(word count 2147)
August 14, 1994
Time : 1500 PDT
Pahute Mesa
High Desert Black Site — Nevada-California Border
"Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh ..... Stop Please , You Psycho Bitch. " .
The Screaming Man once was a powerful figer in the shadows known as Director Vane . Silas Vane . Director Silas Vane spent thirty years as the shadow in the corner of the Oval Office. He was the man the government called when a problem could not be solved with a vote or a public speech. His organization handled the kidnappings and the silent executions that kept the country running during the Cold War. Silas never appeared on a payroll or in a news report because his job was to exist outside the law. He built a network of orphans into perfect weapons so that the hands of politicians could stay clean. In the early 1990s, Silas felt like he was the most important person in Washington D.C. He walked through high-security buildings with a quiet confidence because he knew everyone's darkest secrets. He viewed the children in his batches as assets rather than human beings. To him, FXX067 was just a successful investment that he had shaped into a sharp blade for the state. He never expected that his best creation would turn her skills back toward the man who authorized her existence. (Yes FXX067 that's our MC's name , F for being Female , XX for being from 20th branch and 067 for being the 67th applicant of the batch) 67 or Harley ( her birth name , She checked ) as she likes to be called calls him Francis ( She read it in a Comic that Francis is supooses to be funny , She thinks herself as funny , Spoiler alert She is not). She leaned forward and punched him square in the nose with a dull thud that sounded like a heavy book hitting the floor. She watched him wince and felt a small spark of amusement that she kept to herself. "Ah Ah Ah… No swearing, Francis, you know I hate it," Harley said while she bobbed her head in a slow, playful chastisement. "It's a sign of immaturity and honestly, it just makes you look desperate." She spoke in the same tone a kindergarten teacher might use for a child who had colored outside the lines. "Now that we have established that your immaturity, tell me who else knows about my existence?" Harley spoke over the sound of his sobbing. She felt a sharp prick of annoyance because his crying was a very loud and distracting noise. She made a soft tsk sound and pulled her fist back to hit him again. Director Silas Vane saw the movement and flinched hard against the wooden slats of his chair. He looked at her with bloody eyes and asked why she was doing this to the only family she had ever known."Why are you doing this, we took care of you since you were a toddler," Silas pleaded while he tried to find a spark of loyalty in her blank expression. He told her that the organization had fed her, clothed her, and trained her to be the best agent in the world. He shouted that without them, she would have been just another peasant living a boring and meaningless life. Silas truly believed that he had given her a gift by turning her into a weapon for the government. He thought that reminding her of her debt would make her stop the torture and listen to reason.
Harley looked at him with genuine confusion and spoke in a flat voice. "I mean.... I am thankful, I loved my job and the feeling of growing every day was fun. Assassinating difficult targets was fun, but it became stale." She shifted her weight and looked at the blood on the floor as if it were a boring stain. "Remember our last debriefing? I asked for more challenging and fun missions. Sorry my French, but you straight up effing ignored me."
A very frustrated look passed over her face for a split second. "Come on, for two years it has been the same boring missions. I don't know what being suicidal means, but I think I was suicidal from the boredom." She stepped closer to Director Silas Vane and leaned down until their noses almost touched. "And after coming back from such boring missions we have to stay in a room and stare at a wall all day. If I had a sharp object with me there would have been no Harley no more. You picking up what I am putting down?"
Silas stared at her in total silence because he did not know how to respond to her logic. He had spent millions of dollars training a perfect killer only to realize she was leaving because she was bored. Harley felt like she was being very reasonable and clear about her career change. She didn't hate him for the training; she hated him for the lack of entertainment. To her, the organization was just a job that had stopped being interesting, and Silas was just a boss who gave bad assignments.
Silas' eyes were now bloodshot and filled with a strange kind of horror. "You fucking crazy bitch, I should have killed Harrison for that psychological profile," he spat out through his broken teeth. He told her she was a psycho and pointed out that her sisters in the program had all broken years ago under the pressure. Silas started laughing hysterically because he realized he had owned a perfect killer all along and did not even know it. He was devastated that his entire life's work was being destroyed simply because a young girl was bored.
Looking at the laughing, bloody man, Harley was bewildered and speechless for a moment. She did not understand why he was making such a big deal out of a simple career change. To her, the fact that her sisters "broke" just meant they were low-quality models that could not handle the stress. She thought Silas was being very dramatic and loud, which was another sign of his growing immaturity. She waited for his laughter to die down so she could get back to the practical part of her afternoon.
