Dark Leader

Dark Leader
         The city’s Elect had not looked up from the paperwork he was scrutinizing, and it was this indifference that had caused the gears in Visily’s head to start grinding away while he awaited the Elects sufferance.
         “He always makes me wait.  I jump through hoops for him, and like any good dog I’ll wait.  I swear… if he ever acts smug about it I’ll kill him.”
         No one knew where the Elect had come from.  Visily had one day been working for the confused and rather bloody internecine warfare of the criminal element that controlled the bulk of the city.  But then slowly, for no discernible reason, the warfare ground to a halt and the jobs started to dry up.  Visily was worried that he might have to find another line of work.  This was not a good thing in Visily’s opinion.  There were few very few jobs for unemployed hit-men.
         “I hate to admit this… but not only am I good at this job, I actually enjoy my work.”
Then one day Visily returned from what he thought might be the last job he’d be able to find for awhile, and discovered a post-it note had been left in his apartment saying that the city’s new Elect had a job for him.  Visily hadn’t even known what an Elect was, let alone that there was an Elect, only a mayor.  But Visily took the job, and he had been doing the work ever since that day two years ago.  It was only until later that Visily discovered what had happened. 
Apparently the heads of the gangs, the tsongs, and the families had been figuratively, and in some instances literally, removed from their collective shoulders.  It had been done quietly without any evidence to point out where vengeance should be directed.  Then one day the, Elect was running things as if he had always run them.  No one knew his real name, only that he preferred to be called the Elect.  Visily had always found the name slightly amusing.
         “As if crime syndicates were democratic… maybe they are if force counts as votes.”
The Elect was the opposite of almost everything that Visily was in physical detail.  Where Visily was tall with an anvil chest and a copper tan, the elect was short, thin and vaguely rat looking., and  A pock scarred face completed the rather ugly portrait.  Visily wore the latest trends, cut to fit him so that they exuded style as well as practicality.  And although they were black, they were a deep dandruff hiding kind of black.  The Elect wore clothes whose colors could only be described if the describer had a gun pointed at their head.  Even then, the describer would force out…
         “A blackish brown sort of mauve… maybe.”
         “I don’t think I’m ever going to understand him.  He’s just too twisty for a shrink too figure out, screw my crappy attempts at Psy-ops.”
         “Visily, are you listening?’
         “Yes sir.”
         “And…”
         “The infected men and women will be dead within the hour.  I won’t let the disease spread.”
         “And…”
         “The building will be cauterized as well.”
         “Excellent.  Report back to me as soon as you have finished.  Remember… The first sign of the disease is blindness.  Do not come in contact with any infected, it is over ninety three percent communicable.  You are dismissed.”
“Sir…”
“Yes Visily?”  He said without raising his eyes.
“Where did this virus come from?  I mean… Is it our fault that it’s out there?”
“Visily, I do not intend to explain to you the source, or complete dangers of this disease at present.  All you need to know is that there are fifteen men and four women in apartments throughout the target building that have been infected through their own culpable stupidity.  They must be removed.  Once again, you are dismissed.”  The Elect did not even look up as Visily made his way out the door.

         “It’s not as if I set out in life to be a hit man,” Thought Visily.  He shouldered his backpack, glanced both ways, and then crossed the street to the apartment complex that was his target.
         “I mean, I wanted to be an artist.  How did I end up doing this?”  Visily often found himself reflecting upon his descent into the career of a paid assassin.  It had started as a flash of knife streaking rage when he came upon a women being raped in an alley.  The rapist was dead in seconds, and Visily was home within minutes, rocking back and forth in the corner waiting for police to break in the door and see the guilt all over his hands and clothes.  Instead, Mortis had slipped in through the window, snuck up behind Visily, and asked him a simple question.
“How would you like to kill evil men, and get paid to do it by other evil men?” And underneath his fear, disgust, and moral disquiet, a tiny grain of rage at the injustice of the world said…
“Yes.”
Since then, Visily trained with Mortis, and then went on missions with Mortis.  Together they carved a bloody swath through uncountable pimps, pushers, mafiosos, and thugs.  Mortis was Visily’s professor in murder. 
The training had been hard, almost impossible.  But the hardest had been discovering how easy it was too pull the trigger, slice the knife, or press the button on a remote detonator.  It scared Visily sometimes how easily it came too him.  He knew he was supposed too have a conscience,  but from the very moment that he had fired his first round through another human being, he couldn’t seem to locate the damn thing anywhere.  Visily had been raised with the cartoon belief that two miniature copies of himself lived on his shoulders, one with wings and halo and the other with horns and a tail.  Perhaps they had taken an extended vacation the minute Mortis had shown up?
         The absolute hardest thing Visily had discovered though, was that his teacher could not be there with him forever.  The ambush had involved five men, and Mortis was not the one and only man that walked away alive from it.
“Like all who live by the sword, you die the same way.  I miss you Mortis.  Now think WORK Visily, work, work, work, work, work, work.”
The building that Visily was walking towards could only be described with the word dilapidated.  The windows in all four stories were broken or too skuzzy to see through and graffiti on the wall informed the world that “DJ ate dog shit.”  The steps up were chipped and stained, and there was a faint odor of sewerage wafting out of the buildings openings.  The building was an accurate measurement of most of the dwellings in the city.  Visily set to work. 
         He removed what looked like five small golf balls from his backpack.  They were silver and much heavier than they appeared.  Visily crouched down at the northernmost corner of the building and pressed the first ball into the wall.  At first it did nothing under his hand, but after a second, the ball vibrated and appeared to burrow into the cheap masonry like a tick.  It shook with a happiness that was normally seen in excited puppies.  Visily nodded to himself, and stood up, repeating the process at the other three corners of the building.
         Visily crossed the street and ducked into an alley.  He touched a small part of the fifth ball that was no different than the rest and it opened up like a clamshell.  Raising the broken sphere to his lips he spoke…
         “Five second delay, activate.”
         Red light on the inside of the ball flashed in acknowledgement and went silent.  Visily smiled.
         “Right, five,…four,…oh shit.”
         There were children, a group of them walking up the steps of the building.  They were laughing and screaming, tussling as they scampered in through the beaten down doorway.  And in no way did they look blind.
         “No children Visily.  They are innocent and have hope of a different life.  Never children.”  Said the patient, internal, professor of murder.
         “But they don’t look sick at all, he lied to me that sonuvabi-“
         Visily was interrupted by the building imploding with a sucking sound.

