The early morning sky outside was overcast, a gradually brightening gray. After waking up and heading out, he followed the detailed instructions on the note. It instructed him to follow them in exchange for answers. What answers, however, it did not say. While he only did the assassination business part time, past dealings with these secretive people made Vodko curious since they paid well. In both information and currency.

  Having freed up some time, he left the building with the duffel bag slung over his shoulder. He ran down an alley, found a stairway, and went up the steps. The doorway to the second floor of this ruined building was scarred and warped, the door was blown off its hinges.

  He went through it and came out in a maze of clear-walled cubicles filled with cracked glass cylinders. He made his way through the maze, the floor covered with huge chunks of broken glass and twisted coils of wire. Every step made loud, crunching sounds.

  Eventually, he reached a window looking down on an alley, only to see half a dozen people dressed in slick black suits, with white earpieces, carrying weapons. The dim forms of other men could be seen coming and going. He couldn’t place what three-letter combination agency that controlled them, but he felt a good sense of tension wrapping around his body.

  It was the feeling he always felt when trying to leave the lawless zone.

  Between two walls, a red hologram shimmered down in a circle like a hose with maximum pressure. The word VISA hovered within the space in bold letters. The barrier in front of it was framed like a doorway, a checkpoint to ward off people or to judge those with permission to enter.

  Vodko pushed himself from the window, and ran towards an open area, saw the crater in the floor, jumped, and heaved himself onto a steel beam that hung in the air between the two buildings, connected by a couple of hefty wires. As he ran, he knocked over a metal canister that spilled fuming liquid across the sidewalk below.

  Once over on the other side, Vodko picked up speed, turned a corner, and jumped over some debris as he moved towards the abandoned elevator shaft where a sturdy brown rope hung secured.

  On a broken brown desk, a neatly wrapped box sat on the table. He shoved the package into the duffel bag and leaned over the edge in the elevator shaft with a firm grip of the rope. A rat scurried past him just as he bent over the edge, and he lost the grip of the rope for an instant.

  “Ah blin!” Vodko suppressed the shaking in his heart when he finally got a firm grip of the rope again. Friction from the rope burned his hands slightly.

  A couple of minutes later, Vodko had managed to get down after the long climb and jumped down from the rope onto the dusty remains of an elevator car and then onto the cold stone floor that constituted the flooring of the pathway. It felt like he was stepping foot into a place where he wasn’t invited to. Darkness spread between him and his goal.

  Dust fell in the endlessly stretching tunnel as he walked. Vodko checked the note he discovered yesterday. As he walked, he noted the supporting steel beams and counted as he walked until he reached the appropriate number and turned to the right. There was a small hole in the wall. Fortunately, Vodko was short, so he easily got through it. He pulled in the duffel bag on the other side. The path ahead was a connecting maze of the sewage system. After navigating through it for twenty minutes, he discovered a metal ladder to the surface, climbed up, and pushed the manhole cover to the side.

  The city outside had an entirely different feel. Sleek modern electric cars dotted the streets parking lots despite the early hour. As patrols were going to start any time soon, Vodko darted away from the area, towards a building dotted down at the back on the note, on a makeshift map. It was easy enough to understand so there was no reason to complain.

  The rest of the instructions were fairly simple. Clock a guard in the face, take his service weapon, shoot him, take his clothes, enter the building, find a janitor, clock him in the face, take his mop and then shoot him. Everyday stuff.

  Vodko scurried down the hallway carrying the service weapon and mop as he ran through the bleak hospital landscape. The occasional potted plant stood beside the occasional bench and momentarily disrupted the feeling, but felt like it didn’t belong there. It was the kind of atmosphere that would make you sick if you weren't beforehand. Vodko propped himself up towards a white door he pulled the door open just enough to peer through the gap.

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “It’s beginning to look a lot.. like..” a doctor unfurled his arms like a massive winged beast, “Christmas,” he coughed before continuing, “...which is unusual for a tumor.”

