Sarah Killian: The Marching Tides

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Do we have to do this Julie Andrews Getting To Know You bullshit again? I have to bury my mother today—well . . . there isn’t really anything to bury, but it’s her fucking funeral and I’m not here to argue semantics, you get the point—and I am so not in the mood for this.

Okay. Fine. Let’s just get this over with. Previously on The Universe Shits On Sarah Killian:

My name is Sarah, and I work for a super-secret organization called the Trusted Hierarchy of Everyday Murderers (T.H.E.M.) that employs Professional Serial Killers (P.S.K.’s) and assassins. I hate, hate, hate assassins—so I find it particularly appropriate that their title starts with two asses.

T.H.E.M. is contracted by various entities—a few wealthy private citizens and corporations who can afford us, but most of our work comes from the government. Completely off the books, of course.

Assassins’ work is pretty boring and straightforward, so I won’t waste my time on them. The P.S.K.’s is where T.H.E.M. gets innovative. As a P.S.K., when on a project I get sent to a location, usually for several months—if not years—at a time, where I integrate myself into the community under a pseudonymous ‘Dupe’ personality. My Dupe personality is the everyday person who just goes to work and lives their life and is my cover for being in the area of the murders.

Meanwhile, I also have to create the persona of the killer—the ‘Herring’. The Herring for each project has to have a unique M.O. and set of characteristics that distinguish them from other projects I may have worked on to avoid anyone being able to connect the dots from one project to another. I also have to make sure no one connects the dots between my Dupe personality and my Herring personality. Fortunately, seeing as I mentioned the government is one of our biggest contractors, we have a certain amount of immunity from the F.B.I., but there are enough Private Dicks in the world that it’s not a bad idea to take the extra precaution.

As you can imagine, the fact that many serial killers suffer from multiple personality disorders lends itself well to developing these dual personas when on a project.

T.H.E.M. has a team of specially trained surgeons—I call them the Fabricating Ugly Cock Kissers (F.U.C.K.’s) because I hate them all and everything they do although I begrudgingly have to admit their work is pretty fucking impressive. It’s basically some sort of merging of plastic surgery and prosthetic makeup—less permanent than the former, but longer-lasting and more realistic-looking under daily in-person scrutiny than the latter.

My boss—the man who both originally recruited me and founded T.H.E.M. in the first place—is a man who I only know by the name of Zeke. At the time Zeke recruited me, I was twenty-two and had killed thirteen people since I was sixteen. The Feds, so far, had not pinned me for any of the murders. T.H.E.M., however, is somewhat better at their job than the Feds and had succeeded at connecting the dots for all but one of my murders and traced them back to me. Zeke, who was even better at the job than his subordinates, had managed to connect me to that last murder as well, a fact which he has not been afraid to use as leverage on me over the years.

When Zeke approached me, he gave me the following offer: work for T.H.E.M. and receive full immunity for any murders committed under contract for T.H.E.M. or T.H.E.M. will hand me over to the Feds. The catch was that henceforth any non-work-related murders committed by me would result in an immediate termination of my contract with T.H.E.M. and I would be immediately handed over to the Feds. Even with that one condition, it was not a hard choice to make. Fortunately, back in his heyday, Zeke had been a serial killer in his own right before founding T.H.E.M. and ‘retiring’, so he is fairly understanding of the urges we get from time to time and is therefore reasonably open-minded about getting us quick-and-easy ‘one-off’ jobs when needed.

For over eight years, this was the perfect arrangement for me. Get paid to go out and kill people without any fear of prosecution? Yes, please!

Then, last fall, everything fucking changed and went down the fucking shit pipes.

Sorry. I have Tourette’s, which you’d already know if you’d read the first two installments—and we wouldn’t have to be doing this damn recap to begin with.

Anyway, as I was saying, last fall everything changed when I got put on an assignment in Minnesota. It should have been a fairly standard assignment—plant myself in a high school as a temporary substitute teacher, kill a bunch of cheerleaders, blame it on the goth kids, and get out before anyone catches on. That’s what the project should have been, but then at the last minute, Zeke slapped me with a trainee. At the time I knew her as Bethany, though I later learned her real name was Mary Sue. Bethany/Mary Sue was basically the antithesis of everything I am. Bubbly, perky, outgoing, and loquacious. Oh yeah, and as if all of that wasn’t enough to make me hate her, she was religious, too. How she managed to balance her religious beliefs and being a P.S.K. is one of the great mysteries of life I never truly was able to comprehend.

