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JUNE 29, 2022

Nemo

“Would you rather…”—he dragged out his opening gambit—“only be able to have sex in the shower or on a table?”

It was pitch black, hot as hell, and Nemo was bored. It wasn’t an uncommon state for him. Only thing he liked better than breaking into places and stealing shit was running. All the physical activity was part of what Tribe hired him for. It’s what made him great at apprehensions when someone got the urge to flee. Unfortunately, a lot of the time, his current job required sitting and watching. Those were not his strongest skills. He could do them, and he could do them well, but he hated waiting and left those tasks to others whenever possible.

Like Steel. He was a master at waiting.

Without turning to look at him, the Latino man next to him, lying on his stomach and looking through his scope, asked, “ ? Qué? ”

Nemo scratched at his scruffy, dark-blond beard and repeated himself. “Would you rather only be able to have sex in the shower or on a table? You know. Like you could only ever do it that one way your whole life.”

Steel huffed quietly. “There is something seriously wrong with you.”

Nemo frowned and reared his head back slightly. “What the hell do you mean?”

“We’re supposed to be gathering intel on Ka-Bar, and you want to talk about my sex life?”

Nemo snorted. “If Kubrick’s brother was ever here, he’s long gone by now. Loki, Gilgamesh, and Medusa reported seeing him here in April. There’s no way someone would still be holding him here.”

“Even if he’s not here, this location could give us breadcrumbs on where to look next. I’m sure Kubrick would be much happier knowing that you were invested in finding her brother rather than wasting our time on that stupid game. And I refuse to go back to the boss man empty-handed. He’ll move heaven and earth for his woman, and I don’t want to be caught in his earthquake.”

Shrugging, Nemo lowered his night vision goggles over his blue eyes and focused back in the same direction Steel was watching. “Okay, Hansel, we’ll look for your breadcrumbs. But I’ll have you know, Kubrick loves my quirky charms. I’m Mr. Funderful.”

“ Jesucristo , she called you that when she was frustrated with you. Can’t you tell the difference between sincerity and snark? You’re around her enough—you should know by now.”

“Nope. She called me Mr. Funderful. I heard joy and happiness. You, Mr. Nonfunderful, are so negative you heard sarcasm. You gotta stop hanging around with the Cyclops and start hanging out with me more. ”

Steel grunted. “I wanna be there when you call TB ‘Cyclops.’ He’ll kick your ass back to mythological times.”

“Pfft. TB doesn’t scare me. As soon as he balloon-dropped three hundred red balloons on me in the armory, I knew it was over. He’s all domesticated now.” He pretended to be annoyed, but he loved TB’s woman, Flame. She was perfect for His Royal Grumpiness, all sunniness and cheer.

“My cheeks still hurt from blowing those fucking things up. I think I collapsed a lung.”

“You idiots are such amateurs. For ten bucks, you could have gotten a chargeable air pump.” They lay on the hillside shelf looking down into the village of Sallum. “Now quit stalling and answer the question,” Nemo prodded.

For several moments, Steel was silent. Nemo thought that his teammate wasn’t going to play along, but he should have known better. They all gave in eventually.

“ Mierda .” He sighed in capitulation. “I hate shower sex. Table.”

Nemo twisted his torso to face his partner, raised his NVGs, and looked at Steel with an expression of absolute horror. “That’s not possible. No one hates shower sex.”

“I do.”

“Why the hell do you hate shower sex?”

Sighing, Steel asked, “Are we really going to get into this now?”

“Yes, we really are. It’s not like we have anything else to talk about.”

Nemo lowered his NVGs and rolled back into his previous position on the ground. It was quiet for about thirty seconds before he twisted back, raised his goggles, and asked, “Seriously? You really hate shower sex?”

Muttering something in Spanish, Steel rearranged himself on the ground. “If I explain it to your dumb ass, will you shut up and do your job?”

“Swear it on my sister’s grave.”

Steel looked at him, his cold silver eyes revealed after raising his own NVGs. “You don’t have a sister.”

“Details. Avoidance. Start talking.” Nemo twirled his finger in the universal get-going sign.

