The Ferryman Read online

  The Ferryman

  Hit World Book Three

  By

  John E. Siers

  PUBLISHED BY: Hit World Press

  Copyright © 2021 John E. Siers

  All Rights Reserved

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  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events, or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  * * * * *

  Dedication

  To Bill Webb, who dragged me away from my comfortable existence in the Lunar Free State, and into the weird and strangely compelling landscape of Hit World.

  * * * * *

  Cover Design by Shezaad Sudar

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  Contents

  Dedication

  The Hit World Universe

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  About John E. Siers

  Excerpt from Book One of the Chimera Company

  Excerpt from Book One of Murphy’s Lawless

  Excerpt from Book One of the Revelations Cycle

  Excerpt from Book One of the Salvage Title Trilogy

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  The Hit World Universe

  September 11, 2001 was the blackest day in American history. A dozen hijacked airliners wiped out most of the American government and brought America to its knees. The population screamed for blood, but the government was in chaos. The senior surviving member in the line of succession was a junior senator from Oregon nobody had heard of outside his native state.

  The Chinese, Iranians, and Russians all eyed the United States to see if the time had come for military action against American interests worldwide. The new president had only just been appointed and didn’t have the political capital—or will—to risk World War Three. Indeed, he was on record as publicly blaming America for worsening relations with the Muslim world prior to the attacks. He called for restraint and refused to commit the U.S. military to go after those identified as responsible. “We brought this on ourselves,” he said in a nationwide broadcast.

  But Americans were having none of it, not even the constituency that had elected him. The wealthiest of the wealthy went to work behind the scenes, committing tens of billions of dollars to show America’s enemies what happened when you dared to attack us. The terrorists jeered and vowed more attacks, trying to provoke a response.

  It worked.

  The answer was the formation of a lavishly funded group of mercenaries hired by those wealthy private citizens. The mercenaries sped to the Middle East, set on bloody revenge. The president threatened to arrest everyone concerned, but America’s law enforcement agencies sided with the mercs, and he never pushed it beyond threats.

  Impeachment loomed.

  The money to finance the mercs was funneled through a dummy corporation called LifeEnders, Inc. They attracted the best black ops people America had, plus select others from friendly nations, with many either on detached duty from the U.S. military services, arranged by loyal officers who defied the chain of command, or who left the service altogether. The billionaires who supported them spared no expense to supply them with the best equipment available. They even lured some top-flight freelancers out of the shadows and into the fight. As always, money talked.

  Within months, most of the men responsible for the 9/11 attacks were being executed on live American pay-per-view television, along with officials from the countries who supported them. Outraged protests from enemy states, and America’s own president, fell on the deaf ears of the American public. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff clarified that American military capabilities were at full strength and on high alert, but the president ordered them to stand down. Officially, the military obeyed. Privately, they defied their commander in chief, and let America’s enemies know it. Rather than risk nuclear war and worldwide Armageddon, foreign countries backed down.

  But Americans didn’t want to limp along with a rump government that was wildly unpopular and had proved unequal to the emergency. As the federal bureaucracy struggled to restore itself and fill critical positions, the population demanded power be turned over to private corporations wherever possible. These new Corpses, a derogatory name for the corporations, replaced the bureaucracy with results.

  With impeachment likely to succeed in deposing the president, and as a presidential recall petition passed 90 million signatures, America held a special election on September 11, 2003. Though challenged by the traditional parties, the Supreme Court deemed such a vote legal. Both parties nominated the usual candidates, saying all the usual things, but the mood in America remained angry and combative, and through the summer, a populist movement grew to draft Charlton Heston for president. The two political parties laughed off his efforts, but they’d misjudged the mood of the country. The actor won in a landslide write-in campaign, and with him, both houses of Congress swung toward revenge- and security-minded independent candidates. When the actor took office in January 2004, he had the strongest mandate of any president in American history.

  LifeEnders, Inc. grew out of the mercenary group that struck back in the Middle East. The corporation found and eliminated threats to America, worldwide, with the speed and precision of a scalpel. When terrorist organizations were discovered within America, LifeEnders, Inc. found and eliminated them. Terrorists couldn’t hide from their reach, and there was no appeal on their judgment.

  As time went by, LEI, as LifeEnders, Inc. came to be known, also tried to end murder within America’s borders; killers were met with swift Old Testament justice. But that didn’t work. First, there were too many murders, and second, the regular police angrily opposed such intrusions into their areas of responsibility. So the government passed all the legislation and—more to the point—set all the corresponding fees and tax rates to finance private, legal assassinations under the quasi-governmental LEI. Non-contracted killings remained murder, with all the usual punishments, but contracted murder through LEI was the law of the land.

