Packfire Quotes

“The man in black hustled down to the wreckage, used a rock to smash the window glass, then pulled out his Raging Bull Casull .454. Before he fired a round, the woman pulled down her mask and opened her eyes. With chilling calm, she said deliberately, “God will damn your soul. Think before you make a decision that will stand for eternity.” ”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“Pack couldn’t go home at the conclusion of his shift at the Cunningham Aircraft plant and relax. He wasn’t Chester A. Riley. He was a sheepdog protecting his herd from wolves like Rick Jason. For Simon Pack, there could be no long recovery time. Wolves were on the prowl, and without his vigilance, and those like him, his herd would disappear. He would not permit his America to perish in the flames of hatred. Back to work tomorrow.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“The holes in the bodies were cavernous. Cooter continued to cry. His breath caught when he picked up the infant Kaleb. The hard shell car seat Kaleb lay in had a hole through the top of it. “Praise God in Heaven, this little guy is alive and not even crying.” Several of the men reached for him, but Cooter kept him bound in his arms.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“If I lived to one hundred years of age, I could never become an elder. They do not appreciate my views. They believe the white man is a leech sucking the Kootenai out of their children’s bones.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“In today’s world, you can find a power-mad city bus driver seizing power in Venezuela. A vapid man. A hollow man. A man offering handouts and promises of a better future, neither of which went to any but the few partisans closest to the president. In the blink of an eye, one man shreds every lovely piece of the fabric that held the country together for a hundred years and more. Reducing everyone to penury. Citizens dumbfounded and confounded, not understanding how this happened. The oil derricks that were symbols of prosperity sitting frozen in rust, pumping nothing. Not a wheel in the nation turning. Children, in some places, eating dirt to survive.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“Tetu stood his seven feet straight as a yardstick. His chin tilted upward. He was unable to mouth the words to the hymns. This struggle to hold back a torrent of tears consumed him. Yet he found the joyful noise soothing. What he was thinking in those minutes was, “Let this go on forever. Bang the death drum slowly. Bugler, play Taps for an eternity. I do not want the time to come when I’ll have to commit the bodies of these three people I have so loved to a cold place beneath the soil.”  ”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“The Angels had fun with them. They laid the deceased out on a pool table and took turns pouring beer over him, ritualistically, you know? They stripped this embalmed figure of his wrappings before the ritual. At the end, they took Bobby and Ty—at knifepoint—and forced them to kiss the deceased’s lips and say, ‘I love you, man.’ But the worst was yet to come. Without becoming vulgar and utterly gross, let me just say the Angels gave them a choice: die slowly of knife wounds or fellate the corpse on the table.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“Tetu’s attorney, David Hotchman, was a diminutive figure, slight in every bodily respect except, it was obvious, the muscularity of his brain. Every judge into whose court he came armed for legal combat was acutely sensitive to the fact that he or she needed to prepare with special intensity to keep pace with his legal argumentation. They couldn’t search for a precedent or two and hope that would be sufficient.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“Let’s add up what we know. He gravitated toward all things occult. He wanted to be a member of a tight clan with strict rules and secret codes. He craved highly organized social structures, with leaders and followers clearly distinguished.  A group with little appeal to the masses. A group with few members. We know that these Nordic runes fascinated him. And apparently he held that fascination for a long time, given that he added the ‘Hagalaz’ to the message intended for Marshal Pack.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“Keto wasn’t just any dog. He was vicious, trained to be a killing machine when called on. Pack had invested much time and effort into training Keto. He hadn’t barked before attacking the murderer. It was close to a stealth attack. Probably flew through the air the final eight or ten feet. Mouth open wide, upper and lower incisors ready to rip the prey apart painfully, efficiently. 
And the killer’s screams weren’t just any screams. They were shrieks, the kind arising from sheer terror. Knowing your means of defense are dead, as dead as you soon will be.
 ”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“I want this case over so I can feel the warmth of your hugs and kisses again. Sometime before you called, an hour or two maybe, I was fantasizing about kissing you. In this fantasy I haven’t seen you for a while, you come in the door, I hug you…we don’t speak, just look at one another at extremely close range. I look at your face, which in, of, and by itself is a turn-on for me. You have a sexy face, mister, a very sexy face, although I kinda hope other women don’t see it that way. I’m looking at you in this suspended state of excitement. I want the kiss, but I don’t want it to happen too soon. I can hardly breathe. I might pass out when it actually happens.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“When I go on to wherever I’m going, I’m gonna look over you every day. If what I’m thinking is a prayer, maybe God will grant the only thing I can think of to ask for. Thanks for bein’ the greatest momma ever was. I sure don’t know why you loved me as much as you did, momma, or what you saw in me, but you did everything right.
