Prologue

All spies, assassins, and other super-cool bad-guy hunters drink shaken martinis, bang a new hot chick every week, and drive around in BMWs, right? Fuck, I wish.

Just like they all started out being uber-good at this shit. Right. Like one day you can walk into an agency and ask "Hey, you guys are recruiting paid killers now, huh?" All the movies and books never mention where those high-priced sophisticated killers began their journey into a dark and dangerous world. No one ever talks about the mistakes they made in the beginning, how they were introduced into a life on the edge... nah, skip straight to the good part, where they have it all figured out. People enjoy that more.

Maybe that's where I should start. I have some pretty damn decent stories to share if I do say so myself. I have taken down men who thought they were badder than bad, and organizations more powerful than any of the mainstream religions' false gods. Yeah, I suppose that is where I should start... but I won't. I want to take you through it all, from the very beginning. Well, maybe not the very beginning. I won't talk about my parents fucking to produce a fertilized egg and all that shit. I'll start when I was eighteen, but first I'll give you a bit of a rundown on me. I know, I know, authors are supposed to show, not tell. But I ain't no author, I'm a goddamn hired gun. This writing shit is new to me, but I kind of figured it would help me pay some of my bills in a more legal way than I normally do.

I was intelligent. Well above average. Top one percent of my class and all that good shit. I was also somewhat overweight, I had a case of acne like you probably wouldn't believe, and I found it impossible to hold a decent conversation with a member of the opposite sex. I also wasn't so hung up on this American dream everyone seemed to be after. Two point four kids, a mortgage, student loans, credit card debt... wonderful fucking dream. What was so special about this life everyone wanted? I just never got it. I wanted to be different, fresh, original, and I couldn't think of a way to do it.

So like any good depressed teenager, the first thing I tried was suicide.

It hit me when I was signing my loan application. Thirteen thousand eight hundred dollars for the first year of my college education. My parents hadn't forced me to choose a small, private liberal arts college, but fuck, if I was going to do this shit I was going to do it right.

They were going to own me. A lending institution was going to own my ass as sure as if I was a goddamned slave. After four years of hard studying at a college I would go out and seek a job, work my ass off, and then turn around and give half my damn salary to the blood-sucking lending vampires every month for twenty years.

Fuck that shit. That kind of thing was never for me, and never will be. I used to look around me at school, watch people go about their lives and just wonder. Questions raced through my mind. What the hell makes you so important? What makes any of these pathetic lives matter? What does any of this mean?

I was conforming, and I knew it. I had actually been about to put pen to paper, to guarantee one small section of my soul (if such a thing exists) to some credit agency. And I couldn't even get it back through bankruptcy. What a great deal.

I'm not really sure why I chose that moment to try suicide. Maybe it was because my parents were both at work and my sister was off at a friend's house. Maybe it was just because I couldn't think of a reason not to.

Whatever the reason, I grabbed the sharpest steak knife out of the cutlery set in our kitchen and made my way to the bathtub nearest my room. Might as well die in familiar surroundings. I filled the tub with warm water (I hoped it would help keep my blood flowing out my body) and climbed in after taking one last look into my murky blue eyes and pale skin in the mirror. I didn't even remove my clothing. Hey, who the hell wants to walk in on a naked dead guy? Sure as shit ain't my idea of a grand time.

I made it a simple affair. I rolled up the sleeves of my Metallica shirt, studied the lines of my veins for a few moments, and then I made the cuts. Not the pathetic across-the-wrist cuts the cry-for-helpers used, but cuts that followed my veins all the way from my elbows to my wrists. It was surprisingly easy, once I started. The pain was intense, yet easy to ignore. It wasn't that I didn't feel the sting of the blade, it was just that I didn't care. It was kind of like being on Vicodin, you know? It doesn't get rid of the pain, it just makes you not give a damn.

The water turned red fairly quickly, small, concentrated, crimson globules floating around me as my eyes grew heavier and heavier. I was unbelievably tired. It is kind of hard to describe it to someone who hasn't felt it, but it was definitely a unique sensation. I felt a heavy weight on top of my chest, every breath and heart beat echoing distantly in my ears. The world sort of blurred around me, and I became less and less aware of my surroundings. Soon I wasn't precisely unconscious, just floating inside of my own body. My heart was a slowly beating drum, struggling to continue playing, its sound growing more and more hollow. My breaths made me feel as if a large snake had wrapped itself around my chest, and was slowly squeezing the life out of me.