Indiana-–East Chicago, July 4, 2018

Sergeant Nesmith was more than AWOL, he was a fugitive. A fugitive of a clandestine eugenics project, which made him the worst kind of fugitive: the embarrassing kind. The kind to drive handlers of clandestine organizations to do anything to anyone in order to retrieve such embarrassments quietly. Nesmith was what was known within the secretive infrastructure of the government as a “considerable investment-acquisition in time-resource assets”, one that could not be readily justified to any committee no matter how entrenched in the shadowy side of politics; one that could never be reasonably justified to the public-at-large. Ever.

Nesmith was valuable, but not indispensable. Now, he was a faulty product that threatened the entire machinery from whence he came, and that was a threat intolerable.

Nesmith knew this, accepted it. It was why he had taken his crew on the lam; why he had entered into the service of a two-bit Mafioso. Why he even now sat aboard the yacht in the marina on Lake Michigan waiting for this operation to commence in earnest, so his team could earn enough cash to secret themselves out of the country and into a place far from the hostile intent of his former commanders. For supersoldiers on the run from their secret government enclave, the price for freedom would be exceedingly steep. These men would not disappear so easily. Or cheaply.

In fact, the operation was far more overt than he cared for, but desperation ruled his time-table.

Nesmith sat in the enclosed wheelhouse of a thirty-foot cabin cruiser named See Monkey Deux. It was a stupid name for a boat, he thought, but for personal reasons, he couldn’t resist the irony. He imagined the pained look on Ashland’s face when he was made aware of it, and it made him smile.

The tinted windows of the cruiser’s main cabin offered the perfect blind, from casual observers and hunting eyes alike, which gave Nesmith the vantage on his target he needed.

He had commandeered the vessel in the early morning hours with no resistance; its owners were nowhere to be found and had not attempted to return to their yacht, at least not yet. Probably owned by some upscale Chicagoan with a condo in the city and a lake house on the shore, the sergeant mused. If things went as planned, he wouldn’t be there much longer, and the owners would arrive to an empty berth.

It was nearly 4 a.m. on Saturday morning; the time, Nesmith had learned during his training, when people were at their most vulnerable--normal people, at least. At that hour, they would be at the most physically and mentally sluggish, regardless of their level of rest or preparedness. It couldn’t be helped. It was an innate factor of genetics. What a wonder of evolution, the internal clock, Nesmith thought.

The powerful soldier ran a rough hand over his weary brown eyes that seemed to hold a perpetual sadness, no matter his circumstances. He heaved a heavy sigh.

Nearly a month prior, Nesmith was the ward of a research group working from a grant from the National Defense Development League. On the surface, NDDL was a consortium of federal and private organizations striving towards applied and integrated militaristic technologies. Their efforts included research into hardware, software, wetware, psyware and behavior science, with an emphasis on blending hybridized somatic systems with mechanical constructs, though they had divisions managing projects ranging from personal stun equipment to strategic defense orbitals. The N-double-dee-L was host to a whole new world of secrets that even the learned-few of the so-called Shadow Government barely realized existed, but for their upper echelon. The NDDL was actively engaged in something they referred to as OKINT: Occult Intelligence.

Sergeant Nesmith was the star pupil in Project: OVERLINK, being conducted by the Hollis-Severn Combine for Theopneustia’s bioweapon research division. Nesmith was the commander of a group of specially selected and trained soldiers being prepared for a very specific type of warfare. They were an elite team, each member a one-of-a-kind warrior. Through bionic implants and carefully administered psychotropic chemicals, as well as autonomous conditioning and gene therapy, The Combine had rewired Nesmith’s brain and conditioned it. We’ve washed it, Dr. Stella Sheffield, the project’s manager, would often tell Nesmith. She told him they were making him better. Making him perfect.

Sheffield took Nesmith as her pet project within the overall research of OVERLINK. She would engage him in conversations after training exercises or chat him up over meals or review the psychological aspects of his written testing, encouraging him to understand his failures and celebrate his triumphs, all the while driving him to reach beyond the conditioning to understand the implications he represented. Stella Sheffield even taught him the game of chess and would often play against him. She would remark on occasion to her colleagues within earshot of Nesmith that ‘the pupil outclasses the master.’ Once he moved through the learning curve, she could no longer manage to best him.

