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DO WE REALLY have to go through this whole ‘introduce ourselves’ thing again? The only thing I hate more than introductions is repeating myself.

Okay, okay. Fine. I’ll do this, though I have to say it would be easier for all of us if you just read my first book.

So, my name is Sarah Killian and I am a Professional Serial Killer. DO NOT confuse me with an assassin. I hate those guys. Every. Last. One.

Well, except for Mary Sue. She’s an exception. She’s an exception to a lot of things. I’ll get to her in a bit.

In a tortoise shell, I work for a secret organization known as T.H.E.M.—the Trusted Hierarchy of Everyday Murderers. T.H.E.M. is clandestinely contracted by private individuals, corporations, or sometimes even the government to complete the dirty work of furtively killing off individuals or groups of people.

I won’t bother covering the assassin side of things, because that’s pretty much just the boring, run-of-the-mill shit you’ve seen in every Hollywood movie. SNORE. No, the interesting side of T.H.E.M. operations is my side—the Professional Serial Killers, or P.S.K.’s.

Basically, when a client of T.H.E.M. wants to wipe out a large group of people discreetly, a P.S.K. gets sent in, under cover, to make it look like it was the work of a serial killer. The P.S.K. positions themselves in the community for several months, sometimes even years, and creates a profile of the killer they will be portraying—the ‘Herring.’ Sometimes the Herring is one of the marks that will be killed, and at the end of the mission the P.S.K. will make it look as if the Herring killed themselves. Other times, the Herring is a completely fictitious persona invented by the P.S.K. who, at the end of the killing spree, will disappear into the void from whence they came –a la Jack the Ripper or the Zodiac Killer.

But that’s not all, not only does the P.S.K. have to stage the persona of the Herring, but they also have the ‘Dupe’—the ‘everyday’ person they are pretending to be while on assignment. If the Herring is not one of the Marks, the Dupe and the Herring could be one and the same—however that’s generally avoided as you don’t want to draw too much attention to your Dupe character. The Dupe ideally is someone who just blends into the background of the killing spree and does not attract any extra scrutiny from the authorities or public eye.

But it’s even more complicated than that. Not only on each mission does the P.S.K. have to maintain at least two separate personae, but they also have to be able to make each and every case they take completely different, to prevent the Feds (or amateur investigators) from being able to connect the dots and realize multiple cases are the work of one person.

As you can imagine, this line of work is ideal for people with multiple personalities.

As for getting recruited into T.H.E.M., obviously it’s not the kind of thing where you can go to a job fair and fill out an application. That would be silly.

In order to get hired by T.H.E.M., you first have to get on their radar. Kill five people without being identified or caught, and you’ve got T.H.E.M.’s attention, even if they don’t know exactly who you are yet. This earns you the label of a Recognized but Unidentified Serial Killer (R.U.S.K.), meaning T.H.E.M. has identified your killings are the work of one person, they just don’t know who you are. Kill ten people without getting caught, and T.H.E.M. will try to recruit you—obviously they’ll have to have identified you before they can recruit you, but T.H.E.M. is very good at identifying serial killers, so if you kill more than ten people without getting identified by T.H.E.M., you are something special. I used to think I was pretty special, because I had killed thirteen people before T.H.E.M. caught up with me.

Then I met Mary Sue. She killed twenty (or twenty-one—she’s a bit hazy on that matter) people before T.H.E.M. approached her. Fucking Mary Sue.

Sorry, did I mention I have Tourette’s? No? Well, I have fucking Tourette’s, so you might as well get fucking used to me fucking swearing, fucking got it?

Sorry. Like I said, Tourette’s.

Anyway, kill more than ten people without being caught by the Feds, and once T.H.E.M. has successfully identified you they will come to you with an offer: work for T.H.E.M. as a P.S.K., and they will have your official record expunged and you will be immune from prosecution for the rest of your life. Reject their offer, and they immediately hand you over to the Feds.

‘How can they make such a promise?’ you might ask. Remember how I mentioned earlier the Government is one of our biggest clients? Yeah, that’s how.

Obviously, if you’ve murdered more than ten people, and get offered a deal like that, most people will take the deal. There is, however, a catch. You have to stop killing for pleasure. Cold turkey. One single murder outside of a T.H.E.M. assignment, and your ass is grass, baby. Your contract with T.H.E.M. will be nullified and you get to spend your last remaining days in a padded room waiting to find out if you get put down by lethal injection.

