The Colonel's Table: Session Ten

 

Pagan the troubled foster kid was excited. One of his friends at school was a member of a secret magickal paramilitary organization and invited him to join. He spent the last few days working at a shitty fast food place on the state highway but tonight was the night he would be initiated into the mysteries.

 

He arrived at the Wenatchee KFC at around 9 PM to find it closed. The lights were off, the doors and windows barricaded from the inside with furniture. Fonz Trepanier, Pagan's learning disabled friend from school, shouted down to him from the roof. A hand reached up and yanked the kid down out of the line of fire. A fat guy in a uniform ballcap peered much more cautiously over the parapet. When he saw Pagan he quickly lowered a stepladder down to ground level. Pagan climbed while the fat guy covered him. 

 

On the roof:

• Mick Redhook, portly ex-military type with a lisp and an AR/Red Dot combo 
• Commissar Nadia Gage, clad in her signature red scarf and toting an SKS
• Fonz Trepanier, excited to be there and rocking a Mini 14 

They told Pagan to keep his head down. The Church's goons had showed up armed (like Nadia told them to if they were ever going to show their faces again) and were somewhere out there in the dark. But they could handle it. Right now they needed Pagan to find Moses, who would have orders for him. Fonz was excited to tell his friend all about his adventures but the adults sent him on his way. Nobody shot at him out of the dark on the way down the ladder.

 

The Colonel's Table: Session Nine

Cameron Wilson joined the Colonel's Secret Coterie because the cute commissar in the red scarf gave him a rousing lecture about the struggle of the workers and trade unionism and how he they could seize the means of production together. He was a labor organizer and the Wenatchee Valley shop seemed ripe for unionization. On recruitment her lectures had gotten weirder. Marxism Leninism Colonel Saunder's Thought. Liberation of the productive forces of magick.
 
Nadia Gage wasn't working that night. It was just Cameron, Mick and Fonz. Fonz got in an argument with a customer at the register and Mick sent the new recruit to help the excitable teenager. A fit woman in her thirties, clad in a Tom of Finland type leather jacket and peaked cap covered in buttons, stared at the menu. The raccoon on her shoulder stared at it, mimicking her. Fonz yelled at her that animals weren't allowed in the store. Cameron took over and asked her more gently to put the creature outside. It was a health code violation. She looked at him like she realized for the first time where she was. She had been somewhere else. She wasn't used to ordering food in restaurants, or hearing any voice besides her own. The buttons on her coat all read the same thing: 
 
EXPLORERS OF THE FURTHEST REALMS
 
All in different colors but all with a wedjat, an eye of Horus. She picked up the racoon and put it on the floor. It obediently waddled to the exit and waited until she opened the door and allowed outside. Then she ordered a family sized bucket. Cameron gave her three of the ten "special" pieces that Nadia had told him to distribute at his discretion. The lady in the jacket paused to peer around the interior partition at the bathroom door, then left the store. She gave a drumstick to the racoon, who ate it in a circular motion like an ear of corn.
 
With that resolved, Mick lisped to Cameron that he had another job for him tonight. He was the only member of the away team who hadn't yet been involved in a crime. His job was to take this box of two sandwiches and a chicken fries to this address in the south side of town to meet up with Hank, who would have further orders for him.

 

The Colonel's Table: Session Eight

 

Hank the new recruit to the Colonel's Secret Cadre parked his Hilux down the road from the restaurant and entered to find Nadia Gage, Mick Bonnavera and Ozzy Packard working that night. Nadia kept her gun in her holster and told Hank that he wouldn't be working in the store tonight. He needed to go find Edgar, who had been told not to show up in the first place, and tell him that Nadia had been interrogated by federal agents. An FBI hood by the name of Special Agent In Charge Esme Parkreiner asked her if she knew anything about the big pile of ANFO the domestic terrorism unit found in an abandoned house in East Wenatchee. Nadia's face appeared on a conspiracist's pinboard found at the scene. Edgar would know what to do after that.

Nadia gave Hank a sack of three special orders. Chicken sandwiches and a thing of fries. He passed an elderly cyclist on the way out, clad in spandex and clasping a forty in a brown paper bag as he entered the restaurant.