And though there relationship was more ‘teacher and student’ rather than ‘master and slave’, Nesmith knew he was at best a prisoner. Almost from day one, that recognition was clear to him. He was pulled from his ignorant life in the mountains and put into this project as a captive, selected for his innate physical prowess and the lack of concern his absence would generate. Nesmith knew, even after he had determined to escape his confines in OVERLINK, that he would never see his family again. He wouldn’t know how to handle his family anyway, not after they were done with him.

To some extent, Nesmith was able to accept he was who he was due to OVERLINK. In many ways, they had augmented the best aspects of his personality, nurtured it. He had become enlightened. Nesmith assumed it was a byproduct and not the intent of their research. A weapon that thinks too much is a dangerous tool. For their part, he knew this was considered an unfortunate consequence. They wanted an animal, one they could control.

The thing about animals, Nesmith realized, was that their cages tended to make them invisible to those on the outside. People would say or do anything in front of them, as if the steel bars would filter it all safely away.

Dr. Sheffield would often discuss the politics that ebbed and flowed through the corridors of the NDDL laboratories; she would conduct Combine business over the phone during their meals or discussion sessions. It was how Nesmith learned about Amaranth.

Amaranth had given the corporate elite within The Hollis-Severn Combine wet-dreams, apparently. The suits has whispered that the Pacific Ocean had offered up an island, uncharted and unknown. A remnant of a once-thriving alien society. A place of infinite promise. It had merely arisen in the sea, floating for a time. Then it disappeared. It sank out of sight. From what he could gather, Amaranth had a habit of doing this, and The Combine had managed to lose at least two separate research teams in its dense jungles. Despite their first-hand experience, however, they had not yet managed a way to accurately predict the island’s return or track its course. A place that had managed to confound The Combine sounded like just the place to escape to, Nesmith thought.

The moment came sooner than Nesmith had hoped. His contact with Sheffield had been occurring infrequently, with the engagements being limited to the more clinical nature of the relationship. The testing outside the cages stopped. Live-firing exercises and obstacle-yard activity halted. Simulation demonstrations ceased. There was talk amongst the staff that “Phase 2” was in the preparatory stages. There was talk of closing down the “Phase 1” laboratories. The “Decommissioning” was to begin. Immediately.

Then, one afternoon Stella Sheffield arrived to Nesmith’s steel-barred quarters. She was friendly, animated, and light-hearted. Her long, brown hair, usually worn wrapped in a tight-knot on the back of her head, was left to cascade over her shoulders. She wore contacts instead of her usual severe black-rimmed spectacles. She wore make-up and perfume. She laughed.

She removed Nesmith from his cell and they retired to one of the many exercise rooms in the facility. Nesmith found a chess set prepped and ready, and he knew it was the condemned man’s Last Day. The two sat at the board and commenced the game. Sheffield purred over his proficiency with each move. Nesmith quickly became aware that her manner was not just friendly, but aggressively provocative. Seductive. It was not enough to give him a last game, he realized, but this woman wanted to offer herself to him. An act of mercy to send him off into the sweet hereafter with a smile on his face. Or, more likely, a final conquest for the good doctor’s memoirs. A one of a kind dalliance with a one-of-a-kind animal, Nesmith reckoned.

Despite the repulsion flooding Nesmith’s brain at the thought of Stella Sheffield and her cloying, bosom-baring efforts at arousing him, the soldier found it hard to not consider the offer on the table, silently though it was tendered. But the rage at her audacity was quickly crowding those emotions out. Deep down, it was clear to Nesmith, that for whatever her reasons, heartfelt mercy or Machiavellian bravado, the woman before him considered him a fool to be disregarded.

Nesmith moved a chess piece deliberately.

“Checkmate,” Sheffield’s eyes smiled, considering the specimen she had created, and now intended to deflower. “You let me win,” the woman demurred.

“You think I’m an idiot,” Nesmith snarled.

“No,” Sheffield soothed, “No, not at all.”

“Yes, you do,” Nesmith clenched his jaw tightly; “You have me in here unrestrained. You dragged me into this place, too. ..,” Nesmith choked on his words, feeling ashamed and debased.

“You have me in here and you haven’t followed any of the security protocols, and you’ve disabled all the monitoring devices, so ...,” Nesmith stuttered, barely suppressing the rage, “So you could do what you wanted, because you think I’m a fool. You think I’m not dangerous. You think I’m obsolete.”

