“I’m no mercenary. I don’t like to be involved.”
General Kern leans in close leaving a foot of breathing room, both of their breaths fighting for space,” You don’t have much of a choice, do you Jack?” Kern leans back in his seat, removes one of the thirty Panamanian cigars from its cedar box and lights it. “Listen, Jack, I’m not asking you to do this run, I’m telling you to do this. Back in 90′ when you were handling the Noriega job, you missed something.” Kern takes a long draw of the dark leaf wrapped cigar.
“That was 11 years ago Kern, remember you set me up for the fall, why would I trust you now, I’m finished with you…and Panama.” Grabber stands up. His 6’5” frame looms a shadow over the General across the military stamped desk. As he walks out he hears the creaking of the General’s chair. “Hey Jack!” Grabber turns around drawing his hand towards the 11 inch blade he keeps on his left. General Kern exhales a long cylinder of grey-black smoke. “Godot’s still over there.” Grabber is frozen in his tracks. Samir Godot was the only man Grabber worked with on a mission in the army, Samir Godot was the only one Grabber trusted, Samir Godot was someone Jack Grabber would call…”a friend.”

“Kern, you sonuvabitch” Grabber roars drawing the knife from his left. Within what seems like one second, General Kern’s cigar, once in his mouth, now stuck to the wall under the blade like a bug in a scientist’s biology lab. “Go to Hell, Kern. You lie.”
“Do I, Jack?” Kern throws a stack of pictures across the table fanning out like a deck of cards, except there was no luck lying behind these pictures… only death. Kern leans back again, drawing from his cigar that he had pulled off the wall. “It seems your pal Godot has made himself a little mess down in Panama.” Grabber looks through the pictures. One black and white shows three children all sharing a bed covered in blood, two of them with their eyes open. Another shows a pregnant migrant worker bloodied and swollen from the Panama heat, lying dead in shallow water and still another shows an entire family slumped over a table that rests on a dirt floor of a small thatched home. “Apparently, old Godot isn’t playing with a full deck anymore, you know, ovens on but nobody’s cooking?” Grabber didn’t cook or gamble and the obvious look of confusion overwrought his face. “He’s lost it, Jack, he’s completely lost it.” “You mean…Godot did this?” Kern gets out of his seat and approaches Grabber, “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Now, go back and get him.”

He was out of breath when he finally stopped running and his body was glistening with sweat. It wasn’t that he felt he had made it to safety and it wasn’t that he could see anything, it was still too dark for that. But he could sense the sheer face of the cliff in front of him and he could hear the waves of the ocean breaking against it’s face about a hundred yards to his right. They had found his camp in the night and caught him off guard. He hadn’t had time to put on his clothes, but had simply grabbed his pistol and ran off into the darkness completely naked. He could hear footsteps far off. They were getting closer and he would have to climb. The problem was he couldn’t afford to leave his gun behind and he wouldn’t be able to climb much higher than about 75 meters one handed. Not in the dark. His years of training wouldn’t provide a solution to this problem. They wouldn’t, but genetics did. Sometimes you’re just lucky. He wrapped his penis three times around the thick barrell of the colt .45, double-knotted it, added a bow and then began the long blind climb upwards out of danger. Only a couple of them had gotten close enough to where he was on the wall to fire some desperate shots up at him. He reached down, pivoted the makeshift gunsling and fired back at them. He didn’t hear any more shots or voices after that.

The sun was setting and the streets of Chicago remained sticky with the humidity that accompanied so many Midwestern nights. There had been reports of some sort of beast roaming the foggy alleyways of this windy city but these reports had been inconsistent; some reported seeing a large animal, others a man. A police officer on patrol caught something out of the corner of his eye one night and cautiously approached what he had thought to be a small bear; one he assumed had escaped from the Lincoln Park Zoo. When the officer came closer to the dark mass, he saw that it was feasting on something, something upon later inspection that turned out to be a half-eaten deer. The creature, what the officer later described as “more wolf than bear”, turned and attacked the officer who released nine bullets into the animal’s torso, which then, according to him, leapt over an adjoining fence and then disappeared all together.

There were no sightings of this animal for the past 28 days which gave Jack Grabber, according to his calculations, two days to track it down. Jack Grabber was not superstitious by any means: he thought the Bible was mythology, the number 13 was just another number, he was suspicious of gravity and in the eyes of Jack Grabber, anything that could not be determined by science was outright silliness. However, there was one thing that Jack Grabber was absolutely certain of, more certain than he was about the sun rising every day… and that was the existence of werewolves.

