Breaking Sound (Chapter 7)

by Sarah Alsgaard

Chapter Seven
Roy
Witness (Measure 2)

Oh God having to do this for a living. I didn’t know how much more I could take of it, in all honesty. I think it depends on what day it is and how strong the memories haunted me. Sometimes murder is the most beautiful act in the world, and sometimes you can feel pieces of you break off and stay with the dead.

There were two of them this time, not that I could tell you how many there had been the times before.

It didn’t make sense.

If I understood it right, the psychic she had employed could only drain one person’s mind of memories and thought. One person at a time, anyway. What had the other man been doing while my co-worker had drained the older man’s mind? Or maybe my co-worker had gone for the young guy first. Both were still breathing when I arrived, much to my deep regret.

I decided to give the older one a more honorable death for having lived so long by shooting him in the chest, right through the heart. It was a nice, clean death; he died before I felt the push-back of the gun against my hand.

My cell rang. I carefully tucked the gun into the hands of the younger guy, who was muttering at a wall about music dancing across the sky, and I answered the phone.

“Are they dead yet?”

She has no patience, that woman. She kept chewing on her nails over the phone too. I swear she just tilted the receiver closer to her mouth so I could hear.

“Stop calling me when I’m out,” I grumbled. “It distracts me.”

“You’ve been given five minutes to carry out this task and it’s not finished yet?”

Crunch. She really laid into one of her fingernails on that damned receiver.

“One of them’s dead. How would you like the other one killed?”

“The younger one?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

There was a pause on the phone. She stopped biting her nails.

“You’re going to burn the house down, right?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Just leave him inside,” she said. “You’re in a hurry.”

We both hung up and I set to work arranging the whole thing to look like one happy family tragedy. I carefully erased the body memories on the two before I went out to the gas station across the street to get a jug of gasoline. That way if the police showed up while I was out getting the gasoline, they would only have blank bodies to stare at and a young guy with a gun in his hand muttering about clouds.

The Corporation would probably come knocking around again because the two guys were registered with the G Faction, but they’d find empty minds anyway, and no memories left on the bodies either thanks to me. It was highly enjoyable: Frustrating the cops, a rival faction, and The Corporation all in one strike.

And, I thought as I poured the gasoline around the house, the drugs my boss had started sending me more than took care of my memories of anything ever happening. She had ordered the drugs when we all found out that The Corporation had started investigating all of the murders. Usually The Corporation just let the factions sort out these types of problems, but apparently they discovered that a member of the C Faction, some idiot with a vendetta, had originally been from a different faction, and had murdered three people.

How they find all these things out is beyond me, but I’m grateful The Corporation had started poking around because I hate, absolutely hate, taking in people’s body memories and remembering them later on. After being forced to take the memory drugs, I got my first full night sleep in years. No more having nightmare after nightmare of feeling like someone’s cutting me up or pushing me around or running into me. Those drugs were incredible. Truly, truly incredible.

The boss would send a couple of thugs to escort me back home, and then I only had to wait until I passed out on my bed before the drugs made me forget everything. So far, a week had passed with two or three murders a night, according to the papers, and I might have done all of them. I couldn’t remember.

It was perfect, and I started to maybe enjoy my job.

Until that one, single night, that is. The night the drugs stopped working. Then things got ugly.