the corner of my room. They join my clothes and other things discarded during the rush hour of life. These three sheets of paper need some reading, so I can’t read them now.

When I walk to the lounge room, I see another piece of paper, one taking the shape of a business-envelope.

It’s my father who calls from the sofa, telling me to open the envelope.

My father is sixty-four-years-old. Before I answer him, he reaches for his medicine bottle sitting on the lamp table beside him. The bottle label claims in scientific lingo that the pills inside it keep him, my pa, alive. Some mumbo-jumbo later, it says they counteract his heart condition, one he never knew he had until he visited a pharmacist for painkillers three years ago. The pharmacist told him that once-off pain medication for a torn back muscle was too dangerous for an uneducated man to self-administer. But she sold him heart pills he would need to buy all his remaining days. See you in a month, she said. We offer discounts for annual supplies. After he took his first pill, I never saw him look so ill.

My dad ought to be sixty-four-years-young. Before he started taking those pills, he was good-looking, with no gray hair, and he was fast, muscle fast.

The letter, he says to me before he says anything else. It looks like the test results.

Two months ago I talked to a shrink about something I never thought about before, dyslexia. Dyslexia? I thought kids caught it. The shrink tested me like a tube of stuff squeezed from a science kit.

Apparently, this envelope will tell me how crazy I am. It can wait till after breakfast.

I ask pa where Johnny-the-Kid is. Here is another reason for my father to fight through the fog of his pills each day. Here is another reason stopping him from growing old too soon, despite a year’s supply of heart pills. Johnny-the-Kid is ten, and he’s my son, and dad looks after him while I’m away at work, which is most of the time. Most of the time for me means it’s an entire world of time for a kid who is ten years old.

I keep everyone alive, but pa holds it together.

I walk from the three-room house into the front yard. It’s my world when I’m not tight with AJ killing people for Naskie World.

My suburb is Heliotrope. My world is the greater City of Carrington.

Who would’ve thought that a town without a map could have grown so big, so quick?

A city with a downtown population of twenty thousand and a metropolitan population of two hundred thousand swelled to hold twenty-four million people,