Jack Grabber had never been to Illinois and he hated it, but didn’t bat too many eyelashes at the idea, as he knew he only had to be there for two days. Grabber mapped out the sightings and found a perfect central location between the three points of origin where the beast had been spotted, it was here, he thought, that he would catch this man-wolf. Grabber needed a hearty meal before the next 36 hours, as he knew that he would not be eating any dinner, nor sleeping and sleeps. As he walked up and down the streets of the city he passed a small pizza joint by the name of Renaldi’s and he would have passed it like the hundreds, or maybe even HUNDREDS of others that he had passed that day, but the scent of deliciousness ripped his nostrils open to three times the diameter of their original hole size. Grabber stopped, stalled and made an about face, looked up at the Renaldi’s sign, eyed the door in front of him and kicked it open with such force that the patrons inside dropped their slices right into their laps causing a massive, restaurant wide scalding of the crotch. All the eaters inside ran out the front door and fire escapes screaming, holding their crotches. Perfect. Grabber had the place to himself. He ordered four large deep-dish Chicago-style Renaldi yum yum pies and finished them in only forty minutes. “That should do it.” Grabber walked to the waiter and asked what the damage was and then immediately, before the waiter could even answer, asked if they had any silver in the back and if they did he’d like it all and he’d be more than happy to pay for it, at price. The manager pulled all the silver that was handed down from the Renaldi family immigrants, placed it in a burlap sack for Grabber. Grabber paid the bill, $1,987, and headed out the door. Grabber headed to his hotel room at the Days Inn on Diversey and set up a smelting station where he melted all the silver down and dripped the liquid metal into bullet casings for his 22. long rifle. Grabber was set. It was Lycan killing time.

The central location that Grabber had mapped out only three hours earlier was perfectly aligned with the entrance to the Lincoln Park Zoo. It was here that Grabber made camp and just as the sun set and only moments after the moon had risen, Grabber heard a blood-curdling, ball-shrinking, eye sweating howl that would have chilled any other man’s bones, but not Grabber. As a matter of fact, it gave Grabber a stern, unapologetic erection. “Perfect” he said out loud. It was then that Grabber eyed something to the East; a wolf that walked on two legs as it stood about five feet ten inches. Grabber loaded the 22 long and took sight, then before Grabber could say, “This pizza is making me thirsty” the werewolf was staring through the sight. “How could it….” Grabber thought before the wolf of were had ripped the rifle out of Grabber’s hand and bent the barrel like a wet piece of greasy taffy. The beast let out another howl and gave Grabber an upper cut that launched him over the entrance into the flamingo habitat. Grabber had never been hit like that before in his life, that is, until the last time he was face to face with a Lycan. Unphased by the knock he took on the chin, Grabber jumped to his feet like a skilled dancer. “C’mon, you hairy deer-eating bastard,” Grabber said out loud in Spanish. It was then that the werewolf leapt into the habitat and in one fell swoop ate two flamingos whole. Big mistake; flamingos were Grabber favorite animals, well, third favorite behind tigers and toucans, but he loved them nonetheless. With his love of flamingos in mind, Grabber grabbed two pink love birds by the neck and slammed the werewolf on each side of his head, causing disorientation and anger. The Lycan jumps on to Grabbers shoulders and leans over and vomited pink flamingo all over Grabber’s head causing disorientation and anger. Grabber lets out a roar of his own, so loud that the werewolf stumbles backwards falling into the water part of the habitat. “That’s it” Grabber thought. Grabber builds up all the power from the Renaldi’s he at a day and a half earlier and squats down then rises immediately, “AAARRRGGYYYHHHRRR!” The werewolf stumbles on the shore of Flamingo Island and holds its ears with its hairy long fingered wolf hands. Grabber’s yell never faded or stopped, Grabber had been screeching for nine minutes now and had defecated in his pants twice during that time; two events he had not noticed due to the overwhelming sound of every other creature in the entire zoo screaming and howling in unison… the ultimate OM. Grabber had almost completely forgotten why he was making so much noise until the werewolf’s head shook violently for twelve seconds and then exploded with a large KABOOM that actually killed the remaining flamingos in Flamingo Island.

