Tomahawk

Tomahawk

  By Zachary Adams

  Copyright © 2016 Zachary Adams

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law unless document receives visible attribution and author notified beforehand. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the email address below.

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  Published in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 1

  "Fuck off, Mr. President."

  Tomahawk "Tom" (Codename: "Hawk") Abrams slammed the phone down into the receiver. He hated being interrupted at work.

  He looked around the office. His manager's chair—a black mid-back mesh with a large, cracked indent in the leather of the seat—was pulled away from the double-pedestal cherry desk. His manager had left in a hurry. Hawk didn't wonder why.

  He looked up. There were pencils embedded in the popcorn ceiling. Being an utter man-child, his manager had bent staples, stuck them in the erasers of pencils, and flicked them at the ceiling, where they stuck easily.

  By his estimate, there were more toys than actual work materials on the desk. There was a blue shark, standing on its fins, holding a projector in its jaws. Next to it, unsolved, was a Houdini lock puzzle. The chrome was heavily scratched from his manager's failed attempts to solve it. There was a beer glass with a pair of breasts on it—classy. A model NYPD car sat on top of some papers. There was glue everywhere. Hawk suspected that his manager had accidently glued the car to important documents.

  A knocking on the window of the door behind him sounded.

  "Tom, I hate to interrupt you, but the boring machine isn't going to bore itself."

  Hawk narrowed his eyes and turned around.

  His manager, a short pudgy balding man with pale skin and a constant stench, stared through the window into his own office.

  "What have I told you about interrupting me, Bob?" Hawk said.

  Bob cleared his throat and grabbed the door handle. "You're in my office, Tom. And my name is Bill. How did you get into my office? Did you fake that emergency in shipping so you could break in?"

  "No. I suspect that was the Secret Service."

  Bob laughed. "The Secret Service! You kill me Tom!"

  Hawk didn't laugh. He picked up the beer glass with the pair of breasts on it, flipped it into the air and caught it.

  "This is mine now," he said. "See you around, Bob."

  "Yes, I'll see you."

  Hawk made to close the door behind him as he left the office.

  Bob shouted as he left, "Keep up the good—!"

  Hawk slammed the door before Bob could finish.

  He returned to his boring machine. Hawk's job was simple: he made small holes bigger by boring them. He worked for a manufacturing company that made easy-to-construct furniture, sold cheaply in the many locations of a large warehouse store franchise. His job was boring, which Hawk considered to be dull work. Sometimes he bored tapered holes, which was marginally less dull work. Sometimes he backbored, a manufacturing term that means going inside a small hole and boring the back of it, making it gradually larger. Backboring was the most boring he performed in a typical day at work, which suited him fine because it was the least dull work he performed.

  Hawk was thirty-two years old. He stood just over six feet, weighed just about two hundred pounds, and had almost 120,000 hairs on his head, which he wore in style that Men's Fashion magazine called Waving Back. He also wore a mustache that some magazines called a Horseshoe, others called the Gunslinger, and his girlfriend called horrendous. He preferred to call his look "The Hawk", which was often confused with Hawk's least favorite hairstyle, the Mohawk.

  Without all the fancy terms, he wore his medium-length hair combed back and his mustache formed three-fourths of a square around his mouth, shaved at his chin.

  He placed the beer glass with breasts on it on the small stand next to his boring machine, and took a seat on the tall cushioned stool beside it. Leading to his station was a conveyer belt, and on the panel of the conveyer belt was a button. Hawk pressed the button, and the conveyer belt turned on. Coming through it were long two-by-fours with two small holes on the top and two at the bottom. All four holes on each two-by-four needed tapered boring.

  He picked up a two-by-four and considered it in his hand. Should he even bother working? He'd pissed off the president. This whole facility was likely the target of a drone airstrike.

  Damn.

  He'd liked working here. He'd been enjoying his retirement.

  The door to the manager's office burst open, and Bob came sprinting out, glowing red and panting.

  "We have to evacuate now!" he screamed. "We've just been alerted! We're under attack! This facility is the target of a drone airstrike!"

  Hawk sighed. He stood from his stool, strode past a perplexed Bob, and returned to the office. He slammed the door in Bob's face and picked up the phone, speaking into it without dialing a number.

  "Call off the airstrike, Frank. I'm coming in."

  Frank was livid. "You're damn right you are, you son of a bitch."