Found and Bound Thermopylae

"Open up or we're breeching the door!" yelled the SWAT cop in Leonard's hallway. There were probably five or six more behind him. It seemed like a shallow threat. All threats were shallow in one way or another if Leonard stopped and thought about it. He didn't like to think about it. It made his head hurt worse than it already did. The voices made so many threats that Leonard had to tune them out somehow. He preferred using classical music, it allowed him to write without bias.

"We'll give you to the count of ten," barked the team leader again. It was hard to respect a man who needed a half-dozen heavily armed thugs standing behind him in order to have the nerve to give orders. Leonard yawned, lit what he figured would be his last cigarette. Funny, he thought, this is the first time I've smoked inside this apartment. It was also not a count of ten, but a countdown from that ominous number. Maybe the commander had read the manual wrong, or at least that part of the script. Leonard took a deep drag and exhaled through his nostrils. He'd never done that before either.

"Don't make us do this, sir," pleaded the adrenaline fueled policeman. Leonard could hear the fear in his voice. He recalled what that quavering tone had sounded like. "We don't want to have to neutralize any threats. Ten..." They must've read up on him, known what he was capable of doing if cornered by the wrong pack of wolves. Leonard was a dog, but they fought just as hard when desperate. He choked on the smoke in his lungs. "Neutralizing threats" was another great euphemism to come from modern-day warfare, much like "engaging targets". Leonard had dabbled in both when called upon to do so. In the flash of a shotgun shell primer he'd be reduced to a target, a sheet of paper, something thin and easy to perforate. He hated what politicians had done with the language he'd loved so dearly. He hated a lot of things and people, but somehow the members of the uniformed hit squad sent to neutralize the threat in Apartment 11 weren't among them. They were only doing their jobs. Leonard missed regular work and admired an ambitious career man.

"Nine, eight, seven," came almost on top of each other. The safeties of various firearms clicked off in the dim light of the tenement corridor. Leonard could hear them through the drywall. It reminded him of flashbulbs going off during a photoshoot of yore. There would be no pictures taken at this crime scene. The right folks would see to that. It was, after all, an election year. Messes of that nature hurt men at the polls. Enough men had hurt due to Leonard's decisions. Well, mostly women in the civilian world, he thought to himself. That list of poor girls grew exponentially. He'd find himself inside one of them eventually. It was easier to stick to sins committed on American soil, though the atrocities were there on both sides of the drink; the atrocities and the victims. He pictured a few of the local variety and wondered if they'd be surprised or not when they heard the news of his demise. He figured they wouldn't. Like most dogs, Leonard was shamelessly predictable.

"Six" and "Five" were more reasonably spaced. A firmness returned to the mouthpiece's timbre, perhaps from the weight of the steel in his hands that he suddenly knew he'd be using. Leonard remembered the feeling too well. Men are born killers and fall into the role quite easily. It's an instinct that can't be bred out of the gene pool. He'd witnessed it overseas. It was appalling how vicious his brethren could be. Those women he'd wronged were replaced in his mind's eye by men he fought and bled next to in the name of a nation that didn't understand. Ramirez was an animal. Slaughtered anything that prayed to the east three times a day without mercy whenever there were no superior eyes watching. Leonard remembered when Rammy took his bullet. Mysteriously, though not written in the official report, it had come from behind him. No one in their platoon asked anything. Leonard was decorated for the skirmish and transferred out to a support position. It was one of the last breaks Uncle Sam would give him. It was one of the few favors he'd incurred after twenty. Sometimes the gods smiled down on the hopeless. Most times it rained holy urine.

"Four. We've only got three left," stated the voice of authority too obviously to be feared. The black gloves were tightening around pistol grips and shotun pumps. There may have also been a few mild erections. Those were the guys you avoided at the bar.

"I've got fifteen," Leonard whispered through the butt of his cigarette as he racked the slide of his Glock, not sure if he'd be able to use it this way. After the ninety-day debriefing that the government mandated before sending him home he swore to never raise a barrel to a two-legged creature again. Three months' time to reprogram an assassin. It seemed the most optimistic estimate going. He'd fought, and in many days died, for his country. What could they begrudge him now other than a closet's worth of broken hearts? The cigarette was barely halfway done, but Leonard smashed it out on the coffee table in front of him. He set the Glock down next to his right thigh. A warrior decided when to fight. A dog was forced into action. Leonard would go out like the former. The sound of Axl Rose begging his mother to bury his pistols in the ground rang in his aching skull. As expected in any stressful situation Leonard laughed at the irony. He wrote once, long ago, that he wouldn't mind dying if the right song was playing. Caution should've been taken in the wish-making process. Prophecies, it seemed anymore, were as self-fulfilling as masturbation.

"Three, two," but One was interrupted by distant shouts from a bullhorn down the stairwell.

"Fall back!" cried an officer with a tinge of terror in his throat. "Wrong coordinates." He meant to say "Wrong building" or "Wrong apartment" or "Wrong anything-else-more-appropriate", but in the new age of law enforcement things were strangely paramilitary. Coordinates, especially wrong ones in Leonard's mind, only existed in places with hard-to-pronounce names depicted by satellite maps.

A cacophony of radio activity filled the building as what sounded like dozens of feet marched down the steps. Amateurs, Leonard thought as he dropped the magazine from his pistol and popped the round out of the chamber, catching the brass-cased bullet in mid-air with a swipe of his left hand. He never heard them turn their safeties back on before leaving. There was always something wrong with the world and the scenes played out in it. This frustrated him to no end. Why couldn't he call a few of the shots outside of his third-floor apartment?

Leonard walked across the room and opened a window to let the smoke out into the crisp November air. It was no time to start living slovenly. There were crucial matters at hand. She was waiting for him in the bedroom. She'd almost missed her shot at immortality. Leonard wouldn't deny her that. He'd fought too hard to come home and wouldn't disappoint.