Dissolution
I'm taking a sip of coffee as the first bullet shrieks into in the wall next to me. One leg kicks over the table, the other kicks back my chair as I drop, all instinct, onto the ground. A snap, a slide, and there's a gun in my hand. Another round glances off the metal table, denting it. Not the same kind of gun; it's a lighter gauge warning shot, to let me know I'm the target. That suits me just fine.
I only have a couple of seconds to get my bearings. I'm in a cafe at the northwestern peak of what is, looking at it from the top, a large octagon that makes up an outdoor mall. It's actually quite nice and quiet this time of day, except I suppose for when someone's shooting at you. I'm on the far side - the shots came from across the way, but they weren't straight-on. No, the first one was a sniper shot, the second came from the same direction. Whoever is shooting at me is doing so from the roof in the center of the complex, and there's about 20 yards in every direction in which I'd be completely open.
There's no choice but to run as more shots ring out, and I dart down the wall, weaving in and out of kiosks and tables as people run screaming. People are running in the chaos, and the shots are coming slower as they push each other over trying to move in the opposite direction I am. No one but me is meant to get hurt here, and the mall is being cleared out so we can do this one-on-one. I know it's her, I knew it from the first shot. It didn't hit me only because she didn't want it to, not yet. I'll have to pick that bone with her later.
I find good cover inside a scented soap store and take the time to catch my breath and try to pin down where she is. From where I am I can't see her, I'll have to get closer, exposing myself. For now all I can do is stick to the wall until I get a better angle. As the store window fills with holes, I know I have to move; if I stay in here she'll toss in a grenade, and no amount of dodging is going to save me then. I roll out and immediately take off. I hear the click of an automatic weapon. Damn, she's serious about this.
The first time I saw her, she was shooting a man in the arm. He was in a business suit, exquisitely tailored, the kind of suit most men would not even be able to identify as being more expensive than their own lives. I faced her from his back, and cocked my head.
“Mind if I ask what the hell you're doing?”
“Well you see, when a boy really likes a girl she fucking shoots him in the arm because he wont tell her what he needs to know. Now if you'll excuse me...”
“Excuse you? You must be kidding me. This is my mark. And we both know he's not some two-bit CFO, which means your company should know that I claimed him.”
“Did they hire you for your big strong brain, or was that just a bonus? Look at my uniform.”
I cocked my head. “You...work for us.”
“Congratulations! You're vaguely insightful. Now-”
“Now nothing, you can't just come in here and steal my mark! You know how much money I was gonna make off this job?”
“Yeah. I do. And frankly, I wanted a new car.”
“You...you bitch.”
Bullets cascade around me as I run, though I get off a shot or two when the angle is right, more to shake her off me than to actually do any damage. As I pass the divides between awnings I catch glimpses of her. She's wearing the same old uniform, standard issue. She always liked the classics. She's got enough ammo strapped to her body to take out a small battalion, but every last one of those bullets has my name etched onto it. She hasn't patched up the holes I put in it the last time we met, and her hair has been chopped off. Her hair used to go down to her waist, she really loved it. I can't see her eyes from here, but I don't have to, I know them well enough already. There's no life in them now, no sign of anything but function; those eyes exist only to identify the target.
Last time I saw her was five years ago, in Stockholm. She was lying on the ground, her hot blood melting the snow where it was oozing out of her body. I looked down at her, a thin film of snow forming on a body that was growing increasingly cold. She mouthed something to me, then used what little energy she had left to keep her eyes open, to keep them on mine, and we shared a long moment of silence. That silence was huge, it was all-encompassing, countries exploded and populations rose and fell and not a bit of it penetrated that silence. It was a real thing, more real than the snow falling, than the cold seeping into our wounds, than all our history and the fact that it was going to end at that moment. We had nothing else to say to each other. It was done. And so I pulled the trigger.
We're alone now, just her and me. She picked the location well. We should have at least a few more minutes before any authorities show up, and longer before they do anything that will effect this. There's no way I can match the firepower she's packing, I'll have to get up to the roof where she is before I can even have a chance, and that is assuming she doesn't blow me away before then. But I know her, I can feel how much she hates me right now, and I know how this is going to end.
She is, as of the last time I checked, the fifth best sniper on the planet. She can shoot the wings off a fly from a mile away without even thinking twice about it. I'm, on the other hand, a knife specialist. You give me something any sharper than a billiard ball and I can take out a whole room of people before any of them even realize I'm there.
Maybe, in the end, that was always our problem.
As the chatter of her weapon sends a hundred metal slugs my way, I can almost hear Gordon's voice again, think about him telling me not to date within the company, that I'm being crazy.
“Man, you're being crazy.”
“I know what I'm doing, Gordon. I'm not some rookie, I don't harbor any illusions about what that kind of girl is like.”