Grabber walked over to the immobile Lycan body and watched it metamorphosis back into a nude human form. The head was gone so Grabber could never know who the human was but he slept great that night knowing that he had just killed another human, like the four hundred and forty eight he had killed since he had been twelve years old. Grabber lay in bed that evening being thankful of two things: that he hadn’t actually killed an animal that night and that he got to leave this forsaken shit clamp state called, Illinois.

“We are NOT NEGOTIATING,” the blond haired man said in a cold and quiet voice that silenced everyone around him. He rose slowly from where he was seated. He seemed impossibly tall and muscled as his body rose. In fact, although he had always been well built he had indeed had a growth spurt this year. Two inches in height, 17 lbs of muscle mass and 1 shoe size. His doctor had told him this had never been recorded in a middle-aged human being. “Maybe in human beings.” he had responded. “There are a lot of human beings, they’re a general species… but there’s only one Jack Grabber.” He had smiled. The doctor tried to respond, to argue with the man using science and logic, but in the end he could not disagree. Though Grabber’s refusal to negotiate here defied the logic of the terrified parents sitting around him in this hostage standoff, they couldn’t argue with him either. No one could.
The group was gathered on a small hill that looked out over the vacant expanse of the Cleveland Zoo where an anonymous terrorist group had just taken 31 schoolchildren hostage. One of those children was Falwell Grabber. Or was it Ferguson? Grabber had only known his son for 3 days of his 13 years, having been tragically separated from he and his mother by his adventurous spirit and a few enticing women. Now someone had kidnapped the little bastard, and it seemed personal. They had taken 31 children in all and relayed a message to the local press indicating that beginning at noon today they would start killing one child a minute until their financial and political demands were met. The last child to die, they had said, would be Gerald Grabber. Grabber had not been phased, saying simply that “this gives me 30 minutes starting at noon – and I’m going to need every one of them”.

After some silent moments of mental preparation, Jack Grabber looked up briefly at the sky and muttered “cover me” before beginning the walk to the outer wall of the zoo. His stride was quick and relatively natural considering his pants were stuffed practically to bursting with weapons – and god only knew what the biggest one in there was. When he reached the wall he leapt up and was atop it in one cat-like movement. In the next moment he had broken the barbed wire with his hands and let himself fall deftly within.

No sooner had Grabber’s feet hit the ground that he went into a barrel roll, drawing a large magnum and firing at the noise that he hadn’t heard but had somehow sensed as he fell. Three shots rang out and then he looked up for what was left of his mark. There was no human body lying there, but rather a Toucan with only a broken-shard stump of its beak left sitting on a low branch, eyeing him with fear… afraid to fly. Grabber smiled and made a clicking sound with his mouth. The bird flew to him, perching itself on his shoulder… pecking at his cheek with the broken shards of its truncated beak. Grabber loved birds. He understood them. He pulled a little seed from his pocket and gave it to the bird before it flew off, the seeds falling out of his beak that was now unable to grasp anything. It flew off into the sky; into the horizon; into the thin line of its starving fate.

Jack Grabber looked at his watch. Two minutes had gone by. Only two kids down, then. That was good. Maybe even a little ahead of schedule. He had to pace himself, and more than that he needed to find a tiger – and soon. He stuffed the rest of the seed into his mouth and head off slowly, almost ponderously across Simian Square and toward the African and Indian habitats. As he walked, he realized that he hadn’t heard gunshots… were they stabbing the kids to death? That would be good. He could go for a good knife fight today. Breaking their necks? That would be better. Hand to hand was always a blast. “Fuckin’ amateurs” he roared out involuntarily. Perhaps a mistake. He subtracted two extra children for that in his mind. There was no way the kidnappers would put up with it. But all was not lost. In the distance to his right he heard a responding roar: Tiger Town.

Samir Godot was born in 1963 in a small village in the desert tundra of South Africa. His mother died during child birth, was resuscitated just long enough to give him the name “Samir Godot”. Her name was Marie Hafermash, but she just liked the way “Samir Godot” sounded. Within seconds of naming him, she died again, for good. Samir’s father, Steve Akmenimagaad, was in the Republican Guard all throughout Samir’s period of upbringing. He died in 1987, when a practical joke turned tragic, and Steve Akmenimagaad was literally scared to death by a camel spider. At the ripe age of seven, Samir was recruited as a child soldier in the diamond mines of the Sierra Leone. He quickly climbed the ranks and became “Little Junior General” by the age of 12. By 15 he had executed 50 women, 9 men, 3 lions, and a rogue crocodile. By the time he reached his late teens he no longer dug for the diamonds he had collected for so many years, but commanded the largest child army Africa’s diamond trade had ever witnessed. At the age of 21 he joined the Republican Guard in Iraq and was a lead interrogator for the next eleven years. Sadam Hussein once said of him, “He is like the 9th son I never had.”