  The street name for this new reality was Hit World.

  Chapter One

  Drop Zone

  “Uhhh…why are we walking around naked?” Norman asked, looking around the balcony in obvious confusion.

  �
��I’m not naked—you are,” Lisa replied. “And that’s just the way we do it here.” Norman made no protest as she cuffed his hands behind his back. Besides, I like looking at naked men…even if you’re not exactly a prime specimen.

  At 37 years of age, Norman “Blues Boy” Bartholomew looked like a worn-out scarecrow—the product of long years of fast living and drug abuse. He’d come in this morning already zoned out—Lisa hadn’t asked what he’d been snorting, shooting, or popping. Charon’s Ferry didn’t require a sobriety test for the finalization of a contract.

  She walked him out past the waist-high control pedestal to the 4-foot square in the center of the semicircular balcony overlooking the execution room. The balcony floor was covered with industrial carpeting—gray except for the square, which was blood red.

  She bent to pick up the noose from the floor, glancing up to the ceiling above to make sure the rope was hanging properly. She pulled Norman’s long, greasy hair out of the way as she slipped the noose over his neck and pulled it snug.

  “Wh…wha’s going on?” he asked. “Wha’s that for…?”

  “Just got to make sure you’re hooked up properly,” she told him.

  “Oh…OK.” He nodded, dumbly.

  He is soooo wasted. I’m lucky he can still stand up.

  Her nose wrinkled at the close contact. Wonder when he last took a bath. Oh, well…he’ll be in the tank soon and it won’t matter—but I’m going to take a shower as soon as we’re done.

  Satisfied all was in order, she turned him around to face her. She stepped back to the pedestal and turned the selector switch to the armed position. She flipped the safety cover off the large red button.

  “Bye, Norman,” she said sweetly. “Have a nice trip.”

  She slapped the button, and the floor opened under his feet. Without a word, and still wearing a zoned-out expression, Norman dropped out of sight. The rope twanged tight, signaling the end of a very short journey.

  It’s not the drop. It’s the sudden stop at the bottom that gets ‘em, Lisa thought, feeling the sudden rush she always got when she terminated a client. It wasn’t exactly an orgasm, but she’d yet to figure out the difference.

  She drew a deep breath as the feeling faded. Then she turned to the corner of the balcony where a brass fireman’s pole came up through a circular floor opening. Hiking up the skirt of her business suit, she mounted the pole with practiced ease, and slid down to the floor below to check the results of her handiwork.

  Arriving in the drop zone, she found what she expected—Norman dangling on the end of the rope, his feet about 18 inches off the floor, and his head at the crazy angle that showed a cleanly broken neck. His legs were still kicking and twitching, but as she watched, his body relaxed and his bowels and bladder began to empty.

  “Nicely done…” Lisa turned to find Mark—already in clean-up coveralls—bringing the gurney onto which they would load Norman’s corpse. “I guess the Deep State Warriors are going to need a new lead guitarist.”

  “Yeah, well…his music wasn’t up to par lately,” she said as she pulled her own coveralls from the wall locker. “Too many fried brain cells, too many road tours. Same for the rest of the band. Surprised they didn’t all show up together to be snuffed.”

  “They were riding high on the charts for a while,” he mused. “Made buckets of money. Good thing Norman decided to punch out before they pissed it all away, while he could still afford us.”

  It didn’t take long to lower the body and load it onto the gurney. Lisa went back up to the balcony, pulled the rope up, and closed the trap. She gathered up Norman’s clothing, bagged it, and tossed it down the laundry chute. By the time she returned, Mark had dealt with most of the mess Norman had left on the tiled floor of the drop zone. One of the reasons I like hangings, Lisa thought. A lot less cleanup than some of the other ways we do it.

  “The floorbots can handle the rest,” he told her. “We don’t have anything for this afternoon, so I was thinking we should just close up shop and take him straight to processing. I just put fresh saline in the cold tank, and I’d rather not have him contaminating it.”

  “Fine with me,” she said. She looked at the scrawny corpse. “Think there’s anything here worth salvaging?”

  “Probably…the broker says the medical schools are always looking for horrible examples. We should get something out of him, even if his inside looks as bad as his outside.”

  Per the terms of the contract he had signed, Norman’s corpse was now the property of Charon’s Ferry. With that in mind, Mark and Lisa wheeled him into a refrigerated basement room they referred to as the Meat Locker, transferred him to a large cutting table, and went to work.

