E.R.

Sirens slammed against my head in steady intervals as I bounced around the back of an ambulance. It was too bumpy to put in an IV, so they'd strapped Amy in tightly and shot something into her leg and pumped oxygen into her mouth with a clear, plastic... oxygen squeezy thing. I was trying not to notice that her shirt had been cut open.

Someone had tried to poison me. Amy had taken it instead. Her body was out of her control. Her mind locked in a convulsing prison.

I watched a heart monitor displayed on a screen mounted to the side of the vehicle, lines danced their merry dance. It was then that I realized this was my life now. As much as I tried to run from it, nothing was ever going to calm down. Something in the core of me seemed to summon havoc, manifest it all around me. I let go of any hope for a normal life then, and just hoped that my curse wouldn't spill onto any more of the people close to me. I did not want Amy to die, I couldn't let her take my bullet.

The ambulance screeched to a halt and the doors burst open, the chaos amplifying. White jackets and green scrubs yelled back and forth between blue coats. Everything was moving, everybody was making noise; I couldn't track any of it.

"This the poisoning?"

Out of the ambulance.

"Amy Westborne, 16. Suspected oral strychnine poisoning, muscular spasm, diffuse esophageal spasm."

Automatic doors.

"Pulse ox 88 and slipping."

Past a desk.

"Twenty-five of diazepam and unknown dosage activated carbon administered orally at scene. Ten-cc phenobarbital administered en route."

Around a corner.

"Trauma three is clear. Any idea how much strychnine was ingested?"

More people show up.

"Get me a line of saline with two milliliters of diazepam and seventy dantrolene."

Through double doors.

"We need to intubate."

Past a waiting room, people's heads drawn to the motion.

"No, not with DES. Keep bagging."

More doors. Curtains and beds everywhere.

"Who's he, a relative?"

Last set of doors. Even more people.

"Boyfriend, I think."

"Sir, do you know how she was poisoned?"
I figured the voice was talking to me so I answered without tracing the source, "She drank from a bottle of tea, said it was bitter. After ten minutes she complained of a headache, after another ten she went lockjaw and dropped."
"You recognized it as strychnine poisoning and gave her activated carbon and valium yourself?"

The rolling stretcher stopped beside a bed on wheels. Four of the people floating around her slid Amy from the stretcher to the bed.

I turned to look at who was talking to me, it was a doctor, female, forties. "Yeah," I said. "I mean, no. There was a guy there, a med student."
The woman nodded, then turned to a nurse and said what I thought was, "Get Petey down here." The nurse nodded and went out a set of doors behind her.

Another nurse was running an IV line into Amy's left arm, another standing over her head and squeezing the plastic bag pumping air into her mouth and nose. A few doctors shouted terse directions back and forth.
"Is she going to be alright?" I asked the doctor who'd been talking to me.
"Don't know yet," she said, "we're pushing anticonvulsants to keep the muscles from spasming, but her lungs aren't working properly so she's not getting as much oxygen as she should be. We can't run an orotracheal tube right now because her throat keeps opening and closing. If that doesn't stop we may have to perform a tracheotomy, cut a hole into her trachea so we can run air into the lungs."

The doctor stepped away from me and over to Amy, a flurry of hands moving all around her. Amy just lay there, motionless, like a CPR dummy. Something in my mind was telling me to get out of there, like something was wrong. I should call Amy's dad, I knew, and I should call my mom and make sure she doesn't touch any of the new food. It was something else, though. Who's Petey? Get Petey down here, it kept repeating in my head. Do I know a Petey? Or could she have said "PD," the police?

A girl was poisoned with some obscure chemical, and I just happened to be able to identify it and know how to treat it. That might look bad. Cops would want to talk to me. They'd want to know where the strychnine had come from, how it got into a bottle of tea that was technically mine. The fact that I was on the shitlist of a Scottish-accented killer who'd used the same poison to kill my principal the night before probably wouldn't go over too well. They might also wonder why I wasn't at school, if that made any difference.

I started to back out through the door we'd come in when I realized that I was clutching Amy's purse in my hand. I set it down on a small cart of supplies by the door, and slipped out the door into the hall. I pulled my cell phone from my pocket, the screen was black. I tried to turn it on, but nothing happened. Shoot, I was supposed to get a new charger for the phone since the original one was in my house. The one that burned down. I headed toward the main waiting room for the ER and found the payphone. I slid my debit card through the phone's slot and dialed Rubino's cell number from the business card I was given last Sunday.

Four rings. "Rubino."
"It's Baker. You need to come pick me up at Mary Washington Hospital."
"I, uhh, why?"
"So you can take me to Quantico and so I can put three bullets in Schumer."
"Ok," he said, "any particular reason?"
"So he can tell me who the guy is that he hired to take out Comstock," I said.
"What, did he come after you?" Rubino asked with little concern.
"Someone put strychnine in food delivered to my room. Amy got some of it,---"
"Your little girl pal?"
"She's in the ER right now, they're talking about cutting a hole in her throat so she can breathe. Are you going to pick me up or not? I need to get out of here before the police find me and start asking why there was poison in my tea."
"I can deal with the police, for the hundredth time," he said. "I can also send Bremer over to your hotel with some uniforms to check on your mom and watch the place."
"Ok, good," I said. "He'll probably try to come after me again when he finds out I'm still walking."
"Alright," Rubino said, "I'll be there in a few minutes."
He hung up, I hung up.

I paced around the waiting room while I waited.

Strychnine. Damn it all, someone tried to poison me. Some crazy hitman. What is this? This isn't normal. A guy my dad worked for hired a hitman to take out my pretend school principal because he screwed up in hiring a hitman, and now the hitman is upset that Amy stabbed him, or upset because I'm the one who actually killed the first hitman? This, all because I'm the product of some insane program to build pre-programmed soldiers from scratch? I felt like my head was about to explode. I'd been awake for over 24 hours now and my brain felt like mush. Amy was laying on a slab in the ER unable to breathe for herself, my dad was dead, my ankle still kind of hurt from when I'd kicked out the back window of a stupid little European car in Austria, I hadn't eaten anything all day, and my house had recently exploded.

I wanted to go find Schumer, dragging the wrath of a holy hellstorm behind me. I wanted to make this all go away, make him tell me what's going on, make him call off the hitmen and put my life back together. I knew that wouldn't happen, but I'd be satisfied with a bit of revenge.

Rubino finally came in through the main ER entrance, spotted me, and walked toward me.
"Congratulations," he said, "it looks like you did manage to piss of a hitman."
"Looks like," I said with my arms crossed, trying to contain my roaring stomach and ignore the screaming madness in my head.
"I suppose it will be no surprise to you that the lab report came back on Nathan Comstock, and the cause of death was, in fact..."
"Strychnine," I said.
"You bet," Rubino said. He looked around for a moment, then asked, "how's the girl?"
"I don't know," I said, truthfully, "I'm afraid to go in there. Plus, the police will have questions I can't answer."
"Alright kiddo," he said, putting a hand on my shoulder. "Let's go face the music."

My dad used to call me "kiddo".

Activated

Through all of this, the one thing I'd never felt was helpless. I conned my way into bank records, broke a guy's arm without caring, slipped into a double-locked hotel door, and escaped a slow-moving car drifting through oncoming traffic; and through all of it, the only fear I felt was that it wouldn't be enough. I'd never feared that there was just nothing I could do. Never felt my heart beat echo in my own ears and my breathing stutter because something was just out of my hands.

My hands were gripped around the back of Amy's neck and her arm as she lay on the cold, cement floor of a Costco Warehouse. Her muscles twitched rhythmically as her eyes darted in all directions. A few feet away a man was half-screaming into his cell phone about a girl having a seizure, or something, in the middle of the store. The guy tried to repeat instructions and questions from the 911 operator, but he made a poor proxy and I couldn't concentrate on anything except the girl in my arms. The only language I could process was the, "No, no, no" playing on repeat throughout my skull and escaping as whispers from my lips.

What was going on? I had no idea. My mind raced in circles but couldn't stop on anything. Sixteen year olds don't have seizures. People don't die when you care enough about them.

A slight panic was spreading outward from my position like ripples on the surface of a sea of self-concerned shoppers. What's all the commotion? Is someone hurt? My god, she's just a kid. Is she on drugs? Is there a doctor? Does the coupon for applesauce apply if I buy the three-pack or is it just for single jars?

After the first concerto of dread finished in my mind and the encore was about to begin, a guy who didn't seem much older than myself filtered through the forming crowd and knelt on the floor across from me. He said some words I didn't hear, pulled up his sleeves, and put one hand on Amy's chest. What kind of pervert, I thought. I tried to focus my consciousness onto something nearby I could bludgeon him to death with. He repeated the same words, but they were again lost to the thick soup my brain had turned into. I had a knife. I could flick it open and swing it up into the base of his jaw. The blade wouldn't reach his brain, but it would get him the hell away.

