A Poor Attempt at Eliciting Sympathy for Anonymous Deceased Henchmen

(Note: I only placed the small dashes to clarify the extra breaks; the one-line breaks after paragraphs signify a new paragraph, not a change in topic/mood/whatever as the dashes show. Formatting writing that was originally written on a Word doc can be difficult, so bear with the extra space, please.)

Here is the gist of it all, as close as I can get it: Richard June (henchman) has his neck broken by Pierce Slater (hero) on a cold night in February.

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Expository details: Richard June has a wife, Alyssa, and two daughters, Samantha and Ariel (aged eleven and nine, respectively). They live in the suburbs. (The exact city is unimportant.) Richard drives off to work every day and stands guard at a slate-grey complex located a few miles off the interstate. The complex has a large colored sign out front indicating that “Brantley Corp. Is A Great Place To Work!” This isn’t true. In reality, no one works there except for Richard and the other guards. And Brantley. Richard does not like doing what he does, but he does it because it pays well and he likes his house in the suburbs. (His house has three bathrooms—Richard has never lived in a house with three bathrooms.) Richard and Alyssa argue about his work sometimes, but they know that it is best for him to continue as he does. After all, with three bathrooms there is rarely any waiting for a shower in the morning. All four members of the family like that. It’s hard to consider giving up something that the entire family can agree on.

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A quick moment of action: To break up the monotony of exposition, here is a brief instance of action. This is not central to the story, nor does it fit anywhere, chronologically or otherwise. It is an example of life on the job.

Night, and there was gunfire. Richard stood over the body, breathing heavily, his gun heavy in his hands, the air weighted with the smell of smoke and blood. Footsteps pounded on the stairs behind him, and Richard turned as a heavy-set guard—Jared Fitzgerald?—entered the hall. He was panting. “What the hell happened?” he said.

Richard’s hands shook. Blood was pooling under the body at his feet. He swallowed, cleared his throat. “I’ll call Brantley. Someone tried to break in.”

The other nodded. “Sure. Good shot.” He left the hall to return to his post. Richard closed his eyes and took a breath. He lit up a cigarette. He took another breath. This would weigh on his thoughts tonight. He hadn’t made a kill in weeks.

Before he took this job, he had assumed that blood would be darker. Against the white floor it looked like strawberry syrup.

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Additional exposition: The nature of a henchman is criminal. For this to be a well-rounded story, there needs to be a lawful do-gooder. The one we’ll use is Pierce Slater. He has a history with the aforementioned Brantley, though now there is only bad blood between them. In fact, at this moment Slater is “storming the castle,” so to speak, with the intent to kill Brantley. The reason for his revenge is unimportant—though it probably has something to do with a kidnapped girlfriend/love interest/wife—just know that it is happening. (Side note: Slater is not the intruder that Richard shot in the previous scene. It is Slater who will be doing the rest of the killing—he is the hero, after all.)

To get things moving again, we’ll cut to Slater’s arrival.

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Slater approaches the corner, hugging the outside wall, his breathing quiet and controlled. There is a breeze on the night air and enough light from the moon for him to see. He has remained unnoticed so far. He tightens his grip on his pistol and peers around the corner. A solitary guard stands near the building’s entrance, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the wall. His rifle rests on the steps. He coughs and sniffs, wipes his nose with his sleeve.

Slater smiles. This will be easy.

The guard turns his back and flicks his cigarette away. Slater sprints forward, the guard turns, and there isn’t even time for surprise to cross his features before Slater is on him.

He delivers a kick to the guard’s torso before smashing his head with the butt of his pistol. The guard groans and tries to stand straight. Slater head butts him, and the man falls, blood streaming from his nose. Slater grabs him from behind and wraps his arms around his neck in a vicious headlock. He squeezes, and the guard kicks his feet out. He tries to grab Slater’s hands.

Slater grits his teeth and squeezes harder. There is a sudden cracking sound. His legs stop kicking, and his arms fall to his sides. Slater drops the body and walks to the door, which is unlocked. He isn’t even winded.

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There are twenty-six guards positioned in and around Brantley’s complex. Over the course of his assault, Slater will kill them all. He will do this without conscience or thought. (Character insight: Though after everything is over, long after he has exacted whatever petty revenge he is there to exact, Slater will find that he cannot sleep. He wakes in the middle of the night in a sweat, neither hot nor cold, just a sweat, his hands clenched and his legs wrapped up in the sheets. He takes to sleeping on the couch so as not to disturb his girlfriend/love interest/wife, though even there he rarely sleeps. He won’t talk to her about his insomnia. He finds his thoughts wandering into the realms of death, and killing, and they begin to dwell there for much of his waking hours. Throughout all of this he does not dream at night, except for a recurring sensation of being suffocated. No images are attached to it. There is only a feeling, forced out during the final moments of the dreams that he does not see, of having no air, and the feeling becomes so unbearable that he wakes, only to find that he has been sweating and that he cannot recall any specific image or nightmare.)

Of course, it is a long-established fact that the hero can (and will and should) do everything in his power to complete whatever his goal happens to be—revenge, rescue, retaliation, whichever—without regard for the rules of right or wrong. It always ends with casualties, though we tend to gloss over these as “collateral damage,” as “excusable.”

Speaking of casualties: If you hadn’t already guessed, Richard June is dead, the first of Slater’s victims, splayed out on the steps to the building, complete with cracked spine (near his skull, one of the cervical vertebrae, probably the second because that is the one that rotates) and crushed throat. His eyes are open, and they stare straight ahead at the overhang above the stairs.

