Formidable Occupation

Chapter One

Our faces scrunched up to an unfamiliar disdain as we closed our envelopes, we knew what was coming and it would not be great. Somehow, I would like to do some kind of honoring before I kill ceremony thing, but that would make me look crazy, even possessed.

Garret must have seen the guilty look in my face. He tapped my shoulder and that tap meant we should move forward. So we headed to the one place people with our job are obligated to go to before we started to stalk on our targets.

As we stepped out of the gloomy murderer’s mission lair as I called it, the whole atmosphere of the room changed from straightly guilty business to subtly guilty lavish business. Every decoration in the corridor and most of the rooms were designed to covered up the fact that N.I.A ran a disgusting effort to keep their reputations up.

We passed through those doors again, the way they were closed, colored differently, guarded with sophisticated looking ID swipe security systems, they made me curious yet I knew I didn’t have any business for the things that might lay behind them. Doors, doors, doors, what’s behind them? I’d never know.

After we passed the bend with the funny angle in the corridor, we found the clear glass door with the words ‘Medical Facility’ stylishly painted on the sophisticated clear surface. As we entered the room, we could see the sort of lobby part was also lavish and over the top for a workplace. Why in the hell would a medical facility need a fucking three feet long chandelier? Decorators, I didn’t get them. It was all about image apparently.

The Med wasn’t exactly packed, only a few people, sick employees maybe, walked around and some doctors were handling them. The woman behind the lobby desk nodded at us politely before we entered the room with the black door with a ‘Restricted Area’ sign.

As usual, the too coldly air conditioned room was almost empty. The unnecessarily pretty but also comfortable chairs lined up in a perfectly straight line from the wall for us to sit in as the company doctors shot the stimulant into our veins.

The stimulant was a formula of hormones, vitamins, and whatever science things that can affect human brain and body to have less empathy, to be less depressed, stronger, faster, think better, have less impulses, kill better.

“You’ll be fine” Garret gave me that mentor-ish reassuring nod.

We sat in one of the chairs, and then he turned to me, making the chairs squeaked as he moved. I was tense and he was not. As stupid as it was, I was freakishly afraid of needles, the length of needles the doctor brought to us sent chills through my spine.

We couldn’t see the face of the doctor, he was wearing a hospital-y mask. He could be a woman and we wouldn’t know. Maybe he saw us before in some other Med appointments, he looked like he knew I shouldn’t go first.

I had to distract myself from the needles, so I looked up to the equally unnecessary chandelier above our heads. The wallpapers were brown and black, making the room looked like a kind of room we would find in Four Seasons Hotel rather than an insurance company. The huge gap of distance between one wall to another would probably freak an agoraphobic person.

I turn to my left to see how Garret was doing with the stimulant. He was doing good and bad at the same time. After the masked mystery doctor pulled out the long needle from the vessel in his neck, Garret closed his eyes as he threw his head back like a heroin addict getting his fix. His fingers curled in satisfaction and his eye lids fluttered then closed. Then he leaned back like he’s the world’s most relaxed son of a bitch. An addict.

I was not yet in that point of stimulant consumption, I wasn’t addicted to it. At least not that kind of addict. I didn’t know if I was still on the effect of the doze of stimulant they gave me last time or not, all I knew was I got to get that pink looking liquid in my system, to make me do my job better.

My nails dug into the cushion of the chairs as the needle found its way to my blood vessel and shot the stimulant into me. Before I knew it, it was done and the doctor had left us alone in the room.

I looked around from the pretty looking walls and chairs, to Garret who was just about to be out of it. The look in his eyes told me his consciousness was starting to come back, he would live through, I didn’t have to worry. The longer I stay in this place, the less focused I got. So I decided to leave.

“See you later, take care, okay?” I pat Garret’s arm before walking out to The Med, the corridor, passing the wave of hungry cubical workers on lunch break. I didn’t have to be worried about them seeing me, they would think I’m a bike messenger or something, they’re too busy thinking about their lunches to notice.

These are the things that I will do

I will meet someone in surveillance and statistic section of the company

I will check out the backgrounds of my victim

I will stalk them, find out about them

Then I will eliminate them in a discreet and subtle way

I told myself this so I could focus on my job, not my underlying depression caused by my guilt and my insecurities, These were the things I shouldn’t but would do.