"I said, is she a diabetic?" he said again, much louder this time.

The volume seemed to trump my hysteria. My thoughts pulled together slightly.

"Are you a doctor?" I asked in one quick breath.
"I'm a medical student," he said, dismissively. "Do you know this girl? Is she a diabetic?"
I tried to process the words. "Diabetic. I don't think so. Medical student?"
"I'm a third-year. I started my internship at the hospital a month ago," he said, leaning in and putting his ear near Amy's mouth. "This looks like hypoglycemia. Insulin shock. You don't know if she's diabetic? Has she eaten or drank anything yet today?"
Diabetic. Diabetic. The word hung for a moment before I remembered what it even meant. "I haven't seen her take insulin or anything before," I said.

I let go of her arm with one hand and grabbed a hand, looked at the tips of her fingers. I didn't see any puncture marks. I pulled the sleeves of her shirts up to look at her arms, saw no needle marks or scabs. There were a few long, very narrow scab-looking scars on her bicep in a neat row. Was she a cutter? Did she ever mention that?

"I said did she eat anything to drink? If she's hypoglycemic she has to get a certain amount of sugar. These spasms are severe."

I tried to remember. The only thing I remembered her having was that bottle of tea back at the hotel, but she didn't have much because she said it was bitter. Bitter. Something about that tickled on the back of my brain. Bitter. The groceries. What was it? My mind was trying to tell me something. Why is my mind trying to tell me something? That doesn't make sense. I am my mind. What does it know that I don't? Well, besides all those handy ways to kill people...

"Wait," I said, then let my mouth hang open. Amy had stopped spasming for a moment. They seemed to come and go.
"What?" the guy said.

Something was seeping into my mind, my real mind, but it was coming slow. Ways to kill people. How did they say Comstock died? Spasm something. Where did that tea come from? Somebody usually had to sign for the groceries when they were delivered. This morning they were just sitting there after I'd left the shopping-list on the doorknob the night before. Bitter tea. Plastic bottle. Comstock. What was all of it? The lady said Comstock may have been dosed with VX nerve gas or something else. Can you put nerve gas in tea? Is it bitter? Shouldn't nerve gas be a gas? What was the other thing? Damn it. It started with S.

"Strychnine," I said at last, in a low, somber voice.
"Strychnine?" the med student said, incredulously. "What about it?"
"She might have been poisoned. Do you know what strychnine is?"
"Yeah," he said, "it's poison. How could she have--"

Amy started spasming again. The muscles in her chest and back seemed to heave against each other. The medical examiner said most people die by breaking their own back.

"Oh god," the guy said, looking down at her.
"What?" I asked.
"This is going to be bad."
I swallowed.

He looked up, tried to pick out the guy in the crowd who had called 911. He was still on the phone, seemingly narrating the events.
"Is that still 911?" the med student asked the narrator.
The man said yes.
"Tell them to inform the ambulance dispatch that it's strychnine poisoning. They'll probably want to prep the ER for her arrival."
The man nodded slowly.

I looked back at Amy. Besides the twitching, she looked almost peaceful. Not yet, I thought.

"So it's poison," I said, "can't we just induce vomiting?"
The med student placed a hand on her throat. "No," he said, "I don't think so."
"You don't think so?"
"No, I mean. If the throat muscles are in spasm, reverse peristalsis is impossible. She would choke on the vomit." He sounded like he was reciting study notes from memory.
"What can we do, then?"
"Wait," he said. "And try to stop her from snapping her spine. Strychnine activates all the skeletal muscle tissue at the same time, her muscles are flexing against each other at once. If they ever get into a contrary rhythm, they could tear themselves apart or break her bones."

"There are couches over there," I said, "we could move her off the floor."
He thought about it, then said, "No, motion can make the spasms get worse." He turned around and asked the crowd, in general, to go fetch a pillow. A few people scampered away.

Wait? Wait. Amy was lying there on the floor, her body turning against her and we just wait?

The med student repositioned himself and pressed one hand against Amy's chest and the other against her stomach, like he was pushing her into the ground. he told me to hold her legs, but the words bounced right of me. I had an idea, but I didn't understand it. For a moment I wondered if I had slipped into the other me, but I didn't care.

"I'll be right back," I said as I stood up and ran through the circle of onlookers and down the aisles of the store.

I ran full speed, bobbing my head in all directions like a robin to look down the aisles as I passed them. Office supplies. Desk chairs. Clocks. Kitchen knives. Water filters. There. I stopped in my tracks and doubled back, cutting through the aisle and stopping in front of the home water filtering pitchers. I grabbed a box of replacement filters, and then started running again. Winter jackets. Toothbrushes. Shovels. Car batteries. Books. DVDs. Wine. Cakes. Raw meat. Fresh shrimp. Produce. Bottled water. I stopped again, pulled my knife out and cut away the plastic wrapping from a large case of bottled water. I grabbed two bottles, replaced my knife, and headed back to the pharmacy area. I slipped through the crowd and slid on my knees back to Amy's side. The two bottles I set on the floor, the box of replacement filters I tore open and produced a single plastic, tube-ish water filter.

The medical student, and everybody whose face I could see, looked at me like I was crazy. If I had the time, I would have smiled.

I pulled my knife back out, set the water filter on the floor, and stabbed into the side of it with the knife. Once through the thin plastic exterior the knife stopped against something dry and sandy. I used a sawing motion and twisted the filter with my other hand to cut the whole top off of the filter and tossed it aside, leaving a kind of makeshift plastic cup in my hand. Inside the cup, and overflowing onto the floor, was a black, slightly crystalline powder with a few plastic-looking, tiny rubbery balls mixed in. I had no idea what the balls were, but the black powder was pure carbon. Activated charcoal.

The med student was holding Amy's torso against the floor still, someone else was holding her legs down by the ankles. When the med student realized what I'd done, he let out a slight laugh.

I poured some of the charcoal onto the floor to make some room in the filter-cup and topped it off with water from one of the bottles. I covered the top and shook the filter to get the carbon particles all wet, then poured the sandy sludge right into Amy's mouth, followed by some water. She coughed a few times, but it went down.

"What the hell was that about?" the man holding Amy's legs down asked.
The med student turned his head toward him and said, "Activated charcoal. It absorbs the poison in the stomach so it isn't metabolized. Most people get it in tablets."
"I'm not most people," I said, standing back up and retreating again. I squeezed through the crowd and headed over to the small, white mini-building that acted as the store's pharmacy. I looked around for people in white coats, but the room was empty. I turned back around and saw that pharmacists were all in the midst of the crowd, standing out like grains of salt in a pile of pepper.

"I need Diazepam," I said from just outside the pharmacy window, loud enough for the pharmacists to hear me. "Or Valium."

The outer ring of the crowd turned toward me, pharmacists included. The oldest of them, a man with graying hair, walk-jogged over to me.
"You need what?" he asked.
"Diazepam," I repeated.
"For her?"
No, I just remembered I had a prescription to fill and thought this would be a cool time to fill it. "Yes, for her!"
He looked around, nervous and distraught. "I can't issue meds without a doctor's authorization--"
"This is an emergency!" I interrupted.
"Even still. Only a doctor can know what she needs."

I sighed, then turned around and slid the pharmacy window open a bit wider and jumped onto the counter and dropped into the pharmacy.
"Hey!" the guy said. What was he going to do?
I looked at the shelves, hundreds of white bottles perched at the edges of each shelf. I tried to make some kind of sense out of the ordering of the medications, incorrectly assuming it would all be alphabetical, and after about seventy seconds stumbled upon the Diazepam. I grabbed the whole bottle and hopped back over the counter and pushed past the protesting pharmacist, through the crowd, and back to Amy and the men keeping her down.

I held the bottle out to the med student, the label facing him, and said, "How much?"
He squinted to read the label, looked at Amy, then back at me. "What are you?" he asked.
"Unique," I said. "How many pills?"

Entry Number Fifty

I didn't sleep that night.

It wasn't insomnia, and it wasn't bad dreams from seeing a disgustingly dead guy or finding myself in yet another situation where I have to wait around for a more-prepared version of myself to take the reins of my body. It was more of a crisis of identity, a thing I couldn't stop thinking about. I brought Amy back to the hotel where she got her dad's car and went home, then I came up to the room and tried to inhabit every inch of the bed but couldn't find sleep. The TV helped pass the time, but through all the commercial breaks I sank right back into my brain and kept re-thinking the same things.

I wished I had a computer. I thought I might head to the store and just buy a computer, like I'd done before. Something about that made me feel impressive. Like those people who can just go into a store and buy whatever they want and not even consider the prices. Too bad, I thought again, that such things come at the price of death and destruction. More to think about, less to sleep for.

