Chapter 1: Murderer

I didn’t choose this life. The reason why I kill people, well, it’s a thing that I simply cannot stop, an impulse. If the people in my life were a little better, then maybe I wouldn’t be the way I am now. Bad people will be in everyone’s lives, it’s a simple fact. I just happen to be a little more “bad” than everyone else. I feel as though the world should thank me, I’m ridding it of trash. Yet, I’m constantly being hunted, and people want me behind bars.

This is...a job, rather than a hobby. You know how some people have to do a couple of odd jobs just to make money to eat and to live a semi-comfortable life? Well, I couldn’t care less about the way that I live personally, but my family needs me. Especially my little sister. She’s in and out of the hospital all of the time. My family isn’t rich, so they couldn’t pay for the bills when we were younger. My parents started working several jobs a day.

If you really want to know why, out of all of the odd jobs I picked up, I chose to be a worldwide wanted hitman, well, it’s really simple. One of the jobs that my mom did was work in a factory that made parts for cars. She had a particularly heavy workload one morning and she was getting tired. She worked at a company where behind their plastic smiles and perfect fronts, they would use violence on the workers who weren’t working like machines. Sometimes it wouldn’t stop at hitting, it would even result in a pay cut and we really couldn’t afford to have that happen. My mom tried her best, pushing herself to the limit, when she collapsed.

Instead of helping her up as the boss should have, he hit her repeatedly, thinking that it was just a joke to get out of work.

Later that day,

My mom was pronounced dead.

I remember that day so clearly. The next day was my 17th birthday and I couldn’t wait. My parents told me that at 17, I could start to apply to jobs to help my parents pay the bills. We have this tradition where every year, the day before one of our birthdays, we would have a family game night. This year, I just wanted to play board games because the cable had been taken the previous year. My mom usually came home around 7, but as the hour came, she didn’t show. At first, we didn’t think much of it, sometimes she stayed later to get a head start on the next day’s work so she could come home earlier. However, as the hours passed, and midnight rolled around, we started to panic. My mom obviously didn’t have a phone, so there was no way we could contact her.

My sister started to cry and demanded that she see mom “Or she would never go to bed.” It caused a headache for my dad and I, but no more than 20 minutes later, she was asleep. I scooped her up and took her to the room that we shared and put her down to sleep, making sure she was all tucked in so as to prevent her from catching another cold. When doing so, however, I heard someone knock on our door, and I thought, “Oh mom is home now! Kind of late, but it’s okay, at least she’s home.”

I went out to go greet her when I saw my dad on his knees in front of the door and standing there was a police officer. I looked down at my dad.

“Dad, what’s going on? Why are you on the floor?” I asked him and tried to pull him up, but he wouldn’t get up. The police officer looked at me with pity written all over his face and despite maybe already knowing what he had to say, I asked anyway.

“Sir, what happened? Why is my dad like this?” The officer took off the hat that he had been wearing, bowed, and said: “This evening, we found your mother outside of Cars and More…..dead.”

I dropped to my knees beside my dad and I felt as though I couldn’t breathe. The air I was trying to force into my lungs simply would not stay and I couldn’t make it either. It couldn’t be true. How could she have already left this world before I even had a chance to give her the help that she needed? It hardly seemed fair.

Soon enough, my vision started to turn red as I realized who’s fault it most likely was. The wrong people always seem to die. But, what if I could be the one to change that? They say you shouldn’t wait around for change to come, and you should be the one to start it. So, I must start a new era.

It was then that I rose from my knees, wiped the tears from my face, and in a monotone said, “I see, thank you officer. As you can see-” I gestured to my dad. “-we still need some time to cope with everything.” The officer nodded and turned to leave, and to this day, he’ll say that he knew something was off when he turned around and saw me grinning. Looking at something, yet nothing at all. When they catch me later on, that is what he’ll say again.

A couple of days later, I went on the black web. I figured why not, at that moment, I had nothing to lose. Think about it, I was a young kid with little to no money, one dead parent, and soon to be in even more debt. I had nothing else to do. Though, before you think that I immediately chose the black web, I’ll have you know that I didn’t. Following the days of my mom’s death, I looked for a bunch of jobs so that we would have enough money for a proper funeral for my mom at least. But two days before the funeral, my dad told me to give up and that we would never have the money.

He had been working more than he ever did before and it was tiring him out. He had two hours of time to himself during the afternoons and four hours during the early morning hours to sleep before he was off to work again. Of course, the icing on the cake was that my sister caught some sort of cold again and back to the hospital we went. Usually I stayed the night to watch over her, but that was the night where I went home and looked for more jobs.

