Previously:
“What’s down there, Zane?” Ling asked, hunkering down farther as she saw Zane stare over the edge of the ride. “What do you see?”

Zane turned around and hit the floor. His face was paled and his eyes wide. He looked like he was going to be sick.

“What’s wrong?” Ling questioned hurriedly, watching as Zane looked up towards the edge of the pod and then straight into Ling’s eyes.

“That’s… that’s my dad.”
?????

Zane sunk deeper into the broken shards of glass on the floor, tears beginning to fall down his cheeks in sheer betrayal; his eyes wide, displaying his incredulous disbelief. For a moment even Ling was incapable of speech; Zane’s father had been declared dead by the Navy Seals weeks ago. Now they were being shot at by what looked to be a band of people being led by a dead man.

Ling began to rise to her feet to get her own look over the edge, but Zane pulled her down, his command audible over his blubbering:

“Ling, stay down. I don’t want them to hit you,” Zane said, his chest rising and falling in a spasmodic, pattern-less shake. He grabbed Ling’s shirttail and pulled her to the floor, her knees again striking the shattered glass from the broken light bulb above their heads.

“Do you know those peo-“

Before she could finish a echoing rumble came from below the capsule, drowning out Ling’s words. Flame snaked up and wrapped around the edge of the broken glass on the edge of the capsule, singeing the scalp of Zack’s head.

He yelped in pain over the sound of the explosion, then balled up on the floor and stared at Ling as though she may have the answer.

“Zane.”

The yell was quiet over the noise of the fire and of the screams and sprays of gunfire on the ground below them, but it was audible.

“Zane, if you can hear this, stand.”

The sound had the audio consistency of a megaphone, as though one of the shooters was yelling up to him.

“Zane, if you’re crazy, stand up,” Ling said, restraining him from rising.

“Zane, you are aware of what we are capable of,” The voice from below said. As if to emphasize the point, a spray of bullets pinged off the outside of the metal capsule, making bubbles in the floor. “ If you do not stand within fifteen seconds, I will personally send your little capsule on a one-way downhill trip to the gates of hell. One, two, three…”

Ling released Zane’s shoulder, not taking lightly the smoke filling the air around them from the decimation of the pod below.
“Seven, eight, nine…”

Zane looked at Ling’s eyes. Both were silent, though that did little to mute the sound of the screams down below. He gave her one last mental hug and stood, looking at the ground below.
“Thirteen – oh, hello Zane. Look at me.”

He scanned the pavement, looking for a face for the voice.

“Come now, do you really expect me to think that you can’t find your own father? Are you so unobservant that you’re missing the man making his way up this metal staircase?”

Even before the voice finished speaking, Zane’s father swung down from above and threw his lanky body into the pod.

”Ohmygod,” Ling screamed, ducking out of the way as Zane’s father’s legs narrowly missed her face. Zane’s dad looked at the cowering figure on the ground and delivered a decidedly forceful kick to her stomach, curling her up into a ball as she whimpered in pain.

Zane stared at his father, who had a microphone pinned to the collar of his greying red t-shirt. It took the boy about two seconds to meet his father’s gaze before he wheeled back and punched him square in the jaw, his years of karate coming to use. His father was thrown the eight feet across the capsule, hitting his head on the seat even as Zane came down, his knees knocking the wind from his father’s chest.

“You are not my father,” Zane deadpanned, despite the knowledge that he was wrong, as his father looked at him with mild amusement. “My father died a month ago.”

His father suddenly sprung up with both hands, sending his fingers around Zane’s throat and throwing him off. He wrapped his arm around Zane’s head and dropped him to the floor gasping for breath.

“Au contraire, my boy. I am far from dead, but you are deathly near,” his dad said with a sneer. Zane struggled to stand, a heavy foot weighing down on his chin, “especially if you try to stand up.”

Zane stopped squirming and looked up at his father, his eyes shimmering with pure hatred.

“Why?”

The word rang through the air in the capsule like a broken bell, sending waves of sorrow through all their ears. Zane’s father was hesitant for a moment as though he was unsure of the answer, but he eventually began to speak, putting a hand on the holster attached to his waist to keep the kids quiet.”

“Three years ago I left the house to go on a Seals mission. I was assigned to a small guerilla attack in Afghanistan to neutralize a group of insurgents that were planning to attack the President. This is news to you because Seals missions are meant to be kept completely confidential. I have no qualms of telling you because you won’t be alive long enough to go and spread anything around.

“That month was the most troubling of my life. This was my first assignment in Afghanistan, and it was my first glimpse at how heartless this country is. The team I was assigned to was evil in its purest form – when we were sent to attack the insurgents in the town, we finished off their ranks without issue – there were only a dozen or so of them – with only one casualty on our side.

“When we were done, though, my team refused to leave the town. If I remember right, they wanted to ‘hang out and have some fun’ for a while. Their idea of fun was sneaking into the houses of innocent families and seeing who could kill in the most disgusting manner.

“They were ruthless, devoid of any feeling. They thought they could just blame their terrors on the insurgents, say that they weren’t fast enough to stop them in their act. They thought nobody would care if they lobbed a grenade into a sleeping baby’s room. They thought nobody would mind if they played Russian roulette with somebody’s grandmother they crippled with a shot to the knees. They thought they were invincible.

“I stayed up that night and shot all of them, all twenty of them. There was no other way.

“I vowed to avenge the lives of all the innocent people that were killed in that town, all the families that they killed in cold blood. Unfortunately, having killed the only pilot of the helicopter, I had no way home. I wandered the deserts until I came across a small village. I met the leader of the town, told them my story. It turned out that they were a small terror group that had yet to strike; they were unknown to any anti-terror programs associated with the U.N. In any other conditions I would have reported them immediately, but I had to make right what had been done so horribly wrong in the town.

“And so it was – I stayed in the village for two years, planning an attack on this waste of a country. Now it all comes to fruition.

“Join me.”