Dawn came eventually, light began to slowly blot out the darkness and brought sounds of morning; birds chirping about whatever they have to be happy about. Reruns of shows long-canceled and advertisements for hair removal cream were replaced by morning news shows and morning talk shows. First we banter about recent news events, then we have a fun little game, then someone comes to talk ever-candidly about the movie they happen to be in that happens to come out on Friday, then somebody shows us how to bake a pie with half the carbs , then someone comes to drone on about a book they just wrote. Somewhere in there, a band plays and somebody in the audience wins a trip to someplace depressing like Boston or Seattle, places millions of people live day by day and don't consider it a vacation. Betwixt all these segments are three minutes of advertisements for cars, coffees, and travel websites.

I got tired of telling myself that if I slept now I'd probably sleep until 2PM, then 3, and so on. I got out of bed, opened the window the rest of the way, and took a shower in the bathroom connected to my room. A few times I nearly nodded off with hot water hammering my neck, but I held on to my lucidity. I felt like I needed a massage, if not from the car crash at least from all the stress. When we first got to the hotel I made a point to see if they had a spa and they didn't. Maybe when I'm out buying computers by the armful I can stop for a day in a spa. Drape salad toppings over my eyes while some Dominican rubs sea-salt cream or ground up snapping turtle shell all over my body. Pish, it's only money.

When I was through the bathroom and into my other outfit, I got my knife out of the plastic FBI evidence bag and dumped it in the sink and ran some hot water on it, then wiped it dry with a towel and clipped it in my pocket. I went into the kitchen and opened the front door to get the newspaper and found a plastic bin with the groceries we'd asked for yesterday. Trying not to make too much noise since my mom was probably still asleep, I brought the bin inside and started putting the food away. Crackers and granola bars in the cupboards, bottled waters and green tea in the fridge. I probably should have specified a brand of green tea when I wrote it down, since they got the cheapest and most notoriously-awful brand. When I put the three bottles in the fridge I thought about having one then, for the caffeine, but figured I'd get something better down in the lobby later.

The room phone rang, loud and annoying. A quick wave of concern pulsed through my mind, but I scrambled over the phone and answered it as casually as I could manage.

"They won't give me your room number," Amy said through the handset.
She must have been at the front desk. "Well, you could be a crazy person," I said. I tried to get a handle on what time it was and why Amy would be here, but I could only manage one thought process at a time.
"When has my being crazy ever gotten in the way of our visits?"
"You're going to scare the person at the desk," I said before telling her the room number and hanging up.

It could have been a trick, or she could have been making the call under duress. I could never seem to figure out whether I was the one who was in danger or I just kept stumbling into danger. My only source of information on this matter, the Federal Bureau of "Information" was being tediously glib on the subject. I'd have to call one of those boys sometime in the day and find out if they know who hired Scrooge McDuck to kill Comstock or why, and whether I should be concerned.

I watched through the peep-hole until Amy finally appeared, alone. I opened the door before she could knock.
"Good morning, sunshine," she said. She was wearing khaki-colored cargo pants and a striped button-up shirt. No bands I'd never heard of.
"Do you know what time it is?" I asked, still in the doorway.
"Do you?" she asked.
"No," I admitted, dropping my arm from the door and letting her through.

She took a few steps in and looked around at the kitchen area, the couches, the tv, and the open door to my room.

"It's seven," she said, "the time you used to have to get to school every day."
"Huh," I said, rubbing my head. "Yeah, I used to go to school."
"So did I," she said, looking out the window by the couches down at the parking lot.
"Not anymore?"
"I don't know," she started, then turned around. "I woke up, got dressed, got in the car, and drove towards the school, but I just couldn't give myself any real reasons to go. I mean, after all this, it just seems like..."
"Another life."
"Right. How do I go back to that, seeing what I've seen? FBI, hitmen, it's all way above high school level stuff. I don't know how you went back, after your dad and all that."
"You made it easier," I said, leaning now against the refrigerator. "I didn't stay very long, anyway."
She nodded. "So, it was either home or here."
"Home away from home," I said to myself.
"So, is there any sleuthing for us to do, perhaps?"
"Not today," I said, "I'm going to leave that to the professionals. Maybe this afternoon I'll call Rubino or Bremer and see if they know anything, but I don't really feel like sticking my neck out anymore."
"Then what were you going to do today?" she asked.
"Was thinking about getting some of the shopping done with the home insurance money. I need clothes, a computer, maybe some food for here. Do you want to go shopping?"
"Well, they tell me I'm a girl," she said, "so I guess that means I like to go shopping. Where were you going to go?"
"I don't know," I said, "if I had a computer I'd probably just buy it all online."
"Do you have a Costco membership?"
"I... do not."
"I do," she said. "It'd be a good place to start. They have food and some cheap clothes. They have furniture, if you want to start decorating your new house."
"I think the decorating will be my mom's job, but we could go there."

"Do you have anything to drink?" Amy asked. I pulled the fridge door open and went back in my room to get my wallet, phone, and keys.
From the kitchen I heard Amy cough and say something to the tune of, "Eugh!"
I came back out and saw she was holding one of the bottles of green tea. "This stuff is nasty," she said.
"I know, I didn't tell them what brand to get," I said. "Did you shake it? I think you're supposed to shake it."
"I shook it," she said before taking another sip and wincing. "It's bitter," she said after forcing it down. She held the bottle out and said, "You try it."
"Well, with such a ringing endorsement..." I said, not moving.
She said, "Alright," and set the plastic bottle down in the sink, I could hear it running down the drain. "We going?" she asked.
"We going," I said, opening the front door and letting Amy through.

I held the door open for a second to make sure I had a card key, and the door to the other bedroom in the suite opened and my mom came out in a bathrobe.
"Hey," she said, "are you going to school?"
Amy was in the hallway, so my mom didn't see her. "No," I said, "I was going to go get myself some clothes and stuff."
"Ok, she said, sitting down at the kitchen table.
"Don't drink the tea they brought, it's nasty," I said as I pushed the door open and went through it.

Amy and I went down and got in my car, and she told me where the nearest Costco was. It was about 20 minutes away, so I opened and closed my eyes a few times to make sure I was awake enough to drive.

Once on the road, Amy asked, "Did you not sleep or something?"
"Why?" I asked.
"You look like you didn't sleep."
"Did you sleep?"
"Some," she said, "no worse than after the day in Lorton or after the siege whatever on your house."
"I didn't sleep," I said.
"Why? Afraid of--"
"No," I cut in. "Just, thinking."
"Thinking?"
"Thinking."
"About what?" she asked.
"It's complicated.
"Everything's complicated with you."

I sighed, realizing this conversation wasn't going to go away, and resolving not to bring up with a female something I don't want to talk about.

"It's just, when someone talks about their body, or their arm, it's 'my body' and 'my arm'."
"Right..." she said.
"And when they talk about their mind, it's 'my mind.' Like, your body and your mind are both something you own. But if you aren't your mind or your body, what are you?"
"You... what?"
"What makes you you, what makes me me? If your mind and body are just possessions of yours, what exactly is the 'you' in that scenario? There's that thing, 'I think, therefore I am,' like there's no real way to know that you even have a body because the only way we experience it is through our senses -- through our mind, and our senses can be tricked, so the only thing we can know for sure is that we're at least thinking. So, the only guarantee is that you have a mind."
"Alright."
"So if the you in 'you' is your mind, how can it be your mind if your mind is you?"
She thought for a minute. "I don't know. Your mind exists on a conceptual plane and your body exists in the physical plane. Maybe the only way to bind together something from both planes is with an abstract concept like the self."

I drove in silence for a while.

"Ok," Amy said, "maybe we are nothing but our minds. Maybe our bodies are just manifestations to serve the purpose of the mind, since our minds would be useless if they couldn't move around and interact with objects. Like, if the purpose of a knife is to cut things, then the physical knife is just a manifestation to allow for the knife's purpose."
After exactly five seconds I said, "I don't think I'm high enough for that to make sense."
Amy laughed her little laugh, then said, "So what's the point of all this? Are you considering a career in philosophy?"
"No," I said. "I'm just... I don't know. Most people are content with that they are because their minds and their bodies are all they have and they're both the products of chance and effort. But me, if I'm to believe Schumer, my body is the product of some genetic screw-turning and half of my mind was given to me like people get organ transplants. If I'm nothing more than my mind and my body, there's very little here that's me. The only thing I have that I made myself is the me that I am now, when there aren't any guns or badguys around. The body, not mine, and the part of my mind that keeps me from dying a few times a week, isn't mine."
"But Schumer also said that you can have all the hypnosis-garbage removed if you want, so it'd be all you up there."
"The problem is, though, that I like it. I like being able to do the things I can do. I like being able to protect myself, and you. I like the answers to all my questions popping into mind before I even ask them. I just don't know if I like it enough to always be wondering what's me and what's the other guy."
"Ok, I can imagine losing sleep over that."
"I'm glad," I said.
"Alright look, there's that other saying. That a man is nothing more than the sum of his actions. It's not your body or your gray matter that makes you Chris Baker, it's the things you do. Your cells are dying and regenerating a million times a day. You're not even the same physical person you were a few months ago, and your mind changes just as often. The only thing that makes you you is that through it all, you do what you do. If I told you to draw a picture of yourself you'd probably draw yourself in that shirt and those pants, but those are just as peripheral as your hair and your body. The you is what you want it to be, whether it's a high school kid with a dead dad or the pre-configured Marine running around inside your skull."
"You just put that together yourself?" I asked after a bit.
"Yes, but now I have a headache."

