Free Influence by Andrew Snadden

Foster shot up as quick as a lightning bolt and told him to fuck off, knocking a couple of empty pint glasses onto the floor in the process. O'Keeffe looked at Conan in shock and then told him that now was the not the time or place to discuss this stuff. Conan nonchalantly raised his hands up with his head tilted as if to say 'whatever' and looked at Foster with a relaxed expression and said “Let’s leave it Foster, no harm done eh?”.
    “Come on then big man, you want to sort this out now do you? Come outside, it's time you learnt how to shut that big mouth of yours! I'm not Adam Jennings, you don't scare me!” Foster snarled at Conan who looked taken aback at how Foster was still being combative after he had backed off. A few heads quickly pirouetted from the bar behind on hearing the names Adam Jennings and Foster. Their fellow drinkers linking the two names with the story that had been dominating the news. Jones noticing the unwanted attention told Foster to sit down and Conan to shut up. Despite Conan being willing to settle it, Foster with his alcohol clouded thought processes, was not.
    O'Keeffe sensing something bad was about to happen, suggested they leave the pub and go for dinner somewhere to soak up the misguided amount of alcohol they had consumed. Foster's face began to display the same vacant, aggressive expression he had witnessed in the toilets of the secret debrief location, and numerous occasions since the operation. O'Keeffe recognised it and knew that whatever was going on in Foster's head, it was only going to lead to one thing, and that was trouble.
    “What's happened to you anyway Foster, you're a bloody mess? It's about time you started getting your shit together! Do you think you're the only one who's struggling since the operation?!” Conan asked, pissed off at Fosters inability to back off and how he had been acting over the recent months.
    “Screw it down Conan you idiot, people can hear you!” O'Keeffe implored him, realising that they were being watched and knowing that Foster was just about to explode.
    “Bollocks, I want to know why this little prat has been playing the post-traumatic stress card since that night. Looking for compensation are you?” Conan slurred in drunken defiance of O'Keeffe.
    “Just leave it Conan!” Jones said, trying to defuse the situation.
    Foster put his palms flat in the middle of the table and leant towards Conan with pupils like they had been in the court room, dilated and fixated. His breathing started to become heavier with a more purposeful, slow rhythm as if he was preparing to do something terrible.
    “Do you want to be the next person I kill?” Foster quietly whispered to Conan without a shred of humanity in his voice.
    Sensing that Foster was going to go for Conan, O'Keeffe moved between the two men and pleaded with Foster to calm down and leave it. Foster averted his cold gaze from Conan to O'Keeffe before he relaxed and stood up from his chair. Both Conan and Jones let out thankful sighs.
    “Aren't you that copper who slotted that unarmed terrorist?” said an overly confident man in his early thirties and wearing a suit with an Essex boy style hair and stubble, naively believing that his question would be well received.
    Foster quickly spun around on his heels and grabbed the man by the throat before he rapidly pushed him backwards up against the bar, holding him by the throat and screaming into his face with his fist raised. The man's eyes grew as large as planets as he looked upon the enraged, flushed face of Foster, whose veins looked as big as garden hoses because of the angry adrenaline filled blood pumping around them.
    “ANTHONY RELAX! Come on mate, let him go, he's not worth it” O'Keeffe pleaded with Foster who was still gripping the man by his throat and almost forcing him in half over the edge of the bar. The landlord who was standing less than six feet away didn't move an inch; no one did.
    O'Keeffe desperately attempted to