Chapter 28

It didn’t matter how many corpses he had seen in his years on the job or how many more he would certainly see; Martin, his very superior, lying there sent a sharp signal to his brain. The man was no more. The very same man who had prepped them on the mission that morning and swore a hundred times at how slow they were being was no more, he was gone, permanently.

It gave Smith a kind of reality he didn’t like; the reality that wanted to scare him. But since he wasn’t one to be afraid, he hated fear, so he hated to admit that he was afraid. And maybe honestly he never was. Maybe he wasn’t the sort to get afraid at all. Maybe all he did was try to be calculative and careful and then make sure he didn’t put himself where he would lose his cool for any reason whatsoever.

With the realization that Martin was no more came the question of what life was, anyway. It made him question his own existence and why he was alive if Martin was dead. He realized the bullet could have been