At Costco, Amy flashed her membership card to get us through the door. A quick gust of heat from an industrial heater mounted right above the door seemed to cook the top layer of my skin as we stepped into the giant warehouse. We were then standing surrounded by flat-screen HDTVs , delicious, reasonably-priced televisions. Suddenly I could feel the debit card attached to hundreds of thousands of dollars in insurance money burning a hole through my wallet.

"Come on," Amy said, "I need something for this headache, the pharmacy and stuff are over here."
"I thought you were joking about that," I said.
"The real joke is that we'll probably have to get a bottle of 400 pills when I only need one."

I followed her past the TVs, around a corner with a few laptop computers set up on display and told myself I'd be coming back here. As we approached the white, boxy pharmacy inside the store Amy stopped in an aisle covered in over-the-counter meds . While she looked through those for something for a headache, I looked around at the store, the shelves, the door, and the stuff they carried.

"You know something?" I said, still looking around.
"What?" Amy asked, looking at a box of some kind of medication.
"If there was ever a full-scale zombie outbreak, this would be the perfect place to come."
She set the pills down. "Zombie outbreak?"
"Yes. Zombie outbreak. Like, zombies everywhere so you'd have to hole up someplace safe."
"And you'd go to Costco?" she said, looking at another brand.
"Yes. Just look at it. Tall, brick walls. No windows, the only entrances are at the front, and there's two separate sets of locking steel shutters with a vestibule between the two. The store is laid out so you can see each corner wherever you're standing, whereas most stores are set up in sections so you can't see very far, so there'd be a lot of blind corners and places for a zombie to pop out. There's a ton of food here, a whole meat section in the back, bottled water, clothes, plenty of tools for makeshift weapons, they even have grills and stuff here. And generators. And there's a gas station out front. You could live in here for a year or more, I bet."

Amy turned around and looked with me. Her face seemed to show some of the pain from her head ache, and she rubbed the base of her neck with one hand.

"But there's no guns or ammo here," she said. "A Wal-Mart or something like that would have all this plus guns and ammo."
"Yeah, but they all have windows, and glass doors. Plus, like I said, the different departments are walled off and there's a whole warehouse in the back of those. It would be impossible to lock the place down, and it would take forever to clear the place out of any residual zombies."
"Residual zombies."
"Yeah, zombies already in the store," I said.
"But here...?"
"Since everything is so sparse, and you can see through all the shelves, there's very few places where you'd have to make a blind turn or anything."
"But how would you clear out the residual zombies if there's no guns here?"
"You'd need to start off with some guns first, to get here. That's the only downside, really."
"Uh huh."
"Oh, and look at those shelves where the food and stuff are. They go all the way to the ceiling, practically, and the top few levels are just storage. You could clear out the stuff off of those and use the top shelves for sleeping, and use ladders to get up there. If zombies did ever get in, they couldn't get you up there since they can't use ladders; so you could use the shelves as a fall-out spot."
"Zombies can't use ladders?"
"No, they don't have the coordination."
"I see," she said, going back to the painkillers.

After a few minutes of complaining about the headache, she grabbed a package of Excedrin and said, "Hrrr."
"What?" I asked, turning back to her.
She made the sound again, dropped the package onto the floor, and brought her hands up to her jaw. She said a few more garbled words without opening her mouth, then her eyes went wide and she started breathing faster. Her arms went stiff and she shot backwards a step and backed into the shelf. She kept breathing quickly, her eyes darting around, her arms at odd angles and her fingers half-taut.

It was a decent imitation of a zombie.

I half-laughed and said, "What are you doing?"
She didn't laugh. She kept trying to talk but her jaw wasn't moving. He breathing quickened more and she started to whimper. Tears began to flow from her wide eyes. I repeated the question, but she fell to the floor before I could finish.

I caught her as her legs gave out and she slid against the shelf, dragging allergy pills and decongestants down with her. Her arms and legs were flailing in quick bursts now, her chest heaving with each breath. Her eyes begged for something.

"Hey, is she alright?" came a voice from somewhere around me.
"I don't know!" I yelled.

I shook Amy slightly, called her name. She just looked at me, and kept twitching.

"I'll call an ambulance," said the same voice.
"Ok," I said, "I think she's having a seizure."

Crime Scene Crew

Before long the stinging had completely faded from my eyes, without the help of milk, even. There was still a distant ringing in my ears, but it wasn't that bad.

Amy had apparently had the presence of mind to duck when she saw what she thought was a grenade fall to the ground, so the only hit she took was to her ears.

The both of us were still sitting on Comstock's couch. I was looking out the window at the tree-filtered moonlight. I didn't know if those were actual woods behind the house, or just a patch of trees. That guy, Shamus O'Flashbang , could have fled away under the cover of the trees, or he could just be hiding out there waiting for another chance to strike. For perhaps the fifth time I realized I had his gun in my hand, and felt better about my odds for a moment.

Still, I found my phone and dialed Rubino's number and told him that I had to reschedule our meeting, and that Comstock was dead and the guy who killed him was probably about to kill him so this girl I know stabbed him with my knife and he jumped out the window under cover of flashbang . Rubino had me repeat the sentence a few times as if I were speaking too quickly or reading a physics equation, then said he would be over with a crime scene crew.

While we waited patiently in the unlit living room of a dead guy, who was just in the other room, I asked out loud, "What was that?"
"What was what?" Amy replied, leaning against the arm of the couch and looking uncomfortable.
"That. You grabbed my knife and stabbed the guy," I said, looking for somewhere prudent to set the gun down.
"Oh, that. You're welcome."
"You don't think it was a little, I don't know, dangerous?"
"And grabbing a gun with your hand isn't?"
"That's different, I'm..."
"A guy?"
"Capable. But you're..."
"A girl?"
"Not."
"Not?"
"You know what I mean," I said, setting the gun on the floor.
"Yeah, there's something wrong with your brain and when you're in danger you turn into Batman. That doesn't mean I can't help out."
"By stabbing someone?"
"What were you going to do?"
"I don't know. Ask him questions."
"So I should have done nothing?"
"I don't know. I don't like my danger spilling over onto other people."
"It's spilled. I'm covered in it. I was there in Lorton, I was there at your house. I'm in this thing too."
"I wish you weren't."
"I wish none of this was happening, but here it is. I stabbed a guy and our principal is lying dead by the front door."
"My principal."
"No, I was assigned to him too. I just never saw him because I was never sent to him."
"Because you waited until now to start stabbing people."
"Something to tell my grandkids, I guess."

I didn't say so, but I wasn't sure if I was going to live that long.

Special Agents Bremer and Rubino soon showed up, along with their "crime scene crew" which, I found, was practically a small army. FBI forensic agents milled around the house, some uniformed police officers showed up to watch the outside of the house, and some detectives came and mostly stood around and waited for somebody to tell them what to do. It seemed on their end like another jurisdictional pissing match. Once again, the FBI calls dibs on a crime that the cops would love nothing better but to occupy themselves with. Once again, I was in the middle of said crime.

We two youngsters stayed in the living room mostly, and after ten minutes or so Bremer and Rubino came over to again go over what had happened.

I told about how we'd come over to talk with Comstock, how we'd found the door slightly open and his body blocking it. I told about walking through the kitchen and around to the living room, talking out loud about Dingan and all that, when Angus McHitman stepped from the shadows and confronted me about my involvement with Dingan's death.

"He referred to Dingan by name?" Bremer asked, looking a bit tired.
"Yeah," I said. "He said he thought that the police had killed him, not me."
"He seemed interested in him? Like he knew him, and this was personal?"
"Yeah, like they were friends or partners or... partners."
Bremer made a slight face. "Nothing we know about Dingan indicates that he worked with others," he said.
"Well this guy didn't seem too happy about Dingan being dead. He gave up his position just to confront be about it."
"He might have been planning to kill you two anyway," Rubino said.
"That's nice to know," Amy said with a nod.
"He wouldn't have expected us," I said. "We hadn't made plans to come here, it was last minute."
"Did you talk about it over the phone?" Bremer asked.
I thought for a moment, then said, "No, we talked about it in person. Do you think my phone is tapped?"
Bremer and Rubino both shrugged. I decided I needed a new phone, and a new account.
"We'll be able to figure more out once forensics determines a time of death," Rubino said.
"How?" I asked.
"If Comstock was killed just before you arrived, maybe you caught the killer in the middle of his escape," Bremer started, "or if he died hours ago, maybe he was waiting for you; or waiting for someone. Or maybe he was looking around the house for something."
I nodded, about to reply when two uniforms came through the back sliding glass doors. They each had flashlights and were switching them off.