But really, that one caveat is not too much to ask, especially since if I ever get a sudden urge to kill, I can just contact my boss—Zeke—and he’s good at finding quick work to satisfy my craving for blood.

I was twenty-two when Zeke approached me, and like I said I had killed thirteen people at that point, so his offer was a no-brainer. Zeke is, as a matter-of-fact, the original founder of T.H.E.M. and something of a mystery. A disgusting slob of a mystery, but a mystery nonetheless. All I really know about him is that he used to be a serial killer, but then he ‘retired’ and founded T.H.E.M..

To get a picture of Zeke physically, imagine the progeny of the union of Ron Jeremy, Barry Williams, and a seriously obese walrus. In short, just about the only thing going for him physically is his black curly hair—curly hair is a weakness of mine, and it’s the only thing that keeps me from wanting to vomit whenever I see him. I still won’t touch the man with a thirty-foot pole if I can help it, but at least I don’t want to kill him, which would definitely void my contract.

Maybe I’m just a disturbed sociopath, but this was actually the perfect job for me. Well, until four months, ago that is.

I got called onto a job in Duluth, Minnesota. It was just going to be a standard Zoo Project (i.e.: go to a high school, kill a bunch of dumb-fuck teenagers, etc.), but at the last minute Zeke slapped me with a trainee—Mary Sue, or Bethany as I knew her at the time. At first, this was not the most welcome of news I could have received. I do not play well with others—especially when those ‘others’ are obnoxious, bubbly, annoying, blonde bimbos like Mary Sue.

However—although I hate to admit it—I probably would not be alive to tell you this had she not been with me on that assignment.

As it transpired, ‘Bethany’ was an assassin, who Zeke had assigned to me because a former employee of T.H.E.M., Nick Jin, had broken out of prison and gone rogue. Zeke, in his infinite paranoia, was worried that Nick—who was something of a disgruntled former employee—would attempt to interfere with T.H.E.M. operatives in the field.

As it turned out, Zeke was right on the money, because barely even a month into my assignment in Duluth, Nick showed up and started killing people in a convoluted scheme worthy of M. Night Shyamalamadingdong order to draw my attention so he could try and recruit me into his crusade to bring down T.H.E.M.. Did I mention that Nick is a raving lunatic? No? Well, he is. Several years ago, the guy went over the deeper end and had a complete and very public psychotic break, almost exposing T.H.E.M. in the process. Fortunately, the rest of the world dismissed his babbling as the ravings of a paranoid lunatic and no one took him seriously.

In any event, Nick cornered me and asked me to join him and his mystery accomplice, I declined the offer and threw Nick out of the window of a tower (Ok, ok. Yes . . . he also gave me a pretty significant ass-kicking before I threw him out of the aforementioned window. Sheesh, why don’t ya just focus on the insignificant details, already . . . ) Unfortunately, the bastard survived and disappeared into the void from whence he came.

Oh yeah, the fuck-tard also tricked me into sleeping with him by disguising himself as a T.H.E.M. I.T. operative who bore a striking resemblance to David Brennan, a celebrity crush of mine and former star of the Sci-fi TV series Mr. What. I’d rather not admit that tiny detail, but if I didn’t tell you about it, Mary Sue probably would and she’d undoubtedly embellish it to the utmost point of embarrassment, so there you have it.

If all of the other bullshit Nick Jin put me through didn’t make me want to plunge a sharp, cold knife into his soft, moist gut, that tactic certainly put the jackass on my top list of people to kill. Who else is on the list? Well, aside from pretty much all of humanity, Michael Bay for crimes against ‘80’s and ‘90’s pop culture, and Winona Ryder for being a brat.

Ever since that run-in with Nick, I have been taking informal daily martial arts lessons from Mary Sue. One major difference between assassins and P.S.K.’s is assassins are fully trained in martial arts. I’d never really had an interest in martial arts before, but after getting my ass handed to me by Nick in Duluth, I reluctantly admitted it might be a worthwhile skill to take up, because even before he joined T.H.E.M. as an assassin he was already a deadly martial arts expert. I didn’t want to have to see Mary Sue anymore than absolutely necessary, but there’s really only one other assassin whose identity I know, and let’s just say that he is not an option. And yes, that is all I am going to say on that matter.

So, I think that should more or less bring you up to speed. I kill people for a living, and like it. Zeke is my disgusting boss. Mary Sue is an obnoxious burden to whom I owe my very life. And Nick Jin is conspiring to bring T.H.E.M. down and anyone who stands in his way—namely me.

I still say it would’ve been easier if you’d just read the first book.