Steel grumbled again in Spanish, lowered his NVGs, and went back to watching the village. “One, I have terrible knees from jumping out of too many planes. Kneeling on the shower floor to eat someone out is hell on them. Two, I can’t stand water in my eyes. Three, one too many violent thrusts can send both of you crashing to the floor in a tangle of very embarrassing broken limbs. And four, and most importantly, I go for a while, and the water always goes cold before I finish. I detest cold water.”

“There is so much wrong in that answer; I can’t even begin to unpack it. But I’ll address the stupidest one—you hating cold water. You were a goddamned Navy SEAL. You should thrive in the water.”

“Was, compadre . I was a Navy SEAL. Besides, cold showers are a choice. Cold ocean water is natural. Very different, believe it or not.”

Shaking his head, Nemo grumbled about slapping Steel on behalf of men everywhere, pulled down his NVGs again, and turned to refocus on the building in the distance.

The two men lay side by side on the ground in silence for the next thirty minutes. The building they were watching was a typical rustic structure for the area. A few weeks ago, their teammate, TB, the group’s Information Specialist, had made first contact with a trio by the names of Loki, Gilgamesh, and Medusa. The two men and the woman passed veiled information that they had witnessed what appeared to be an American Navy SEAL being kept in Sallum. When the trouble was resolved with TB’s woman being kidnapped by her former abuser and a sex trafficker, their boss sent Nemo and Steel to the location to find out what they could. So far, what they’d found was a big, fat zero. Ka-Bar was still out there somewhere, and there didn’t seem to be suspicious activity of any sort when it came to this tiny village.

“It’s been three days, and we haven’t seen jack shit. We’re not going to, either,” Nemo complained.

“Probably, but we should wait a couple of hours, then head down and take a closer look. The same guy has locked up and left at twenty hundred the past three nights, and no one has come back until oh-seven-hundred the next day. We should be safe to take a peek.”

“And if we find nothing?”

“If we find nothing, we call the boss and see what he says.”

At oh-three-hundred, the two men crept down from their hillside hideaway. Traveling through the side streets, they worked to stay in the shadows as much as possible. Both men were experts at this, given their previous lives. Nemo and his fraternal twin had been master thieves, getting in and out of some of the world’s most famous museums, banks, and other sites, never getting caught. Plus, Steel had escaped from four separate Black Sites in the years before joining Tribe. If they wanted to be invisible, they were.

Well, technically, you were caught by Waters, but that’s different. And then there was the kitty cat. Different kind of caught .

Nemo tried to shove that memory to the back of his brain. All it did was make him itch like it always did. And that itch needed scratching, which wasn’t happening until they got home… unless he could find himself a flight attendant on her break on the airplane out. The itch turned to a pang in his chest. He rubbed the spot, then refocused.

Arriving at the back of the building, Steel took the watch position while Nemo picked the lock on the back door.

“Not even sure why they lock this door. The tumbler is so ancient, I probably could have jiggled it open,” Nemo groused.

“Look at it as an opportunity to practice your lock-picking skills. You’re keeping your old self alive.”

“Pfft,” Nemo replied. “Lock picking is nothing. Give me something challenging.”

They slunk through the open door. There was little concern of a building alarm. The building was so basic it didn’t even have a sign on it naming the business. A square, nondescript, flat-roofed structure, it was the perfect place to hide a captive. Non-native rescuers would stick out like a sore thumb, so guarding someone wouldn’t need to be a major production.

Inside, Steel and Nemo paused.

“Well. This is unexpected,” Nemo said.

The building was basically one big open space—more like an unfinished warehouse. And stacked in neat rows, four tall, were boxes approximately seven feet long by two feet tall and equipped with computer locks.

“Look familiar?” Steel asked.

“Uh-huh. What the fuck are they doing here? Are the guys who have Ka-Bar connected to what happened with Flame?”

“Dunno. Sure looks that way, though.”

The two men walked quickly and quietly through the rows of coffin-sized boxes with Steel taking pictures. Nemo was remembering the recent rescue of Flame, TB’s woman. She and six other women who had been captured were put into similar boxes and had been in the process of being shipped to buyers on the dark web. These, however, were more sophisticated. The boxes appeared to have computer controls on the front doors, whereas the prior boxes just had ordinary locks.