"We've finished checking the perimeter," one of them said to Bremer or Rubino. "We found a trail of blood leading into the woods, but it ends a hundred feet or so in like he patched himself up. We could bring in K-9 and continue a foot search, or call in some choppers from State."
Both FBI men seemed to consider it. I said, "Couldn't hurt," feeling good about contributing, then Bremer said, "It's been over half an hour. If he's a pro, he should have disappeared by now. You can try the dogs but a chopper would be a waste of time. This isn't a manhunt."

The two cops nodded and went about their business. Over by the fireplace, some forensics people were poking at the drops of blood on the floor with cotton swabs or something. One of them was dropping my knife into a plastic evidence bag.

"Ah," I said, loudly, "do you have to take that?"
Everybody in the room stopped and looked at me, decided who I was talking to, and everybody but the forensics people went back to what they were doing.
"It has his blood on it," the woman holding the bag said.
"There's blood all over the place," I said.
"What, is it your knife?"
"I... maybe," I said, not sure if I should have admitted it or not. I just didn't want my knife to get taken and absorbed into the system.
The woman, on her knees, shook her head and tossed the bag across the room over to Rubino. He held the bag up, looked at my knife through the clear plastic, then handed it over to me, saying, "Happy birthday."
I took the bag, looked at the knife through it, and decided to wait until I could clean the blood off of it before taking it out.

"So, why isn't this a manhunt?" Amy asked.
Bremer and Rubino turned toward her, then looked at me and saw that my expression matched hers.
"Some guy gets drunk and shoots his wife," Bremer started, annoyed, "you have a manhunt. Someone breaks out of prison by shanking a guard and scaling a fence, you have a manhunt. Both of those people are scared, sloppy, untrained, and predictable. If this guy is a real hitter, he spends hours each day planning how to evade a manhunt. Someone like this, you have to track down with your brain, not a bunch of yokels with bloodhounds."

Over by the door, examiners in blue FBI jackets had finished fluttering around Comstock and were loading him onto a stretcher. Forensics people were coming out of the kitchen loaded with evidence bags full of various items. One of the medical people, another woman, came over to our little circle and snapped off her latex gloves.

"Cause of death?" Bremer asked.
"Unsure at the moment," the woman replied.
"Time of death?" Bremer asked.
"Also unsure," she said, hesitant.
Bremer lowered his head slightly to look at her from the top of his eyes.
"The problem is, external indicators all say he died no more than an hour ago. But, just looking at the body, it looks like three to four hours. His body is in mid-stage rigor mortis, which takes three or so hours to even begin; but the musculature is locked into the position it was in at the moment of death, while usually the body will relax into a more natural posture before going stiff. It looks like cadaveric spasm, or instant rigor. That almost only happens in drowning, but nothing indicates he was drowned and dumped here."
"Is there anything else that can cause that?" Rubino asked.
"Nerve gases like VX will do it, and a few glycine-antagonist poisons like strychnine can do it. Both of those usually cause death by spasming the skeletal muscles until the spinotrapezius and latissimus dorsi muscles work against each other and break the spine, but it doesn't seem like this guy's back is broken. It could also cause the diaphragm to displace itself, which may have happened. We'll know more once we pump the stomach and analyze some of the foods it looks like he's eaten."
"You said VX nerve gas?" Rubino said, concerned.
"Yes," the woman said, "though if it were in the air right now we'd all be on the floor dead. It's possible he was given a quick dose of it. Again, we'll know for sure once he's on the table."

Bremer thanked her, and she headed out the door with the rest of the science brigade. "You didn't eat anything while you were hear, did you?" Bremer asked me.
"No," I said, "and I didn't sniff anything, either."
"Me either," Amy chimed in.
Bremer nodded, then noticed the gun on the floor by where I'd been sitting before. It was partially knocked under the couch.

"That yours or his?" Bremer asked. I turned and looked at the gun. It seemed like a nice gun, and I rather liked the idea of keeping it.
"His," I said, unfortunately.
"Then that, I'm sorry, we will have to take."
Bremer pointed to it, and Rubino stepped over and picked the gun up by sticking a pen through the trigger guard.
"A Walther," he said, "a .22, with an AAC silencer."
Bremer chuckled and said, "Well there you go."

I looked from him to the gun, then said, "What?"
"Two types of people use .22s," he said, "target shooters that are just beginning, women mostly, and hitmen. Add a silencer, and it's pretty obvious. A .22 bullet is so small, it can barely pierce bone. Sometimes they get caught up in the abdominal muscles and don't even get through the gut. They're only any good at point blank range, but they're so quiet -- especially with a silencer -- that it's like a housefly's fart. Takes two or three shots to do any damage, but the noise is what people like about them. That, and their velocity is so low that they rarely exit the body."
"So there's no mess," Rubino added.

"Wow," Amy said, dryly, "this is all very fascinating and I'm sure I'll one day use that information in a novel, but I think a more relevant topic would be what is going on to catch this guy, and when can we go home?"

Rubino stood for a moment, holding the gun from his pen in silence. He pulled an evidence bag from his suit jacket and dropped the gun into the bag.

"Finding the guy isn't likely," Bremer said, "more feasible would be finding who hired him. If this was supposed to be retribution for something to do with you, or for screwing up by hiring Dingan, then there are few suspects."
"What, Schumer?"
"Probably."

I sighed, wishing I had some kind of clue as to what was going on.

"So there's nothing stopping this guy from coming after us now?" Amy asked.
"Coming after you? If he wasn't contracted to kill you, he's got no reason to bother," Bremer said.
"These types never go off-book, unless you really piss them off," Rubino then said.
"It's a good thing neither of us stabbed him in the leg, then," I said, looking at Amy.
She shrugged. "You grabbed his gun and hit him in the throat, I'm not the only one he'd be mad at."
Bremer looked at both of us, and asked, "Are you two in some kind of piss-off-hitmen contest or something?"
"We do have a knack for it," Amy said.
"Oh yeah," I said, "Dingan was supposed to be bringing me in, but I managed to coax him into wanting to kill me. How's that for off-book?"
"I don't understand this," Bremer said, "you want credit for annoying people into wanting to kill you?"
"I'm just saying, this new guy could still be a threat."
"I wouldn't worry about it," Bremer said.

"How about my house? Do you have any idea who came to my house and burned it down?"
"Blew it up," Rubino said.
"Huh?"
"It wasn't burned down, there was an explosion. If the house had just been set on fire, it would still be standing."
"Ok, so... wow. Um, do you know who blew up my house?"
"Nope," Bremer said.
"Awesome," I said, sarcastically. "Since I have little to no idea what the hell is happening in my life, could you perhaps provide some kind of list of people who might want to shoot me or blow me up?"
Bremer looked confused, "Well, it's a short list. It starts and ends with Schumer."

Why would Schumer want to kill me? If nothing else, it seems like he would want to strap me to a chair and have some hypnotist take a swan dive into my mind and undo his mistakes. I represent the last two decades of work for him, and probably millions of dollars were spent on the stupid program that produced me. There was no reason for him to want me dead, so why were my FBI stalkers saying he would?

I remembered something Schumer had said. "You won't know who to trust." At the time, I thought he was just trying to be mysterious. He implied it was the FBI who'd actually killed my dad, as little of a fan I was of him at the moment. Lately, it seemed as if all Bremer and Rubino cared about was using me to mole out as much information about the program as they wanted. Maybe the FBI cared more about the program than about me. Maybe the FBI is who my dad was trying to sell the program to, not a foreign government. Maybe the FBI double-crossed him, or he double-crossed the FBI, so they killed him, and are now pumping me for the information he couldn't get them. I supposed if that was their goal, they would want me to hate Schumer, wouldn't they?

My head was spinning and my stomach felt sick. I didn't like the thought of being used. I didn't like the thought of anything that was happening to me. I didn't like that my dad was dead, or that my house had exploded, or that I was wanted in Austria, or that for the last 17 years I'd been having my head screwed around with without knowing about it. I didn't like that I was still standing in my dead principal's living room, or even the fact that my principal was dead. I also didn't like the fact that wherever I went, I was putting my and Amy's life in danger. Once again, I was fed up. For all I know, Bremer and Rubino could have blasted Comstock with VX gas, or hired the .22-Caliber-Killer to "off" Comstock.