“Ahh… Visily, I am assuming that your mission has met with success?”
         “Yes sir, the disease has been contained.”  Visily almost spat the word “disease” in contempt.
         “Children you bastard!  A whole apartment building full of them.  You made me think there were none, that they’d be at school, but it was a lie you planted in my head!  They weren’t even sick!  Of course you didn’t say, you just let me assume.”
         “Good, Visily, I want to show you something.”  The Elect rose from his seat and gestured to the door behind his chair.  Visily followed him warily into the passage beyond, all the while playing with the knife in his pocket. 
“I kill for money you bastard, but you I’m going to kill for free!”
Down a scorched stone brick corridor the same color as the ugly yellow lights that hung in odd intervals from the ceiling.  The Elect and Visily stopped when they came to what looked like a fogged window implanted next to the stone.  The Elect pressed a brick that looked like any other among its fellows, and the window cleared.  Visily’s jaw gaped as if trying to disbelieve what his eyes and brain were telling him.
         “I am imagining that there is some consternation in your mind due to this latest assignment, and for that I apologize.  I am also going to do something that I have almost never done before with those whose services I engage… I am going to explain myself.  What you see beyond you is the final stage of the disease which you have labored to keep from spreading.”
         “Good God, Is that even human?”  Thought Visily as a whip-thin braided tentacle brushed the glass.  As if the Elect had heard his mind, he responded.
         “Yes, what you see was once human, and they even still maintains almost ninety-percent of its original human DNA.  However, so do crocodiles, birds, and earthworms.”
         “I acquired these children at great expense and at the loss of two of your compatriots, from the federal government.  They created this retrovirus and tested it on these children.  They have been searching for a new way to terrify their nonexistent enemies, and used people from my city to be there laboratory.  These are the last infected humans the government had, and when these poor souls die, so does their creation”
         “Tell him.”  Said the Professor.
         “Sir, I was planning to kill you five minutes ago for what you made me do to that apartment building.”
         “I know Visily, I saw it in your eyes.  That is why I’m showing you this, because I don’t have the desire to train another wax-man that has managed to maintain his conscience.  You are a rare breed Visily, even more so than these poor creatures, but unlike the men responsible for this, I have hopes that one day your ideals of service and conscience will be common place.  None shall treat my city in such a way, because men like you and I shall always stand in the way of things like this.  Always.” 
The Elect pointed at the glass with his final words.  But Visily was not looking.  He had been too enraptured by the briefest of flicker of a raging inferno that appeared in the Elect’s eyes.
Visily realized that the Elect, for all his ties to the underworld, cared more for the humanity under his gaze than any mayor, senator, or even president.  Only a man out of touch with the human species would let a weapon like the retrovirus be created.  And only a man, who knew the people and met them every day, a man like the Elect, would stop it at all costs.
“Perhaps one day at the cost of your own life, but then again Visily, there are many worse causes to die for then defending the innocent.  I should know.”  Visily could not think of a strong argument against what his professor of murder had stated.
“So Visily, if you are not going to slice me open with that little knife you have been palming during this discussion, then perhaps you will be interested in the criteria of your next assignment?”
“Am I right in guessing Elect, that it involves the manufacturer of this Virus?”
“As sharp as ever Visily, as sharp as ever.”  The Elect swirled in the shadows to head back up to his office, and Visily simply followed.