The Kills

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John Jacob Ford’s morning began at 3:03 with a call from Paul Geezler, Advisor to the Division Chief, Europe, for HOSCO International.

Listen. There’s a problem and it can’t be solved. You need to disappear.

* * *

Five hours before Geezler’s phone call, Kiprowski came to Ford’s cabin and presented him with a Mason jar. Stopped at his door, Ford listened without much interest — until Kiprowski tilted the jar and what Ford had taken to be a nest of beetles unsnagged one from another, and he could see without trouble that these were scorpions, some ruddy-black, some amber, some semi-translucent. Most, except one, with bodies smaller than a quarter. The largest scorpion, black, brittle, almost engineered, took up the entire width of the container from claw-tip to tail.

Unwilling to touch the jar, Ford managed not to recoil. He asked Kiprowski what he wanted and Kiprowski said he didn’t rightly know. He’d found them under a tarpaulin close to Burn Pit 5, and while they were dead he didn’t trust the other men not to use them for some kind of a joke, Pakosta especially, and he didn’t want them winding up in food, in cots, on seats, in pockets — and besides, he said, I thought you’d be interested. They look like toys, he said. Like clockwork toys. And they light up under blacklight. They fluoresce, honest to god. They glow.

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