“Listen to yourself. If you really knew what she was like, by which I mean if you hadn't already slept with her, you would never even think about it. She is completely crazy, and you're crazy, this whole damn thing is crazy.”
“She's really not as bad as everyone thinks.”
“You mean she's not a cold, vindictive, distant, break-your-arm-in-four-places-if-you-glance-at-her-chest bitch?”
“No, she's all of that. She's just...different sometimes, that's all.”
“You know what? I'm out. No way am I getting in the middle of this. You know what dating someone from the company entails, you know the rules. She's going to tear you apart one day, you know that right? Besides, everyone knows female assassins are stingy lovers.”
That's completely true, by the way. They are stingy. I never had a chance.
I'm kneeling behind a wall now, tearing off part of my shirt to staunch the bleeding in my left arm. It's pure luck that she didn't render it useless; the bullet's in deep though, and I doubt I'll be able to get it out. While I'm here, I check the other injuries I have. A couple of grazes, another bullet in my thigh, nothing life-threatening and nothing I haven't had before. In general the saving grace of a firefight is that once you've been shot a few times you usually give up or stop moving. We don't have that luxury. We've been trained to take everything we inflict, and while being able to shrug off a few bullets in my flesh may seem advantageous, it makes fights between professionals drawn-out and brutal in a way that it even makes us queasy. And us, we're two of the best.
There is a stairway directly across from me, from which I can access the roof. Between me and that lovely little door, however, is a wide open space with nothing for cover but a couple of gaudy plants and a bench with melting ice cream on it. Letting her waste bullets until she has to reload isn't an option; with the payload she's carrying there's no way I'd be able to last that long. Looking to my left I see a car on display, a disgustingly yellow hummer that has about as much taste and function as a couch with electrified metal spikes on all the cushions (professional killers don't need a giant boxy eyesore to assert themselves). However, I can get inside with no problem, and if I can scramble, I may be able to hotwire it.
Of course she continually pumps the car door with led, and if I move at all I'll be full of holes and soon even this monster wont work so once it's running, still on the floor, I slam the gas pedal with one hand and cover my head with the other. Even with the break, the car impacts the wall next to the door, and I feel the metal contorting, and hoping my stunt doesn't kill me, I can't help but think about the first time I slept with her.
As we were lying there, I could have sworn she looked at me the same way she looked at someone through a sniper scope, as if my life was entirely in her hands and she controlled every inch of my being, and lying there under her I felt more naked than I ever had or have since. Love Will Tear Us Apart shivered from a record player sitting in the corner, but I could barely hear it as the full weight of her presence bore down on me. She was regarding me in the manner that she regarded a mark, and I found myself shaking as lowered her face to mine. No one else ever made me shake like that.
Crashing a car into a wall to simultaneously escape a hail of gunfire and open a securely locked door may seem like a stupid thing to do, and I'm not exactly prepared to argue that it's not. However, when given the immediate choice between different ways of dying, you'd be surprised how little either of them start to matter. Death, at some point, is just death. No point cloaking it in different language. Self-inflicted but accidental impalement or turned to a colander by a jilted lover; is either one really preferable? In any case, I'm wonderfully alive and safe from her for now. A couple flights of stairs separates us, and as much as I hate where this is going, I have no choice. I start to run, ignoring the shooting pains in my leg, and each time it hits a step a pain shoots through my whole body and memories come flooding back to me.
---
My eye's resting on the scope, and I'm trying to hold my hand steady.
“I don't think I'm cut out for sniping. My hand keeps shaking.”
“You can skin a man with robotic precision in twelve minutes, but using a sniper rifle makes you nervous?”
“Hey, it's not my thing. You only get one chance, it's too far away, it's so...impersonal.”
“Yeah, because I like to have conversations with people I'm killing for money. You're doing fine, just take a deep breath.”
“ The target's too small.”
“It's not too small.”
“Can you even see it from here? It's way too small!”
Her finger circles around mine on the trigger, and I feel her chest against my back.
“If you don't shoot this thing in ten seconds I'm going to break your finger.”
“Would you calm down, this isn't a job, it's freaking practice, I'm trying to do this righ-”
The yell muffled the snapping of my finger.
---
She stretches out on the bed, then shifts onto one elbow to look at me.
“So what did he say?”
“What do you think he said? He begged for his life. He gave me that look – you know the one -- and he started telling me about his family, how much they love him. Like I've come this far and I didn't think about shit like that.”
“Can you blame him?” she asks, as I pass her the cigarette. “Guy's got a knife to your throat, you're not gonna try whatever you can?”
“I guess you have a point. I dunno. It's starting to get me down.”
“Going soft on me, are you?”
“It's not that. I love what I do. Hell, I don't think I could do anything else. I ever tell you what I used to do, before I joined the company?”
She takes a long drag, and stares at me. She hates existentialism, doesn't have the patience for it, but she accommodates me.