Sheffield sat up, cocking an eyebrow seductively.

“Nes,” she whispered, “I did all this because I trust you. It’s important to me, that you have ... That we have this time, because I don’t know when we’ll ... get to play together again.”

Sheffield leaned forward, her lips spread softly.

It was at that point, secure in the knowledge that they were indeed as alone as anyone ever was in the NDDL labs, that Nesmith grabbed up the chessboard and in a blindingly swift stroke slashed Dr. Stella Sheffield so deeply across her exposed throat with the board’s crisp edge that her head, still smiling but with eyes as big and bright as headlamps, fell back over her shoulders, held in place only by the bony vertebrae of her neck.

From that point, Nesmith and his crew were fugitives, albeit too dangerous to the powers-that-be to pursued publicly. The hunt was on, but it was a quiet chaos that pursued these supersoldiers. Neither side could risk the exposure: Nesmith knew there was no authority that could protect them from the reach of The Combine; The Combine knew, too, that the Nesmith Problem would have to be solved internally, lest they reveal a world of recondite ills to harsh and unforgiving scrutiny.

And so now, Nesmith had dragged his team to Northern Indiana, to the city of East Chicago, to stake out a floating gambling casino for John “Il Mostro” Bombardi, the self-proclaimed Don of Sewer Side.

East Chicago was a city long darkened by the shadow of corruption and crime, but it first forged its reputation on the backs of laborers at the start of America’s Industrial Revolution. During WWI, the city was known as America’s Arsenal. It served as a central relay station at the base of Lake Michigan. Iron ore and coal brought down to East Chicago’s shores would be distributed through her rail yards to all points east, south, and west, fueling the fires of steel-forged freedom.

East Chicago’s population was predominantly immigrant, boasting a multitude of distinct ethnic backgrounds, with 80% of its citizenry first-generation Americans. But that diversity also brought with it a multitude of trouble.

Prior to the close of WWII, East Chicago was abuzz as a keystone city in the U.S. industrial machine, but soon after the close of the Second World War, America’s reliance on her rails and ports saw thousands of workers suddenly jobless. Her proximity to Chicago, too, fed into her woes.

The Chicago syndicate’s South Side Crew reached deep into her shadows and began to strangle her for all her worth. Soon the world forgot her heat-forged history and saw only her hell-bent reputation.

For decades, Chicago’s organized crime was controlled by a coalition sometimes referred to as The Outfit. Even in the days of Capone, the city had been divided into roughly equal parts: The Rush Street Crew, The Cicero Crew, The West Side Crew, The South Side Crew, and the Chinatown Crew. As the nature of the business became more fluid and globally oriented, pressure from competing sources and federal law enforcement grew more intense, the landscape shriveled underneath the syndicate and they struggled to maintain a semblance of their former glory.

By 1997, the city was divided into three parts: The South Side, West Side, and North Side. John “Giovanni Jones” Bombardi was a lieutenant in the South Side crew working for Eddie “The Fish” Gigliani. But Bombardi was ambitious, if not particularly clever, and a series of dealings with Russian mafiya, designed to establish his wealth and power in a side venture, had managed to handicap himself physically as a result of an accident with his new partners, driving him underground. But there, deep in Chicago’s metro-guts, Bombardi had discovered a portion of the city that had never previously been carved out by any other crew. Virgin territory for a man with the heart and strength to conquer it. Giovanni Jones was now Il Mostro, the self-appointed Don of Sewer Side.

Nesmith had established a connection with Bombardi through a happenstance encounter on Chicago’s South Side. As these things often unfold, the two reluctantly determined they could use each other to obtain something they each wanted. In Nesmith’s case, he was looking at the considerable pipeline to Mexico that Bombardi had access to, which could work in reverse to funnel his comrades and him out of the U.S.

From there, the plan was to secure a vessel and begin the search for their secret island. Nesmith wasn’t even sure he believed that could be accomplished or that Amaranth even existed, but the hope it generated for his brothers-in-arms was enough for now.

Bombardi, on the other hand, needed cash--large amounts and quickly--to pull him out of the jam he had managed to get himself into with his Russian associates. For that, he was desperate enough to do anything and employ anyone. Even someone like Nesmith.

