CHAPTER ONE: Dead But Not Buried

There are few things as beautiful as a gunshot. Now, that might sound like a fucked-up thing to think and you’d be exactly right. This is the thought of someone with a hole in their brain. But the agent didn’t have time for self-critique. She was busy shooting people in the head and trying very hard not to die. The gun fired again and she didn’t even notice pulling the trigger. It was an auto-immune response to the threat of getting murdered.

She was crouched behind a stack of large concrete blocks, the making of some sort of traffic cordon. Through it she could see the shapes of her wannabe killers, like lights in the darkness. They were people or at least people shaped, she couldn’t see much more than their outlines and her head and heart were racing a mile a minute, acting faster than she could think.

Collapsing from her crouch and leaning to the side, she braced her pistol with her other hand and fired several more times before withdrawing her arm to safety. She could see the bullet-trails and the shapes of her attackers through the cordon, through the skin of the world itself. If she closed her eyes she’d still see them, intruders on what is supposed to be a personal and private darkness. But she didn't close her eyes. She fired again.

The pistol doesn’t need to be reloaded. This is a note purely for your benefit as she has completely forgotten about reloading or ‘ammo’ at all. She’d forget about bullets too if there wasn’t one firmly lodged in her waistcoat, slowly chewing its way through fabric and then later skin and muscle and bone. She hadn’t started bleeding yet but it was only a matter of time.

There was only one assassin left that she could see, the others must have died while she was momentarily withdrawn and thinking bullet-thoughts. The attacker is skittering around to the side, intent upon ambush, perhaps entirely unaware that she sees them every step of the way, trusting on the permanence and reality of things. Uncharacteristically foolish. She does nothing until the moment her target ceases to be a silhouette and becomes a creature, having travelled into the realms of mundane sight. She fires before she sees it or at least, before she can think about seeing it. By the time the phenomenon, the sensory package of sight had hit her eyes, travelled into her brain and her first thought was formulated, the creature has already been dead for at least a thousand years.

The pistol was black and blocky and generic, reminiscent of at least a dozen handguns that you have probably seen and entirely without distinguishing marks. If someone caught a glimpse of it, someone normal, someone without a hole in their head, they’d probably mistake it for another model. It did fire bullets of a sort though, so it was a gun. It was a gun. The agent didn’t know its exact make or model or even if ‘make and model’ was a thing for guns or if that was just for cars. All of that was classified information and she was at her lowest security clearance yet.

The agent looked at her pistol and it was good. She didn’t look at much else. Not even at the corpses she’d made. She wasn’t blind to them. But the moment they had stopped being hostile they had been removed from her sense of the world and were just like the asphalt and the rocks and the cars.

Instead she just sat there, semi-crouched in a sort of collapsed squat and she thought about nothing at all for a little while. All other capacity had fallen out of the hole in her brain, you see, the hole that could not be seen or felt but was much more real than you or me or almost anyone else.

A long moment passed and

+++COUNTER-HOSTILE PROTOCOL: Locked+++

+++COUNTER-HOSTILE PROTOCOL: Unlock+++

+++Incorrect+++

+++COUNTER-HOSTILE PROTOCOL: Unlock pretty please+++

And just like that she was back to normal or at least as close to normal as she ever could be. She could see and feel the world again and not just exist as a cluster of accelerating bullet-thoughts and auto-immune reactions. Higher functions regained. Don’t get me wrong though, there’s still a hole in her head. It’s just a different one, one that she doesn’t know about yet.

Having returned to personhood, she could see that she was crouched behind a pile of cinderblocks in the shadow of a half-built overpass. There were concrete walls all around her, the shell of a man-made river or flood outlet that was right now running dry. Had been running dry for a long time. Up over those walls she could dimly see the night sky and the clouds between it and her and the skyscrapers between them and her. They were all lit up, as was the rest of the city that she couldn’t see but it wasn’t like that here. She was in an industrial welt, where electricity didn’t go and people forgot about. Sometimes this was due to something properly anomalous but a lot of the time it was just because the wrong people lived there.