As it turned out, Mary Sue was not a trainee, as I had been led to believe, but an assassin who had been assigned to me for extra protection. Turns out a former T.H.E.M. assassin named Nick Jin, who’d had something of a mental breakdown and had gone rogue—invalidating his contract with T.H.E.M. and earning him a life-long cell in Los Angeles County Prison—had escaped from L.A.C.P. and was on the loose with a vendetta against T.H.E.M., so Zeke had ordered all P.S.K.’s be partnered with assassins for extra coverage. The reason for the whole trainee charade was that Zeke suspected I would have been even less receptive to the idea of being the babysittee instead of the babysitter. To be fair, he was not at all wrong.

Anyway, Nick had indeed targeted Mary Sue and I on our assignment and began killing people in Duluth, throwing an effective wrench into the plans for our assignment. Nick confronted me and offered to let me join him and his mysterious co-conspirator as they sought to bring an end to T.H.E.M. Seeing as T.H.E.M. had been nothing but good to and for me, and without T.H.E.M. my immunity from the law would also be gone, I was not overly inclined to accept his offer.

Nick did not take my rejection well. He tried to kill me, I pushed him out a window, and then he disappeared into the night.

Sadly, that was not the end of it. Four months later, Nick resurfaced making trouble for T.H.E.M. again. Zeke came up with the ‘brilliant’—the fact that there isn’t a sarcasm font invented yet is one of humanity’s greatest failings as a civilization—idea to use me and Mary Sue as bait and sent us out to the backwoods of Tennessee on an assignment to try and lure Nick into a trap.

The decoy assignment was to investigate and kill a family of alleged K.K.K. members who stirred up trouble. As it turned out, the family was actually innocent of being white supremacists—though the head of the family, Clark Grobe, Senior, was still a worthless, wife-beating piece of shit. In order to gain information and spy on the family, I had developed a relationship with Clark Grobe’s nephew, Duke. And yes, by ‘relationship’ I mean that I fucked his brains out. Don’t give me that judgmental bullshit. What, it’s fine for James Fucking Bond to sleep with every woman he lays eyes on, but I fuck a hillbilly for work and that makes me a slut? Fuck that double standard bullshit. Besides, Mary Sue was fucking another one of the cousins. Not sure how that helps my argument, but fuck you.

Anyway, Nick took the bait, got in the way of our decoy assignment, and—once more—offered us to come over to the ‘not-so-bad’ side. In an attempt to convince us, Nick confessed T.H.E.M. had been experimenting on him with a new mind-control technology that would allow T.H.E.M. to ‘program’ someone—anyone—into being a temporary killing machine. The experiment had gone wrong on Nick and had led to his alleged mental breakdown, which resulted in his being disavowed by T.H.E.M.

Normally, I would have scoffed at such a tinfoil conspiracy story, however, Nick had displayed multiple examples of having ‘enhanced’ brain powers. I hesitate to call him ‘psychic’, but really that is the best word for it. So, if T.H.E.M. had been experimenting on his brain, that could explain how such talents may have been awakened.

Anyway, once again I rejected Nick’s offer, and in the fight that ensued, Mary Sue was killed. This sucks balls because I had started to come around to liking the twit, against all my better judgments. I retaliated by killing Nick. You’d think I’d be able to rest easy, believing my enemy defeated, but alas, I’m haunted by the enigma of Nick’s unidentified benefactor—the puppet master who still lurks in the shadows, pulling their menacing strings of fate.

With Mary Sue dead, I was left to clean up the ‘loose ends’ of our decoy assignment in Tennessee by myself, which means killing the two cousins Mary Sue and I had been sleeping with. I felt bad about killing Duke—he was a good guy—but the job is the job. Loose ends can’t be spared.

Zeke had ordered me to spare the head of the family, Clark Grobe, Senior, unless absolutely necessary. However, the bastard was such a disgusting wife-beating pig—and I admit I was in a bit of a vengeful mood after having lost Mary Sue, the only person in years who I had even come close to considering to be a friend—I disobeyed that order and killed the creep anyway. I’m probably going to be getting hell from Zeke over that insubordination. Hell . . . I’ll be lucky if I don’t get fired and handed over to the Feds, to be honest . . .

All the loose ends cleaned up, I returned home to Los Angeles to be greeted by the news that my mother—who had been incarcerated in Los Angeles County Prison for the murder of my asshat, wife-beating father when I was a teenager—had been killed in an explosion that had completely obliterated L.A.C.P. and left no survivors.

And here we are. You’re all caught up. Happy? Now, if you don’t mind, I have a funeral I need to get to.