The Lady of the Lake was anchored in the Calumet region, calling East Chicago its port-of-origin on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. The riverboat was one of the many establishments fronted by Bobby $ Xanadu. The “$” stood for Money, and Bobby Xanadu was fond of making note of that to anyone within earshot. The casino boat was the largest in the flotilla of Xanadu Entertainment, which boasted three other vessels and one land-based casino operated by Native Americans in Michigan, as well as part ownership of Xanadu, a casino resort in Las Vegas and Zanadoo Too, the first moon-based gambling operation in JFK Space Harbor.

The Lady was home to 50,000 square feet of luxury suites, restaurants, bars, and 3,000 individual opportunities for games of chance.

Xanadu was a nightclub entertainer, film producer, and B-list celebrity-turned-pawn of the Maltese family. Xanadu helped lend legitimacy to many of the ventures that served as laundering operations for the Maltese organization in Chicago and Las Vegas. As such, the heist that Bombardi was about to pull off was the very definition of robbing Peter to pay Paul. If Nesmith’s squad of supersoldiers were as good as they promised, the whole thing was a calculated risk on Bombardi’s part. That was how desperate Bombardi had become, for, despite his present situation, he had incurred other debts even more dangerous than raising the ire of the Don of one of most powerful families in the Chicago syndicate.

The Lady of the Lake took in $250,000 on any given day; with the take double that on a weekend. That didn’t include the cash on hand as reserve, nor did it include the various below-deck laundry operations that cleansed Maltese blood money for circulation.

It was 4 a.m. on Saturday morning in July, 2018. Summer vacation was in full swing. The take promised to be huge.

The plan was simple: members of Nesmith’s team were already on the inside ready to move at the appointed time. Il Mostro had provided them the means to stowaway onboard the ship. A combination of shock, terror, and force would give them the leverage they needed to grab as much of the cash as they could carry, pitching it over the side of The Lady onto the deck of the See Monkey Deux, where it would be transported to Il Mostro’s crew in Illinois. All that needed to happen now was for the inside man to make contact with Nesmith.

#

Bernard Garfield had been in the employ of Xanadu Entertainment for over a decade. In that time, he had managed to learn the deeper darker secrets of the hospitality industry. In that corner of his world, he had learned to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. That kind of loyalty breeds trust. Trust that cultivates reward. For Bernard Garfield, that led him to the position of floor manager for The Lady of the Lake. Garfield was not an intimidating man, nor was he especially sharp, but he had a ruthless streak and a cold-heart, his love of money enabled him to apply force where and when it was needed to ensure The House--and he--came out ahead. Bernard Garfield was what John Bombardi derisively referred to as a Corporate Capo, someone whose authority only came from the front covering the real business--mafia business--underneath.

Garfield was unabashedly an obsequious toad to his superiors, an officious jackass to those under his supervision. Garfield was quick to remind his charges of the real weight that lay behind his office door. La Cosa Nostra. He loved to say it, his affected accent bubbled with enthusiasm with each utterance. He loved playing at wise guy.

Though his demeanor often hinted at it, Garfield was not a man capable of violence, far from it. He was slight of frame and looked older than he was with is greasy-thin moustache and slick front-to-back comb-over, which he had a habit of preening meticulously: twice over the lip with the index finger and thumb, then running an open palm over the hair once. His employees noted he did this compulsively, about three-hundred times a day. When push came to shove, however, it was hired muscle that did Garfield’s dirty work.

Bernard Garfield was just the man for the job of running the customer service side of a syndicate boat in the heartland of America. No one who worked his decks reported late, punched out early, or let a hot streak continue for more than three hands. And absolutely no one failed to report anything out of the ordinary going on, on “Mr. Garfield’s Ship.”

It was early, but Garfield had already been aboard for an hour when the call came down. With tremendous consternation, he folded his morning newspaper curtly and slapped it to a table top with a display of exaggerated frustration. He’d barely gotten through the front page, with its giant splash headline: “Rage Remanded To DIS; Knight Hawk MIA.” The maniacal gap-toothed grinning mug shot of the man Chicagoans knew only as “The Rage” took up the front half of the paper. Blood red wings of feathered hair fanned out from either side of a bald strip of pate, a white anarchy “A” painted in the hairless divide. Wide and vacant eyes stared out from the page above that leering, laughing smile. It was, as Chicago police commissioner Ramsey Sumner stated, as if a Gasey painting had sprung to life in horrible homage to the artist.