Harley adjusted her grip on her tool and wondered if Silas had finally lost his mind completely. She found his reaction much more interesting than his previous sobbing, but it still was not giving her the names she needed. She decided to let him finish his little tantrum before she asked her question one last time.
After a minute of listening to him laugh, Harley spoke in a very long and drawn-out voice. "Soooooooooooooo…. about those names?" Silas looked at her with desperate disbelief and shouted that no one else knew her fucking name or face. He told her she had already killed every person who knew who she was. Harley looked at the blood and the desperation on his face with another bout of disbelief. She felt like she had wasted a lot of energy on a man who was not as smart as she had originally thought.
"So….. you are telling me this torture was unnecessary and that you were stupid enough to not share the identities of your agents with anyone else?" she asked. She told him that keeping all that information in one facility seemed like a very bad strategy for a professional organization. Harley wondered why he never thought an agent might go rogue and kill every single one of them. She mentioned that there are literal movies and comics and novels about assassins killing off their own organizations for revenge or something like that. She still did not understand why those fictional assassins went on long crusades when the job was actually this easy.
"Anyway, your stupidity killed you, Francis," she said with a shrug. Silas managed to growl that his name was not Francis, but Harley just shook her head at him. She told him he was stupid and did not know what he was saying because she had already decided on his new name. She looked at her watch and saw it had only been about thirty minutes since she started this "massacre," which she described using air quotes. She was disappointed that the final boss of her life was so disorganized and simple to defeat.
Harley looked a bit lost for a moment and wondered what she should do next with her afternoon. The sound of Silas sobbing provided a surprisingly calming background noise as she thought about her travel plans. She flicked her knife up and down in her hand and felt the weight of the metal against her palm. Without saying another word, she threw the blade straight into his eye and ended his empire in a single second. The room became very quiet and the only sound left was the hum of the air conditioning.
She did not feel any sadness or triumph as she looked at the body of the man who had raised her. To her, it was just the end of a very long and boring chapter in a book she was tired of reading. She reached over and grabbed a handful of black liquorice from a jar on his desk because she liked the way it tasted. Harley walked out of the office and did not look back at the mess she had made in the middle of the room. She walks towards exit.
On her way toward the exit, she stopped at the corpse of an older female doctor. "Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa..... sorry, Granny, I had to kill you. You know I can't let any loose ends exist," she said while looking down at the woman who had helped raise her. She remembered the doctor telling her once that a secret between two people only stays a secret if one of them is dead. Harley felt that killing her was actually a way of following the doctor's own advice. She thanked the woman for the comics and novels that had kept her mind busy during the long years of training.
She looked at the teenage corpses of the other batch members scattered around the hallway. For a second, she felt a flicker of something strange that might have been guilt if she understood what that word meant. She wondered for a moment if she should take the doctor's body and bury it because the protagonists in her books always did that out of respect. Then she realized that digging a hole was grossly inefficient and might lead to someone seeing her. She decided that leaving the bodies behind was the most practical choice for a girl on a schedule.
Harley found it funny that no one had come to investigate the noise of her massacre. She knew the facility was hidden from the world, but the silence still felt like a lucky break. She stepped over a fallen guard and pushed open the heavy steel doors to the outside world. As she walked toward the parking lot, she started to hum a catchy tune she had heard on a radio once. Her life as #XX067 was officially over and her life as Harley was just beginning.
The reason nobody came to stop Harley is that Director Silas Vane had spent thirty years making sure his facility did not exist. He built the compound in a "black site" area that was officially listed as a condemned water treatment plant on government maps. The local police were paid a monthly salary just to ignore any loud noises or smoke coming from that direction. Silas had created a perfect bubble of silence for his dirty work, but that bubble also meant no one could hear him screaming for help.
The technology of the 1990s also helped Harley keep her massacre a secret. There were no smartphones to record the sounds of gunfire and no social media to alert the public in real time. The security feeds were all on a closed-circuit analog system that Harley looped before she started her walk through the building. Since Silas didn't want the government checking in on him, he didn't have any "dead man's switches" or automatic distress signals linked to the outside world. He wanted total privacy, and Harley gave it to him.
Finally, the organization was designed to be self-cleaning. If a fight broke out, the protocols were to lock the doors and handle it internally to avoid an international scandal. The guards died waiting for backup that was never allowed to come from the outside. By the time anyone from Washington D.C. realizes the phones are down, Harley will already be halfway across the country. She left behind a ghost town that the government will likely burn to the ground themselves to hide the evidence of what Silas was doing.