Seven Demons Aidan Truhen (reading an ebook TXT) 📖

that is sort of WWE and militia cool and rap and rock music all in one place at one time. Like there was an American commander in Afghanistan who famously wore a sheriff’s badge and a ten-gallon hat and that is exactly the sort of behavior that makes Europeans think Americans have something wrong in the head parts I do not know what the Afghans thought about it but I am assuming it started with whatever is the word for fuck in Pashtun. A hat like that has swinging big dick energy and why would you ever show a bunch of snipers your dick energy that is just putting a target on your energetic dick.

But that is not to say there is no swinging dick energy in Europe there is so much dick here sometimes you would actually think there was no room for more dick but newsflash: there is always room for more dick and on that basis there is the Mercedes G-Wagen Service Edition. The original ’70s model was a street-legal German military truck and the Service Edition is the modern cartel-grade road tank executive upgrade and this one has been additionally pimped with big lights on top like you would use to shoot squid from a boat if that was a thing anyone did. It is less a vehicle than an enormity with wheels and I see it before Agent Hannah or the driver because I happen to be looking out the right window. It is going to T-bone us like a bear taking a buffalo calf like that.

Huge.

Fucking.

Truck.

Do you know the Greek royal family have these, they bought like a baker’s dozen in anthracite matte apparently so all the kids could have one.

Wow that is so big and I start to say LOOK OUT but I say:

LO—

I am thinking: huge big thing big coming so fast I swear every fucker in this conversation has meaner tools than I have I am woefully under-tooled—

No not like—no I mean—

WHAM.

—

There is clarity in flight.

I do not mean in flying but in being in flight because the whole world stops and you see everything in the future and the past and you see it perfectly because you have stopped too. You don’t have time for extraneous thoughts you just have one endlessly extended instant of frozen white light and knowing and I know:

We are upside down in midair.

Agent Hannah has her hands braced against the ceiling and her head is half turned to me to tell me something probably that I am an asshole. She probably thinks this is my team but I already know it’s not because if it was my team they would have used Saul and Saul would have used a spike strip.

Out of the front window I can see the sky like an endless nighttime blanket over the mountains and the world.

And under me I can see—

I can see the road but not just the road I can see—

Metal—

And—

What the shit is that is that—

Like seething velvet: moonlit and cloudy and blue.

When we hit the water I bang my head so I do not get to feel the cold. At least I do not feel it as it happens. But my bones remember it and I think they always will.

The water comes into the car and I am upside down so first it is great I am hooked to the ceiling and FUCK MY FUCKING FEET ARE ON FIRE no that is water O SHIT COLD COLD and it is rising and the agents in the car are not looking so good and the car is fucking SINKING are you KIDDING ME—

Right now I would give anything to have Lucille’s appalling sweet potato ballsack. I think my balls are not so much blue and frozen as retracted into my body as if I was a baby again and I think probably they will never come out again and I do not honestly blame them if I could go somewhere warm and hide I would also do that.

The water is rising up my chest up my back the car is O SHIT the car is TURNING OVER and so I will go down into the—

—ICE WATER—

Ice water white and blue and green and chalky and thick and I cannot tell you how cold how cold. Cold like another life like being hit like being—

At least—it’s odd—at least in this cold I don’t really feel the need to breathe. Or move.

In the water, I wonder if I should just die. After all that time I was scared of heights and burning and ash here I am cold and clean under a Swiss river with my hands hooked to the floor of an upside-down cop car and not—

My face breaks the water and we’re like sideways so only half my face is drowning and I can breathe water if I just stay in this damned uncomfortable position forever and the car does not sink. Agent Hannah’s cop friends are yelling but not screaming because they have serious intestinal fortitude I got to give them that they have integrity they have Swissness.

Heh. I’m pretty sure your boss hateboinked my fingers while she was arresting me and that let me tell you boys even I know that is motherfucking un-Swiss. But I love your integrity I do. And I love hers too because Agent Hannah is alive and awake and she looks at me and I see her see me seeing her and I know what she’s thinking because in the end we’re not that different. She’s a dedicated cop and I’m a professional criminal and there’s all that but in the end—we’re both people who do, and then there are people who don’t, and that is all. And she is thinking that she cannot let me get offed here.

Someone gets shot in the face. It isn’t me so I don’t care.

Hannah lunges like a fucking eel from the front seat down into the back in her soaking sweatpants. Down