| Courtesy: donsevers.com |
Today’s
Prompt:
Two men stop you on your way into your local
post office. One flashes a badge at you. They tell you about a top secret sting
operation they are about to execute and they need your help. They can’t give
you any of the details, only that you are to walk into the post office, go up
to the counter with the gentleman named Bert working it, and you have to say to
him, “My stamps are looking a bit square these days, if you know what I mean.”
Write what happens next.
Word Count: 2,107
Kama
came to; his head buzzing like a turbojet engine in full swing. He reached for
the back of his head where it throbbed feverishly, and touched his finger to
it. The pain was the world. It projected black and white images to his vision
and the nasty headache took it personal. He tried for his eyelids and it was a
battle prying them open. His right eye was almost completely shut. It was a tad
too puffed-up; it was sort of a tough job keeping it open, so Kama let it slide
shut. His remaining eye could not take in much of his surround; a cloak of
darkness had concealed it in plain sight.
The floor where his bare feet
rested was musty and impossibly cold. Somebody with a queer sense of humor had
Kama strapped to a steel chair in a frigid zone. It tuned up the cold a notch
and he shuddered recurrently. Grume and goo plugged his nostrils; he traded exhales
for gasps. He cleared his gut and coughed up blood, instead. Kama closed his
functioning eye and tried to focus, listening in for memory’s footfalls. Trying
for how he managed to get himself in this fix. He negotiated a blank.
He
remembered the chap that stood, breathing down on him the moment before… he
passed out? Had he done this to him? The chap couldn’t have been more than
nineteen, going by his looks, anyway. He was like young 50 cent and he had a
lean, mean voice. Another strip of memory flashed across his mind; Kama
remembered the questions, the first words Babyface
spat in his face. It was a question and as vague as trying to translate the
gurgling of brooks into human words.
“Where’s the stamp?” Babyface
asked.
Kama
remembered his response. “What? What stamps?”
Babyface compensated him for throwing that question with a whack over the head.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I
ask all the questions, mister.” The tall, huge man-kid Kama called Babyface said. “It’s your duty to
respond. Now, hand me the darn stamps.”
At
that point, Kama was getting on the fringe of hysteria. “I don’t have the
slightest idea what you’re talking about. Could somebody please, tell me what
is…” The question expired on his lips when the idea of any whack over the head
crossed his mind.
The
tall man-kid seemed to notice and a smirk spread across his face. “You’re
wasting time, champ. The only virtue in the world I do not have is patience.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.” He synchronized his forefinger with an
imaginary pendulum.
‘You lack a lot more than you know.’ Kama
thought but didn’t say aloud.
“I got to get my hands on those
stamps ASAP. I know you have them, so don’t play games with me cause I don’t
play fair. You got just two options. One, you can either give me what I want
and two, or you can tell me where I can find ‘em. Cause I know they ain’t on
you. I frisked your ass a hundred times already.”
“That is no option,” Kama
sneered. “What if I don’t have them?”
“Suit yourself. I’m gonna ask
you one more time and if you don’t wanna cooperate me and you are gonna take a
walk down the corridors of terror. The type that’s gonna make you cry for
hell.” Babyface leaned over Kama their noses almost touched. “Where are the stamps,” he hissed.
Babyface
looked dead serious, like he would go through with his threats of doom and
gloom and he would too. And so was the crowd with him. They had indeed come to
collect and Kama was the only thing between them and their prize. The problem
was Kama didn’t have the stamps. Whatever the stamps were Kama had a strong impression these were not your
regular post office stamps that these dudes, who had apparently kidnapped him,
were trying to pull out of him with a chain fall.
“The way I see it, you guys
already turned out my pockets and forgot to return my pants, if I may add.”
Besides the boxers on him and his armless T-shirt, Kama was naked. “So, you
probably know I don’t have it on me. I would suggest you start searching someplace
else. People, I’m completely ignorant of the situation.”
He
could as well have been talking to the stone pyramids of Egypt. The men who were
by guesstimate, four in number neither moved nor flinched. They were like robots
programmed to do one thing: retrieve information. Anything shy of their
responsibilities didn’t really count. Kama conjured and contrived, did the best
he could to call up an image, any object in his mind that could come off as a stamp. Exasperated, he opened his mouth to
speak and one of his captors cut him off.
“Better get on with it, the boss
would be here, before long.”
“You mean there are others? How
many people exactly indulge in this obsession with stamps that perhaps, don’t
even exist? Somebody let me out of here.”
The
man-kid leaned forward and glowered over Kama. Kama flinched, shut his eyes and
waited for the blow that would probably hurt like a bastard. There was no blow
not even a rap over the head. Kama raised his eyelid a crack and saw Babyface
leaning over him.
“I want you to look at me and
listen up. I’m going to tell you something worth more to me than your very life
and I ain’t one to repeat myself. So listen good and try not to fuck this up.”
“Yesterday, at exactly 0800 hours,
you walked into a post office but not before talking to two security
operatives.” The man-kid saw Kama’s eyes light up with comprehension and rammed
his words into the opening. “You were given a simple mission, and you downright
flunked it. What we want to know is, who did you talk to after you left Bert’s
counter; who followed you and what did they want; and did you give them any
piece of information that could lead them back to us?”