  ‘Wrong room,’ Vodko thought to himself, carefully closed the door and continued further down the hallway. He once again propped himself up to another white door, listening with his ear to the door this time to hear what was being discussed inside.

  “Is quite irony. Autopsy is show America was kill by only thing he not of fear,” a polish doctor spoke with a terrible broken english accent.

  “Fear itself?” a young nurse asked beside him.

  “What? No, Coronary Artery Disease,” the polish doctor explained.

  “Ohhh, that makes more sense,”

  Vodko peered into the room through the keyhole, watching the nurse as she made an embarrassed smile, nodded and scurried out of a door to the left.

  ‘Ah, this must be the place,’ Vodko thought as he turned the doorknob to the room and opened the door.

  The room was small and furnished in the humblest manner, but the air was pure, and everything looked clean and tidy. In a chair, with a pillow pressed in at his back for support, sat a pale man in a doctor's coat, with wrinkles in his face, produced by stress rather than age, with a pair of horn rimmed glasses on his sharp nose.

  The doctor was the first one to speak.

  “W-Who?”

  “You don’t need to know. Note for you,” Vodko said and pulled out the note.

  After the Doctor adjusted his glasses, he read the information on the note. After he reached the bottom of the large text, he exclaimed.

  “Ah you’re.. Hm. Translate? Translate what?” the doctor asked with a perplexed expression.

  “This,” Vodko said as he pulled out the newspaper from a bag on his back. He flipped through it and placed it on the doctor's desk.

  The article was circled in with a black crayon. The doctor scanned through the newspaper twice, as though he were memorizing its contents before starting to type quickly on the computer in front of him. Vodko turned around and sat down on an empty chair as he waited.

  A couple of minutes later, the doctor interrupted the silence with a cough and adjusted his posture in his seat before finally hitting an enter key. A printer started whirring to life as papers started to get pulled down into its machinery before landing below in a compartment.

  The doctor handed Vodko the papers who then looked them over before pulling out a box from the duffel bag on his back. Vodko handed it to the doctor.

  “Your payment. Fifty Caliber handgun, for when burglar is behind refrigerator, at your neighbor's house, blyat. I need not hear what you need it for,” Vodko said.

  The doctor began to slightly sweat. After he had pulled off the wrapping, next to the gun, a phone sat in the box with a note attached. The doctor shakily read the note before handing the phone to Vodko and pushed his doctor’s coat to the side so that he could stuff the gun into the back of his pants.

  “I-is for you. S-supposedly you have to call this number.”

  Doc handed Vodko the note.

  * * *

  The sun gradually rose. Shimmering streaks of light glowed on the floor as light had seeped through the blinds. Vodko pushed the phone number into the phone as he sat down in a chair next to the desk, the waiting signal started beeping. An answer came through.

  “Ah, Mr. Jatkovich, I presume?” A robotic voice was heard through the phone.

  “Da. Is Vodko.”

  “Pardon this mechanized distortion. One can’t be too careful these days. We’re thankful for the successful delivery of the aforementioned package. Inclosed in this package is a productivity increasing device which will provide us with the number one condition for further job satisfaction: safety.”

  The phone crackled for an instant before the robotic voice continued.

  “While the productivity device is in pristine condition, it is only properly handled by practiced personnel. Your mission is only half complete, upon completion you will be rewarded as previously specified. To that end, if you would be so kind to offer the phone to Dr. Niemec.”

  "Da, is for you," Vodko said, as he raised himself from the chair by grabbing the edge of the doctor’s coat, before slapping the phone to the doctor’s ear like a dead fish.

  The doctor muttered nervously with the phone to his ear before nodding to an instruction. He placed it carefully on the table. In the next instant, he sat down in a brown chair and began looking through the records on a monitor, his fingers hitting the keyboard rapidly. The speaker function of the phone was activated.

  “Pardon us if it appears like we’re keeping you out of the loop, Mr. Jatkovich. The continuation of your assignment is an issue of two very crucial steps. Gathering of data and then the implementation of an extraction plan devised from said data,” the speaker on the phone conveyed mechanically.