He covered up, but soon felt the impact of fists and feet on his bettered body as the gang set to work on him, targeting his face, his head, his back, his kidneys.
Yes, Cole thought, go on!
He felt booted feet stamping on his legs, fists hammering away at his head, a sandaled foot burying itself in his ribcage. He felt things starting to break, saw blood running into his eyes.
Yes, he thought to himself through the glorious pain, that’s it! Do it! I deserve it!
He deserved it because it was his fault that his family had died; if he had been less selfish, if he had never married, if he had never had children, it would never have happened. If he had given up his work after getting married, after having children, it would never have happened. But no — he was too arrogant, too confident in his own abilities, he never thought for one second his family could be hurt.
But they had been.
As the blows continued to rain down on him, he saw their faces.
Sarah his wife, so beautiful, so confident, so happy.
Ben, his six year old son, such a wonderful boy.
Amy, his four year old daughter, a beautiful, wonderful little girl who had looked just like her mother.
He saw their faces blown apart, blood exploding outwards. Blood everywhere, over everything.
The blood that ran down Cole’s face now was their blood.
Innocent blood.
Yes, Cole knew as the pain wracked his beaten body, I deserve this.
After travelling to the secretive mountains of Burma to find and kill the man responsible for ordering his family’s death — Charles Hansard, the Director of US National Intelligence and Cole’s own boss — Cole had escaped across the border to Thailand, where he’d stayed ever since.
A part of him had known that it went against all operational protocol, that he was bound to be discovered so near the border; but the other part wanted to be caught, wanted to be punished. And yet he couldn’t simply turn himself in, just as he couldn’t simply end it all by putting a bullet through his own head. Such an act wasn’t in his nature, no matter how hard he wanted it to be.
And so instead, he put himself into situations where he could receive his punishment. He had fought in Muay Thai rings throughout the north, battered from one side of the ropes to the other, the crowds amazed by the punishment he could take. He had even fought in bare-knuckle contests across the border in Cambodia and Laos, letting his opponents beat him half to death every time.
But when he got tired of that, he started working as a bouncer in dozens of towns and villages, from Chiang Mai to Sukhothai. He never lasted long though, as his employers soon realized what he was trying to do — commit suicide with the assistance of their customers. And so he was forced to keep on moving, often staying in remote villages for weeks on end, but eventually heading for the big cities for his next dose of masochistic violence.
And now, blood from his wounds leaking onto the dirt-stained, sticky floor of the Climax Club, his consciousness just about to black out entirely, he wondered if this was finally it.
The end.
It was the sound of the knife flicking open that caused Cole to finally react, his instincts too finely honed after his years of training, unable to override them anymore despite himself.
His mind clear in an instant, he seized the wrist of the man with the knife as it plunged towards his chest, digging into a pressure point with his thumb. The attacker collapsed for a brief instant from the pain, and Cole sent the callused fingertips of his other hand straight into the man’s throat, killing him instantly.
He tried to stop himself, but his body had already taken over; before he knew what was happening, he had lashed out with his foot from his position prone on the floor, shattering another man’s kneecap. And then he was on his feet, taking out another of the gang with a vicious uppercut that caught the man just under the jaw.
In the next instant, Cole pivoted to his right and knocked someone else out cold with a left hook, and then turned again as someone tried to tackle him. He dropped his weight and smothered the attack, raising his knee up sharply into the man’s face — one, twice, three times, blood and teeth spraying across the floor just before the man’s unconscious body followed them.
Another man grabbed him from behind, and Cole jerked his head backwards to break the man’s nose, arm slipping backwards around his waist and then hauling him over his hip in a powerful judo throw, driving him into the hard ground and following up with a stamp onto the man’s forehead.
The customers, staff and dancers who hadn’t fled were now backing away, looking at him with a mix of disbelief and horror.
Cole turned his head from side to side — targets down, scan, assess — as he surveyed the carnage.
Six men were down and out, at least one of them dead.
And it had all happened in under twelve seconds.
Cole knew he should wait, knew he should accept his arrest by the police and his imprisonment, his punishment; and yet his sense of self-preservation, his natural survival instinct trained and nurtured over the years until it was as keen as a knife’s razor edge, simply wouldn’t let him.
It never would.
Cole turned on his heel and ran from the club into the bustling, humid, sweat-hot streets of Pattaya, his mind screaming at him to stop even as his legs spurred him on.
Damn it! his mind screamed at him as he ran.
Why can’t I die?
2
Cole slowly sipped at his ice cold beer as he surveyed the bar.
He was in a tourist trap right off the Khao San Road in downtown Bangkok, a popular bar for foreigners; not yet packed at this hour but with enough people so that he wouldn’t stick out. The ceiling fans offered a cooling respite from the heat and humidity outside, but the smells of the street still wafted in. There were the wonderful aromas of street food — fried rice, grilled and stir-fried meats, spiced noodles and fish sauce — as well as the ever-present fumes of diesel and gasoline and the unavoidable stench of human sweat. Bland Euro pop blaring too loud through a poor-quality sound system completed the atmosphere.
It was unlikely he would be tracked to Bangkok, Cole knew. Thai law enforcement wasn’t amongst the world’s best, and they would probably just sweep the incident at the Climax Club under the carpet as they generally did with crimes committed within the country’s money-generating sex industry. But even if they were being keener that usual, the Thai capital was so awash with foreigners of every description that he would never be found here.
He knew the city well too, having spent many a weekend of R&R here when he’d been with the US Navy SEALs; it was a favorite haunt of American forces stationed in Asia, offering any number of opportunities for military pleasure seekers with some time on their hands.
Even so, his professional instincts caused to him to continually scan his surroundings, even after his sixth beer of the afternoon. Was anyone paying him undue attention? Did any of the customers seem like they didn’t belong? Were there people out in the street beyond who passed the window more than once, or who paid a little bit too much attention to what was going on inside?
But there was nothing, and so Cole was left alone with just his thoughts and a bottle of Chang.
Was this how he was going to live for the rest of his days? He’d been torturing himself for well over a year now, and he started to wonder if it would ever end. Could he let it end?