Richard had drawn the unlucky straw earlier that day—none of the guards liked the shifts out front, and the fact that it was February and cold only added to that. There was little sense of camaraderie between them, and no one offered to take Richard’s place. Richard didn’t bother to mention the cold he had been nursing for a week—it wouldn’t have mattered. In the big picture, all the guards would die, anyway, though of course Richard did not know this.

Richard had wondered throughout his life how it would feel when he died. The physical sensations didn’t concern him. He wondered what it would feel like. Would there be some flash of light? Would he see his life in a million-fold spray of images? Would there be anything, or would there be the physical sensation alone and then nothing?

Here is the moment of his death: His arms losing sensation and falling to his sides, his legs kicking out their final pathetic kicks, his throat closing and finally tearing, the cartilage and bone and sinew holding his spine together cracking and tearing apart, shredding his nerves and leaving a traffic jam of misfired signals and crashed synapses. Had he been able, Richard would have gone back and told himself, desperately—angrily, even—to stop worrying about what it feels like to die, because there is nothing to feel, nothing to see, not in that sense; there is only the feeling of dying, of losing oxygen and struggling, helplessly, against whatever tide was sucking you out to whichever dark ocean happened to be waiting.

If we were to revisit Richard’s last real thoughts (the thoughts not about choking and breathing and getting away from this man who has my throat, I can’t breathe, God I can’t breathe), the thoughts before he was struck by nothingness, if we were to pull them out of his head before the neurons completely puttered out, they would resemble the following. (Though here they are out of order and lacking definition; I have pieced together the remnants as well as I could, but thoughts come in flashes and flashes are impossible to hold.)

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He only smoked when he was anxious.

Things Alyssa had said the night before had made him anxious. He was afraid the girls could have heard. Yes, they were in bed and it was late, but that didn’t matter.

Sneaking into the hall as a little boy and standing by the large fish tank, casting wavy shadows in its watered-down light, a clear view into the family room where his parents would sit and watch TV, programs he was never allowed to watch—and that was only a part of the fun, watching the TV. The rest came from the thrill of being there, of watching his parents when they didn’t know that he was watching, of outsmarting them in some way. Maybe they had known all along and were just allowing him to have his fun. Maybe he was a failure as a father because he wasn’t aware if his girls were awake or not.

Alyssa was upset about the work again, about Brantley. Brantley needed guards, and Richard was what Brantley needed. It wasn’t always the most honest job, but it wasn’t the mafia (not exactly) and it kept the family secure and

That’s my problem, Alyssa would yell, we’re not secure, we’re never secure, and I hate when you throw that word around. You come home and you’re bleeding and there are guns in our closet, in our closet, Richard, and how long before Samantha or Ariel find them? How long before they start to realize what’s going on? They won’t be children forever, why can’t you remember that?

Samantha turned eleven. Her party was in the park. All her friends and their parents came. The cake was chocolate and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.

Brantley is yelling about something, about revenge on someone, his old partner. Left him for dead. This is nonsense. I have places to be. Samantha’s birthday is tomorrow and I have to buy the party stuff and order the cake, and Jesus Christ, Brantley, we get it, Slater is an ass. Who is Slater? Alyssa will be worried. I’m not going to be home until late at this rate.

Driving to the mall with all the girls. We’re a happy family again. Samantha and Ariel want toys and clothes, clothes and toys; they’re caught in that age before all they want is clothes and boys. Alyssa wants to compare luggage prices, and I’m here because. Brantley is calling; will I have to turn around? Alyssa is happy, now. I don’t want to take this call.

The first day: Shake Brantley’s hand, firm grip, look him in the eyes. Remember, he’s buying us a house, we’re out of the apartment, we’re out of the city. Firm grip. Look him in the eyes. Long hours Alyssa doesn’t think are worth it. Brantley is younger than I’d expected. Working on the outskirts of town, he says. That isn’t too far. I wonder if I’ll get a new car out of this. Heater’s broken in the Honda. Maybe Brantley would understand if I explained that to him.

It’s cold out here. I wonder if Alyssa smells the smoke on me when I come home. This cold won’t go away. I haven’t been sick like this in months. Brantley asks a lot. How late is it, anyway?

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The rest is incoherent. That would be the instant immediately before Slater grabbed him and broke his bones. A romantic view of dying holds that when the moment is there, when death is a step away, one’s thoughts return to loved ones. This isn’t true. Just as Richard June saw no white light or pretty collage summarizing his life, neither did his thoughts return to his family. He thought (if it could be called thinking) only of the terrible pain. Then his neck broke and there was nothing else to think. No thoughts, no sights, no feelings, and there would never be any of them ever again.

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A moment from the past: Here is one more image, something to hold. Richard’s thoughts may have been wild and elusive, as are all thoughts, but this is a construct and I will leave you with something clear. It isn’t false. It isn’t fabricated. It is as much a part of Richard June as everything else already presented. I like to think that it is happy.

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Richard is by himself on his narrow balcony, his hands resting on the metal railing. It is summer, late afternoon. The city is spread out in front of him. Down, nearly fifteen stories down, he watches people move about, in their cars, on their bikes, on their feet. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. He looks at them, taps the pack absently on the bar. Behind him, in the apartment, his daughters watch TV. The door is open and he can hear the nonsense noise of cartoons.

There is another sound, and he turns his head to see Alyssa stepping through the door. She wears her hair short these days. She stands next to him and leans forward, placing her elbows on the railing.

“What do you think?” he says. Her eyes are very blue today, in this light.

“About what?”

“This time next month, we’ll finally be out of here. No more apartment. No more city.” He turns back to the open air in front of them. “No more view.” He shrugs. He taps the cigarettes against the bar again.

“I think it’s what we need. A change.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. I am.”

In a sudden moment of inspiration, Richard throws the pack of cigarettes off the balcony. Inside the house, his daughters shriek with laughter.