Hard Candy Saga Read Online Free PDF Page A

Marines watched, while others turned away.
    Rock’s heart throbbed against his chest bone as the Marine attempted to mount the girl. He quickly took action, by grabbing him by his neck and dragging him away from the little Vietnamese girl.
    Some of the white Marines yelled at Rock.
    â€œWhat the fuck you doing, Barton? You nigger!”
    Rock ignored them. He took the Marine by the scruff of his neck and proceeded to bang his head face-first into a huge tree trunk, rendering him unconscious instantly. The Marine’s face split open like a watermelon.
    But Rock was possessed. He continued to bang the Marine’s head on the tree. When he fell to the ground, he started to kick him all over his body.
    Rock ended up beating his fellow Marine to death and shooting two others who tried to stop him. Rock went on the run in the Vietnamese jungle for two weeks after that, surviving on sheer instincts and highly classified countersniper training he’d received from the military.
    When American soldiers finally found him, they treated him worse than some of the Vietnamese prisoners being held by the Americans. He was beaten and tortured. Rock was dishonorably discharged from the Marine Corps and held in a military prison for a court-martial.
    However, it wasn’t long before the CIA heard of his superior abilities to move alone in the jungles of Vietnam. And they offered Rock a deal he could not refuse. Rock became a covert operations officer for the CIA in lieu of being court-martialed and sent to prison for the murder of his fellow soldiers. Serving as a CIA covert ops officer was ultimately where Rock learned how to make himself invisible and to make people disappear. The government had trained him to be a first-class “cleaner.”
    When Rock finally returned to the United States after the war, he chose to live a demure, circumspect life. He ended up in his hometown of Brooklyn, New York, where he rented a small apartment and began his very low-key life. Rock would leave his apartment once a day to purchase food and staples he needed for that day, frequenting the same store each day, a small bodega two blocks up from his apartment, which was where he’d first met Eric “Easy” Hardaway. Rock always felt that their meeting was predestined.
    It was a hot summer night, and Rock had already turned in for the day. He’d gone on his morning store run and purchased some of his usual food items, like green tea, whole wheat bread, and skim milk. On that particular day, after the sun had gone down, Rock started feeling slightly ill. Rock was never one to get sick and could count on one hand the number of times he’d had so much as a common cold. But, that day, he had an incessant pounding in his head and a very high fever. He’d tossed and turned for hours before deciding he needed to get some pain relief.
    When he got to the bodega, he noticed several guys hanging around talking and several skeletal-looking men and women passing the guys every couple of minutes. Rock wasn’t stupid. It was clear to him that there was drug dealing going on. He wasn’t judgmental about anyone’s hustle. Some of the guys noticed Rock, and a few of them made comments.
    â€œLook at old dude walking around like the grim fuckin’ reaper,” one of the young guys commented about his all-black clothes and his size, garnering laughs from the others.
    â€œI see that big-ass nigga e’ery day, and he always look scary as hell. That m’fucka taller than Shaq,” another one of the guys joked.
    â€œI don’t care how big that bitch-ass nigga is. His ass better be scared of this,” the first guy said, lifting his shirt to display a firearm in the front waistband of his pants.
    Rock continued to walk into the store. All of his life people had commented on his size—six feet nine inches tall and a good two hundred and sixty pounds. Rock’s skin was like onyx, and his eyes were