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Lt. Colonel Schumer drove into the underground parking garage of his apartment building just after 10PM. The subtle roar of his over sized Cadillac's engine echoed from the confining concrete walls as he navigated two turns and pulled into the space marked with his apartment number. He sat in the driver's seat with the engine idling for a few seconds before killing the engine. He opened the door and stepped out, straightening his long gray trench coat as he surveyed the area around him in one broad turn of his head. The dim overhead lighting emphasized the drooping lines in his unshaven and weary face. He let out a breath and closed the door behind him, sidestepping to open the door to the backseat and reach in. He stood up again, clutching a square cardboard box to his chest with both hands and about to swing the door shut with his left knee.

He hadn't seen me, ducked behind the hood of a car in anticipation of his headlight's direction and the limits of his sight-lines. He hadn't heard me, baffling the sounds of my footsteps by carrying the tension of my weight in my knees and timing major movements to be covered by the sound of the engine shutting off and doors opening or closing. He hadn't even smelled me, for the whole place smelled of exhaust and rubber.

He felt me, though, when I was finally within range and drove my right knee into his back, shoving his body into the side of his car. He felt me when I drove my left elbow down into the back of his neck, slamming his chin into the roof of his car. He felt my right hand gripping around his neck, my thumb pressing into the base of his carotid artery, causing his head to draw in to the right and his legs to weaken as a reflex. He felt me pull his left wrist around and press it into his back, making him drop the cardboard box onto the cement floor. He felt me force him back and away from the car and forward, into the narrow hallway leading to a single elevator and a musty stairwell.

When I stopped four feet short of the far wall and gave him one last shove, when he had enough time to raise his arms to blunt the impact with the wall, when I'd had enough time to draw my gun and train it two-handed at the center of his mass, and when he pushed himself away from the wall to turn around, he finally saw me. The look on his face was neither shock or recognition, it was a slight grimace with a hint of a smile.

"This is how you're going to do it?" Schumer grunted before I could speak. "A bullet, in cold blood? A dance in pale bravado." The grin on his face remained.
A slight tingle crept up the base of my skull and swept across the top of my head. "Can't think of anything more fitting," I said.
"It's just," he said before stopping to let out two dry coughs, "I thought you'd developed a thing for poisoning. Haven't eaten anything but fast food since you did Comstock."
"What?"
He leaned backwards against the wall and brought his left hand up to his neck, rubbing the right side. "Trying to kill your way to the top until you get your revenge, huh? It's noble, I guess."
He wasn't making sense, trying to distract me or take me off balance. "Answers first," I said, "then revenge."
Schumer straightened up a bit, dropping his hand from his neck. "What the hell haven't you figured out already?"
"I want to know the truth about your program, why I can do much more than you claim I should be able to. I want to know how you could have been training me my whole life when there's not any missing time in my day-to-day. And, mostly, I want to know why you killed my dad."
The expression fell from Schumer's face for a moment. "Wow," he said, flatly. "You're a lot farther behind than I thought you'd be."

"What are you talking about? All you've told me is lies, how would I know anything else?"
Schumer leaned his head back and chuckled deeply, sickly. "This is quite a situation, then," he said through a grin.
"So tell me, then," I said. "What am I supposed to have figured out already?"
"The program change!" said Schumer. "I thought this was all because you'd found out."
I just looked at him, the gun still pointed at his heart.
Schumer let out a low sigh, then adjusted his footing slightly as if his legs were cramping. "What I told you about the program was true, my intentions, how it was designed, that was all the truth. For a while, it was, anyway."
"I'm listening," I said when he stopped talking.
"Over a decade into the program, there was a regime change. New President, new bodies in the White House, new oversight committee, new superiors. The people who had approved my project, who were providing me with the funding under the table, they were all gone. Retired, redistributed, whatever. The people who came in after them didn't want to hear word one about what I was doing, about all the money already spent and how much we'd lose if we scrapped the project. They wanted nothing to do with it. It was a new world, a new military once more. The climate that made the project a possibility had changed. The money was gone.

"So, I was forced to find new avenues of financing. I was approached by someone who wanted to fund the project, so I took the shot without asking questions. Questions I should have asked."
"What was the problem?" I asked.
"It turned out I wasn't getting straight funding so much as a promotional sponsorship or an investment. The ones with the money had their own agenda for how to use the program, beyond military recruiting."
"What kind of agenda? Political, or commercial?"
"Yes," he said. I smiled slightly; that's the answer my mother once gave when I asked if a tomato was a fruit or a vegetable.
"There was tremendous pressure on me to do what they wanted. They wanted results. They didn't want duty and honor taught through hypnosis, they wanted to see how far we could take it. This was late in the game, though, you were already in your teens, only a few years from completion. Still, they wanted results or the money would disappear."
"What did they want, then? You said you changed the program, what did you change it to?"
"You," he said. "Exactly what you are now. A ruthless, unquestioning, mechanical delivery system of death. 'What is the point of having an advanced training platform if you only teach what can be learned in a few months of training?' they asked me. They wanted the product of years of service and training. They wanted Special Forces. They wanted kites, shadow men, wet workers, black ops. They wanted Navy Seals coming off of an assembly line."
"And that's what you gave them," I said through grinding teeth.
"I had them change your training schedule, brought in some of our SF instructors to write a new 'curriculum' for you. Battlefield ethics and squad formations were out, knife fighting and improvised explosives were in."

