Damage Control by John Gilstrap

tried to stop them. The terrorists didn’t give a warning or anything. They just came in, shouting. Mr. Hall and Mrs. Charlton stood up—not really interfering, even—and they shot them down without a word. Just bang, bang.” Tristan’s eyes narrowed. “How did you know how many people were taken? How did you know my name?”
    “Homework doesn’t stop when you graduate from school,” Jonathan said. “People who care about you hired us to rescue you.”
    “People who care about me? Who’s that? What does that even mean?”
    “Believe it or not, that’s none of your business,” Jonathan said. “Tell me about the executions.”
    “I did. After they killed Mr. Hall and Mrs. Charlton, they just dragged the bodies out of the bus and dumped them on the ...” The boy’s voice caught in his throat and he went quiet. A few seconds later, he cleared his throat. “They dragged them out onto the street and we drove off. The terrorists kept yelling at us to keep our heads down and to stay in our seats. While we drove through the streets, they made us change seats—nobody could sit with who they were sitting with—and then they passed out handcuffs and ankle cuffs, and made us chain ourselves to our seatmates.”
    Jonathan admired the level of detail in Tristan’s storytelling.
    “After a day or so, maybe two, that guy who was dead in the aisle made a speech about nobody caring enough to pay for our release, so he unlocked Mrs. Blazak’s handcuff and he let her ankles go and then he dragged her out of the bus by her hair. He took her right outside the bus and made her kneel down, and, you know, just put his rifle to her head.” His eyes reddened again. “She was a really, really nice lady and they just blew her head off.” He grew quiet.
    Jonathan gave him a half minute or so to collect himself. “What happened after that?”
    “He just left her there. Climbed back into the bus, and within an hour, he was trying to do small talk again. I hated that son of a bitch.”
    Hate was good, Jonathan thought. As emotions went, that was one that tended to focus the mind.
    “That leaves one more, right?” Jonathan asked. “Miss James?”
    Tristan pushed filthy tendrils of blond hair out of his eyes. “We’d been held hostage for a couple of days, I think. The kidnappers said something about people not being fast enough. They took her outside and two of them ...” His voice faltered again.
    “Take your time,” Jonathan said.
    “You have to understand that she was really a nice lady. She was like a thirty-year-old grandmother, you know? She was all about stopping the death of decorum. That’s what she called it.”
    Jonathan just waited through the preamble, confident that the boy would get to the point.
    Tristan struggled more with this story than he had with the others. “So, there were two of them, so they took her out just like they did Mrs. Blazak. They made her kneel on the ground, but then they made her give both of them a blowjob. In front of everybody. I tried not to watch, but ...”
    There was no reason for a seventeen-year-old boy to finish that sentence.
    Tristan settled himself with a long, deep breath. “And after she’d done them both, they shot her in the face. A third one took videos of the whole thing.”
    Jonathan inhaled forcefully through his nose and held the breath in for a few seconds. There were levels of cruelty that he just could not comprehend. He got the panicked shooting that happened in the bus after the assault started back there at the drop site. He didn’t endorse it, but he understood it as if I’m dying I’m taking you with me . But to humiliate someone in the most brutal way like that made no sense to him at all.
    If nothing else went right with this mission, at least he could rest comfortably that he’d increased the population in Hell.
    “Those are some pretty ugly pictures to have swimming in your head,” Jonathan said.
    “Tell me about it.”
    “I am,” Jonathan