(Hail) HYDRA

Chapter I.

"Okay, Cairo, you got this." I told myself, holding my pistol carefully, loaded and ready to kill anyone who would dare to oppose me. I walked into the store, gun hidden under the jacket. I grabbed the food I was looking for and came to the cash register. Except for the teen girl at the counter, this store was completely empty. I looked at my freshly stolen watch. It was almost midnight, and the store was about to close soon.

It's been just a few hours since I escaped the hospital, but it seemed like eternity to me. Those unknown streets of 'New York' were nothing for me... or were they? I wasn't sure. The first thing I remembered was me waking up in the hospital with hell of a headache and... well... blank mind. I remembered absolutely nothing, and yet when I was about to rob that small store, I didn't manage to remember anything more. My mind was as empty, but this was about to change soon....

"Sir, card or cash?" The sweet voice of a hard-working teen got me out of my bottomless pit of thoughts as she asked for like the fifth time already.
"I will take the cash, please." I smiled at her and took the gun out, pointing it at her. "This is a robbery." The girl was shocked. I feel both guilty of traumatizing her, yet so proud of myself I pulled it off so smoothly. While she was taking the money out of the register, I once again fell down into my history in my mind.

The doctors told me I was caught in an explosion. Didn't tell me where or when, just that an explosion occurred and the police that went to investigate it found me heavily injured there and that I was lucky - there were no other survivors. This was a week ago. Today in the morning, police went to investigate me, as I was finally able to answer somewhat properly their stupid questions, like "What were you doing here?", "What's your name?" or "Get the security, he's insane!!!" The first I answered by the classic "I dunno, I have freaking amnesia, dude." and the second I joked around and said "Cairo", the name of that doctor that was taking care of me.

...well, now that I thought of it, the last sentence wasn't a question as I was already free, and those were the captain's last words before I threw him out of the window. Oh well.

I was about to grab the money from the terrified girl, when I looked at the poster on the wall. It was a simple ad for some kind of Greek mythology-inspired cereal, but my eyes got stuck on just one word on the poster.
"Hydra." I said out loud. Then I grabbed the money and ran out. I, just in case, shot a few bottles of various alcohols behind the girl so she would be sure I had a real gun and I ran off into the abandoned empty flat I called home. I sat down, started eating my bread and tried to get my mind off to something else. "Hydra. Why did that sound so familiar?" I asked myself. Then, a simple, yet frightening phrase came to my mind and I said it out loud without even thinking about it:

"Hail Hydra."