by Tim Waggoner
The pug whined softly, as if sensing her emotional turmoil, and she smiled and scratched its head. What she needed was something to help her calm down, to take the edge off. She reached into her nightstand drawer and took out a joint and a lighter. She lit up, took her first toke, held the smoke in her lungs for several seconds, and then let it out slowly.
God, that was good. She felt better already.
This was definitely something she couldn’t do in the palace. Marijuana was illegal in Sweden, and most Swedes viewed it as no different from harder drugs such as heroin or cocaine. Alcohol was legal—although Swedes weren’t generally big drinkers—and Tilde saw little difference between it and cannabis. As long as one was careful not to overindulge, she saw no harm in it. She knew her parents wouldn’t see it the same way, though. The princess smoking an illegal drug? What a scandal! Even so, she smoked rarely, and now was a special occasion. The man she loved may have loved her back, but he didn’t love her enough to truly be with her, not in the way that mattered most, and this had shattered her heart.
She took another toke as her phone buzzed. She picked it up, read Eggsy’s latest message, and then deleted it. She tossed the phone onto the bed, lay down, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and despite her intention not to cry anymore today, new tears began to flow.
Chapter Eight
Eggsy paid for the drink he hadn’t touched and left the bar. But instead of getting back in the car and returning to the distillery, he decided to go for a walk. Maybe the night air would help clear his mind. Or maybe he’d get lucky and some drunk sod in a car would lose control of his vehicle, jump the curb, plow into him, and put him out of his misery. He’d lost Harry. He’d lost Tilde. Roxy, Brandon, and JB were dead, as were the other Kingsman agents, most of whom he’d gotten to know to one degree or another. It sucked righteously, as a matter of fact, and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about any of it. What was the point of being a highly trained secret agent with access to some of the most sophisticated technology on the planet if you couldn’t fix the things that mattered most?
He walked past darkened storefronts, the sidewalk dimly lit by evenly spaced pools of fluorescent light, the headlights from approaching vehicles momentarily blinding him as they rolled past. He walked with his hands in his pockets, head hanging low, sinking deeper into depression with every step. Because of this, he almost missed it. But something caught his attention. Maybe it was the neon glow from the sign over the door. Maybe he saw the store’s name out of the corner of his eye and it registered on his subconscious. Or maybe it was just sheer dumb luck. Whatever the reason, he raised his head and turned to look across the street. And there it was: FURRY FRIENDS PET STORE.
The letters were blue against white, and although the store was closed, the sign still blazed in the night. He looked at it for a moment, frowning. His brain was trying to tell him something, he knew that, but what—
And then it hit him.
A wide grin came onto his face. He ran across the street, earning several angry honks from drivers who just barely missed running him over. When he reached the store entrance, he withdrew from his pocket a small gadget resembling a tin of breath mints, one of the pieces of equipment he’d gotten from the Statesman’s jet. He touched it to the lock, activated it, and an instant later there came a satisfying snick! He opened the door and slipped inside the darkened store, swift and silent as a shadow.
* * *
The meeting was over, and Poppy had dismissed the sales reps. Some had accepted her offer to stay overnight in the guest quarters she provided, which were as luxurious as any five-star hotel. But most had opted to leave as swiftly as they could, ostensibly to return to their individual territories and get back to work, but she knew the real reason: none of them wanted to end up as playthings for Bennie and Jet, like the dear departed Grigor. She had to admit that she was a little stung by their lack of trust in her, but, all in all, the sooner the Golden Circle resumed normal operations, the better. If her plan worked—which it would, because she’d designed it and it was brilliant—there was going to be a lot of work to do.
She sat in one of the diner’s booths, laptop open on the table in front of her, watching the video she’d made. She’d watched it maybe a dozen times now, and she was certain it would accomplish what she needed it to do. She wasn’t reviewing it because she was nervous. She just liked watching herself. After all, she was damn impressive on screen.
Charlie entered the diner and trudged over to her. He was soaked from head to foot, and he looked monumentally irritated.
“The dogs are clean,” he announced. “You didn’t tell me they liked to… frolic in water.”
Bennie and Jet’s central processing units incorporated brain tissue from actual dogs. This meant that from time to time they exhibited a certain playfulness that she found charming. It seemed Charlie, however, had a different opinion on the matter. She smiled.
“Must’ve slipped my mind.”
“Of course it did. If there’s nothing else you need me for, I’d like to go dry off.”
He turned and started to walk away.
“Charlie…” she said.
He stopped but didn’t turn back around to face her. “Sit down for a minute.”
He hesitated, but then he returned to the booth and slid into the seat across the table from her. She closed the laptop and looked at him for a moment before speaking.
“Why drugs, Charlie?” she asked.
He looked at her, uncomprehending.
“I mean, why would someone like me, with both military and business training, decide to go into the drug trade?”
He shrugged. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I guess I assumed it’s because you like to make money. A lot of it.”
“Well, of course I like making money! That’s the whole point of business, right? The acquisition of profit. But there are far easier ways to make money, Charlie. Safer ways. Ways that don’t require a person to live like a hermit in the middle of a bug-infested jungle.”
