01>< From the sky he fell

LEVI

I try to blend in as I head towards the busy city market. I have one chance to take down the heads of the crime syndicate and if I blow it up, I'm screwed.

Going into the details of what was at stake if I didn't is just plain boring because honestly, to sum it up, I don't really care. I'm not a hero type, I don't work for the greater good and in my personal opinion, humanity could take a chill pill because sometimes the greater good did more harm than not.

I was hired to take those guys out, so take them out I would. It was no easy feat though, it took six months to get the information I had on them and if I lost my opportunity, I would have to wait another two years until their next meeting, that was time I didn't have.

I quickened my pace as I walked through the market. It was a holiday so it was super busy with everybody either scrambling for the cheaper prices or using their free time to stock up on groceries. I made my way to an old looking building, an old record lending library of some sort.

It must have gone out of business so it looked closed down and unused for ages. I walked in still and confidently made my way across the floor, I easily passed as security, so I didn't get many questioning looks but I didn't get smug, I had to kill the board of directors and get out of there stat.

Once I got to the floor where the meeting was being held, I walked into the bathroom then snuck into the air vent and shuffled along, turning the various corners until I got the the vent right above their meeting room.

This board of directors and gang leaders always picked different locations for their meetings which were held between three and five years apart and yes, their hiding skills were impeccable, I was even amazed that I'd managed to find them and within a short amount of time, (not that six months is childs' play, but compared to everything else, it really was a short amount of time). As a result of all their focus being poured into hiding, their security lagged behind and fortunately for me, that was something I could exploit.

I lay in the vent and waited patiently for them to settle in and begin talking. That did take a while, considering that they spent some time doing an alpha-male and testosterone competition and all, but they eventually deflated their heads and got started.

They talked for a short while, then I decided I'd heard enough and got to work. I unscrewed two of the nuts holding the vent in place then stuck my silenced gun out. I wasn't planning on being seen or anything of the sort, so I aimed for the centre of the forehead and hit them all in six precise shots.

I waited for a good minute to make sure they really were out then I went back the way I'd gone in and made my way out of the building.

The market was a little crowded and had the people milling about, either going for the holiday specials or using their free day to stock up on groceries, most people didn't notice me, and if they did, they assumed I was just a guy heading home from work, to their credit, they were right somehow.

As I moved about, I couldn't help but notice some lady who looked a little out of place. She was a light brown skinned lady and she seemed about my age, or two or three years younger ......... possibly 22.

She was sitting under the shade of her stall selling fruits and vegetables and she was a little to nicely dressed for the kind of market we were in. She wasn't in anything special, just a long plaid shirt, a pair of jeans and some sort of head wrap scarf for her hair.

No offence to the vendors, but they knew they would be spending the whole day under the hot sun so they dressed for comfort, so they looked more or less like vultures for most of the time, naturally, that lady caught my attention.

I watched her as she noticed an old man in the way of some oncoming forklifts that were moving too fast for forklifts. They were carrying cargo in bulk to some other area in the market, and the old guy would be seriously injured if he didn't move out of the way.

She didn't seem to put much thought to the situation as she reached for him and dragged him out of harms way then checked him over and began to ask if he had gotten hurt and if he was alright. The forklifts had gotten unbelievably close and the machinery had hooked and yanked off her head scarf but she wasn't too concerned with her near injury brush. She didn't seem religious at all and was unbothered by the loss of her possession.

The old guy swiftly nabbed the small bag of her earnings form around her waist and took off running like he wasn't acting sick to his bones a few moments previously. The lady panicked and began to chase after him, but he skillfully lost himself in the crowd and miraculously popped up right in front of me.

I grabbed the bag from him and gave him a look hot enough to melt titanium so he just continued to scurry out of the area. I headed over to the woman and handed her the bag.

"Here." I said to her.

"Thank you." she said with a gentle sigh of relief, "is there anything I can do to repay you for your kindness?"

"Uuuuhh, no." I said, "you can't. I have everything I need, you don't seem like you should be giving out free merchandise."

She pursed her lips but didn't say anything.

"Alright, how about a pineapple?" I suggested. She walked over to her stand, bagged the pineapple then handed it to me. "you're not very noisy for a vendor, are you?" I asked as I received it from her.

"I don't need to be." she said as she retreated back to her shade, "have a nice day."

I waved absently at her as I continued to mosey about. I lived alone and had nothing to do but sleep once I got home, so I decided I would just mill around and loose my scent before going home in about an hour. I wasn't even worried about being caught honestly.

At around that point, the security back at the records lending library had noticed that their respective bosses had been sitting dead for a short while, and they were out for my head, not that they even knew what I looked like or who had even done it.

Gunshots rang out as they left the building and began going into the market in search for their suspect, they weren't even sure of whom it was they were looking for. People began to scream and panic at the sound of guns being fired so they began to run and scramble in all directions, it really was not a pretty sight.

I continued my calm stroll as most of the security zoomed past me in search of someone who better fitted the bill for assassin, apparently, I wasn't it. One guy, however, recognised me from earlier when I had walked into the building and so he tried to attack me.

I quickly fought him off then decided to get moving faster, since the others were going to catch on that I was their guy. They picked it up surprisingly quickly and so they begin to chase me.

I always move around with a handgun in my jacket and one tucked into my waist band, so I pulled both of them out and began to shoot at them, taking down five or six, probably out of 20, easily. The hunt was on.

