An excerpt from
ON the Use of Covert Government Force Against Nonstate Groups Who May or May Not Have One or More Legitimate Grievances
REGINALD pressed his thumb down, savoring the precision click of well-machined components as he swept the safety off of his carbine. Quite a good job those boffins down in Armory did, the peculiar buggers, he thought. They really knew how to make a piece of kit, and if they’d had a social media page he would recommend it to everyone he knew as well as to complete strangers.
The complete strangers in the compound below would sadly get very little time to appreciate the quality, but they were at least lucky enough to experience it from the end that he himself could not, so they had that over him. The carbine had a suppressor on, that caused it to make a kind of silly sounding boof boof instead of BOOM BOOM. BOOM BOOM was a much more threatening sound, but it was also unpleasantly loud and there was also the small chance that someone who heard boof boof when they were being shot at would think there was a clown involved somehow. The compound itself was laid out like a series of small plates in a fancy restaurant, only some of plates weren’t plate-shaped and all of them were buildings. A lab for developing illicit chemical weapons, or perhaps bioweapons, but probably not nuclear weapons. Regardless of the weapons that were being developed there, they were all things that certain governments were very keen to keep other people from playing with.
Down we go then he thought as he slithered his way through the thick rainforest undergrowth, which would be an emerald overload in daytime but was now a false-color motion-higlighted wonderland through the Omnispec goggles. The surveillance he had gathered that morning (on what ended up being quite an enjoyable hike, even if he did have to take it slowly and quietly) lurked in the goggles field of view. Labels of buildings, neon-outlined exits and entrances and windows, projected locations of not-visible site personnel, illuminated visible site personnel, and electronic sensors along with their status of ‘jammed’ or ‘not jammed’. He crept closer as a pair of sentries on a patrol separated from the main bricked path to make their route through the trees. Hopefully they’d enjoy it as much he had earlier. They were going to approach but pass by him at a tangent, and all he had to do was wait, while his sound pickups tried to pull in the noises around him which would hopefully include (though sadly, not) an entertaining conversation between the two sentries. They weren’t big talkers and they quietly walked along until their backs were to him. He settled the dot of the sight on the head of the one on the left. Boof boof went the carbine, and he barely had the dot on the head of the one on the right, on the side of his head since he’d turned it to look at his partner’s exploding melon, when he caressed the trigger again boof boof. Reginald wondered if the second man had thought that he was being shot at by a clown.
Those Armory buggers should really get out into the field once in a while, he thought. It would be a real shame to make a wonderful firearm like this and never shoot anyone with it. He checked the corpses for anything useful, and found a keyfob per corpse that looked like they were part of the same batch of keyfobs and thus very likely their keys for the facility. He also found an open packet of tamarind-flavored chewing gum in one of their pockets, and he took that as well, in case he wanted to try it later. The corpses were then secreted away without ceremony in the thickest piece of foliage that Reginald could spot from where he was standing.
Everyone always thought that getting shot in the head would be instant goodnight Eileen goodnight, but what if it wasn’t? What if somehow, as the brain was liquified by the transfer of kinetic energy to soft tissue, the effect swirled things in a way that sped up consciousness? That the millisecond of projectile-skull collaboration would play out as an eternity in the agitated mixture, the person within experiencing a void of not-life? One of these days he was bound to find out.
