The Iron Ankh
Foreword

My real name is Harold, or Harry to my friends. For the rest of this tale the names are fiction. I have told no one my story. Mostly because I was well into my forties and at the grave of the first woman I ever loved that I finally realized the awful truth of it.

I have a life you wouldn’t believe. I have money stashed all over the globe in numbered accounts. Hundreds of millions. And that’s my get the fuck out of Dodge money. The money the IRS will never know about. I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you’re thinking.

It was given to me by very bad people that are either dead or rotting in prison. You see, I have certain abilities. I can make people do things, like transfer their entire ill-gotten fortunes into a numbered account and forget they ever did it. Or walk into traffic to be run over by a truck. Yes, I’ve killed. But the ones I kill are beyond redemption. They were pedophiles, corrupt officials, and outright maniacs. This world is a better place without them.

Most of the time I don’t. I just take their donation before they walk into court and confess all. Like that former Secretary of State that blurted out the whole story of her malfeasance in office including the amounts and sources of her payoffs during a campaign debate on live TV. My only regret is I didn’t catch up to her and her piece of shit husband twenty- five years earlier before they sold us all down the river. If you were paying attention to the news to the time you could probably name others that I swept up in that project. It was quite a circus that left one of this nation’s political parties a rotting carcass.

I try to use my power to stop evil. People that hurt children, politicians that take bribes, people that use religion as an excuse to harm their fellow human beings, drug runners, and pimps get on my bad side so I use my power to make them the victims for a change. Turnabout is fair play, after all.

From the start I’ve been careful about staying in the shadows. In public I am a futures trader and real estate investor with a slightly higher than average success ratio. I live moderately well within my means, pay my taxes, obey traffic laws and generally mind my own business.

But in reality these days I spend most of my time on airplanes going from one Islamic shit hole to another trying to keep the fucking world from blowing sky high. And whenever I take one of these trips there is a run on body bags in that local market because I usually just make the crazies shoot each other. There is no record for these trips in my real name. I’ve got a safe full of aliases I use for that stuff. And I use ‘bad guy’ money to do it. Then I just fade into the crowd. Since on my straight job I work from home and have a platoon of witnesses to verify the fact anytime I ever need it.

But this tale is not about that. You see, my abilities come from a nasty kind of magic. It is an old magic that really has no place in this world. And like the nasty green guy said, “All magic has a price, Dearie,”, so does this. A terrible price. And God help me I do enjoy collecting it. This tale is about that price and how I have to collect it. Have I become the paladin with a blazing sword smiting all that’s evil, or became a monster worthy of only contempt? You make that call. By the way, I could give a shit less.

Major Gregory Boyington is quoted as saying, “Show me a hero and I’ll show you a bum.” After you know how I got started and how I fuel this weapon of mine, you decide. Am I one or the other?

Chapter 1 »