Meet John Regent, Former Professional Badass

This is the VERY rough cut of chapter one of Nomad, the first installment of The Minus Faction. It needs a lot of work yet, but for those who are interested in John and what he can do, you get the idea.

The trick to borrowing someone else’s body is to not get caught.

But then getting caught is not the same as being seen. You can be seen all day. All you have to do is give people a single, plausible reason why the man in the hat and sunglasses is not their old friend Jeff who’s been in a coma for six months—Jeff had dark hair and no mustache and that guy’s mustache is blond—and people will assume it’s just someone who looks like Jeff and go right on texting. Or whatever.

The trick to busting a drug deal on the other hand is to not get shot.

On a warm Saturday in April, John Regent failed at both.

According to the Army, the trick to surviving a gunshot wound is to stop the bleeding and get immediate medical attention. This means keeping still and putting pressure on the wound. That’s what they teach in Basic training, and it’s true.

But then, people who are scared and angry enough to shoot at other people tend to keep shooting as long as those others are around, so the trick to surviving a gunshot wound while still being shot at by scared, angry people is to not go into shock. And the best way to avoid shock is prior inoculation: being shot before, preferably multiple times. Like homeopathy for soldiers.

Of course, any nice, normal person would have listened to the armed and screaming drug dealers and simply left. But Regent had a job to do, and he had been trained exactly for this kind of thing. In fact, it was in training that Regent had been shot the first time. Not Basic training. Not Ranger training. Not even Special Forces training, although they feigned it.

It was after that, at the training that had no name for a unit that had no insignia, the same training that had no manual and that never, ever took place. Officially. It was the training where John had been drugged, blindfolded, shot in the arm, and dumped out of a helicopter into a swamp by his own instructors and told to find his way back without a map or compass or anything. Oh, and there are guys on the ground hunting you. With dogs. It wasn’t until the clouds parted a few hours after the drop that John could see the stars and figured he wasn’t even on the same hemisphere anymore, let alone the same continent.

That was Day One of the training that didn’t exist. Things got progressively harder from there.

The trick to hostage rescue is getting inside without the hostage-takers killing anyone. Standing there, bleeding against the door of some asshole’s second floor apartment, John was already inside.

See? He told himself. Stop complaining. Hard part is already over.

Of course, it helped that when he wandered, when he was in someone else’s body, Regent could control the pain. And the fear. And all the responses—all the shit—your genes saddle you with in their vain effort to keep themselves alive. Riding someone else’s bones, John was in total control like he never was, like no one ever was, in their own skin. Even with a gunshot wound, he had total clarity.

The trick to disarming someone is getting them to want to drop the weapon, even if they really don’t want to. There are a variety of ways to do this, but if you’re reasonably sure your target hasn’t seen combat—this kid looks like a tool, John thought—then a firm strike to the top of the forearm usually does the trick, preferably with something hard. You know the place: where the skin runs thin over the bone and good whack sends a shock of pain to the hand.

The thing about combat is that you do and see shit normal people just don’t ever experience in life: get hit, stab someone, see your buddy’s head explode in a burst of red smoke. That kind of thing. It’s a shock some people never shake, people like John’s friend Mario. Mario had just finished a tour. Mario was in bad.

The drug dealers in the room hadn’t seen combat. They were barely literate punks. Mean, but undisciplined. They all stood there for a moment as the handgun bounced on the floor with a thud. No one expected “Jeff” to fight back, not after being shot, not without a pause for breath.

To Regent’s right, asshole number two stood at the end of a couch where a young mother sat clutching her baby. Fuck. No shooting to that side. To Regent’s left, asshole number three already had a hand on his gun. He was twitchy, not afraid to shoot, but he had his pants around his knees, which meant he wasn’t mobile.

Three seconds. Tops.

In a single fluid movement from the one that had disarmed his first opponent, Regent popped the kid in the throat. That disorients. People who aren’t used to getting hurt, people who aren’t trained to stay focused, think about the pain and—for a second at least—worry about whether or not they’re able to breathe. That distracts, makes their limbs pliable.

Regent clutched the man close, using him as a shield as he walked forward along the couch, pushing asshole number one toward number two while number three raised his weapon.

Two seconds.

John was an athlete, or he had been once, and he stared ahead like he was getting ready for a juke. His didn’t take his eyes off his target. Then he pushed asshole number one to the left without turning. The man, still clutching his throat, stumbled in front of the twitchy gunman.

One second.

John smacked number two in the teeth, grabbed the kid’s gun, swung and went down on one knee—that lowered his profile and made him a moving target despite that his feet were planted—and shot number three in the shoulder before the choking kid could stumble out of the way. Three’s torso turned from the impact and swung the barrel of his gun toward the door and away from the mother and child. He screamed and went down. His Glock slide across the hardwood.

Regent stood and popped number two in the gut with his fist. When the kid doubled over, Regent rammed his knee into the boy’s nose.

Crack.

That hurts.

Number one regained his balance and put his hands in the air. Everyone froze. Regent held number two’s gun loosely and stood in the middle of the room.

Three seconds. No fatalities. One casualty.

It was clear the kid on the floor hadn’t been shot before, let alone seven times.

John looked down at “Jeff’s” leg. Make that eight.

Numbers one and two looked to the twitchy one rocking back and forth on the floor. They were waiting to see what he would do. He must be the leader. He was moaning and holding his shoulder.

That’s good, Regent thought. Just what they teach in Basic. Stay down, keep pressure on the wound.

John knelt and put his gun to the boy’s shaved head. “Hurts, don’t it?” White people don’t look good with shaved heads. Except Captain Picard. John always liked Captain Picard.

The kid grimaced. He nodded.

“Been shot before?”

