Nothing on earth is like him,
One made without fear.
He looks on everything that is high;
He is king over all the sons of pride.
So there I was, standing in the gore which had minuets earlier been the largest, and most covert, sadomasochistic orgy the city had seen in years, feeling severely disappointing at how the evening turned out. Don’t get me wrong, seeing a plan go off without a hitch is a very nice thing to see, especially in my line of work where problems usually equated to lives. Everything went over spotlessly, the Kill Squads got into position on schedule, and all the targets we were expecting to attend showed up early. At 2AM on the dot the soldiers blew open the windows and doors, sealing any and all ways in and out of the club and purged the entire area while I watched safely from a monitor in an armored van two blocks away. And, right now, other agents were leaking the information we wanted out to the press and the public was doomed to either swallow it, or ignore the event altogether. Yes, everything was coming together perfectly, and that is the problem.
You see, my job after I get everything planned, checked and organized, is too wait for something to go horribly wrong so I could fix it. Now when things go accordingly, like with today, I end up wasting a lot of my own time and effort for nothing. Feeling both bored and resentful for having showed up and wanting only for the assignment to be over so I could go home and do something a bit more constructive with what was left of the day, like masturbation or drinking. On my better days, when the targets don’t show up, or we become short on men, or when someone gets wind of the mission before go, or for some inexplicable reason the agency puts the whole assignment on halt, I end up with a lot more things to do and a lot more job satisfaction. But as of yet, I have only had to contribute a reminder of everyone’s tasks during the mission and the go code, both of which were extremely pointless seeing as everyone already knew what to do and I wasn’t exactly needed to tell them when to start doing it.
Around me heavily armed and armored Soldiers were moving about the body strewn night club, identifying the dead, locating survivors, and exchanging stupid comments with each other as they worked, like, "How many B.N.s you get on contact Joker? I’m counting 7 myself!" and, "Hey man, check out this b***h! I would so hit that if I hadn't already hit that, Ha!" bondage clad bodies were being stacked in rows on the floor, after being thoroughly inspected and tagged for special disposal by the men. I was standing between rows B and C, giving the bodies a visual inspection that they did not need, to make sure that none of the pale infected and normal looking uninfected corpses were misplaced. This, sadly, was the only thing I could do to occupy the time until the mission was over and I could be given the go ahead to go home.
Ahead of me the few survivors that were left were lined up against the wall, a lone scientist moving from one to the other, poking their exposed skin indiscriminately with something resembling a blood-suger display diabetics use. The loud beeping noise it made with each test caught my attention, then I became fully entranced by the look of the people. All of them clutched the wall and each other as if anyone would fall away from the pack they would be slaughtered by the soldiers that held them at gunpoint. It was pathetic really, not in a sad way, but a way that made your blood boil at how it was really their own fault, like a healthy homeless man asking for coins. The Scientist prodded a pale, bondage bound woman, who was being held by a equally clad, but much larger and less pale man.
The Device he was holding beeped again, but this time at a much higher pitch, whatever that signalized, though I could hazard a guess, did not bode well for the woman. The scientist took a step back and one of the soldiers stepped forward to pull the woman away from the group. I believe everyone knew what was going to happen to her once the device had made its noise, but this really sent the message clearly to the group. The man who was holding her lunged forward his face filled with a greater fear than that of his fellow prisoners, screaming as he did so, "No! What are you maniacs..." But fell short just as a second soldier shot forward, kicked him in the gut, and sent him reeling back to the others where he was held at direct gunpoint. The woman, was kicked to her knees by the soldier without care and before anything more could be done he put a bullet through the back of her skull, sending a spray of pink mist cascading onto the already bloodied ground.
This all happened within the span of a few seconds, I was too far away to have done anything. Not that I would have necessarily, I knew from experience that she was too far gone. But I wasn't just going to sit there and let the soldiers execute the survivors in front of other survivors. I stepped over the corpses I was inspecting and headed toward where the survivors were herded against the wall. Passing the scientist, who stood stunned with his device still in hand, obviously not used to the blatant violence often displayed by the kill squads, I headed toward the soldier who had performed the execution. The Man who was protecting the now woman in his arms was fighting against the soldier to get to the corpse of the girl, shouting in pain and anger all the while. Standing just behind the executioner I leaned in and said over the screams of the other man,
"Was that really necessary?"
The soldier half turned to face me, but paused seeing I was just and agent, and a commanding officer, theirs a stigma traditional between the branches of our organization, and said,
"Standard procedure, Sir. Execute all Fre... Infected on sight."
He was about to say Freak, not exactly the most endearing term for our enemies, but it was sadly a more precised them than the term Infected. I frowned at the soldier and stepped around him to kick over the dead woman's body with my food and gave her a look over,
"I know that, I was talking about the public execution! You couldn't just drag her off to where the others couldn't receive even more emotional damage?"
The soldier shrugged off the comment and moved to away to continue holding the others against the wall with his rifle. Just then the man broke free of the soldiers grasp and barreled for the body of the woman, grabbing her torso and holding it to himself as if she could somehow come back to life, but he was not so lucky. The soldier who had been restraining him walked up behind him but was stopped doing any damage when I put my hand to his chest,
"Wait!"
I strode over to the scientist, who standing in the same place and in the same position as I had last saw him and took the device out of his hand. Moving back to the sobbing man I leaned down and poked his neck with it. It made the same noise as it did with all the other survivors, smiling I tossed it back over my shoulder toward the scientist and said,
"He's good"
----------
I wasn't content with the idea of the survivors being handled by the kill squads, obvious reasons aside, after the execution. I called in a Black Van to get them to a proper Processing facility and had a exit cleaned for their removal. All that had to happen now was for the van to actually get there. Survival of the witnesses was not a priority of our organization, in reality it was quite the opposite when compared to our overall goal, and the order was probably pushed down by some operator. This was not new, there's a lot of cleanup to do after a raid when you don't want anyone to know about it, and with so few people to get things done everything seemed to take more time than necessary. As far as I knew, most of the agents were currently working away in upper level of the club, sorting through papers for information before moving it to transport. The scientists were busy moving the dead bodies and, on a lesser extent, cleaning up the damage caused by the kill squads. And aforementioned psychos were mostly heading back to HQ for debriefing.
All this, as you can expect, took precedent, and were the reasons why it took me a half hour from ordering the transport for it to arrive.