Once again, I wont go into detail, it's the basic movie scene fight. I run, they chase, they shoot at me, I hide behind something for protection, I shoot at them, they hide behind something, I make a break for it, bullets whizz past me. I manage to conveniently shoot down a few more but then I conveniently run out of a magazine.

"This is just great." I muttered to myself as I made a run for it, being chased by the last five of the group and woefully ditching the pineapple.

Come on people, I kill for a living, I had to be pretty good at what I did to be able to reduce almost 20 men to 5. You have to give me some credit at least. Anyway, I was running even more from the people chasing after me and I had to ditch both of my empty weapons.

I successfully evaded them for a few, then got tailed again and led them up into some alley. I quickly realised it was a dead end, but that didn't stop me, I quickly climbed up the low roof of the back of some store then use that height to deliver a stomp to the first guys head. He was immediately out like a light.

The second guy who was closest to me started to point his gun at me, but I grabbed his wrist, placed my one leg between his spread ones then turned him right around and made him shoot his friend in the centre of the forehead.

Given the adaptable stance which I was in, I quickly twisted the pistol out of my guys hands and shot him in the head too. The third dude headed at me and at that point, I was so over the whole thing, so I grabbed his arm, slung him around right over my shoulder and slammed him into dude number four coming for me.

Guy number four is the one hit with the body of guy number three, so as soon as he hits the ground he smashed his head on an unbelievably large stone just sitting there and passed out cold.

Guy number three however, who I used as a throwing bag, had drawn his gun in preparation to fire while I was mid body toss, I saw this move coming so I tried to pry the weapon out of his hands, I didn't want to end up un-alive. So during the entire ordeal fiasco, a gun is fired.

let us do a recap, shall we?

-Do I get the gun out of number three's hand?

--yes.

-Do I die in the process?

--no.

-Do any of them die?

--yes. because as soon as I pry the gun out of number fours' hand I shoot them both in the middle of their heads.

The final guy comes at me .... guy number, I lost count, but with my expert precision and overall awesomeness, I shoot him before he shoots me. There. Five to one. And I win.

That is ..... until I realise my side is on fire, and numb at the same time. Like an icy heat. I recognised it as a bullet wound, which was nothing new, but the feeling still sucked each time.

"Thats' great as well." I muttered to myself as the familiar lightheadedness took over and I start to feel my fingertips chill. I suspected my injury was probably just a a graze, but you could never really know.

At that point, I became aware that more bodies were headed towards me and thy were spewing malicious intent.

"Can't a guy get a timeout?" I said to myself again, trying to strategise an escape plan, but once again, I was at a dead end and I quickly realised the only way out was going to cause me a lot of pain.

I sucked it up and chose to leave my suffering for a later time. I stretched my arms upward in an effort to begin to climb out of the alleyway, gritting my teeth at the blinding pain that radiated from my side.

I managed to climb onto a low roof and I hoped the security dudes would run right past me, but no, they spotted me and began to scale up the walls to get to me.

I rolled my eyes even more then began to run across the series of roofs in front of me. The pain in my side only increased but I had to ignore it if I didn't want to fester in a basement somewhere and be tortured to death. That wasn't a way I wanted to go.

The injury was definitely not a graze, maybe it was just very, very deep, or the bullet was stuck somewhere inside me, or it had passed clean through. So many fun possibilities to consider.

My vision was getting very blurry, I had lost a lot of blood. Sigh. I miscalculated the distance from where I was, to across the next alleyway and onto the next roof. So instead of jumping as far as I wanted to, I ended up dropping a gracious ten feet into a narrow dusty path between the buildings, managing to badly scrape my face against the roof I was trying to land on.

There was still lots of people panicking, screaming and running, so I was amazed I didn't crash into as many people as I thought I would and that they hadn't stampeded me as much as I thought they would.

"That didn't feel good." I said as I got myself to my feet and kept going.

The security wasn't onto me yet, but they would be soon and I wasn't going to give in to them. I staggered in the opposite direction from the crowd and turned into another alley devoid of people. I slumped to the ground, having broken out into a cold sweat. I pressed my hand to the wound, which was low on my abdomen and a couple of inches above my waistline.

The bullet had cut into the vulnerable flesh of my stomach, and pressing my hand to it to stop the bleeding wasn't fun at all, it was barely even helping. I could feel myself slipping out of consciousness. No, no, no, no, no, no. That was not supposed to happen. My hand had blood flowing from between my fingers. was i really bleeding that badly?

I wanted so badly to move, but I was in too much pain to force myself another step. It was unfair that I was probably going to lose to such a miniature injury, but come on people, I was exhausted from all night research and running and being shot really, really hurt.

I was frustrated, but also unbelievably tired so giving up didn't feel like such a bad idea.

I was still drifting out of consciousness when someone snuck up and draped my good arm over their slim shoulders and urged me to stand up.

"Come on," she said, "lets' go, you cant pass out and die here."

I forced myself to focus on the face and recognised the vendor lady.

"You helping me is a bad idea." I coughed.

"Oh yeah?" she said, getting me to my feet and leading me away from the commotion. "how so?"

"It's going to get you killed." I said.

"Good to know."

"I'm serious." I said. she probably thought I wasn't being serious.

"I know." she said.

I wanted to argue my case but I could hardly see or breathe. Also, a lot of me hurt, I was pretty heavy and was fairly surprised at the woman's ability to keep me up.

"Come on," she coaxed, willing me not to fall asleep. "you have to keep going."

"I can't let you do this." I said, barely able to keep my eyes open.

"Just shut me and let me help you."

"Lady ...." I started, but then we had to go through some chute and I saw black as I gave in to the darkness.