“Maybe you’re a user, and after being an amateur for a while, you decided to go pro,” he ventured. “Good way to ensure you have a never-ending supply of drugs on hand.”
Poppy laughed. “Goodness, no! I never touch my product, Charlie. I don’t take drugs. I prefer to be in complete control of my mind and body at all times.”
“All right then,” he said. “Then why drugs?”
“When I was a kid, do you know what I wanted to be when I grew up? I wanted to have my own ice cream truck. Do they have those in England? I wanted to drive around neighborhoods in summer, music blaring from the loudspeaker, and sell ice cream bars and popsicles to all the excited children.” She paused, smiling as she pictured the scene in her mind. “To be honest, the frozen treats from those trucks weren’t very good, but it wasn’t really about them. It was about hearing the truck coming down the street, grabbing a handful of change, running outside and down to the sidewalk and hoping you got there before the ice cream truck passed your house. It was the experience, Charlie, don’t you see? And for a lot of those children—ones who didn’t have picture-perfect families and happy home lives—that short time in their day was a break from their miserable little existences. A respite. A fucking oasis. Do you understand?”
Poppy realized that her voice had grown steadily louder as she spoke until she was practically yelling. She pictured other things in her mind, now… things she didn’t want to remember, that she’d worked goddamn hard her entire life to forget, as a matter of fact. When both your mom and dad were in the military, and you were an only child, and nothing you did was ever good enough for them, they made sure to let you know it—with their words, their fists, whatever object happened to be within reach at the time…
“Poppy? Are you all right?”
“Hmm?” She realized then that Charlie was staring at her. “Of course I am! Never better!” She smiled, and the memories that had come close to surfacing sank back down into the forgott
en depths of her mind where they belonged. “Life is hard, Charlie, and people need to do whatever it takes to make it through. Unfortunately, something as simple as ice cream won’t do the trick, not with the kind of world we live in. But drugs… well, they help make life bearable for millions of people. Some of those drugs society approves of. Others, it doesn’t. Caffeine, nicotine, sugar… But in the end, they’re all the same. They’re medicine for the soul, Charlie. And that’s why I went into this business. Because the world needs someone like me. Every now and then, the world needs a break so it can keep going.”
She looked into Charlie’s eyes to see if he’d gotten what she was trying to say. But then she decided she really didn’t care if he’d understood or not. She had a sudden craving for ice cream.
“Go dry yourself off,” she said, then slid out of the booth and headed for the kitchen. She hoped there was some Rocky Road left in the freezer.
* * *
Harry sat at the desk in his study, sipping a lovely cup of tea and reading the newspaper—or, at least, trying to. It was a most peculiar thing; the harder he focused on the words, the more difficult they became to make out, as if the ink was in a constant state of flux, perpetually sliding from one configuration to another, unrecognizable as part of the English language. He supposed it was due to some sort of printing error, and he was considering calling The Times and lodging a formal complaint when he heard a thumping noise from downstairs.
He lay the paper down and listened. An intruder, perhaps? To a Kingsman, a garden-variety burglar wouldn’t prove to be any real threat, so he felt no fear at the thought. Then again, if someone could get past his security measures, then he or she could hardly be called “garden variety” now, could they?
He continued listening for several moments, but he heard nothing more. He might’ve thought he’d imagined the thump, but as a highly trained agent, he wasn’t given to flights of fancy. If he’d heard a thump, then most likely it was real and something or someone had caused it. He slid his chair back from the desk slowly, to make as little noise as possible, and stood.
He then walked, silent as a cat, out of the study and toward the stairs. In the hall, he passed a grandfather clock, one that had been in his family for generations. Instead of numbers, tiny heads poked through holes in the clock’s face, all male, all wearing Kingsman eyeglasses. Harry recognized them as fellow agents, but when he looked more closely, he saw they were all the same agent. Him, as a matter of fact. The hands of the clock were two-headed axes, and the hour-hand axe was pressed against the neck of the miniature Harry whose head was in the ten position, while the minute-hand axe had already begun to cut into the neck of the Harry in the seven position. Blood trickled from the wound, and Harry Seven’s tiny features were contorted with pain and fear.
How very odd, Harry thought and continued to the stairs.
He listened as he descended, the wood absolutely silent beneath his feet. He kept his home in tip-top condition for occasions such as this. No creaking stairs or squeaking door hinges in the Hart residence, thank you very much. He would be absolutely mortified if he gave himself away to an intruder in such an amateurish fashion, and he’d deserve whatever fate befell him.
For an instant he saw an African-American man standing grim-faced before him, a Heckler & Koch P30 gripped in his right hand. The man raised the weapon, aimed, and fired. A bullet discharged from the muzzle, but instead of flashing instantaneously across the space between them, the round traveled slowly, so much so that it barely seemed to be moving at all. Harry couldn’t move, couldn’t so much as breathe. All he could do was stand frozen in place and watch the bullet make its tortuous way toward him, one millimeter at a time. And then, when the tip of the round had almost made contact with the left lens of his eyeglasses, it accelerated to normal speed. The lens shattered, the bullet plunged into his eye, and everything went dark.
