Formidable Occupation

Chapter Two

After I went to The Med, I decided to stop by my locker to read my target’s file. Usually by now I consult with Mitchell the statistic guy down in the Statistics and Surveillance Centre section of the building. But today a wave of cubical workers on lunch break forced me to hide on a room specially made for the company’s hired murderers.

It was like my feet ran on autopilot to walk towards a white locked cabinet row, on which door was written my employee identity number. Those numbers gave me chill sometimes, maybe because of the fact that the company rather refer us as numbers than as names, as if we’re that replaceable and machine-like we weren’t names, we were something like ED10092044. Just something.

As I opened the locker door by sticking my fingerprint to a scanner and waited until the thing beeped in its highly annoying sound, I accidentally dropped my envelope filled with infos of my target. I bent down to pick it up after the thing beeped, and the first thing that I saw was her prom picture that she could post online in the past. She looked happy as a dumb teenager that age would be, and the group of girls with the same ‘I’m young and dumb’ smile stood beside her raising their hands in a party-ish manner.

I sat down on the floor, to marvel the memory lane that wasn’t mine. Man, I wished my life was that good for me. I liked watching pictures like this, seeing things alive rather than dead and empty, like the most of my life I spent growing up in a mass of land filled with trailers and tents, tied tight to poverty. My brother and I lived in a mountain tent, it had a camouflage motive outside and inside there were probably around twenty blankets and one pillow to share, and a griller an old lady was nice enough to gave us when we knocked on her door, trick or treating on July because there were nothing to eat at all. I remember she said;

“Where do you boys live?” and I looked over to my brother, I remember my brother’s face sunk and I knew he was too much of a man at sixteen to told her that we lived in a tent down in Newark, so I stepped up and told her we haven’t had anything to eat and no one in our hood had enough to share. She gave us a pack of bacon, some bread, and an old electric griller.

I snapped back to reality after I put down the picture back into the envelope, it felt good knowing I haven’t forgotten my past but it also hurt a little that my past were a series of events of being hungry, cold, and miserable. I know I never forgotten the hardest years of my live when I still savored the taste of the simplest food by eating it slower and only have a bottle of water to wash it down to my stomach.

I picked up the scattered papers and scanned my eyes through it. Her name was Savannah Lynn Carpenter, she was only 20, and she worked in a call centre somewhere in the Bronx. Her parents lived somewhere in small town Florida. It looked like she couldn’t stand small town scene or Miami where everyone was encouraged to be orange, that sort of woman, independent pushy woman. I imagined what it would be like to know someone like that, maybe we would be friends maybe she would dislike me, who knows? I never really met a lot of people.

At these sort of moments of getting to know my target, I never really thought about killing them, the real them. I just blurred their face out of my mind so the guilt was numbed a bit, and I didn’t go crazy from all the mentally weighing killing related matters.

I looked through the pictures again, and I saw the white page, containing pictures of her CCTV captured daily activity. Which was a series of pictures of her getting out of her car to her office, somehow she always had food in one of her hands in every single picture, maybe she had a habit of eating while driving.

The eliminating process needed a lot of thought and strategy so it seemed like a natural death. Maybe I could pretend to hitch a ride, maybe snap her neck somewhere, and throw the car off of a cliff or something. I cringe at the thought o me actually putting it into action. I’ve been doing this for two years now, seven targets already, I didn’t know when could stop, I didn’t ask.

I remember Garret always said that he longer I do it, the faster time would go. Neurologically speaking, I think what he meant was the longer I do this job, the more likely I develop Dissociative Disorder. I don’t know… I mean, right now, time feels slow and the slower time goes the closer my past can chase me somehow.

My hands stopped searching through the paper for more stuff and put the things back in the envelope. I put on the earpiece and tapped it three times to activate it, the object was half the size of my index finger’s tip, so it fitted easily in my ear.

I can hear crunching sounds in my ear, like a signal buffer, or dialing sounds, but in truth it was the sound of Mitchell, the guy behind the computers watching cameras for me, the sound of Mitchell eating chips. He was an ex smoker, two packs a day man who needed to keep his hands busy with chips and at desperate times, gummy worms.

“Mitch, you got any shocking unfiled infos for me?” I said as I got up to pick up the backpack that was in my locker. It contained some notebooks so that I look like something that’s not a killer, maybe a student, and some white pills in a bottle that said ‘Viagra’ containing a sort of poison developed to be undetectable.

“Uh, maybe. She applied for a breast enlargement when she was 18 to a clinic in Miami, but there are no files suggesting that she went through the boob job.” He chuckled. I had to give him a break, he was not a ladies man or a lady man, he’s just a man, a bored sexless man. We rarely met outside the cyber world, and the earpiece, all I knew is when he sees me, even walking down the street; his face would form an extreme version of a normal frown and he would shake the expression off by looking down and then up again, faking a confident nerd smile I knew wasn’t real. I knew he feared me. If I were him, I would probably be afraid of people like me too.

“Anything that can really help me, buddy?” The first respond I got was more of him chewing some chips.

“Mm-hm”

“Are you eating Funyun again? You know it’s bad for your cholesterol.” I told him as I slammed the locker close, I liked the way he was able to think of me as a person rather than a killing object through this form of communication. Even a little bit of humanity sometimes made me feel less like a walking dead, like I’m something rather than just a thing.

“Yeah, well, it’s delicious and you can’t stop me. Anyways, you might wanna move fast, E, she’s gonna leave town tomorrow. I saw it in her status.” I could hear his voice turned heavier when we talked about our target. Human nature to kill other human can be triggered only when we’re threatened or really really fucked up in the head, not when it’s our job.

“So I have to kill her before then, man, that’s too soon”

“You’ll figure it out. You can always follow her outside of town. You’re the field guy, you know your way out” He was right, I knew my way out. I knew how to do my job, I just hate that it was me that was doing my job.

Shit, I thought to myself. I really needed to get my mental checked.

“Where is she now?” This was the question I start every job with. It was time to meet her.