Felt like doing a little story starring a new character with my old RHG2 and 3 character. We'll see what I do with the guy from here.
I was a pretty cool person, if you’d ask me. A lot of shit happened over the past few years, but it started out amazingly. I was nothing short of an action hero; I was a treasure hunter for a career, with my own gun and knife and gear, travelling the world to fight criminals and explore the remains of ancient worlds. I’d killed five people over my ten years in this job, and caused the arrest of about fifty people. Not to mention I was rich enough to do keep this career up for another ten years. I was thirty-five years old, and living a dream…things were perfect.
The perfection led forward to a single adventure, about a year ago, that brought me around a mental hell. The target was a Chinese wedding ring that explorers stole and brought all the way to New Orleans. The thieves sold it privately to another rich captain, but the captain was greedy; he didn’t do a thing with it. The ring was somewhere in the captain’s house, which had previously been raided by the museum teams, but they didn’t find it. I thought I probably could pull it off. Besides, no competition made the work easy. As it turned out, it was doomed to be far more than that.
The captain wasn’t too special; a trader, and a greedy one at that. He never made it into the history books, so his home had been purchased by some other person. Breaking and entering wasn’t something that scared me, though. I hid outside for a while until the homeowner left, and with a crowd of four other people; it was surely empty. I picked a lock and was in, and started looking.
It was an old style, wooden house. Very fancy, very antique. The owner cleaned it but didn’t change a thing. I looked under the floorboards, behind old paintings, inside every shelf for a secret one inside, but nothing. It was possible that the owner found and took it, but if the museum scavengers couldn’t, he sure as hell wouldn’t be able to either.
My search ended suddenly, when I heard creaking from the door I came in through. No lights were on in the house, and the door didn’t open further from the sound of it; somebody else was breaking in, trying to be quiet, in a house that wouldn’t let anybody do as such. I stopped moving the instant I heard the new stranger, and I pulled out my 1911 pistol and aimed it at the only place the person could come in from.
I listened to the creaking I could hear, and I made some of my own so this person thought I didn’t know I knew they were there. I didn’t bother to wonder why he was here…I’m sure I’d find out soon enough. A lot of people want me dead, so there was the chance of a hired killer, but I was most armed now; seemed a little unwise. Though, wisdom was never the choice of many people in that work.
The creaking got closer and closer, to the point where I heard it behind the wall blocking my room from the hallway. I figured I’d take a chance, and I was right to; I shot through the wall at the sound, and I heard somebody fall over. I fired a second time to be certain he wouldn’t fire back at me, and I cautiously walked around the corner.
This guy didn’t look official at all; he had a dark red t-shirt on with loose blue jeans, appeared to have dropped a heavily modified P90 pistol, and had a clean, short beard and hair cut. He was casually dressed, along with the blood and two gunshot wounds in the arms. He was also visibly in pain, giving off a few shouts in pain.
“Who the hell do you work for?” I asked. I couldn’t guess, and it was probably the only way to find out; I didn’t expect papers in his pockets.
“Myself”, he told me. Wait…what?
“Who sent you?”
“Myself”
“Why are you trying to kill me?”
“Money. I hear you find a lot of it”
“And it’s mine, not yours”, I explained. I was a bit greedy from the sound of this, but it was…I hated thieves. I wasn’t a thief…I was a hero and a historian. This guy was just an asshole. I thought about his pistol. It was expensive and modded, he had money already. Something wasn’t right.
“What do you need it for?”
He looked at me with anger. He didn’t want to speak. I asked again, but still nothing. I reached into my pocket and pulled out an interrogation method for injured morons; a salt shaker. A little tap over his gunshot wound, and he spoke. He avoided earlier, but he was pretty quick to do it now, like he made an instant change in heart. This guy wasn’t stubborn or cooperative. He was just…well, impulsive.
“I’m part of a...an organization”, he sputtered out, “One that’s a little short on money. Need some rich folks to take from”
“What organization?”
“We kill people”
“Kill for who?”
“Ourselves”
“Bullshit”
I felt like I was going in circles. Was I supposed to believe this guy was part of a company that killed people for no reason? It didn’t sound real. This guy wanted to live, from the looks of it. This group was weird…but there was this one idea in my head that it had something I could want. But before I could ask that, I got the first question.
“You wanna join?”, he asked. He sounded surprisingly casual saying this. I felt surprised. “You could kill me pretty well. Wanna go for some strangers?”
This sounded bizarre. But, I was an explorer and a treasure hunter…I wanted to explore this, and hunt for something I could take. So, I made one of the weirdest decisions in my life.
“Let me take away your guns until I’m in. Then, sure”
“Wait…really?”
“Yeah. Why not”
“Pretty bizarre decision”
“I like bizarre”
“Good decision. Don’t suppose you could fix up my arms?”
I had some bandage rolls in my pocket, and wrapped his arms in them, after taking away a knife in his shoe. When I was checking his pockets, I found, of all things, a guitar pick. I never shot a musician before. Didn’t feel any different, of course. I followed him to his blue van, and I drove, of course. Let an injured man drive? I wasn’t stupid. I was incredibly smart. Chances are, I was about to be the smartest guy in this organization. Shame they’d have me until I left with a prize. The guy told me to go on a highway to Nevada, and during the drive, I asked what that prize would be.
“So, what’s this organization like? Legal? Secure? Rich?”
“No, yes, and less and less every few days”
“Oh?”
“Look, here’s the deal; we kill people, and show that people can have complete mental freedom. We don’t get caught, and we have some suppliers that we take a little extra from, with them not knowing a lot of the time. A couple of them…a big one in particular, isn’t getting as much recently. Times are tough for us”
“Life gets tougher for serial killers?”