I had heard that the black web gave people all sorts of wild jobs that paid pretty well. It was something that I definitely needed right now. So, I got on and started hunting around. It didn’t take long before I found what sounded interesting. As I had said earlier, “If you want change, don’t wait for it. You have to be the one to set the change in motion.” On the Black Web, I had found a job for an assassin/hitman. The best part is the job said that we had to kill someone and document it then send it to them to let them know that we were legit and then they’d summon us to a meeting place to begin work. Lucky for them, I already had someone I wanted to kill.

In the early morning hours when my dad and sister were sleeping, I took an old GoPro that I borrowed from a friend at school and set out to the person's house. What I must say is that it was harder than I thought. Not hard to pull the trigger, but rather, finding out where this man lived and what hours he would be alone. It just happened to be a time that worked out for me, so I was in luck. I forgot to mention though, I got the gun from the poster of the job. They sent me an address on where to get a weapon because I didn’t have one when I inquired about the job and said I would do it.

To spare you all of the gory details, I killed him fairly quickly. I was thinking about using a more...slow approach but my blood boiled when I saw him and I couldn’t stop myself from pulling the trigger. He had no idea what chain reaction he had set off when he killed my mom. I was going to wait for the trial to kill him just so that he could celebrate briefly and...BAM! Surprise, surprise, he would die. Yet again, I was impatient and I needed the money.

I sent in the footage later that evening and during the same time that I killed him, the job poster wanted to meet up at this place deep within the city. It was a sketchy looking bar with dim lights signaling that it was open and only one, single person, was inside. I went into the bar, afraid, because I was underage but I was not questioned. I sat at the counter and took a look around. Though the outside seemed sketchy and uninviting, the inside seemed very neat and well kept.

After ten minutes of sitting there looking like an underage idiot, a woman entered the bar. She was pretty, with short jet black hair, blue denim jeans, and a black V neck T-shirt. Despite her looks though, she had a dark aura around her that made you want to run and hide. When she looked me dead in the eye, I knew she was the job recruiter that I was looking for. She walked past me and walked up a flight of stairs that I hadn’t even noticed existed before. I took that as my cue and followed her.

As I reached the second floor, I realized how dangerous of a situation I was really in. The chances of someone coming up here to save me if things went South were pretty thin so I did what I knew how to do best: Take that fear and any other emotion, and store it away in a box in the deepest part of my chest. A skill that would make me the best hitman there ever was.

The lady that I had seen earlier was now lounging in a booth in the corner of the room, moving her finger back and forth through the candle flame in the center of the table. Pretty confident that she was the one I was looking for, I approached her table and bowed my head slightly and sat down. She eyed me for a little bit, making me feel self conscious and I began to examine myself. My blue ripped jeans and plain white t-shirt didn’t seem too suspicious for a meeting such as this.

As she was looking at me. I began to study her too. Her silky hair slightly fell onto her face as she leaned forward toward me. Instinctively, I did the same and was a little taken aback at how..intense her eyes were. She looked like an animal about to capture its prey and that scared, yet intrigued me. She reached her hand up and then quickly put it back down. I was confused, was I wrong? Did I get the wrong person?

As if to answer my question, she sat straight up and said, “I’m not the actual boss so don’t get your hopes up. No one besides myself has ever met him. I am simply the most skilled of his assassins and the one he trusts the most. Usually he doesn’t take youngsters such as yourself. How old are you? Fifteen?” She sneered at me while examining her dark blue acrylic nails. “In any case, I saw your ‘audition tape’. So listen up princess, if you want to level up with the boss, make sure to give it a little more excitement, okay?”

I didn’t really follow her all too well. At first, she seemed to like me and now she seems to hate me. Maybe all assassins and hitmen are bipolar? “First of all, I’m seventeen and second of all, do not take my age as something that makes me less than you. Who knows? Maybe I’ll turn out better than you, ‘princess’”.

She surprised me by laughing. “I like you already. I think we are going to get along extremely well. My name is Alice.” She extended her hand across the table and I shook it. “You may see me in your everyday life and unless we are on job together, act as though you do not know me. I am a very successful prosecutor and if you go down, I will not go down with you. Do I make myself clear?” I simply shook my head. “Anyhow, once we get you back on your feet, you’ll be working a bunch of odd hours. Have any problems with that? If so, back out now.”

I shook my head. “The name’s Jayce. Nice doing business with you.” Then, with that, the night bled to day and at dusk we parted ways. That was the day I was given my first assignment, and my life as a hitman had begun.