Formidable Occupation

1

 After twenty something minutes of staring at my own reflection in the mirror like an idiot on a moral crisis, which I was, I finally braced myself to go through the underground pedestrian tunnel or the UPT and head off to work.

As I sailed through the waves of strangers that were mostly in suits, like always I felt out of place dressed like a bored sexless teenager. I was not a bored sexless teenager, I was a bored sexless twenty something man, well, yeah, only the age was different. I mean, t-shirt, jacket, jeans, and sneakers, this was the closest thing I had to a work uniform, the dress code is blending in with the crowd I guess.

After a few minutes walking from the nearest UPT entrance from my apartment, I finally reached a white door with N.I.A’s logo on it, I waved at the camera and the doors slid open under the command of the surveillance centre inside.

You might be asking, why did I kill?

Because the company had told me to, I was bound to a contract. The big reason why was because N.I.A was a big insurance company that insured people’s lives. The people bought that life insurance products because the company gave them a prediction of their deaths everytime they purchased some life insurance product such as mortality mortgage or just a regular life insurance, they’ll get a prediction based out of a bunch of complex mathematical equations of when they were going to die. People did this because they wanted to have the time to know, to get ready, to say goodbyes and to be assured. A lot of people wanted it actually, about 70 percent of the population had this predictions.

But not all of those predictions were correct. Less than one percent of that predicted deaths were inaccurate by a thread, this caused the company to lose money and if people found out that those less than one percent were incorrectly predicted, the company would lose credibility. It hadn’t make sense to me that less than one percent of the predicted costumers will make an impact out of the billions of people the company had on hook.

The interior of N.I.A’s underground facility didn’t exactly scream ‘evil company that’s responsible for some frauds, deaths, and shits’ although the truth was quite contraire. Every light were distanced perfetly to make the room felt warm and inviting, the soft carpet that was inches thick from the real concrete floor made the place that should be horrific seemed respectable.

Doors by doors, leading into the many rooms I had never been allowed into were alligned on the sides of the corridor, each doors I passed reminded me of how limited my access were to this company. Who knew what went on behind those doors, an evil experiment? A giant teddy bear? The guy who ran the whole company? Some fucking zombies? I didn’t give it much thought before I knew at some time after that day.

The strange thoughts stopped as I entered one of the very few rooms I was allowed in, this was the room where people who had the same job as me receive a file containing infos about who’s next to kill. This was not my favorite room in the whole world, I mean it really wasn’t, I had nightmares about this room a couple of times.

My eyes instantly focused on a blonde head that was on the corner of my peripheral view, and that blonde head turned to me with a sly smile on his face that was very familiar to me, Garret. He was a few years older than me, he was sort of like my mentor, and he was the only real friend I had at that time. His cheeky look and his extrovertness got a lot of people, including a lot of girls and his ‘victims’ fooled for a minute, and don’t get me wrong, the girls and the victims were totally different subjects.

“How long has it been, lil’ me?” He said while messing with my not very groomed hair as I sat down next to him on the grey unnapealing metal chair. The room was small; everything around us was grey, as if the company didn’t bother to hide the fact that we do evil shits anymore.

“Who’s counting? You shouldn’t be ashamed telling me you missed me” I tapped his back as a form of a manly hug. His presence got me unaware of the existence of that square hole on the wall that I always hated, where people from the department where they handed the envelope containing infos about our victims, it was like they had no respect whatsoever. ‘Hey, kill someone, we’ll pay later. Here’s some envelope, you can’t see our face, bye’

“How are you, Eli? You look… like shit, man” he chuckled. When people like us asked each other how are you, we really meant it. It wasn’t a daily chit chat; it was a fundamental question about the well being of our mental state, which was mostly not very good. Killing people bring no good to anyone.

“Like always, how are you? I’m not gonna comment on your look, it’ll seem weird”

He sighed and zoned out for a few seconds before shrugging it off as if saying he’s okay but not all okay. But he bounced back to his normal sly smile and man dimple to reassure me like he always did. He was the kind of guy who takes everyone but himself.

“Here are your current targets, earpieces and good luck” An ‘invincible’ guy from yet another inaccessible room from me said as he pushed two brown envelopes through the square shaped hole on the grey wall. All we could always see was his hand and a part of his upperbody wrapped up in a sweater. We knew him as Johny. He wouldn’t tell his real name.

We picked up the envelopes from Johny and set about on opening it. As we open the envelopes at the same time, Johny was already gone, and we could see the faces of our targets. Mine was a pretty young face on the photo. The pair of dark eyes on this girl’s photo creeped me out, those eyes seemed to be ‘staring’ at me