Juxtaposed in a smaller photo, inset against the criminal’s portrait, stood the armored Knight Hawk, his face masked in a dark steel-ceramic helm cast in the visage of a dark bird of prey.

The Rage was best described as a criminally insane insurgent; Knight Hawk was a vigilante crime-fighter and nemesis to Rage. For over a decade the two had played cat-and-mouse in Chicago: the vigilante Knight Hawk hunting the demented serial killer, always bringing him to justice after some wildly violent escapade. Always, it seemed, no court could throw away the key and no prison could keep him chained. The Crime King of Chicago would always find a way to vex the city; The Knight Hawk would find a way to ultimately apprehend him. This time, Rage had taken his last victims. He poisoned the city’s water supply with weaponized Anthrax. Hundreds were dead before Knight Hawk subdued him. Though Rage was not considered a “Supra”, this time the courts had managed to stick a sentence to him that would likely be the death of him--rehabilitation in the Daedalus Indocile Sanctum: a Supra-Max prison in the Nevada desert under federal jurisdiction on Nellis Air Force Base. For over fifty years no inmate had ever managed to escape DIS.

Garfield smoothed his hair in a huff and stamped out of the monitor room, to thread his way past the late-night hangers-on mingling with the newly arrived blue-haired early-birds, getting a jump start on losing, to view the disturbance on the main deck.

Waiters, waitresses, janitorial staff and dealers, with patrons following in lemming-like reflex, were parting like a herd of game clearing away from an oncoming predator, as Garfield, his thin frame and crisply pressed beige suit cut a path towards the commotion on the main deck near the cash windows. He spent the first two hours of his morning going over the receipts from the previous night, while hawking the monitors that reported back the scenes from the many security cameras in the gaming areas, while he enjoyed USA Today. It was his ritual. He did not like it disrupted.

“What is this?” Garfield barked. He stared at the thing for a moment, then to his employees nearby. No response was immediately forthcoming, so his eyes scanned the crowd.

“What is this?” Garfield repeated, as if the agitation expressed in his tone would draw out the answer he was looking for.

“Whose animal is this?”

Garfield and a half a dozen other onlookers were quietly observing the small Squirrel Monkey, the size of a cat, sitting on one of the stools used by gamblers to park in front of the slots. It had a tiny fanny pack strapped to its waist and a novelty fez strapped to its black head. It held up a small sign that simply read “Garfield.”

Bernard Garfield looked around for an explanation. None was offered. He was just about to call for security, when the raccoon-faced monkey dropped the sign and unzipped its pack. It produced a black plastic bag.

“Some kind of joke?” Garfield snapped to no one in particular, but directed at all the employees in earshot.

Garfield took the bag and opened it. He had a notion that some sort of hidden camera nonsense was being perpetrated upon him, and that had him a bit cautious. The last thing he wanted was to do something that would embarrass himself or his partners.

The bag contained a walkie-talkie headset. He scowled, annoyed. The monkey screeched. Garfield gave the beast a stabbing glance then looked to the radio. He placed it into his left ear and turned it on.

“Hello,” a voice crackled with static, “Is this Mr. Garfield?”

“Who am I speaking with, please,” Garfield huffed.

“One thing we will need to set straight at the onset, Mr. Garfield, is that I am in control at this point and until further notice, is that clear?”

Garfield laughed an expletive incredulously into the radio, but something in the voice on the other end stopped him short of turning the radio off and discarding it to go about his business.

“Mr. Garfield,” the voice, smooth and even, commanding, continued, “Let me tell you what is going to happen, what is not going to happen, and what will happen if you fail to heed all the conditions I set forth. See our friend, Mr. Kovacs, there? He, no doubt, has now retrieved and primed the detonator to the bomb we have hidden in the hold of your Lady of the Lake, Mr. Garfield. If the monkey is harmed or the alarm is raised, the monkey will release the trigger on the detonator and ... boom.”

Garfield’s mouth went dry. The little monkey had, indeed, produced a trigger device from its pack now. The kind of thing that he’d seen on the news reports related to suicide-bombing terrorists. The little monkey held it in its left hand. It considered the man before him with an untrusting intensity, its tiny head darting back and forth, up and down, as if measuring the man at all angles, waiting for something. A sign.

“Kovacs is well-trained, Mr. Garfield. Ask him to flip.”