Harry staggered on the steps, grabbing hold of the railing to keep himself from falling. He had no idea what that horribly disquieting vision was, or what had inspired it, but it was gone now, leaving him with only a dull pain in his left eye to remind him it had happened at all. He pushed all thoughts of the vision aside. He was a Kingsman, and he had a mission—investigate the mysterious thump—and he had to remain focused. He continued downward.
When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he saw the door to the first-floor bathroom was open. He didn’t remember leaving it that way, but he didn’t remember not leaving it that way either. He didn’t seem to recall much, actually, including how he came to be sitting in his study having tea in the first place. He stepped into the bathroom, and at first everything seemed normal. No one else was in the room. The butterfly displays still hung on the walls, and Mr Pickle’s taxidermied body rested on the shelf above the toilet. The reason he’d put Mr Pickle in here was because Kingsman trainees had to take their pups with them wherever they went and whatever they did—which included answering nature’s call. When the training period was over, and Harry took Mr Pickle home, there was no longer a need for the Yorkie to accompany him to the loo. But Mr Pickle would sit outside the closed door, whining and scratching at it until Harry relented and allowed him in. Thus, the bathroom became a symbol to Harry of Mr Pickle’s loyalty, of how the little dog wouldn’t allow any barrier to separate them. So after Mr Pickle died, Harry had his body preserved and placed it in the bathroom as a way of showing that not even death could separate the two of them. Sentimental tosh, perhaps, but there it was.
He was about to leave the bathroom and check the rest of the downstairs, when he noticed that a square space on the wall was empty. Strange that he’d missed that. He looked down at the floor and saw one of his displays—this one featuring brushfoots such as the monarch, the painted lady, and the mourning cloak—had fallen to the floor. Well, now he knew what had caused the thump he’d heard. Fearing the specimens had been damaged—for no matter how carefully one prepared and mounted butterflies, their bodies were still quite fragile—he knelt down to look closer at the display. He didn’t pick it up right away, out of concern he might cause further damage. Instead, he leaned closer and examined it. Upon first glance, everything appeared to be in order. Some of the butterflies’ positions had shifted slightly, but he thought he’d be able to set them right without too much—
The painted lady’s left wing moved.
Not much, just a little, as if stirred by a breath of air. Only one problem: he was holding his breath.
The painted lady burst into sudden life, flapping her wings furiously. She pulled herself free of the mounting pin and took to the air, flashing past Harry’s face in a blur of orange, black, and white. He felt a sharp sting on his right cheek, and when he reached up to touch his face, his fingers came away with dots of blood on them. The painted lady had cut him as she’d flown by. He knew it was a ridiculous thought. Butterfly wings were far too soft to cause any sort of injury simply by brushing against human skin. But then again, a dead butterfly suddenly returning to life and flying around your bathroom was ridiculous too, but that’s exactly what had happened.
Harry, struggling to understand this tiny miracle, stood and watched the painted lady circle lazily around him. She was beautiful—mesmerizing, actually—and he couldn’t take his eyes off her. She darted down toward his hand, then dipped her right wing to his skin and sliced another quick cut before pulling upward. Harry hissed in pain and drew his hand back. Blood welled from the wound, quite a bit this time. She’d cut him deep. He clapped his other hand on top of the cut to staunch the blood, and looked this way and that, trying to spot the painted lady before she could strike again.
That’s when he heard the fluttering of wings—dozens upon dozens of them—and he saw that all the butterflies in the displays were alive and fighting to free themselves from their mounting-board prisons. One by one they succeeded and took to the air, and a riot of color swirled around Harry, as if he were caught in a brilliant multicolored storm. Butterflies dipped toward
him, wings sharp as shattered glass, slicing the exposed skin of his face, neck, and hands just as the painted lady had. He swung his arms wildly in an attempt to fight them off, but they easily avoided being struck and continued attacking.
A blue morpho nearly severed his left earlobe, and a peacock sliced into the skin just below his Adam’s apple and blood ran down to soak his shirt. A red admiral cut the skin above his left eye, causing blood to flow downward and obscure his vision, and a meadow brown cut across the tender flesh of his upper lip and blood filled his mouth.
Mr Pickle raised his head then, and his glass eyes gazed into Harry’s. A voice issued from the dead dog, although his stitched-together mouth never moved.
Best get a move on if you don’t want to be sliced into confetti, Harry.
Harry thought that was a capital idea, just ace. Leave it to good old Mr Pickle to cut to the heart of the matter with canine good sense.
He turned and fled. But when he stepped across the bathroom’s threshold, he didn’t return to the first-floor hallway of his home. Instead, he found himself standing in the aisle of the South Glade Mission Church.
Bodies of men and women were strewn everywhere, lying on the floor, draped across overturned pews, hanging halfway out of broken stained-glass windows. They had been shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, burnt, or simply had their necks broken. The harsh tang of gunpowder hung heavy in the air, along with the coppery smell of blood, and the stink of released bowels and bladders. A few of these people had killed each other, but Harry knew he was responsible for the majority of deaths that had occurred here.