Seven less people now.

‘People’ was the right term too, even if they had assumed mangled and inhuman corpse shapes. That wasn’t due to some sort of secret internal monster or werewolf deal. It was just what being shot many many times did to the human body. The woman, the agent, let’s call her ‘Agent Z’ for clarification’s sake, rose to her feet and looked at the human meat littering the concrete around her. The last one, the closest one to her, might have been more bullet than flesh by the end of it and had lost much of its mass to being an extended smear on the ground that was at least an inch-thick. It smelled beautifully, creatively, disgusting. But if you have ever seen a massacre or a battlefield or a really-bad-at-it’s-job hospital or anywhere else where a lot of human people had lived and then died very quickly...it wouldn’t be unfamiliar.

And for the life of her, Agent Z could not remember why she had killed them. Why there had been a fight to begin with. She had initiated Counter-Hostile activities, presumably, in the response to some sort of threat. This is what logic dictated. But logic has its place and the human slaughterhouse is never that place. So she stopped thinking logically and shifted through alternative brain modes but none of them provided an answer.

Nothing, at least, beyond:

Something Happened.

The Facts:

She was Agent Z and she was not suffering from any sort of massive retrograde amnesia. She knew everything that was appropriate for one of her current security clearance to know! She still knew who she was even though you do not. But she did not remember what she had just been doing, anything immediately before that bloody baptism into the world that was the Counter-Hostile Protocols. She didn’t remember anything that had happened today. Or yesterday either, come to think of it. The day before yesterday was fine though. She remembered that day. Unfortunately it hadn’t been a very memorable day to begin with. Blander than an egg sandwich. Agent Z has never had a good egg sandwich in her life, probably, because those can be pretty tasty if you make it right. But more importantly all the corpses around her had once been human. Like, ordinary people or something along those lines. And that was bad and not just because killing humans is bad. Though don’t get it twisted, killing humans is bad. It’s not ideal. Agent Z could think this now that she had swapped out the Counter-Hostile hole in her brain for this much more puzzling, much more subtle variant. But it was also bad because there should have been no reason to go Counter-Hostile in the first place if this had been all there was at stake. It’s not for this kind of situation! It’s for bigger, worse things. People, just a gang of people, were not suitable for this kind of activity and that was why the man who had rushed her was now mostly paste. Even the more dangerous person-variants, like police, did not typically earn this response. So. Why had she done it?

And it was at this moment Agent Z recalled that she had been shot. Right in the chest! She was wearing a very sharp black suit, with long tapered trousers and a jacket and a waistcoat and an undershirt and there was a bullet in the middle of that arrangement now. It had slowed upon contact with her, of course, but it had not stopped. The postponed bullet was still slowly drilling a hole through her waistcoat and the shirt beneath it and she probably only had less than an hour before it broke the skin and started digging deeper. Towards her ribs and her heart.

The mere notion of this was a little offensive to her. She shouldn’t have been shot while she was Counter-Hostile. Surely her edge wasn’t that dulled, was it? Ergo: She had been shot before she had engaged in Counter-Hostilities. Perhaps that had been the trigger for the massacre, though it really shouldn’t have been.

So instead she sighed and groaned and patted down the pockets of her bloodstained (not hers, never hers) trousers in search of a cigarette and failed to find one.

Another aspect of this forgotten time: why would she have ever gone without cigarettes?

So instead she just settled for sighing and groaning some more until she felt better, something that required at least three consecutive minutes of just standing around, waving her arms and making exasperated noises. There. Suitably de-stimulated. She didn’t feel normal because she was an agent and she was Agent Z in particular and there was a kind of broken mechanical landslide of cogs and wheels in her soul at all times, even without the hole in her head, but it was alright.

After that incredibly vital activity, she took off her jacket and her waistcoat and lifted up her shirt to inspect the wound that she was going to have in the future. The bullet had not moved with her clothes, despite being embedded in them. Instead it hung in the air less than inch away from her sternum. It was spinning very slowly, almost imperceptibly except that word never meant much to something like Agent Z.

