"Alright Dad, truth is this ain't a vacation. I've- no, WE'VE been disbanded. Now before you say anything, we all knew this was gonna happen eventually. I mean hell, having a single bloody job last this long is practically unheard of for a... for someone in my profession, and..."
Sniper sighed, his spirits sinking a little further as he drove down the abandoned stretch of highway. Who was he fooling? As soon as his father knew he was out of a job, he'd be lucky to get a sentence in before the inevitable half-hour screaming match. He could hear the old man now:
"I TOLD you that weren't no way to make a living, even back when it was just buffaloes you was shooting in Africa! Mucking about with a bunch of criminals, you're lucky to have made it back at all! And did it ever occur in your brain, did it ever even register, what might happen if your 'job' followed you home? Eh? Ever thought of that, son?"
A long brown snake lay basking across the road ahead. He swerved around it mechanically, not really seeing it. His surroundings were comfortable and familiar. The road stretched endlessly in front of his windshield until it vanished into the fiery blaze of the sunset. Flat grassy land broken up by bushes and the occasional stunted tree flanked him on either side. There were no houses to be seen. The only sign that anyone might live nearby was a high fence to his right, behind which a flock of sheep grazed ravenously as though afraid the grass might disappear with the waning light.
Then he saw it. Something dark clung to the side of the twisted wire barricade just ahead, crouched and menacing.
Sniper slowed the van, hand twitching on reflex toward the kukri resting in the seat beside him. But before he could touch it he relaxed. The shape was too small to be a person, and anyways it wasn't holding onto the fence by itself. Someone had hung it there. He got a glimpse of fur matted with blood, white teeth, four limbs splayed out rigidly from a distended belly, before it passed out of his periphery in a blur. The sheep continued grazing.
Farmers hung dingoes they'd shot from their fences sometimes to ward others away from their flocks, he knew that. No telling how well it worked though.
Finally he saw what he had been waiting for. A dark square, nothing but a speck against the horizon at first, drew steadily nearer until it was recognizable as a small house. Asphalt had given way to gravel a ways back, and now even that was disappearing in favor of a long dirt driveway. Despite the knot in his stomach, the corners of Sniper's mouth slid up in a small smile. It wasn't much to look at, just a patch of dirt and grass indistinguishable from the rest of the landscape, some fences marking it off, and the plain little box of a house in the middle of it all. Compared to that mansion Demoman lived in, it was a shack. But fountains and artsy modern architecture didn't make a home. Maybe he'd wait to tell his dad he'd been laid off until the morning, and they could just...
He pulled up in front of the house, smile fading. The door stood ajar, and the windows were all dark. He rolled down his window.
"Mum? Dad?"
There was no answer. Sniper skipped dread entirely and assumed the worst.
He shut off the van and picked the kukri up out of the passenger's seat. He was going inside; at close quarters, a knife was just as viable as a gun and in some ways easier to manage. He ran his thumb over the blade as he stepped out of the vehicle. The cold metal reassured him. He just had to be prepared for any eventuality, that was all. Then nothing could touch him.
Dead grass crunched under his boots. Insects hummed from the nearby tree. The sun's rays tilted their way through the branches to dapple his long frame, warm but not comforting. All too soon he left their light for the shade of the porch and, with the slightest hesitation, stalked across the threshold.
All was still and quiet inside. It wasn't reassuring. His mother should have been cleaning up after dinner or watering her plants while his father groused about something he'd read in the paper. That's what they did in the evenings. But there was no voice or movement to be heard, just the now muffled whine of cicadas in the old tree.
Everything looked in order, at least. No broken furniture or obvious signs of a struggle. He took another step inside, careful not to make the floorboards creak. Some sand and debris from the yard had been blown in onto the floor. He frowned; how long had the door been open then? It wasn't windy now. Had it been hours? Days?