Garfield stood frozen. The crowd about him was growing. His employees were awaiting instruction; the gamblers were waiting for the punch-line. Garfield, for his part, was caught between wondering what sort of bad joke was being planned at his expense and what sort of horrific nightmare he was now at the center of.

“Say, ‘Kovacs. Flip,’” the voice over the radio commanded calmly. “It helps to do circle with your finger in the air.”

Garfield looked around.

“Kovacs... Flip,” his voice finally cracked. His finger trailed as an after-thought.

The monkey immediately did a somersault on the stool. Garfield felt foolish. The crowd gasped and giggled, many moving away, already having grown bored with the distraction.

“When this is over, Mr. Garfield, I will instruct you on how to disarm little Kovacs peaceably. Until my demands are met, however, the monkey holds the trigger.”

Nesmith could sense the hesitation on the other line and added a few more words of encouragement to the floor manager.

“Fair warning, Garfield: any attempt to remove the trigger without my consent and you’re on your own. Kovacs bites. Ever see that Ebola monkey movie?”

The monkey screeched loudly at Garfield. Then again. Then again. Garfield froze. The monkey kept screeching.

“Mr. Garfield,” the radio voice nudged. “Kovacs would like his reward.”

“Reward?”

“In the bag, Mr. Garfield.”

Garfield reached into the bag and retrieved a shell-in peanut. He handed it gingerly to the monkey, who snatched it greedily and immediately cracked it opened and devoured the nut inside.

“This ... This is some stupid joke, right? Some dumbass TV show prank,” Garfield mumbled.

“What if it is? What if this is some joke, Mr. Garfield? You’ve no reason not to play along, then, because, if it is some childish prank, well, you’ve really not got anything to lose.

“On the other hand,” the voice grew colder, “If it isn’t a joke, if it is true that there are enough explosives below decks to incinerate this vessel with all hands, then there is no reason not to do what I tell you.”

Garfield considered the little orange monkey before him and the device in its hand. He preened himself with a shaking hand.

“You see, Mr. Garfield, there really isn’t any good reason not to play along.”

Garfield’s mind was racing. He knew the joke was on him, he just didn’t know where the prank was really coming from.

“I will take your silence as consent. Here is what is going to happen: in a few minutes my associates are going to enter the casino floor and make their way through the crowd to your location, where the cash clerks will turn over all the cash in your reserve.”

“This is a joke,” Garfield snorted aloud to all within earshot.

“My associates will be dressed in the colorful flare of the local sports franchises. Your part will be to treat the whole thing as a publicity stunt. Play. Along. Assure your patrons that whole thing is staged. A book-making promotion. Instruct your employees to comply with the effort. Work the crowd to keep the panic level down.

“Panic level?” Garfield knitted his brow; the voice ignored the question in Garfield’s voice.

“Also, don’t smile directly at any of the Wickersons.”

A plan popped into the floor manager’s head, but before Garfield had a chance to drop the walkie-talkie and kick the stool out from under the monkey, the crowd began to react. In the distance and seemingly from out of every corner of the casino floor emerged monkeys, mandrills, and chimps of all shapes and varieties, all wearing athletic jerseys, each one bearing one of the emblems of a Chicago sports team. Almost immediately, Garfield’s cell phone began to ring.

The congregation of apes moved amongst the crowd. Some were amused; some were startled, some paid no heed or didn’t even register the simian presence, lost in their games of chance. For their part, the monkeys were playful and well behaved, lumbering and weaving, heading for Garfield and the cash-out windows.

Garfield’s cell phone rang.

“Yes,” Garfield answered his phone. The voice on the other end explained that the new slot machine crates that had been waiting to be installed had been discovered busted into and empty and reeking like a barn. Before he could answer, a mandrill, its blue-red face complimenting the Blackhawks hockey sweater perfectly, moved past Garfield, headed towards the teller lines. Garfield hung up the phone and followed.

The little squirrel monkey leaped to his shoulder as he turned. Garfield let out a shrill squawk. He would have sworn the thing laughed at him.

A chimp wearing a Bulls tank top arrived, and Garfield noted the two monkeys at the cash windows were bearing large canvas bags.

“No dye packs, Mr. Garfield,” the voice in the headset chided softly. “These monkeys can smell ‘em. You put a dye pack in their bags and there will be violence.”

Bernard Garfield was waiting for the other shoe to drop, as more monkeys moved in around him. He started to chuckle in embarrassment, considering the women behind in the cash-out stations with a wry smile.

