Agents of DEATH

Chapter 1 - If There's Been A Fool Around, It's Got To Be Me

I could start this story with a hefty dose of action. I could plunge you right into a big battle scene, where I’m with my friends in a gunfight with masked terrorists. I could show you the way my best friend jumps out and faces down the AK-toting baddies and yells, “Hey assbutts! My name is Scipio San Niccolò! You killed my brother! Prepare to die!”

I could do that...but then you’d start feeling lost, because you have absolutely no context of what’s going on in this moment.

So let’s go back a bit. Be kind, rewind. Quadruple speed. No, maybe faster.

Probably the best time to start my story is about three hundred years ago.

Somewhere in the vast snowy wastelands of Mother Russia, a long-dead ancestor of mine, Vasily Krycek, desperately sought a way to save his eight-year-old son Andrei from dying of smallpox. The legend that’s been passed down since then says that old great-times-nine-or-ten-grandpa Vasily met a hooded man in a bar, and over a few shots of vodka (did they even do shots back then?), negotiated a deal to keep little Andrei alive, by giving him a highly experimental shot of some viral cocktail that was said to have worked wonders on English patients.

If only he’d read the fine print.

Ten years later, when Andrei turned eighteen, the hooded man came back and said that it was time for him to join his team. His team, of course, being a secret organization known as Department Earth - Agency of Thanatos. Or, if you care to acronymize it, “DEATH.”

Vasily demanded to know what this hooded man meant by this, and he was shown the tricky language that allowed Andrei to escape Death for ten years. But now those ten years were almost up - in fact, they would cross the ten-year mark two days later. And Death needed to come collect.

The only way Andrei could continue to stay alive was to become an agent of DEATH. Basically, a Grim Reaper in training.

The hooded man told him that being an agent of DEATH was the best job a young Russian man could have. It would sure as hell beat a long, boring farm life, which is what he would have had otherwise - as the firstborn son, Andrei was to inherit the Krycek farm when Vasily died. The job came with a number of unprecedented perks, too - access to highly-trained magical practitioners, all well-versed in the fine arts of supernatural warfare and medicine; competitive pay; a hundred years of job security.

The only downside was that Andrei would have to leave his family for seven years in order to go through grueling training in Hades.

Since he was faced with death otherwise, Andrei ultimately accepted his fate, and served 42 years as the first Krycek family agent of DEATH.

Ever since then, all firstborn sons of all men named Krycek have been similarly conscripted into the Agency at or before the age of eighteen years, three hundred and twenty-seven days, ten hours, fourteen minutes, and twenty-four seconds.

I have less than two years left to enter the Agency myself.

But, because I’m convinced that the whole family legend is utter bullshit, and because I see no future in being an agent, I’m determined to make something different of myself.

The trouble is, I’m still not sure what “something different” could be.

I guess that’s why my best friend invited me to come join him in the woods above Winterhaven for a picnic. He seems to think he can single-handedly change my mind.

“Dude, you know how elite the Agency is,” Nico says as he negotiates his old Ford Escort up the narrow asphalt track that splits the forest in two. “I mean, look at me. They didn’t invite me to join. I volunteered. If they let me in, I’ll be even more special that way.”