Wasn't VX gas the stuff in that movie, The Rock? The little, green, glass balls? Whatever.

I told Bremer and Rubino I'd call them later, grabbed Amy's hand, and left the building.

Distractions

Fiction betrays the reality of certain situations.

Much like how shooting a car's gas tank will not make it explode and no security system on Earth is comprised of a series of red laser beams, it is not easy to be curt and dismissive when there's a gun pointed at you.

It's a gun. You know what it can do. I've seen it, I've shot holes through paper villains to great effect. A gun can put a hole clean through you. Or your windshield.

I didn't know why there was a guy with a gun in Comstock's living room, nor did I know why Comstock was dead or why I was there. I couldn't move; that's all I knew. I tried to remember what the guy had said, "You killed Dingan?" How is that relevant?

The man stayed in the shadows, I couldn't really see his face.

Someone said my name. The voice came from behind. I turned my head just enough to see that Amy was still standing in the foyer. Great. She was supposed to cut through the kitchen, grab a knife, and throw it at this guy's face. Why wouldn't she instinctively do that? I would have.

The guy's still there. Why isn't he saying anything? Was I supposed to answer that question? Is he enjoying the panic he's put me into?

"Dingan tried to kill me," I managed to say.

"So it's true?" the man said, finally. I still couldn't figure out what that accent was. His voice was light, as if whispering.

I said nothing. Just stood there like an idiot with a cell phone in my right hand.

"I was told he was at fault," he said, probably talking about the corpse by the door.
"So you killed him for it?" I said, waiting for a plan to float to the surface of my brain like they usually do.
He was silent for a moment, then turned his head slightly and said, "You, away from the door. Come in here." He was talking to Amy. A few seconds later I felt her standing a few inches to my right.

After another pause, the man asked, "Who are you?" He seemed to choose his words carefully.

I tried to measure the distance between us. It was over six feet. At a distance, the guy with the gun always has an advantage.

"You don't know?" I said, mildly incredulous, "I thought I was at the core of all this."
"I guess I'm being kept in the dark," he said. The accent sounded Scottish maybe.
"Hey, I've been kept in the dark for a while now. I find the best way to get answers is to threaten people, though I usually don't get that far," I said, pointing at Comstock.

The man stepped just a bit closer. Maybe five feet away now. "I do as I'm told, I don't look for answers. I was told to kill the man responsible for Dingan, and I was told that was him."

Hired to kill the man responsible for Dingan's death? Who would do that, other than Schumer?

"You're just a kid," he continued, "how the hell could Dingan have tried to kill you?"
"I'm scrappy," I said. He took another step forward. Four feet. I could see the gun in his right hand better, it was a black pistol with a silver suppressor. It wasn't a Beretta or a H&K, those being the only two guns I know by sight. The fact that I couldn't identify the gun made me wonder if I was only myself. If I'd had weapons training, wouldn't I be able to recognize a gun by sight? I thought that whenever I was in danger, the training took over like a second personality. I felt alone in my mind.

I said, "Dingan was an accident. He tried to take me in, I escaped. He tried to kill me, I killed him back. My understanding is that Comstock hired him, but he did so for someone else. If you want revenge, you'll want to head up the ladder, not down."
"And you're down the ladder?" he asked, less careful with his words. The accent was definitely Scottish. Or Irish. Welsh, maybe?
"At the bottom, and off. I'm off the ladder. I'm running around the yard trying to find the ladder."
"But you're here," he said. "I can't exactly walk away with two witnesses."
"Not my fault you showed yourself. You had a nice hiding spot going there."

After a moment, he said, "Toss the phone."
I frowned and threw the phone in my hand over to the couch.

He took another step forward. Three feet.

Close enough.

My left arm went left, my body went right. I gripped the top of the gun's slide and pulled it backwards, heard the chambered round tumble from the gun and onto the hardwood floor. My right hand went knuckles-first into the man's wrist, freeing the gun from his grip. My right elbow flexed into the man's neck, and I brought my fist down into the back of his head while I turned the gun in my left hand to hold it by the grip. I felt it, that feeling of running on auto-pilot. That clarity. I was glad it was back, comfortable in handing my safety over to a voice inside my head.

I felt something on my leg for a moment, and before I could process it and my surroundings, I saw that Amy had the knife from my pocket in her hands, open, and she lunged forward at the man and plunged the blade into his right thigh. They both howled at the same time, for different reasons. Slightly taken aback, I pulled Amy away from him and kicked the assassin backwards. He stumbled and crashed into the stone fireplace mantle.

"What the hell was that?" I asked, moving the gun to my right hand and keeping it pointed at the man.
"Just helping," Amy said, breathing heavily. I put a hand on her shoulder and walked her to the couch and sat her down.

The man was leaning now against the fireplace, keeping his weight off his leg. He grimaced and winced, both hands wrapped around the handle of the knife stuck into his leg. After some panting, he pulled the knife from himself with a quick tug. He held the knife in front of himself with both hands.

"Drop it," I said, leveling the gun again, and holding it with both hands like you're supposed to, so that somebody can't just grab it and rip it from your hands.

His fingers went limp and the knife fell to the floor. His hands retracted and he held them both over the wound in his leg.

"Now, while we wait for the police, you can tell me all about who you're working for," I said.

The man just kept grimacing. I turned to Amy for a moment and told her to call 911. She asked where the phone was, and I told her it was on the couch by her. She looked, and said she couldn't find it. I turned my head for another moment to look at the couch, but I noticed a slight flurry of movement from the corner of my eye. I turned back to the man at the fireplace just in time to see a small, black cylinder fall to the ground with a slight clank. I quickly tracked my eyes upward to see the man had turned and was holding his face against the mantle, a small shiny ring of metal around his index finger.

I tried to say, "Oh, crap," but was cut off just after the "oh" by a sharp, blinding white light and a deafening explosion. My ears and eyes gave out in an instant, the image of the man holding his face to the wall burned into my vision as I stumbled backwards and tripped over a piece of furniture and fell to the floor. I barely noticed myself hit the hardwood with my back, my senses had all gone away. I existed in a world of sharp ringing and painful blackness. I was aware of the gun in my hand, but there was nothing I could do with it.

For the second time in as many weeks, I wondered if I was permanently blinded.

After a few seconds, the photosensitive cells in my retinas wore themselves out and my vision slowly crept back. All I could smell was ammonia and gunpowder. My ears were still ringing and I found it hard to balance, but I pulled myself up to my feet and tried to figure out what the situation was.

Amy was still on the couch, only now lying down and rubbing her eyes. I discovered the gun in my hand and drew it upwards, scanning the room. There was nothing at the fireplace but a bit of blood, my knife, and a black metal canister, the frame covered by a series of uniform holes, and an aura of black soot covering the floor for about a foot around it. Still fighting for balance, I stumbled into the kitchen, and then the foyer. Comstock was still there, as dead as ever. I set out to inspect the other rooms but back in the living room I noticed that the glass window closest to the fireplace was broken. Outside it, surrounded by bits of glass was one of the small wooden chairs from the table just by the window. He must have used the distraction to escape.

I went over to Amy and put a hand on her shoulder. With her eyes still closed, she tried to fight my arms away until I yelled her name loud enough for me to hear it. I sat down and we took a few minutes to let our senses return.

"Was that a flashbang?" she asked, her voice a bit raw.
"Yeah," I said, rolling back through the series of events. The flash was a magnesium flare, the bang was an ammonium perchlorate reaction probably thrown in with some phosphorus. The intended effect was achieved; not prepared for it, the flashbang had incapacitated me long enough. He could have taken the gun from me and shot me, or used the knife at his feet on me. That he had only escaped seemed unusual, if highly fortunate.
"I thought it was a grenade, or a bomb," she said, "I thought we were dead."
A dull ringing still echoing in my skull, I said, "We're not. Not yet."

And In This Corner

"Ok, I wasn't expecting this," I said, standing in the open doorway of Nathan Comstock's house and looking down at his corpse.
"Is he dead?" Amy, standing beside me, asked. If she was either shocked or alarmed, she demonstrated neither.

I took a broad step over the body, into the house, and looked around for a light switch for the foyer. I found one, and flicked it with my knuckle. An overhead light turned on, scaring away the shadows from around Comstock's face. Oh yeah, he was dead.

"Still wondering?" I asked, looking down still.

Comstock's body was rigid, lying across the wood floor like he'd stopped suddenly in the middle of running. His legs were bent, his arms tucked in against his body. His fingers were flexed as if holding invisible baseballs. His face was pale and sickly, trapped in an expression of panic. There was no blood anywhere. He was wearing khaki slacks, a turquoise polo shirt, and brown loafers; as if he had planned to go out for a late brunch, got as far as the front door, and dropped dead.