The little monkey shrieked then shrieked again.

Garfield laughed nervously.

“He’s not buying it, Top.”

The laughing stopped.

“He’s not buying it,” the little monkey repeated. “It ain’t gonna work, not like this,” the little monkey named Kovacs growled into his own communication link strapped to his neck, never taking his eyes off Garfield.

“Hello! Hello!” Kovacs brandished the trigger mechanism in front of Garfield’s face, who had now turned the corner from incredulous discomfort to growing fear at the scene playing out before him. The apes that had surrounded him now, who before seemed whimsically comical in their sports gear, now had a light in their eyes that suggested something more terrifying.

Garfield looked about, it was clear to him that he wasn’t hallucinating; others had heard the little monkey speak.

“What is your malfunction, Bushmeat? What the hell did I tell you?” the voice over Garfield’s radio crackled in tandem with Kovac’s.

“What part about ‘maintain radio silence at all times’ do you not get?”

“Oh yeah. Oooo-ooo. Aah-aah. Ooo-ooo, eee-eee,” Kovacs the squirrel monkey flatly intoned.

“I mean, how can I maintain radio silence and answer the question, sergeant?”

“Garfield, what is going on here?”

Another pit boss, a big man with a wide face named Morgan, strode over to where Garfield stood amidst the group of apes, showing concern; the apes were looking less comical, more hostile, more erect. More human.

“Garfield, what is this? Some kind of publicity gag?”

Garfield stood agape. The squirrel monkey was staring a hole through him. One of the other apes, the blue and red faced mandrill, was reaching underneath his Blackhawks sweater.

Garfield scanned the menagerie before him then looked to his associate.

“Bomb. The monkey’s got a bomb,” he finally said, loud enough for customers nearby to hear it. And react to it.

Instantly, there was panic in a wave that quickly flowed from one end of the deck to the edges, spilling out into the other decks.

Kovacs gave Garfield a hard look.

“Schmuck!” the squirrel monkey screeched into Garfield’s ear then launched himself to the other side of the teller counter. He then yanked off his fez, revealing a small, metal plate covering the back half of its head.

“Load up, links!” the squirrel monkey barked into his comlink. The apes, chimps, and mandrills produced canvas bags from under their sports jerseys. All had plates or caps fused to their skulls of gleaming metal that sported jacks for electrical hookup.

“Grab those two!” Kovacs ordered.

Two chimps prevented Garfield and his associate from vacating the area.

“Now listen up, Bushmeat!” Kovacs puffed his chest out and swaggered down the teller line; the tellers stared back in abject horror.

“I’m Sergeant Nesmith--”

“No names,” gasped one of the mandrills.

“Button the banana hole, soldier! You really think fake names will keep us safe?”

Kovacs tapped his fingers together in mocking dissertation.

“Oh, it wasn’t Nesmith’s crew of cyborg monkeys that hit that boat, this group’s leader was named ‘Chet’.”

The mandrill snarled back at Kovacs in humiliation.

“You’re an idiot, Darwin,” Kovacs hoarsely spat back.

“Now, here’s how it goes down,” Kovacs turned his attention again towards the tellers, strutting like a drill instructor.

“You’re gonna fill up the sacks my associates give to you with cash. All of it. Even the bad money no one’s ‘sposed to know about.

“No dye packs!” the monkey bellowed, “I can smell dye packs. I smell a dye pack, and the Wickerson twins will go ape-shit on you.”

Kovacs waved his hands towards two chimps, who roared at the teller line. They laughed at the look of terror on the humans’ faces.

“You know, you could get a firing squad for impersonating an officer, Kovacs,” Nesmith’s calmly reminded the monkey over the comlink. Kovacs ignored him.

“See this,” Kovacs held up his trigger mechanism, “This is the switch that goes BOOM! You do anything stupid, and this whole barge goes up in a big ball of fire. You go with it. So, let’s all do our jobs and everyone gets their spot on the five o’clock news, right?”

The ape-pirates offered up bags they had concealed under their jerseys, one after another, before moving back out onto the floor to take up defensive positions.

The tellers were dutifully packing the money away into the canvas bags the pirates had provided, when Kovacs became aware of an approaching gambler, undaunted by the activity around him.