He crouched a bit lower and, holding the kukri ready, began to make his way further inside. No lights on. Had they left then, and just forgotten to close the door? But that wasn't like his dad. Nothing short of a fissure to the center of the earth ripping the house in half would compel him to leave, and even then it might take some convincing. What could have gotten him to abandon his beloved home? And if they hadn't... if they hadn't left, where were they now?
Well. It was pretty likely they were still in the house, wasn't it?
He gritted his teeth. Just got to be prepared for what's coming, that's all.
At this, Sniper straightened up and looked around the room. He looked for some sign, a bloodstain or a huddled mass or a garbage bag in a place it shouldn't be, but almost everything was exactly where it belonged. The couch and chairs stood by the fireplace in the same places they'd been on his last visit. He ran a finger down the arm of a rocker. A stripe of dark wood glinted dully in the light from the windows, freed from its thin layer of dust.
That's not a good sign.
He turned away. No, there wasn't anything here unless it had been stuffed under the couch. Unlikely, but he could check there later.
The glow from the sun had dwindled slightly, and the rays coming through the windows glinted red now. He turned away from the living room. Then he stopped suddenly, his gaze fixed on the other side of the house. A dim red outline formed two sides of a rectangle there in the dark wall. The back door wasn't closed all the way.
He hesitated for just a second. Then, knuckles of the hand wrapped around his kukri turning white, he marched to it. To hell with stealth. If there was anyone here, he wanted them to know they weren't alone. Maybe they'd show themselves and he could get some answers. With more force than was strictly necessary, he threw open the back door.
They had died in the backyard.
He might have been turned into a statue, if there'd been anyone there to see him freeze on the porch. Death wasn't dignified or beautiful no matter how many artists tried to romanticize it. He'd watched enough men die, most at his own hand, to know that much. It wasn't always clean either. Movies had people dying instantaneously from wounds that could have left them there for hours or even days, lingering but doomed and often racked with pain, so unable to function it was hard to know when it was that they finally stopped living. And once someone died, nature didn't care who they were. The scavengers came if you didn't bury them fast enough, and the flies.
It looked like his mother had died fast, at least. Bullet through the temple and out the back of the skull. She probably hadn't even seen it coming. They must have shot her first.
His father had known what was happening. He'd been with her, seen her drop, and gone running... away from the house? Toward the gunman, more like. He'd been shot in the shoulder first, then the thigh. The stubborn old man looked like he had been crawling through the grass when his attacker had finally hit his target. The hole passed straight down through the top of the head. He'd come forward, out from his hiding place, and stood over his dad before shooting him down like a trespassing dog.
From the looks of them, it had been two days ago at least.
Sniper stepped backward into the house. His eyes were fixed on thin air, still seeing their bodies as though they were floating in front of him. It wasn't... quite real, somehow. He moved around, his life changed, he was stationed in different places and the people around him died, but they were constants. This place was his anchor. They couldn't just be gone.
But they were. And he'd thought he was prepared.
He cursed under his breath and turned away from the door. His thumb ran up and down the blade of his kukri, faster than before, back and forth as though he were trying to squeeze out the very last drop of reassurance the metal had provided him earlier. It didn't come.
Who...? Well there were a few possibilities. An image of an old woman on a television screen flicked through his memory, along with a handful of photographs. She'd said something to that effect, hadn't she? That she had information on them? But why the bloody hell the old crone would come after his family was beyond him. He'd never crossed her, and their final defeat was no fault of his own. Gray'd found a loophole.
What about Gray then? Smug old bastard with his robots, seemed just the sort of trick he'd pull. Except... except that didn't make sense, Gray'd won. There wasn't a reason for him to come after his folks. It was impractical.
He shook his head vigorously, pushed up his glasses, and ground one palm into his brow. He couldn't think about this any more, not now. He had to do something. He needed to... to do anything besides standing around thinking about what happened, because no matter how he looked at it this was almost certainly his fault.
And then, quite suddenly, he let out a wheezy laugh. He was shaking, but he would not cry.
"Guess... guess you were right this time, dad."