The kid shook his head.

“Don’t worry. It’s easier the second time. You know Mario Gonzales?”

The kid scowled. “Man, there’s five hundred guys with that name just on this block.” He was cocky.

Regent popped the kid in the skull with the butt of his gun then put the barrel back to his temple.

The boy yelped.

“Heavy set. About your age. Was a soldier. Just got back. Buys pills. You know the guy now?”

The kid nodded. “I don’t know where he is, man. He just shows up. I don’t keep track.”

“I’m not asking where he is. I know where he is. The problem is where he should be. Do you know that?”

The kid shook his head.

“Back at the VA. In therapy. He needs help. He’s got a wife workin’ two jobs and kid. But he’s not gonna get help when he’s hiding inside your pills. So that means you’re gonna stop selling to him.”

The kid raised his eyes to John.

“I don’t care what else you do. I don’t care whose life you fuck to make bank. But you and all your buddies are gonna stop selling to him. Corporal Gonzales is off limits. Do you understand?”

The kid nodded, but he didn’t mean it.

John moved the gun and shot the sleaze in the knee. Point blank. The bullet ran clean through baggy jeans and flesh and impacted the hardwood with a crack, throwing up little splinters.

The kid screamed. He grabbed his leg with his good hand and rocked back and forth, yelling and cursing at the top of his lungs.

John put the barrel to his head again. “See? Hurts less than the first one, right?”

The kid was shaking. He was going into shock. He didn’t have long. But there were sirens in the distance.

John held the gun barrel hard to the kid’s temple. “Convince me, asshole.”

“I’ll stop! Fuck, you crazy muthafucker! Fuck! I’ll stop. He’s off limits, man. I’ll tell everybody. He ain’t fuckin’ worth it!”

John nodded. “You think you’re some kind of soldier, huh? Street war or some shit? If I have to come back here, you’ll see what war’s really like. Am I perfectly clear?”

The kid nodded in pain.

John looked at the other two. They didn’t move. The mother—she must be somebody’s girlfriend—clutched her baby and looked at the floor.

Regent stood. “What are you doing, bringin’ a baby to a place like this?”

She was silent. Her eyes didn’t move, didn’t make contact.

John shook his head and walked out. “Jeff’s” leg was soaked red, and Regent stumbled down the stairs and out the back as he rubbed the gun clean of prints. He dropped it and the fake mustache in a storm drain, and walked onto the street as the police and ambulances arrived. He laid down on the sidewalk and slowed his breathing. “Jeff” wasn’t in the best shape. He’d lost a lot of blood.

When the medics leaned over him, John said he didn’t know who he was or how he’d gotten there. And when it was clear they had everything in hand and “Jeff” was going to live, Captain John Regent took a deep breath and left the man’s body.

That wasn’t how it was supposed to go, he thought.

Regent was always groggy after coming back, and it took him a moment to wake up. He shook his head.

And then he felt it. Like a skin-shriek, an agony-wail from his skull to his shins.

Pain.

Every time he wandered, he could almost forget.

Almost.

He bit down hard. It fucking hurt.

He looked at himself in the mirror of his dark hospital room. The shades were drawn. Sunlight peeked in from a crack in the curtains and made a triangle on the floor. Everything else was gray.

John sighed. He was a wreck. He wasn’t human. Not anymore. He was the shattered remains of a once-potent man. A soldier. But that man was gone.

The taut-skinned burns that covered a third of his body, including half his head, didn’t just give him a slight speech impediment and pull his limbs into odd gestures when he slept. They gnawed. They stabbed. They writhed. They gave him phantom limbs he’d never had. Inhuman limbs. Grasping, angular, insect-like appendages that came and went and were never the same again.

He looked down at his left hand, shriveled from the burns and atrophied from the nerve damage. The skin looked like demon flesh, mottled and stretched, lighter than the rest. It was destroying him.

John reached for the bracing bar that hung from the ceiling and pulled his six-foot-four frame out of his chair with one arm. He crawled into bed with a grunt, dragging lifeless legs.

He was left-handed. Before. Now it was his right or nothing. In fact, his right arm was just about the only thing in his body that worked the way it was supposed to. It fed him. It operated his motorized chair. It dressed him. It flipped the cap to the morphine button up and down. Up and down.

John laid his head back and tried to sleep. Wandering wore him out. Heavy concentration.

His doctors urged him to use the medication. He could have as much as he wanted, they said. They always had sad eyes. But the drugs blunted his mind, made it just like the rest of his body. He couldn’t focus, couldn’t meditate, couldn’t wander. He was helpless on the drugs, trapped in a hazy prison where pain poked through the fog like a searchlight and half-forgotten memories of caves and torture bubbled up from the ground.

It was the same place that Mario was hiding. You can’t stay there. No one can.

Half an hour later John was still awake, fingers twitching from the pain, skin crawling like it was trying to get off him, as noises echoed from down the hall. Doctors and nurses argued about the return of their missing coma patient. Apparently the man had been shot. Apparently he’d busted a drug house. Saved a baby. Or some made-up shit.

Somebody used the word hero.

Regent snorted. Heroes don’t take other people’s bodies for a joyride. They don’t implicate them in an assault. They don’t almost get them killed.

As he laid listening to the increasingly fanciful tales of the afternoon, John knew. He couldn’t stay. He couldn’t take the constant temptation, all the unconscious bodies with working legs and no pain lying around not being used.

John didn’t know what “Jeff’s” real name was. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to think how he’d just changed the man’s life forever.

He grit his teeth under a tingling wave of needle-jabs that made his arm twitch.

There was no getting around it now. He had to leave. But the only place John Regent could go was the last place in the world he wanted to be.

His bulging right arm pulled him up to make the call.