There I sat in the empty laboratory, feeling no peace about what I had just done. My military issue M9 still had smoke pouring out of the barrel from the shots I had fired just moments before. The white, sterile walls stood out in stark contrast with the scarlet red blood that was pooling around my feet. The tell-tale signs of experimentation still remained, albeit scattered around the room as a result of the recent struggle.
A stethoscope was lying in a crumpled heap after being thrown from the experimenter's neck. A scalpel somehow landed in the tray that was its home, although the sterilizing alcohol had been spilled. These were all a testimony to the attempt at finding a cure. But what was trying to be cured was not a medical concern.
A rotting corpse lay still at my feet with eyes that looked up to me, pleading. They pleaded with me to rescue the lifeless body that they were attached to. I knew the corpse's name. It was William Bighorn. He had been my partner for a while. Four or five years if I remembered correctly.
"Big Bill" I called him. With a name like William Bighorn, and the propensity for giving people nicknames that we agents had, it was no wonder that Big Bill's nickname had stuck the moment it was uttered. It also didn't help matters any that Bill was six foot five inches tall.
My stomach was tied up in knots. It seemed like the boy scouts were practicing for their badge inside the sinking pit that had lodged itself in my lower torso.
The problem wasn't that I had caused my partner to die. No, I had killed before, and there was no doubt in my mind that killing Big Bill was the only way to stop the insanity that had found its way into the city. It also wasn't the fact that he had betrayed us and nearly caused a national disaster, much less a public panic. It wasn't even the fact that I had just stopped the heart of someone I had grown up with. The thing that was causing my stomach to lurch like the lowest decks of a cheap yacht was the fact that even though I had just been talking to Bill only minutes ago, he had been dead for almost a week.
As the SWAT team rushed in around me, yelling at me to lie down on the floor and put my hands behind my head, my mind went to the beginning of the week. I was mentally cursing my luck at pulling that assignment, and I tied to recall the events leading up to me putting a bullet in my partner's brain.