“Yeah, it makes me laugh too. Here’s the deal; the gang’s called the Paradise Killers, the PK. You do at least a kill a month, take whatever you need, and share the wealth from the guys you kill. We didn’t used to be thieves, but…I ain’t gonna repeat myself”
There was a silence for about a minute. Then, the guy said something to me I was surprised none of us said earlier.
“Name’s Max, by the way”
“Howard”
“Howard? Howie?”
“Howard Hodgins is my full name, I’ll keep your arms that way if you call me anything but Howard”. I was mildly wealthy, and the full name Howard sounded sophisticated to me. I was given an awesome name; Howard Hodgins. Rolled off the tongue to me.
“Well, the boss might call you by the last name. He does that with a few people”
Max suddenly looked like he remembered something important. He looked in the glove compartment of his seat, and pulled out a syringe. This hit a new high for strange things about this guy.
“You need this in the back of your neck. Helps you be free”
“I got cigs for that, thanks”
“You ain’t getting in without it”
I was a smoker, but I didn’t do anything very ridiculous, like putting unknown needles in my neck. That just seemed wrong to me. Besides, I had a slight fear of needles. His arms hurt enough for me to get out of it. He held it loose with one of his bandaged arms, and moved it up.
“I’m not letting you jab me with that” I threatened, “I’ll do it”
He looked forward and believed me. I didn’t push the fluid in, but I made a hole. I had no idea what this liquid was, but didn’t want a part of it. I just poked a hole. I just hoped they didn’t drug test.
When we got to the base a day and a bunch of hours later, things were simple. The boss, SS, gave me some rundowns on what things were like around here. I listened, but I just wanted to get some money. Looking at all the guns, I could tell this group was rich. I could easily pull off some money from these guys, and they were sickening. A company of killers without causes? I’d be a hero to help bankrupt these guys.
A kill a month was the rule. A day after I joined, the morning after, some body was found under a car, one of ours apparently. I didn’t think much of it, and thought it happened a lot. But under SS’ straight face, anybody could see his anger. He made calls, so did Max, and we were sent to kill off who got accused for the car-guy’s death; a group of charity thieves called the Robin Hood Gang.
I didn’t want a part in these bastards. When I got sent to kill somebody, I locked them in their car underground, and left a note with the location in their home. The gang was smart and kept the guys under a dead status to us, so I never got caught. But it was hard to…the PK were even more secure now. I thought things were at a steady. But something caught me by surprise.
I was in the base after another fake kill, and Max was about to leave with a cannibal in the gang, Zach. He was really my only friend in the group, so I felt obliged to say goodbye. Besides, since the body was found, he was more quiet and nervous than he seemed at first, even with that injection of impulse I learned more about later on. He needed a goodbye. I caught him in the parking lot of the Nevada base, before he got in his van. For the first time since I joined, I left that discussion pissed off.
“Stay safe, I guess”, I said. I didn’t want to be too nice…he was a killer, after all.
“…thanks”
“Want a treat when you get back?”
“Treat?”
“I know about this thousand dollar burger, it’s ridiculous. I get one every few months, from a state away. It’s just as fine nuked in a microwave, even after half a day of travel time”
“Please, you can’t afford that”
“Dude, believe it or not, I’m rich”
“You shouldn’t be”
“…what?”
“SS gets me to take the wallets of everybody, and he hacks the account and information to sell everything off. It just goes into the PK economy”
I held back my anger. I was in the PK for a pretty short time, and the one friend I had here sold away everything I had! I couldn’t kill him, knowing what I’d heard about that rule in the PK.
“See you here in a few days”, I said. He drove off without a goodbye. For a good couple of days, he didn’t show up. That’s because he wasn’t going to. We got a call a day after he left, saying that he was hanging around with the gang he was sent to kill. He became an enemy, and killable. I wanted to more than anything else, and I thought SS’ idea to bury him and let him suffocate was an amazing idea. It’d be fulfilling my false murder strategies. He had a crate and a spot picked out to bury him in, if we could catch him. I kept a taser in my pocket and was ready with it whenever I knew I’d be close.
It figured that the day I did get close to the thief and traitor, SS died. The whole organization died that day. So many PK either died or left the empty gang. All after SS got killed, and after I got my chance and shocked Max. I buried him without dropping my satisfaction.
I thought about my future. I had no money, no home, no affiliations, a few criminal enemies, and all I had were my taser, my skills, a knife, a pistol with a bunch of full magazines, a backpack and pockets to keep it all in, and nothing more. I did some walking for a while; a long while. I lost track of the days quick. I was seeing if Max and SS really did get rid of everything I owned; as I assumed, they did. They were efficient, though evil. A while back, before the PK, I was a hero. I was awesome. I was living an amazing, unique life. Over this adventure, I only knew two others similar, two other lives to stay unique in. One of them was evil and, currently, inexistent. The others were previously enemies that I pretended to kill, but were heroes.
I had a phone number of one of Max’s cell phones, and I knew he was with them before I buried him alive. I had to guess that he left an empty spot. One that I wanted to fill. I hit call, and surprisingly enough, somebody picked up. I didn’t say a thing of the PK, I asked of Max, and asked who the person was. I said who I was, and said I knew about them. In the end, I asked for Max’s spot. Fighting for me, a complete stranger, to join a criminal gang without saying how I knew a murdered member was tough, but these guys liked money. I made the one offer I could think of; I told them I knew about a treasure. I said nothing more, but I said it’d mean lots of easy money. Lucky me, at the end of that phone call I had a future. For now, anyways. I had a place to go, and that…that was something.
