Mad Hatter

They call me the Mad Hatter. Most of them anyways, a few of them call me Soren. No one calls me by the name I was born with, no one calls anyone by that. The Boss we call a lot of things, not all of them nice, but Hotaru Maniac is how we all knew him first. Forgetting the "Maniac" in his presence will earn his displeasure. Hotaru's some Angel of Death from some anime. Never saw it, barely remember the title. Maniac is not Hotaru, he's a Maniac for Hotaru.

Anyways, I've never quite understood why they call me the Mad Hatter. It may have something to do with the fact that even around here, I'm considered crazy. I'm one the only religious folks here. Oh, we all have our gods and rituals, probably 95% of us have a good-luck charm, almost everyone has something they do to stay sane. I'm one of the very few to stick with an actual religion from the outside world, though.

I used to be a Christian missionary pilot. No, seriously. I'd fly missionaries into jungle villages, bring them supplies, medicine, that sort of shit. I had that job for about 3 years. I had a wife, too.

That was supposed to be a career. Me and my lady (Ex-wife, but I don't tolerate people insulting her) had our courses plotted, man. We loved the job, we loved the people, we loved each other. We were committed, like you read about. We were the elite, well-respected in the community. One of the best pilot-mechanic teams in the org, etc, etc.

Of course, such things don't last. I had this family I was supposed to drop into a village in Colombia. Nice folks, mom, dad, teenage kid. They were legit, I'd actually known the mother when I was in flight school. Lovely lady, almost dated her when we first met.

Anyways, my wife and I drop this family off, and as is our custom, we started to make a loop around the airfield before we turned back home. Only this time, apparently some drug lord had decided that a missionary might cut into his profits. As we're circling the airfield, we saw an 8-man kill squad leave one of the huts.

I was 500 feet in the air. I never had a chance to prevent the bastards from killing the son and his father. They never saw it coming, but I did. Slow-fucking-motion, man. My friend was next, we all knew it. Only, the squad leader brandished a rope instead of a rifle when he turned to her.

Missions pilots never carried a weapon. Guns, I mean. We all had knives, but that's a tool, we were told. Guns would have gotten us thrown out of countries where we were needed. It never occurred to the death squad that an unarmed 10,000-lb. airplane flown by an unarmed pilot is a weapon. It occurred to me.

Standing in a group to watch the leader, none of them avoided being run down. The plane ended up inside what was once this village's spirit lodge or something. The leader was covered in what used to be his buddies, so was my friend, the plane, and most of the village. I don't know what he thought had happened, but he didn't think fast enough. He died hard, some totem-carved spirit pole went through his chest. Several times.

Of course, that sort of shit doesn't go down well in the missions world. We praised martyrs, people who died for the faith. Having smashed a half-million dollar aircraft into 7 men, then murdering the last man with a stick kinda made me a target. I wasn't loving, merciful, or kind enough. My friend from college was about to get raped, I'm the bad guy.

The org was thrown out of the country. My family was thrown out of the org. I was thrown out of my family.

I don't blame my ex. I still love her, I think. But all the time we'd known each other, she'd never suspected I was capable of that. I never really knew that I was capable, either. What she saw that day was too much for her to handle. What she saw in me. The guy she loved, always nice, smiling, loving, tender, shoving a wooden spear into a man's chest with nothing but a grim smile on his face.

The man she saw that day was not the man she married. I understand why she left.

The casting call for PBE came two weeks later. If that's providential, I don't want to know what God has in mind. But it's amusing, you know? The hardest, most bat-shit insane band of kill-for-money people on the planet, and I'm one of the pilots. I still pray for these people daily. Only, unlike most of the world, I pray for their continued existence.

We sell death. When we show up, Death comes with us, and when we leave, we generally leave a quiet area behind. The outside world hears rumors about us, we're fine with that. Somehow we became popular, we don't really understand, because the outside world doesn't get it. We're the dogs of war, barely.

We kill evil men. We show up, we don't target civilians. I've heard some of the other groups have had mishaps, civvies got splashed. That happened once on my plane. Some fucker thought it'd be fun to have target practice, shot a lady doing laundry as we flew past. I shot him, threw him out of the plane, and started laughing. For the record, I think he died on impact with the ground. The record itself said he took fire from the ground and fell out. No one argued with me.

"Mad Hatter" started going around some time after that.

I haven't stopped laughing since I got out of training at PBE and realized exactly what I'd gotten myself into. We're rock stars in the world of death-dealing psychopaths. The polo could get me laid in 15 minutes if I wore it to a bar. The same girls would scream in terror if they saw us in our work clothes. I fly a plane that the org I used to work for would have scrapped, only I get shot at in it. The whole situation is so absurd, it's hard not to laugh.