Chapter 5

A Harder Life

Angelina was celebrating her 2^nd birthday; all the little ones close to her age from my former team members were attending and the women were dutifully caring for the children while the men dutifully took turns watching the grill as the others provide a secure perimeter and all were ensuring that the beer would not suffer heat exposure before being consumed.

When the fireworks started everyone was shocked, who in their right mind would have fireworks for children under 3 years of age?

When the beer bottle broke ‘willy’ grabbed his belly as he dropped to the ground. The rest of us followed him down and began moving to get everyone else safe. I realized about the same time as ‘Z-man’ and ‘Smiddy’ did that the fireworks were coming from the alley and front of the house. The three of us stopped the fireworks from the alley or well we shot the four guys shooting at us from the alley (we did not shoot at them!). The idiots in the front of the house were now shooting at the police that had arrived due to neighbors calling 911.

Some illegal immigrant gang banger recognized me and after following me for several weeks found the rest of my team that lived close to me. Then they contacted the big wig south of the border who authorized the hit on all of us. This we got from the few survivors, only one survived healthy enough to stand trial and sent to prison, the other two managed to survive exceedingly long, well one made it almost two weeks in ICU before his body just gave up. All three told the same story or similar based on what level they were in the gang, and what the entire gang was told.

The military sent a team after the big wig but due to leaks he escaped. However, our group, the few of us still around and all retired, took a vacation south of the border to do some fishing. We collected special bait as we were fishing for sharks. The big wig and two others he named as part of the approving body all managed to successfully attract several different varieties of sharks for us to catch.

The government types confirmed our vacation and that fact that we had time/date stamped live videos of us fishing at the time all of the big wigs disappeared, their IT/video technicians screened all the videos (to make sure our doctoring was not detectable, as they doctored them too) providing irrefutable evidence we had nothing to do with the big wigs disappearance.

This allowed all of us to continue to enjoy our retirement safely. The government reminded all of us that we were not really retired – just on ‘INACTIVE RESERVE STATUS’ which they smiled while letting us know that if needed, they could call on us.

We all lived a somewhat normal life after all that.