And it moved with her, staying in the exact same position in regards to her no matter what, a satellite locked in a geostationary orbit that was slowly decaying.

And when it did touch her, it would strike her with all the force of, well, a gunshot. It had not been robbed of momentum. It was still moving as fast and as powerfully as ever, just from another frame of reference. And she had cemented it to her, made it inevitable.

She prodded the bullet but to no result. She hadn’t expected any. But it did let her judge the bullet’s angle. Right for the heart. She was roughly 72 hours away from becoming a Bon Jovi song.

“Well,” she said, speaking for the first time in a while. Her voice was dry and hoarse, like she’d been gargling broken glass. “I better get my clearance lifted.”

She spoke this for her own benefit, to form an echo in her head that would hopefully remind her of her slowly arriving future or rather, the lack of one. She wasn’t speaking for anyone else because as far as she could see, everyone around her had become dissociated meat and corpse shapes. But someone heard her all the same and the sound of a cough, a wet and throaty and thoroughly *alive* sound, made her stop in her tracks.

There was a shape in the shadows of the stillborn overpass.

Agent Z didn’t rush. She didn’t have the energy anymore. She was out of harsh and sharp thoughts and actions and was in the realm of tired sponginess that many of us live out our whole lives within. So instead she just re-acquired and put back on her:

Undershirt Tie (she’d also been wearing a tie this whole time) Waistcoat Suit Jacket Pistol (into her hand, she is not wearing it like the other occupants of this list)

And turned around like a machine to look down into the eyes of a dying man.

He wasn’t dying like she was, with her little bullet pet. He was dying a perfectly natural and normal human death. Namely, he had been shot in the abdomen at least once and not more than thrice. She knew instantly that she hadn’t done it because he was not obliterated or shredded. No, this had been an ordinary bullet from an ordinary gun in the hands of an ordinary person.

Logic, rearing its ugly and unwelcome head once more, dictated that whoever shot this dying man was now almost certainly one of the corpses. Perhaps it could have even been a stray shot that had been meant for her.

That last thought moved her, even as his general plight had not. This man was a casualty of the hole in her head and that was not correct. Things shouldn’t be like that. If she had just decided to inflict this upon him, why, she could have moved on without a second thought! But this man had been speared through by a shot that had originated from her blind spot, from her blind two days and that made her feel bad. Made her feel responsible. And if she was responsible for something that she didn’t remember making the choice to do, that meant it was an accident.

So she kneeled over him and briefly-

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Unlocked+++

++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Locked++

She classified the bullet in him. It and the wound it had given him, the death it had promised him, were well above a civilian’s right to know. It was now a Level 1 Clearance secret, which was as secret as she could make it and the best that she could do right now.

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Locked+++

+++SECRECY PROTOCOL: Unlocked+++

She emerged from her re-classification to see that nothing had changed. He was bleeding and dying and the pieces of himself were falling out. But that was only because she had clearance. The man himself was rising to his feet and to his eyes and the eyes of any other civilian, he was alive. It was just a cover-up but it was a damn good one.

“Thank you?,” the dead man said, unable to believe what was happening to him. Unable to know, truly. “I-.That. Thank you, sir.”

“Ma’am,” she automatically corrected him and he instinctually winced at the sound of her voice. “No actually, don’t call me ma’am. I don’t want to be called that. That sucks. It sucks and I hate it. It suc-I mean, just call me Z. If you have to call me anything. You don’t have to call me anything.”

“...Like the letter?”

“Like the letter. Do you speak English? That Z. Zed and not Zee.” This was an incomprehensible question to the man, since he thought that they’d both been speaking English this whole time. But he was about as comprehended-out as it was possible for someone to be at this point so he just kind of ignored her clarification.

Instead he asked: “What does it stand for?” This might sound like a stupid question and it is but have some pity for this man. He has been thrust into a world where there are no good questions.

“I don’t know.”

And she was correct. Agent Z’s name was above her security clearance.