“Hey!” the man shouted at the teller opposite Kovacs, “Hey, you ain’t foolin’ me, lady. Ain’t no damn bomb. I got a load to cash-out, and you ain’t cheatin’ me out of it, you hear?”

The man was dressed in blue jeans and a Notre Dame t-shirt. He wore a bushy brown mustache, a long mullet cascaded from his head, still showing the compression marks where his dingy yellow trucker’s cap had recently been perched; it was now in his hands, filled with chips.

“Bar’s closed, Gomer.”

The man swore at Kovacs. Kovacs returned the notion.

“You heard me, Jethro,” the simian mockingly continued, “All your chips are belong to us! Duh! Take a hike!”

“Kovacs,” Nesmith growled through clenched teeth, “Since you chose to engage the parties onboard, it is very likely we will see some involvement by the authorities. Hurry. Up.”

A shot rang out. Morgan waved the gun towards the other apes; a deep red stain grew in the orange fur of Kovacs. The monkey’s dark eyes, ringed in tufts of white, fell shut.

“Top! Top!” Darwin shouted in the radio, “Kovacs’ down!”

Nesmith ripped the headset from his head with a massive hand plated in armor. He turned the boat’s engine over and gunned it. It lurched forward and swung tightly, headed straight for The Lady of the Lake’s starboard side. A crunching, twisting shriek of metal and wood rippled across the marina in the pre-dawn darkness.

Nesmith howled with anger and bared his teeth. Massive arms capped at the shoulders with aramid-ceramic plates raised up in the cabin, ripping off the roof. Nesmith leaped from the boat and onto the deck of the Lady, landing with a thud on two leather-clad combat boots, cut just right to allow his massive toes access for better balance and gripping.

Nesmith tore open the door to the main gambling deck and it disintegrated in his hands. He held a machinegun that had been designed especially for his team’s use in his left hand. The gun was heavy with a high rate of fire and large capacity ammo drum, but its unique feature was that it had been engineered with a safety, magazine clasp, and trigger mechanism that could be operated by a soldier with no opposable thumbs. A soldier like Nesmith. A lowland gorilla.

The monstrous ape crashed into the room, powered by set of cybernetic legs wrapped in interwoven rings of bullet-proof fiber. His eyes burned with rage and spittle dripped in long strands from his mouth as he searched for his fallen comrade.

He spotted him.

The gorilla marched in a heavy gait that rocked the ship with each step, towards the fallen monkey and a man named Morgan.

The pit boss fired the revolver in his hand, emptying the cylinders of all available bullets. Some shattered harmlessly against the synthetic armor on the ape. Two found their way into the gorilla’s chest.

The beast did not hesitate.

Morgan, realizing too late that his efforts had been futile, wheezed as all the air in his lungs evacuated under the big paw clutching at this chest, lifting him into the air.

Nesmith tossed his weapon to the mandrill, Darwin, who caught the machinegun and readied it for use.

Nesmith grabbed Morgan’s gun hand and snapped the man’s arm at the elbow. Morgan squealed in pain, sobbing. Nesmith dropped the man to the floor, immediately pinning him under his left foot.

Holding Morgan down, Nesmith gently bent down and scooped the bloody Kovacs up into his arm. He sniffed him, leaned his ear to him looking for a sign of life.

Darwin swore an epitaph.

Nesmith laid his friend out on the counter top at the teller line. Then he turned his attention, again, to the man on the floor.

The great mountain ape jerked Morgan into the air by the back of his shirt, dangling him. Turning him. Staring directly into the man’s eyes, he howled a fierce roar.

Morgan lost control of his functions and began to drip on to the deck.

Nesmith’s armored chest heaved at an increasing pace. The beast bared his fangs to the man hanging before him, as he ran fingers into the bleeding bullet holes in his breast.

“Top!” Darwin yelled, “We’ve got company!”

“I don’t care about cops, they don’t scare me,” the cyborg-ape croaked, holding his gaze on Morgan.

“Not cops, Top,” Darwin replied. “Troubleshooters.”

Nesmith’s eyes drooped gloomily, as the words Darwin spoke cut through the fog of wrath in his head.

He turned to his team.

“Go on, all of you. Take the cash. Get out.”

Nesmith then looked back to Morgan and raised his arm, revealing a buzz-saw blade built into the armature of his forearm. It whined into motion.

“Damn,” Nesmith whispered.

Next Chapter: Chapter 21 - Sewerside