"Why does he look like that?" Amy said before stepping over the body.
"It looks like rigor mortis," I said. "The more pertinent question, I think, is why he was killed."
"I thought rigor mortis takes a few days to set in. And why do you think he was killed?"

I looked up from the body, around the parts of the house I could see from where I stood. Everything looked reasonably normal. He couldn't have just died, though. Not when he's in the middle of this whole stupid conspiracy that keeps trying to kill me. I was somehow involved in a spinning swarm of death and secrets. Anybody inside that swarm suddenly dying, it wouldn't be an accident. I tried to explain that.

"We should call the police," Amy said.
"Should we? I mean, are there any reasons we shouldn't?" I asked, trying to think through it. They'd wonder why we were here, but there's nothing too suspicious about that. The FBI would probably swoop in anyway and take over.
"I don't know. Maybe you should call one of your FBI pals instead," Amy said.
"I was just thinking that," I replied.

I pulled out my phone and held it in my hand as I took a few steps around.

"It's disgusting," Amy said as I walked away. "Look, his eyes are still open."

I stepped around a corner and found myself in the kitchen. It was nicely appointed with stainless steel appliances and Italian-looking tile. There were some bags and wrappers from a carry-out place nearby scattered around the counter. Maybe he had brunch in, instead.

"He might just be paralyzed," I said, loud enough so Amy would hear me from where she was. "Should check for a pulse."
"I'm not touching him. It could be contagious," she called out.
"Death isn't contagious," I said, going around a corner into the living room.

The lights were out in the living room, but enough light from the kitchen and foyer came in to let me see rough shapes. There was a glass sliding door in the back, a long sectional couch facing a square TV set sitting on a wooden stand, and a fireplace on the opposite wall.

"Who could have done it?" Amy asked, now in my line of sight.
"He was afraid that his bosses in the Marines were going to kill him, I guess he was right," I said, standing in the middle of the living room.
"If they're capable of doing that, if Schumer or whoever would kill for that, then this is worse that you figured."
"Yeah," I said, "it's bad."

It was very bad. I'd always hoped that the threat was coming from some outside party. Schumer acted like he wanted to help me, the FBI agents acted like they wanted me to help them. Someone came to my house, shot at me, and then burned the place down. If it was Schumer or the Marines behind all this, there's nothing I could do to stop them. I couldn't outrun them, I couldn't hide. The real mystery was why I wasn't dead already.

The sight of Comstock's face flashed in my mind for a moment, sent chills down my spine. The last time I saw the face of a dead guy was that photograph Pratt showed me in the Vienna coffee house. Some political guy that Pratt thought I'd killed. Killed with some injection that causes or mimics a heart attack. I wondered if that's how Comstock died. Could they have been connected? Comstock and some Austrian guy;Nes-something, Nessiri? Nessimi? Swanson?

If the death was the same, it meant somebody came in here and shot him up with something. Somebody good. There's not a lot of people with the ability to call professional hitters for every little job. The only person I knew with a hitman on his speed-dial was Comstock, he called Dingan to -- allegedly -- bring me in for questioning or more brainwashing. Maybe Comstock had a whole Rolodex of hitmen. Maybe Schumer has his own Rolodex, or the same. Maybe Schumer did have Comstock killed. But why?

"I can't figure out why someone, Schumer or anyone, would really want Comstock dead," I said, still in the living room.
"Comstock thought there was somebody after him because he lost track of you and screwed up with the Dingan thing," Amy said.
"Is that worth killing the guy over? Because I stopped going to school? It couldn't have messed them up too bad. I marched right into Quantico twice now, if they really needed me back in the hypnosis-chair, they've had plenty of chances to grab me."
"Because he talked, then? Maybe since Vienna, he's been talking to someone else. The FBI, the press, anyone."
"I don't know. I guess so. From what I can tell, the stupidest thing he's done in the last month has been sending a hitman to track down a teenager and then having that teenager end up killing the hitman."

"You killed Dingan?" came a different voice, from behind me.

I turned around, and from the darkness in the corner of the room, behind the fireplace mantle, stepped a man. He was dressed in black, like the men who'd come to my house, with various indiscernible shapes hanging from his vest harness. In his hand was a black and silver pistol with a long, silver cylindrical tube jutting from the barrel. The gun was pointed at me.

"I'd heard the cops got him," he said, "that changes things just a bit." His voice had a bit of an accent, though I couldn't put my finger on it.

Amy hadn't said a word. I assumed she was still in the foyer and was seeing this.

I looked at where the man had come from. Unless he'd been creeping around, I would have walked right by him and not seen him. That, the suit, and the gun; it all added up to one thing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I thought, may I introduce: the second hitman.

Home Away From Home

The insurance company put my mother and me in a hotel while they figured out what they were going to do about our burned-down house. The options were seemingly to have them pay to rebuild it or for them to just send us a stupid huge check for the value so we could buy our own house. I wanted the latter, for receiving stupid huge checks from insurance companies was becoming a pastime of mine.

Though I wasn't a fan of losing the things important to me beforehand.

The hotel they put us in wasn't a traditional hotel in the "bed and a bathroom" sense, it was one of those home-away-from-home places for traveling businessmen or families whose homes have burned down. All the rooms were suites with two bedrooms and bathrooms, a living room, and a full kitchen. Down in the lobby they had full meals served buffet-style for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and inside the room there was a card we could fill out for what kind of groceries we wanted and some hotel lackey would run out and get it, charging it to the room. Insurance was paying the room bill, so we went a little nuts on the lackey groceries.

After one day, the insurance company had a guy go out and look at the remains of the house and he determined that it was a total loss and cut us a rather large check for us to start replacing clothes and furniture. He also noted that the garage had fallen onto my Dad's Cadillac and suggested we call our auto insurance for that.

My mom was still a mess from all of this, but I was almost enjoying it. It was unique and interesting, and nobody was shooting at me so I could remain myself through it all. It seemed that I wasn't too attached to any of my stuff after all, at least not so attached that I couldn't re-attach myself to something that insurance check couldn't replace. Maybe I could get that larger bed I always wanted, or the more expensive clothes I had been thinking about; only this time using the new insurance money instead of the old. Tracking my windfalls was getting complicated, though, it seemed like I could make a new profession out of having insurance companies buy all my stuff.

Don't be morbid, your dad died for some of that money, echoed a voice in my head. I was beginning to think it was worth it, after all. My dad practically built me from scratch and unloaded me onto some mind-warped doctors to test some unethical experiment, then he tried to sell all that information to, what, Russia? North Korea? That insurance policy was just so we wouldn't be completely screwed if his plan failed and he was killed for his treason. Some consolation prize. Did he hope I wouldn't find out? Or that the money would make me overlook the fact that my whole life was a lie and that he tried to sell that lie for a quick buck?

Whatever he did, it was probably his fault that the house was destroyed. It's probably his fault that people are coming at me from all angles, trying to get their hands on the amazing hypno-killer boy.

Screw it, I'd take the money but I wouldn't accept it as some kind of reparations for my bungled life. I'll buy overpriced jeans, handguns, or a million candy bars if I want to. I'll let that postmortem bribe buy me a new life, not forgiveness.

Amy, surprisingly, had opted to return to school on Monday. She must have been worried about graduating, because at this point I couldn't be bothered to even consider school. I was living in a hotel, the only things I owned were a pair of pants and a handful of weapons. I was slowly coming to accept the fact that there was a killer inside my head, and that there was little chance that my life would ever be normal. Ever since that phone call a month ago, my life took a running leap away from normal.

It was Tuesday when the insurance adjuster came out and cut that check. We'd just gotten back to the hotel when my cell phone, for which I no longer had a charger, rang. I recognized the number as either Rubino or Bremer's, didn't really care either way which one it was, and answered accordingly.

"Chris, it's Special Agent Bremer."
"Special. I know," I said. I could tell it was Bremer from the first word, the coarseness of his weary old voice was more pronounced over the phone.
"We'd like to see you for a bit of a debrief, sit down with you so you can tell us what it is exactly you know so far, what Schumer told you, and so on."

I wasn't sure how I felt about these FBI Agents -- Special Agents -- anymore. At first they had been a pretty decent, if unpredictable source of information. Now, it seemed like they only wanted information. Schumer said my dad was killed in a shootout at a botched FBI sting. For all I knew it could have been Bremer or Rubino who pulled the trigger, if even that was supposed to be a bad thing. The thing that bothered me the most was that they seemed to want to know everything about Schumer and his blasted "program" as he called it. If the FBI's only attachment to this was that they caught and stopped my dad from selling secrets abroad, why would they care about what those secrets were. If it was a black-ops, black-budget outfit, it seems that the FBI would want to keep its collective nose out of it, but here it seemed like my two Bureau buddies were just as interested in getting their hands on the specifics as whomever my dad was trying to sell them to.