In 1991, Samir accidentally wandered into a Born Again Christian workshop thinking it was a seminar on the proper techniques of inserting bamboo shoots under fingernails. He liked what he heard and stayed a while. By the time the seminar was over, Samir had found God (whom he’d lose a mere 2 months later). With his new found faith, Samir decided to quit the Republican Guard to pursue his true love, scrap booking. The Republican Guard was not happy with this decision and put a price of 400 million Dinars on his head. Samir was captured in Takreet by one of Hussein’s sons, Sal. But, luckily for Samir Godot, a man by the name of Jack Grabber was also in Takreet that day and Mr. Grabber had an agenda of his own with Sal, to completely obliterate him. When Grabber showed up, Samir took advantage of the chaos that surrounded him to smash his wrists on the marble table he was tied to, until his hands and wrist bones were a limp jelly, thus making it easy to slip out of the triple knotted ropes that bound his hands. He then knocked over a pot of hot coffee into Sal Hussein’s lap, creating a diversion and allowing Grabber to punch Sal in the face so hard; his hand went right through like a foot through fresh cement. With a gooshy pull, an empty boney hole replaced Sal’s once handsome face and as the body slumped to the ground, Samir saw the winking eye of Jack Grabber through the face hole of Sal Hussein.

Grabber pulled out his adult size baby carrier, strapped it on and tossed Samir in the back, thinking he was a monkey and intended to sell this rare giant ape on the black market, which Jack Grabber later turned into a little cash cow now known as eBay. It took Samir 72 hours to convince Jack Grabber that he was indeed a human and in desperate need of medical care. Grabber, reluctant to give up this prized monkey, performed the surgery himself on his new friend Samir. The hands and wrists were so badly damaged that Grabber went out into the village and accused 40 innocent people of stealing, knowing that the punishment of course was a be-handing. Grabber took all 40 hands back, attaching each one over and over again until he found the perfect combination. This of course explains Samir’s two right hands. After a touch and go recovery, Samir’s hands were better than ever and Jack Grabber re-taught this monkey who saved his life, how to tie his boots with two right hands. 3 years went by where Samir and Grabber never spoke or saw one another. Then, one sweaty afternoon in Panama, they were reunited. Jack Grabber was tied to a 4 ton bomb and local villagers were hitting him in the head with hammers. Samir was there getting fresh bananas when he heard the hard knocking of steel against cranium. “That sounds familiar.” he thought. Then he remembered the sound Grabber’s head made when they were escaping Takreet so many years ago and Grabber banged his head on the door frame on the way out. “JACK!!!!!!!” Samir screamed. “SAMIR GODOOOOOOT!” Grabber replied. With two right hands, Samir was able to untie the knots that held Grabber to the bomb doubly fast. Once freed, Grabber and Samir destroyed that Panamanian village. They dug the graves so deep, the land curdled inward, creating what is now called “The Panama Canal”. Since this day, whenever Grabber works with a partner, which is never, it’s always Samir Godot.

He heard it. The gritty, quick sound as it drew across the strip of flint. He smelled it. Smelled the sulfur burn. But he couldn’t see it. At least not more than a dim orange momentary glow to the blackness behind the blindfold. In that moment his heart raced, he had to admit. That match could have been just lit to see him or to light a fag, but it could also have been to torch the place. And him with it. It would have been the smart thing to do. It would have been what he would have done. But 30 passing seconds told him it wasn’t what this man had done. After 30 seconds another similar smell started wafting over. A cigarette after all. Tinged with menthol. He could tell it was coming from his left. He could tell by the strength of the scent that it was coming from no more than 7 feet away. He could also tell that it would be his captors last, but that wasn’t from the strength of the smell or the direction it was wafting. No, he could tell that by the strength of the smell of his rage and the way his bloodlust was wafting toward this FUCK. The last word he had yelled out loud, involuntarily. He could hear the man jump a little at the sudden outburst. And that little jump told him all he needed to know. This man was not the man who would finally stop Jack Grabber. With a sudden lunge forward and an even louder yell he burst the chains at his chest, ankles and wrists and – not even stoping to take off his blindfold – reached out with complete surety, grabbed some hair at either side of his captors head and pulled each side out and back savagely in a rear fly arc, the motion ending with him standing (still blindfolded) in a crucifix-like pose with one half of his captors facial skin in either hand. He shoved the pieces in his pockets and removed his blindfold. The body stood there a moment with it’s fleshless face still smoking the menthol cig. A woman. He looked her up and down. “Nice tits” he grumbled, “but I’d put a bag over that face”. She fell, lifeless and insulted, to the ground.

