Humans, possibly one of the more arrogant occupants of this universe are also one of the more important species. At least, this is what I had always believed throughout my teenage years, and my short adult life. Now, in my 22nd year, on an unbearably hot day, the worst news I'd yet heard came to me; the news of my own death. My next door neighbor came to me as I sat on my lawn chair, soaking in the mid morning sun. The elderly woman looked at me as though I should be in a coffin at a viewing and screamed, this caused me to fall out of my chair and land face down on an anthill. I lifted my face quickly, but not quickly enough to avoid the woman's cane as it collided with my shoulder.
“Ouch!” I yelped, slightly dazed, “What have I done this time, Dolores?”
“You're d-d-dead,” she stammered with difficulty, “They said so,” she added with a knowing nod.
This was by far the strangest thing she had ever said to me, even more so than the time I had to help her back home from my New Year's Eve party a few months previous when she began talking about how Elvis would only talk to certain newspapers from beyond the grave. I had to think for a moment before I chose my words as carefully and delicately as I could.
“Okay, Dolores,” I started calmly, “who said that I'm dead, because we can both see that I'm not even remotely corpse-like.”
She looked more at ease, but still guarded as she spoke, “The people at the paper did, your obituary was in it today; saw it while I was looking for my friend Agnes Lyndstrom's funeral time.”
I must have looked visibly disturbed, because she added, “I wanted to skip the wake, her casket will be open and those affairs are so morbid already.”
I shook my head and said, “Dolores, I'm troubled because someone who knew me wrote an obituary about me and got it published,” I looked at the ground and continued, “The number of people who personally know me is quite small; I can count them on one hand, you and your partner Sheila are included. There are only two other people who know me enough to know my full name, one is my sister who doesn't know what state I live in, and the other is Reggie who sold me the house, and I haven't seen or heard from him since he got the money for the house and five years worth of property tax.”
Dolores, looking astounded at what I had said, eased herself into the now empty lawn chair. She spoke much softer now, so soft that had I been a few steps farther away, I would have heard nothing, “What could you have possibly done that was so bad that you severed ties with your family and kept your name off your own house?”
My demeanor grew more serious as I looked all around us and lowered my voice to her level, “Honestly? Nothing as bad as my parents or my sister; my parents, if you could even call them that, raised my sister and I to be like them, contract killers of the deadliest caliber. By age 12 I could shoot better than most army snipers, I understood each gun I used inside and out, their inner workings were explained to me instead of nursery rhymes as soon as I was able to comprehend complex speech. My first book was a textbook on the history of firearms; at this point in time I believed these things were normal. My training and knowledge of Wing Chun Kung Fu was completed at 16, one year before the Incident. For that entire year I practiced and strove for the affection of my parents, while my elder sister made a name for herself as a prodigy in assassination, sometimes seducing her targets and cutting their throats while they were at ease. As I look back on that time, I think she enjoyed killing her victims more so than my parents did; she was a textbook sociopath,” I paused for a bit to look about a bit more, the obituary made me a bit nervous, the people who knew my location wouldn't have done something so cruel; they would have no reason for such cruelty.
I looked back at Dolores who looked mildly horrified and continued, “My family's base of operations was the eastern shore of Clear Lake, all the way into an expansive network of tunnels into and under the western part of Hudson Mountain in an almost unreachable part of Maine. My father always said he had built the tunnels himself, but they were so vast and deep that I couldn't imagine one man building them without an entire team of miners. I didn't know much about the outside world until after the Incident, I may have read about the world and it's vastness, but it was not until after the Incident that I experienced it.” I ran my hands through my hair as I thought back to what seemed like a thousand years ago, and a million miles away. Dolores was the first person I ever confided in, and one of the few people I trusted.