Relief
washed over Kama like a heavy downpour. He leaned back on the chair as far back
as his chains would allow him and brayed laughter. The room’s walls caught it
on the rebound. The men exchanged glances but nobody touched Kama or instructed
him to quit.
“That’s all the information you
wanted and you had to go through all this drama?” Kama stopped chortling and
composed himself. “It was the first time ever I set eyes on the bunch of weirdoes.
At the post office, when they beckoned to me, I obliged because I thought
maybe, they wanted directions.” He shrugged. “They looked lost and totally out
of place. The one on the driver’s side flashed a badge, freaking secret service. I asked him, ‘Am I in some kind of
trouble, officer?’ And he said, ‘No, no trouble at all. We’d like for you to do
something for us.’ ‘Like what?’ I asked him, a little flustered. I mean, it was the secret service. He registered
the fear on my face and waved it away. ‘Don’t worry. All you have to do is
deliver a package to a man named Bert, he’s at Counter 5.’ I told them if there
were no strings attached it was totally ok.”
“You were nuts trusting the
secret service. I mean, they don’t exactly call what they do ‘Secret’ for nothing, do they? Tell me,
what did they say and what did you do with it?”
“The dude beside the one that
was talking to me must have been the boss from the way he acted, he took the
stick of cigarette out of his mouth, spat on the gravel and said, ‘We can’t
give out any of the details. It’s for your safety.’ I nodded. It’s the secret
service. Nobody in his right mind cares about what they do or don’t do. ‘Like
my partner said,’ the agent continued. ‘Find the gentleman named Bert at the
counter and say to him, don’t try to play 007 and ruin the operation, just say,
My stamps are looking a bit square these
days, if you know what I mean. And then beat it.’”
Kama
finished his story and stared into Babyface’ eyes. “That’s the details of my
mission at the post office, it was all I did and when I came out, the car with
the secret agents inside was long gone. By the way, I’ve never seen stamps that
weren’t square my entire life. I wonder why people pass such dumb information
and expect people to buy it.”
Back
in the present, Kama’s memory was returning. He had asked the men to set him
loose and let him go.
It
never happened. They had dealt him the beating of his life and he had indeed
cried out for hell.
Now
alone in the darkness, he believed they had perhaps, left him for dead.
At
the post office, Bert had given him a combination of numbers. Kama didn’t know
what they meant. After he left the counter, a man had followed him. He didn’t
know that Kama was aware he was being followed. Kama saw him from the corner of
his eye and changed his route. The two men entered into the lavatory and the
man came up behind Kama and tried to lock his arm around Kama’s neck.
Kama
ducked under and connected his left foot with the man’s groin. There was a
grunt as the man went down. Kama was all over him the next second.
“The number combinations, what do they mean?”
Kama breathed into his ears. The double agent spilled his guts only when Kama
grabbed the man’s service-issue semi-automatic and trained it at his forehead.
“If you don’t start singing hero, they’re gonna be scraping your brains off
these tiles in two minutes.” The man took one look in Kama’s eyes and started
rapping.
The
numbers were codes for a secret overseas account.
After
the stint at the post office, Kama had returned home to pack but not before putting
two to the head of the double agent who assaulted him in the bathroom. He’d
muffled the noise of the automatic with towels he picked off the hooks. There’d
been a knock on his door shortly after he arrived home. Two men guns pointed at
his chest when he opened the door. That’s how he came to be in this torture
chamber. But these men were yet ignorant of what he knew especially, the number
combinations. Whoever was running the show had kept that part of the deal to himself.
The
door opened and a man stepped inside. Kama feigned dead. He moved to where Kama
was strapped to the metal chair and started pulling off Kama’s chains. He was
gulping mouthfuls of air. Tired out from
digging my grave, Kama thought. All the better. As the last of his
shackles clattered to the floor, Kama reached for the agent’s side arm on his
left hip. He came up empty. The agent who thought Kama was unconscious broke
his paralysis when he saw him move and reached for his right hip. Damn, he’s a leftie, Kama thought as he
lifted the metal chair that had been his prison earlier. It was heavy and ought
to get the job done.
The agent was fast but Kama was
faster. He fired at Kama but the bullet went wide. Kama’s vision was adapted to
the darkness and he used it. He ducked right and brought the chair down hard on
the side of the agent’s head. It whipped him across the face. There was a faint
crack as the man’s skull caved in. He fell in a heap to the floor.
Kama
grabbed his gun and trained it at the body crumpled on the floor but it was the
last anybody would ever hear from the agent. Ciao, world, I’m gone to that
great unemployment office in the sky.
He
fetched his clothes on a table at a corner of the torture room, strapped it on
and walked away into the sun. The agency would get whiff of him eventually. The
story of how former top secret agent, Kama Jackson, code name: Mr. Massacre had his face altered
through plastic surgery and ripped off the secret service.
He’d
salted away close to a billion bucks in hard currency.
But
before they figured what to do about him, he’d be halfway across the universe
enjoying the sun on some tropical beach while some brown sugar warmed his bed.
Eneh Akpan
June
11, 2013
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