Grabber always worked alone, except when he didn’t. Samir Gadott was 97% ex-Republican Guard and 100% vigilante. He left Kuwait in 1999 at the turn of the century to escape prosecution. He was wrongfully accused of raping and sharking a Korean female police guard stationed in Iraq. To this day he claims his innocence, and, afterall, Jack Grabber was the only one with the exonerating evidence, he just didn’t know it yet. This shiticane of torrid happenstances and habidashery created an almost unholy alliance between the two. One: a full-blooded American patriot and ex-Army Ranger with all the trimmings; the other: a full-blooded expatriate on the wrong side of the hemisphere with a penchant for trouble and urinating outdoors. Together: the ultimate odd couple.

An expression midway between anxiety and pleasure played on Samir Gadott’s lips. Grabber glanced at him then looked away. What are you thinking about? He asked. Gadott snapped back to attention. Said he was thinking about that rape charge that still loomed over his head from his Republican Guard days back in Kuwait. Said he was innocent, that it was entirely consensual. He said that a lot. Grabber just looked at him for a moment and replied that he hadn’t asked. And it was true; the truth didn’t matter much to Grabber. You don’t worry about a woman’s momentary discomfort when you’ve seen men get split in half with rocket propelled grenades right in front of your eyes. Hell, you don’t worry about their discomfort when you have split men in half with your own damn hands right in front of your own damn eyes. And plus, their tight military outfits… Grabber let his thoughts trail off and glanced back at Gadott who was lost in thought again, gently thrusting his hips back and forth and making panting noises. Grabber wondered what he was thinking about.

“When you know you’re gonna die, there’s only one thought that you face: “I’m not gonna die!” Of course I couldn’t say this with a gun in my mouth and my hands bound to my feet with zip-ties, so I showed him instead. I didn’t know exactly where I was, all I could make out were repair kits for some kind of truck, piles of gravel, holes in the floor and fresh Concrete. The sonuvabitch with the 11-inch steel colt in my mouth turned his head just for a second; I knew this was my only chance. I bit down hard on the gun and yanked it out of his hand with my mouth. I could hear the crunching of my incisors on the barrel, but I didn’t care, it was either that or a dirt nap…and I wasn’t tired. Shocked the dark man reached for the gun I had whipped across the floor. As he lunged forward he stepped in a hole in the floor, it was dark, we were blind as bats in whatever this place was. Just my luck, he goes down about mid-thigh. I roll over to the repair kit and there’s razor wire and all sorts of things to help me on my way. I used the razor wire to cut through zip-ties. It didn’t take long, but then again every minute felt like a second. I grabbed the gun and spit out a tooth. I raised the hand cannon and shoved in the mouth of the dark man in the floor. Through his gun-muffled voice, I could barely make out what he said, “Jack Grabber.” I spit out a glob of blood, “Always have been, and always will be.”

    It was noon, and the center-most part of this large area of jungle still smoldered.  The chest-high grass and thin, looping trees had just been through 7 straight hours of landscaping by high powered, 21st century artillery.  Uncharacteristically, at this moment Grabber realized he never got to enjoy a quiet moment with a pristine jungle forrest.  His “moments with nature”, if he even had any, always had to come at times like this: when the smells of gunpowder, blood, piss and fear were still in the air… the last earthly remnants of whoever it was that had just crossed his path.  Grabber took all of this in with a gigantic inhale, and turned around to find the worshipping gaze of thousands of indigenous eyes, all joyous in their new found freedom and also silently pleading for their hero to stay and lead them.  But Jack Grabber isn’t a leader.  He much prefers landscaping.