  “Dog food…dog food…more dog food,” Mark muttered as he tossed severed arms and legs into a large bin in the corner.

  “Ugh…look at this,” Lisa said calling his attention to the spotted and shriveled liver she had just pulled out of Norman’s carcass. “Kidneys are wasted, too, and I’ll bet the heart’s just as bad. If we hadn’t gotten him, these would have finished him in year or two.”

  “Yeah, but that’s just the kind of thing the med schools are looking for. Tag it and bag it.”

  “Too bad there’s no market for intestines,” Lisa said as she dumped the slimy tangle into the disposal bin. “These look pretty healthy—at least compared to the rest of his innards.”

  “Commercial meat packers use animal intestines for sausage casing,” Mark chuckled, “but I think the FDA would get upset if we started selling them for that.”

  “I’m sure they would. Hmmm…as expected, heart’s messed up, too. It’s a wonder it could even pump through these clogged arteries.”

  “As I said…tag it and bag it.”

  Charon’s Ferry made serious money selling organs and such to research labs, medical schools, and biotech firms. Legally—with case law supported by many rulings in favor of the big biotech companies—the bodies of Ferry clients were no longer “human remains,” but were simply “organic products in commerce.”

  That meant such products could be bought and sold with little restriction. It also meant that certain other uses Mark and Lisa had for them were legal as well.

  “Glad that’s out of the way,” Lisa said when they finished the task. “Dinner at my place tonight?”

  “Sounds good to me,” he said with a grin as he closed up the cold room and peeled off his coveralls. “What’s your pleasure?”

  “Don’t feel like cooking…thought we might just order pizza. But first I need a shower. Care to join me…?”

  “Hmmm…hold that pizza order,” he told her. “Might end up being a late dinner.”

  Chapter Two

  Brittany

  Brittany Lovell lay face down on the massage table, making purring sounds as Mark’s busy fingers worked the upper part of her spine.

  At the moment, the two of them were the only occupants of River Styx, the small but well-equipped spa on the second floor of the Charon’s Ferry building. Styx was almost directly above Mark’s first-floor office, just off the elevator lobby.

  It had been a pleasant afternoon so far. They’d finalized the contract, then come upstairs, and started in the hot tub. She’d been understandably nervous at first, but had relaxed after a little wine and cheese, followed by a soak in the warm, turbulent water. Then they’d gotten out and gone to the adjacent bedroom for some serious sex—per the terms of Brittany’s contract.

  I’m glad she didn’t want to be on top, Mark thought. At 5’ 6” tall, Brittany weighed 367 pounds, despite which, he was forced to admit, the sex had been good. He smiled as he remembered a bit of wisdom imparted by a grizzled gunnery sergeant during his Marine Corps days: The bigger the cushion, the better the pushin’…A rather large man himself, Gunny’d had little interest in skinny girls.

  Then they’d come back into the spa, and she’d gotten onto the massage table, where he’d been working on her for the past half-hour. He’d started at her feet a
nd worked his way up her legs to the tree-trunk sized thighs. Then he’d started on her back. Mark was not a trained masseur, but Lisa had taught him the basics of the craft—and had been more than willing to let him practice on her.

  “After all that, you’re still a little tight in the shoulders,” he told Brittany as he worked on her deltoids.

  “Mmmmmmm…feels good,” she mumbled.

  “Relax…”

  Rubbing the back of her neck with his left hand, he opened a drawer under the table with his right and took out a small Beretta pistol. He put the muzzle to the back of her neck at the base of the skull and pulled the trigger. The pistol had no suppressor, and the shot was loud in the enclosed room. Her body—which he had worked so hard to relax—stiffened and began to twitch.

  A few seconds later, the muscle spasms stopped. He checked for a pulse and found none. He put the pistol down and grabbed her blond hair, lifting her head to reveal a look of wide-eyed astonishment on her face.

  “Well…you wanted us to surprise you,” he told her. “Guess we did that.” Brittany hadn’t specified a method of termination in the contract, she’d only requested that it be quick and without warning.

  Another satisfied Ferry customer. Love that little .25 caliber. Except for the blood coming out of her mouth and nose, there was no sign of injury. The tiny 35-grain hollow-point bullet had pretty much destroyed her brain stem and scrambled the cerebrum without messing up her face.

  He unlocked the wheels of the massage table and rolled it over to the wall. Opening the wide panel doors revealed the stainless-steel disposal chute, and he switched on the pump to turn it into a brine-washed water slide.