         This is my little opinion.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“There are surprising things you might not know. There’s a transition. The Almighty doesn’t announce His final disposition right away. Not because He needs time to consider your case. I think that’s been decided already. But, I have learned, because He wants to give us time to think over what has happened to us. It wouldn’t be fair if we couldn’t express ourselves honestly. I mean, the Almighty told me that during this period—what is it, two days or two thousand human years? Who knows, because in this realm I’m in now there is no such thing as human time—we have a special dispensation. We can express our anger, our happiness, our disappointment, and so on. Whatever human emotions we once possessed, we get to cling to a while longer, until we move on to our final destination. There’s nothing we can do to hurt anyone from this platform.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“2100 Hours: The lights went out inside the compound. People throughout the auditorium began to shriek. It was chaos. 
         Then they experienced what felt like a sonic boom. Pack’s vehicle had blown apart, metal fragments hurled a quarter mile away. The CEV had knocked the main gate over as if it were a fist going through papier-mache. Once the explosion had run its course, the car was in flames, which caught some of the crew still wearing the night vision devices off guard.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“He recited from memory, with the stylishness and verve of a polished Shakespearean actor, “Listen to me, people, hear these words: ‘So live, that when thy summons comes to join the innumerable caravan, which moves to that mysterious realm where each shall take his chambers in the silent halls of death, thou go not, like the miserable quarry slave at night, confined to his deep dark dungeon, but soothed and sustained by an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, like one who wraps the drapery of his own couch about him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.’” ”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“The Marshal didn’t bother knocking. What he observed was not unexpected, but still shocking. The sequoia of a man, seven feet tall and 360 hard-packed pounds of him, lay with back curled forward, limbs folded in front of his body, on the living room floor, moaning, with periodic sharp intakes of breath accentuating his spiritual desolation. ”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“The big man jerked Jason to an upright position. “You shot me, mister. Now you pay.” He placed a bearpaw over Jason’s face and smashed his head into a tree, hard enough not to kill, but with enough force to knock him senseless. Then he broke each of Jason’s fingers, one at a time. For good measure he squeezed each of the Director’s hands until he could feel small bones crunching.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“I had a feeling from the beginning this young man was a politicker. He wanted authority. He was aiming to be a gothi one day. How do I know that? He talked too much. He wanted to be front and center at any event. He failed to internalize a key precept of ours, which is that if you make a show of seeking power, it will never be granted to you.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“If we can break the code on what the word ‘Hagalaz’ meant to him, maybe we’ll have a lead. Nobody with the surname, so forget that. The anagram parsing leads nowhere. In fact, there is no known seven-letter anagram of the word. Or six letters. Now, there are some meanings of the word out there. It’s a Norse rune. The ninth rune in the twenty-four letter magical Norse alphabet. Its meaning is, to me, difficult to understand. Best I can decipher is, ‘Don’t try to fix what we should break before it breaks us.’” That got Pack’s attention.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“Frontman looked hit man in the eye as he filled two clear water glasses with the foul hairy mucous. Frontman toasted hit man, held his glass high, and—with the sound system’s re-verb functioning—said, “Rat brew, bro! Bottoms up, m-----f-----r!”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“Tetu was publicly keeping it together, but in his private moments he suffered from a profound spiritual dryness. And this terrible pain wouldn’t pass tomorrow or the next day, either. The thought flitted through Pack’s mind that the man with the Brobdingnagian heart, literally and figuratively, if he were honest with God, was thinking of his Creator as the Abominator. Why have you struck my family down like this, Abominator?”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“Tetu Palaita is one of those for me. He is my son, my brother, my friend. I hurt for him so much right this moment I’m incapable of describing it. I’m finding it hard to be rational. I want revenge. Not justice. Revenge. I want to hurt whoever did this to Tetu’s family in the most brutal ways I can conceive. My perspective has taken a leave of absence.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire

“The person in the ski mask, gloves, and all-dark clothing hunched forward to bring his truck engine to life. His lookout a mile north had signaled the target car was on the way. Nobody could have spotted him in the hide spot near the highway. He’d been there throughout the darkness of the night. Since the sun began its climb, he’d been enshrouded in the smoke. And with all the hissing and booming the fire was causing, what he was about to do wouldn’t be heard, either. Conditions couldn’t have been staged any better.”
― John M Vermillion, Packfire