"Ok," I said, knowing I didn't have a choice, "when and where?"
"We can come to your hotel room tonight, around seven or eight."
I looked around for a clock, found the one by the bed in the room that had become my own and saw that it was just after 2PM. "Alright, I guess. Though, maybe somewhere outside the room, like the conference room down in the business center."
"Why there?" Bremer asked.
I didn't want them in my room because I didn't want my mom hearing any of what they or I would have to say, and also I had some kind of instinct to protect my property from people I didn't like. I couldn't say that, though, so I said, "There's not a lot of room in here, it's kind of cramped with the two of us. And, hey, I can have the conference room catered. Insurance company's treat."
"Whatever, we'll call you when we're outside the hotel." He hung up.

I tossed the phone onto my bed and went back out into the common area and got a bottle of water from the fridge. My mom was at the kitchen table, looking through the paperwork the insurance guy had given her and idly tapping the check with her free hand.

"I should probably put this in the joint checking account so you can use your debit card to buy yourself some clothes or other stuff," she said, watching me spin the cap to the water bottle.
"Or you could put it in the savings account with the rest of the money, let it earn some interest," I said, leaning against the counter.
"Then you couldn't spend it with your card," she said, looking down at the paperwork again.
"I could withdraw cash from it at an ATM with my card," I said.
"You don't want to have to walk around a mall or a store with a bunch of cash on you."

I remembered being back at Dulles airport and pulling a thousand dollars from an ATM, and consistently feeling like a whole band of ninjas was going to appear from nowhere and rob me or pick my pockets until I'd spent most of the cash. I also remembered that I'd spent most of the cash on an Austrian sparbuch account, and that the only things proving I owned that bank account had gone up in flames along with the house. That sucked, wasting however-many real dollars that thing cost me. It meant that that account was going to sit idle, untouched, for years and years. That 100-Euro balance was going to accrue interest until the global economy fails. Some bank teller will notice in a thousand years that there's an anonymous sparbuch account that nobody's touched since the 21st century with a balance in the billions. Oh, my imagination.

I told my mom she could deposit it into the checking account and whatever we didn't spend after a while could go into savings later, then went back to my room and shut the door. If Amy was still skipping her afternoon classes, she should be out by now. I sent a text message to her phone asking just that. While I waited for a response I sat at the edge of my bed, opening and closing the bottom drawer of the dresser with my foot. Under a folded blanket were three pistols, the USP .45 I'd bought before and the two Beretta 92s I'd taken off Schumer's impromptu bodyguards. I didn't know what else to do with the guns, so I just hid them in the drawer and every few hours had a compulsion to make sure they were still there. I had three loaded magazines for the USP, and one apiece for the Berettas. The 92s used 9mm ammo, so I couldn't use any of the .45 ammo I'd already bought, though that wouldn't matter because everything I couldn't fit into clips was left in the house. The one that burned down.

Looking at the guns in the drawer, I did some mental arithmetic to determine I had 69 rounds if all the mags were fully loaded. If the boogeyman came through the front door of the hotel suite, at three-round bursts fired twice per ten seconds, I could hold the boogeyman off for just over a minute and a half.

My phone beeped, distracting me from my wandering mind. Amy said she was out and asked if I wanted her to come see the the hotel room. I sent back that she should come over around 6PM.

There were still some things I wanted to go over with her before I had a sit-down with the FBI.

In the meantime, my mom and I went to the bank together to deposit the check. She jokingly said I made a good bodyguard, since I was so quiet. The quiet was on account of the contemplating I'd been doing, but the idea was interesting to me. When I'd read that novel on the plane to Vienna about a bodyguard, I thought it sounded like it might be a cool job. Swearing your life to protect somebody, it seemed noble. It was interesting to watch the teller at the small bank branch try to hide her reaction to the amount on the check, the same way they had when we deposited our life insurance checks.

After a few hours of staring at my arsenal, Amy sent notice that she was downstairs. I told my mom I was going to go check out the dinner buffet in the lobby, but that's not what I did.

"Am I not going to see your room?" she asked when I approached her in the lobby.
"I'm sure you can imagine it," I said, walking toward the business center where there was a room with a few computers to rent. It was empty, and suitably private.

"So you're still leaving school at lunch?" I asked.
"Well, I wasn't going to. I was going to start hitting classes four through six, but yesterday I got a memo from the office that fourth-hour study hall was canceled for the day so I thought, what the hell, and called off the rest of the day."
"They canceled study hall?"
"Yeah, couldn't get anybody to proctor it or something."
"How hard is it? Everybody just sits there."
She shrugged.
"So, was Comstock there?" I asked.
"At school?"
"Yeah."
"No, not today or yesterday."
"Alright, we need to go talk to him," I said.
Amy paused, thinking. "Why?" she asked after not coming up with an answer herself.

I told her about the meeting I was supposed to have with my FBI friends tonight, how they wanted me to tell them everything I knew, but that there was too much I didn't know. Comstock would have those answers, so I had to ask him.

"Do you have his number?" she asked.
"I did," I said, "it went with the house."
Amy looked down at the bank of computers. "Is that camera thing still there? We could at least see if he's home."
I thought about it. I didn't have the address to view the camera feed, but I could get it from my email. "Good idea," I said.

I sat at one of the computers, logged onto my email, got the address, and in a few seconds the familiarly grainy and tree-obstructed picture of the front of Comstock's house was on the screen. The lights were on inside the house.

"Good enough for me," I said.

Before we left I stopped at the business center's main desk and asked if I could reserve the small conference room from seven to nine tonight. It was available, so I reserved it and asked for a coffee service and a sandwich tray or something for the room. I walked away feeling like a rich person, realized I technically was a rich person, but felt better about it knowing it wasn't my money I was spending.

"What do you need to talk to Comstock about, anyway?" Amy asked in the middle of the drive across town to his place.
"What Schumer told me doesn't add up," I said. "He says that Comstock's main job was to wrangle some free class into my schedule so I could have my brain blasted with Marine Corps trivia every day, but if that's the case, why do I remember every single class? There should be on class where I can't remember any classmates, or that I can't really focus on."

Amy and I walked through my class schedule for this semester. College Writing first hour I had with kids from other classes, and I had group projects that I'd talked about with other kids. Anatomy second hour I also had with kids from other classes, had done group projects, and I'd had to memorize and learn so many terms that it had to be real. Third hour was Pre-Calc/Trig, and while it was amazingly boring, I remembered it too vividly and I'd done too much homework for it to all be a self-imagined product of hypnosis. After lunch was fourth hour study hall, which I had with Amy so that had to be real, plus I can remember all the other students from the class. After that was Euro History and Computer Hardware, and there were two kids who were in both of those classes with me, and I walked from one class to the other with.

"Maybe all the hypnosis-classes were before, and since this is your last semester there aren't any fake classes this time," Amy suggested.
"Schumer said this all started because I stopped showing up for my daily brainwashing after the fight, and he said that if I had kept going to classes that they could have just 'fixed' whatever went wrong with my brain."
"So maybe Schumer was lying," Amy said.
"He was lying about something, I know that much. If he was lying about this, then it changes everything."
"So you want Comstock's side of it?" Amy asked.
"Yes, and another thing," I grinned.
"What?"
"I, uh, want to have him make sure I graduate," I said.
Amy was silent, then laughed. "What, you're going to hold him at gunpoint and tell him to make sure you have the credits?"
"I don't have any guns on me. I could hold him at knife-point. Again."
"You're serious?" she asked.
"I-- no, not about that, but I can still ask him. He owes me that. I don't want to have to make up a summer of classes if I want a diploma, all because of this stupid program. He can fiddle with my grades the same way he fiddles with everything else about my school life."
"Allegedly."
"Right."

We arrived at Comstock's house and, for the first time, didn't have to sneak around. I pulled into his driveway, and we both got out and walked up to the front door. I was practicing in my head how this would all go, I could play it straight or I could try to be the bully again. Did he even know that it was me in Vienna? I thought Schumer said he figured it out, but I couldn't remember.

We got to the door and Amy reached out to ring the bell but I stopped her. Something was twitching in the back of my mind, something wasn't right. The door was already open a crack, I noticed.

I stepped around and tried to look through the windows beside the door but couldn't see anything inside, just empty hallways and a living room. I reached my palm out the door and gave it a light tap to swing it open, but the door didn't move. I pushed again, something was blocking it. I used both hands and my shoulder and pushed, the door opened slowly, pushing whatever was obstructing it. After a few feet, the obstruction had been pushed out of the way and the door, newly free, swung open and slammed into the stopper loudly.

The foyer wasn't lit, but the thing blocking the door was evident. It was about five feet long, laying on the floor awkwardly, and looked a lot like a dead Nathan Comstock.