Steel looked closer. “These aren’t just locks,” he whispered. “There are other buttons here. Temperature controls. Oxygen and carbon dioxide monitors. They must have been losing people during transport. Had to increase their technology to ensure survival,” he surmised.

A noise came from a dark corner of the room. Quietly, both men drew their weapons and focused in the direction of the sound. The floor of the room was concrete, and the tapping that was coming toward them was not human.

Steel whispered, “Dog.”

A golden-colored dog appeared in the moonlight. Just short of two feet tall from pointy ears to feet, the animal was skinny as could be. Looking at the two men frozen in their tracks, the dog lowered its head and let loose a soft but menacing growl.

“Nice doggie,” Nemo breathed out.

The dog advanced two steps closer, the growl becoming slightly louder and more menacing.

“Nemo. It’s a female.”

“So?”

“No, dumbass. Look. She’s had puppies recently.”

Sure enough, her belly dragged with teats. “She’s frickin’ emaciated. How is she feeding puppies? Shit, shit, shit.”

“Back up slowly. Maybe if we show we’re no threat to her pups, she’ll leave us alone,” Steel said.

The dog was in heartbreaking condition. Nemo’s fear seemed to suddenly vanish. He felt like he understood this dog. She was clearly here as protection of the space. She was being starved to make her mean, and protecting her puppies wasn’t helping the situation. He remembered more than a few days of his life being hungry and vulnerable.

“Hey, girl,” he whispered. “You hungry?”

“Nemo,” Steel hissed. “What the fuck?”

Nemo holstered his weapon, then ever so slowly reached into his cargo pocket for a tube from his dinner MRE he had stashed there. He gently tore open the package and gently squeezed some of its contents over the edge of the opening. Just as slowly, he hunkered down into a crouch and extended the tube to the dog. “Hey, sweetheart. You’ll like this. C’mere, girl.”

“Nemo, she’s gonna bite your face off, and we cannot go to a hospital when she does.”

Nemo just ignored the man behind him. He squeezed a little bit more of the contents so that the dog could get a better whiff of it.

“Nemo, what is that?”

“Peanut butter. It’s okay for dogs, although at this point, I don’t think much could be bad for her.”

The dog was still growling but less intensely. Her nose quivered. One step at a time, she came closer and closer to Nemo until she was within a long-lick’s distance of the offering. Her tongue swiped out. At that first taste of the peanut butter, her ears perked slightly. One more step closer, one more lick. That was all it took. She moved in reach of Nemo’s outstretched hand and began to lick the tube in earnest as he squeezed out its contents.

“Good girl. Good girl,” he soothed.

He looked up at Steel.

“No.” It was the only word that came from Steel’s mouth.

“No one gives a shit about them.”

“Nemo, no.”

“They’ll die here.”

Nemo’s lower lip protruded in a cartoon state of sadness .

“How the fuck do you plan to get them on the plane? They have to quarantine.”

The dog lay down on the concrete and rolled over on her back for tummy rubs from Nemo.

“Freakin’ Frankenstein,” Steel swore, using one of Flame’s favorite sayings. “Even these types of bitches roll over for you with next to no prompting.”

Nemo grinned because he knew he’d won the argument.

Steel sighed. “Waters is going to kick my ass. And when he’s done, I’m going to help him kick yours.”

“You know you love me.” Nemo’s grin turned to a full-on smirk.

“Fuckwitch,” Steel murmured under his breath. “I’ll go find the damn puppies.”

Steel stalked off, once again muttering in Spanish, occasionally getting louder with the swear words and threats to Nemo’s life.

“You’re going to love it in Los Angeles, and we’ll find good homes for your pups. Promise.” Nemo looked down at the dog whose belly he was still scratching. She was starved, covered in scars, probably infested with fleas, and he refused to leave her here. “I bet you’ve got a thousand stories to tell, girl.” A thought popped into his head. “Scheherazade. Perfect.”