“I worked in a meat packing factory. For, God, it must have been seven years.”
“That explains how good you are with knives, I guess. It's not so strange.”
“I never touched a knife. I did office shit. Seven years in this place where they cut up animals and shipped them off for people to eat, and I did stupid office shit.”
“So? You left. You live a great life now, at a job you love, that you're great at. You've moved on.”
“That's not what I'm talking about.” I sigh as I put out the cigarette. She has never been about the big stuff; I don't think she could understand what I'm talking about even if I knew how to explain it.
“It's been a long day. You're just worn out. Turn out the light, get some sleep.”
We're lying in the dark about three minutes before she speaks again.
“I never did tell you my real name, did I?”
“Nope.”
“Don't got one.”
---
Time's running out. It's raining hard, the kind of rain that suffocates you when you stand under it, so thick that everything loses its form and blends together. She's sobbing and my arms are around her, but I can tell she can't feel them, she just beats her fist on my chest again and again, and I'm trying to find words to calm her down but I don't have any and it makes me feel weak and useless. Having nothing left to say to her then, it was like a kind of death. Maybe worse.
---
It's been a week, and we haven't spoken. She calls me from another hotel across Stockholm, and tells me where to meet her. I take a long time strapping on my weapons; I make each movement slow and deliberate, almost lovingly preparing myself. It's snowing outside, and even from inside I can tell that there's going to be a holy silence out there, the kind that can't happen unless there's snow to soak up the noise. For a while I sit on the edge of my bed, head down, not thinking of anything. Then I get up, sigh once, and go to see her for the last time.
---
In most situations like this, were I to bust through a door to the roof I would be shot dead before I could even finish kicking, but she's going to let me do it. She's being old-fashioned about this, which isn't like her; she never had the patience for anything but cold reality, whatever was needed at that moment and nothing else. She has this way of consuming everything. It's not a conscious decision, not something I think she knows she does, but everything and everyone around her is meant only to feed her, to be witness to her, to be used by her at whatever moment she chooses. There were times where I felt like a resource -- something that was feeding her, that would eventually be used up and discarded like a fleck of dead skin. I couldn't hold it against her, even now. The way things turned out was, I've decided, inevitable. I know it for sure now, and I probably knew it then too. We were always destined to come to this, even though I tried to avoid it.
I kick open the door, gun pointed, and for the first time in half a decade, I see her face. She has a rifle pointed at me, and her eyes are just as I imagined them. She doesn't even blink as we stand there, listening to the sirens approach. My sense of time and space fall off their axes, and for just a moment I feel like all this is fake, like I'm actually back in my apartment listening to her shower and staring at her green dress slumped over my chair before I come to, and the reality, the cold physical circumstance I'm engaged in comes back to me. I barely hear the words that come out of my mouth.
“There's no way you would have missed that first shot.”
“You're a real son of a bitch, you know that?”
“You cut your hair. It's different, but I like it.”
“Don't fuck with me. You know how this works. You stood there above me, you pointed your damn gun at me, and you didn't kill me. Do you have any fucking idea what it was like waking up in a chopper? Knowing that I had been denied that basic fucking right? God, you know how these things are supposed to go. You knew how I would feel when I woke up.”
“But you did wake up-”
“Don't you feed me any bullshit! If you didn't have the balls to put one between my eyes you weren't worth my time to begin with.”
“So this is really it? There's no way to do this but one of us leaving in a body bag?”
“If you don't like the rules, maybe this life isn't for you. That doesn't give you the right to insult me like that.”
“Maybe I'm not cut out for this shit. I don't know.”
“Shut up. I don't care what you think, not anymore. One of us dies here. That's the rule.”
“So it's really that simple? That's what it all boils down to? A fucking rule?”
She puts one in my shoulder. It goes straight through, and I can already feel the blood going down my arm. I try not to flinch. We trade shots, a flurry of movement. She's on top of me, but this is my area of expertise; I ditch the gun. Soon we trade places, and she's lying on the ground, staring at me with the eyes someone who's been hovering on death for years, and she's using them to tell me what she couldn't with words. Whatever feelings she may have once harbored for me, there's nothing there now, nothing but raw hatred. Did I really turn her into this? I'm holding a knife at her throat, but you'd never know it looking at her. Even drenched in blood, with her short, ragged hair, stone eyes, she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. I have to wonder how many men have suffered for her. It was wrong of me. I know that. I've spent five years running from it, but she was never one to let things like that go.
---
I put in a call to the company as I leave, tell them she's dead. I'm told she quit after Stockholm, same as me. The receptionist, Amanda, tells me she's sorry to hear about it, that we were the cutest couple, most people didn't get it but she saw what made us work. Too bad, she says, that it always works out like this so often. Our kind weren't meant to find happiness with each other. I tell her she's probably right, then thank her and hang up.
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