So that's what it was. I wasn't supposed to be the perfect soldier, I was supposed to be the perfect killer. It explained everything I'd been able to do, it explained the fleeting grasp I had on myself.

"Who are these people? Who's paying the bills now?" I asked.
Schumer leveled his gaze at me. "People with more power than they should have. People who stand to gain from having people like you on staff."
"You said this was all about that, the program change?"
He nodded. "In essence, when I changed your training program, I set the roof on a house of cards. Something messed up your hypnotic compartmentalizing, and the training started leaking out, as you've discovered. Stress, fear, whatever it was, it shouldn't have happened. It wouldn't have, if we'd stuck to the original program."
"That stress was from my father being killed!" I barked.
"Well," Schumer said, "house of cards."

I pulled back the slide of the pistol with my left hand, chambering a round. "Explain please."
"I didn't think he'd like the idea of the new specialty we were preparing you for, so I tried to keep it from him. He had, after all, agreed to have you taught about discipline and all that 'The few. The proud. The Marines.' garbage. When he found out, he didn't take it very well."
"It was illegal, unethical. He tried to report it to the FBI."
"We couldn't have that," Schumer said in a disgustingly coy tone. "I tried to talk him out of it. Told him we could reverse the training once it was proven, told him it was under control, even offered him more money since there was a newfound surplus of it. He wouldn't take."
"So you killed him."
"Not myself, no."
"Just because he was going to shed light on your secret project?"
"As I said, there was tremendous pressure to keep it running. I might give you a moment to process that but I know it would be useless, you were taught to suppress your emotions. Box them up, drive yourself crazy later, just get the job done now. You can't even make yourself care now, can you? Knowing why your father died. A normal person would care."

My mind did seem rather blank. I knew Schumer was responsible for my father's death, but hearing him admit to it should have affected me somehow. No, he's just trying to distract me again.

"Shut up--" I started.
"As for your other question," he began before I could finish. "As for when exactly the training was conducted, I'm not entirely sure. That was all Nathan's job, I figured you would have asked him that before you killed him."
"What are you talking about, you had him killed!"
"Is that how you're painting it for the police? If you can pull it off, I guess."

What was he talking about? I killed Comstock? No, I didn't. I would have remembered that. Like how I'd remember being trained as a killer in the first place. Could he be right? Could I be doing things still without realizing? No, don't lose your focus.

"That box," I said, glancing for a moment behind me and toward the parking area. "What was that?"
Schumer chuckled again, "That? Files. Everything that's left of the program. I shut it down, Chris. It's over. I figured that since you've started shooting FBI agents now, there would be no way to keep the heat away from this thing anymore. I destroyed most of it tonight, I thought I'd bring the rest home for one last hurrah, you know?"

More nonsense, he's still trying to kick me off balance. I called Amy's name and she appeared from the stairwell behind me.

"Over by the car there's a cardboard box, bring it here," I said, keeping my eye on Schumer who seemed very surprised to see Amy.

When the sound of her footprints vanished out of range, Schumer stopped following her with his eyes and looked back to me. "Either she's gone rogue or you're one hell of an idiot," he said.
"What?" I asked.
Schumer's smile returned. "Do you think Nathan Comstock was our only means of keeping an eye on you? Hah, how old did she say she is? I've heard her go as low as sixteen."
Shaking my head slowly, I said, "What are you talking about?"
"Please," he said. "When did she first start talking to you? What has ever happened to you when she wasn't around? I didn't think she'd last this long."
"No," I muttered, "What are you--" and I trailed off in thought. Amy first showed up in my life right after my dad died and she took an unusual interest.

She was there in Lorton, when Dingan somehow tracked me down in a city nearly an hour away from home. It was her plan to go there in the first place. She was the only person who knew I was going to Austria, and she was the only person who knew when I was supposed to return, which was exactly when the guys showed up at my house, which she was there for. She was the only one who knew I was on my way to Comstock's house, where I showed up just after he'd been killed. She was surprisingly good at deceiving people over the phone or in person, and she was the only justification I'd had that my fourth hour study hall couldn't have been when I was being hypnotized.

God. No, wait. I'd met her father, though he was involved with the Marines as well. I'd remembered Amy from long before she actually started talking to me, though. Right, that.

"She was around a long time before my dad was killed, though," I said, "I remember her."
Schumer's face became oddly sympathetic. "You remember her," he tapped his forehead twice,"or you 'remember' her?"
My hand wavered a bit. It could have been a distraction, but it made so much sense. As an administrator, Comstock could have fudged the paperwork to transfer her into school to watch me or make sure I did the right things or didn't figure out the wrong things. I couldn't remember her ever being too scared whenever I, or "we" were in danger.

Amy walked back into the corridor, the cardboard box in both hands. I turned sharply to look at her, then back at Schumer.

"Here," she said. "It's full of file folders."
"I--," my voice stuttered, "what's in the folders?"
She sat the box down on the floor and knelt down, Schumer watched with a satisfied smirk. "Looks like..." Amy started, "orders, more orders, logs, charts. Some of the folders have names and words on the tabs some don't. Here's one with your name on it."

"Nothing in there links me to your father," Schumer said to me.
"Oh, I'm not planning on bringing this to trial," I said.
"Right. You just want to shoot me," he said, crossing his arms.

He stood there, saying nothing for half a minute, as if waiting for something. "For killing your father," he said, as if a prompt.

If he was banking that I couldn't summon the rage, he was wrong. His distractions had worked well enough, I'd lost the train of thought I'd been riding earlier, but the fact still remained that Schumer killed my father, who had done nothing wrong. Who tried to do the right thing. Who knew he might die, and wanted to make sure that if he did die that I wouldn't be put out.

I'd wanted to kill Schumer for days now.

This was my chance.

I straightened my right arm, centering the reticule in the middle of Schumer's chest. I told my heart to slow down, my breath to steady, the thoughts and feelings in my mind to silence. I tightened my grip on the pistol. I felt Amy's presence just a few feet behind me. I put my finger on the trigger, and told my hand to squeeze.

Nothing happened. I tried to pull the trigger again, nothing. I couldn't. My hand wouldn't move. Then, the more I thought about it, the sillier the idea of killing that man had seemed. He was so friendly.

"What is it?" Amy asked.
Schumer smiled, then broke out into a laugh. I lowered the gun and shook my head slowly.
"I can't kill him," I said, turning to Amy.

"Of course not," Schumer said. "I'm so friendly."
I turned back at him, heard Amy go back to flicking through the folders and rustling pages.
It was odd, Schumer saying 'friendly' after I'd thought it. Looking at it again, it seemed odd that I'd thought it in the first place. It seemed like a foreign concept, something surreptitiously slipped into my mind.
"What did you do?" I asked.
Schumer held his smile. "I'm not an idiot," he said. "I'm not about to let loose a rabid dog without putting a leash on him."
"Ummm..." Amy said, from the sound of her voice I could tell she was looking down, still looking through the box. I ignored her.

"What do you mean?" I said, lowering the gun.
"Safe words," he said, simply. "I couldn't let somebody learn how to kill without learning the weight associated without a safety mechanism. 'Dance, pale, bravado.' Those are yours. I had to look yours up. If somebody says the safe words, the hypnotic programming in your head overrides everything else and tells you that whoever said it is a friendly. I wasn't entirely sure if it would work on you, since you weren't officially activated, but it seems to work out just fine."

I clenched my teeth again, raised the gun again. I couldn't make myself do it. The whole idea of it seemed wrong, like smashing a puppy with a brick. I practically growled at my uselessness, then stopped suddenly.
"Chris..." Amy said behind me. I ignored her again.
"Wait," I said to Schumer, "What do you mean look mine up?"
Schumer smiled that dreadful smile.

"Your name isn't the only one in here..." Amy said, continuing to thumb through the folders.
I looked back at Schumer, a new flavor of rage in my mouth. "There are more, aren't there?"
He kept smiling.

I raised the gun again, realizing still that it was probably pointless. "How many are there?!" I screamed for the first time.
Schumer took a step away from the wall. "It's not like building guns, where you go from spec to production in a few months. This is building and programming people, I couldn't wait eighteen years for the first prototype."

My mouth went dry, my head started to pound. It was too much, I couldn't process any more. I thought I was the only one. I thought this was all about me.

"How many?" I asked weakly, my whole throat seemed dry. "Five? Fifty? Hundreds?"
"Oh my God," Amy said quietly, to herself. She dropped most of the folders she was holding and stood up.
"A few," Schumer said, taking another short step. "Each in different stages, we started a new subject every year or so, adjusting the program as we found errors. Did you think you were special, Chris. You were just the pilot program, kiddo."
"Chr--Chris?" Amy said, I still wasn't paying attention to her.

Kiddo. My dad called me kiddo.

My heart picked up its pace, started trying to escape my chest. My stomach and lungs tried to join it. I felt slightly dizzy, the room and my head starting to spin. Where Amy was standing, it looked like she was reaching for something shiny stuck into her pants. Where Schumer was standing, it looked like he was moving forward and pulling something shiny from the front pocket of his coat. I was stumbling backwards, unsure of where I was or what was going on, but I knew I saw a gun. Hell, it could have been mine. Still, an instinct took over and I pointed my gun in the direction of the gun I thought I might have seen as my body wearily stepped backwards. I held my breath, closed my eyes, and tried my best to pull the trigger knowing full well that I probably couldn't and that even if I did, I was probably already dead.

A lone gunshot cut through the silence of the darkened corridor.