I hope you all had a merry Christmas and a good time celebrating the new year ;) Here's chapter 4 for those of you who still want to read this fanfic.
Syria, Damascus, 1980
His target had done a pretty good job at making him chase it around the goddamn planet. His mission started almost a year ago in Washington. Back then nothing had foreshadowed that he would end up here, in Damascus, still trying to track down that wretched man whose life he would have to take. It had to be done, his target was of too much value to his enemies. With this man gone things would certainly start to look better for him and his fellow brethren. For those reasons it was important that he finally got hold of him, he couldn't waste any more time! He'd met his contact man in Damascus earlier that day. The latter, a guy in his thirties, had suggested that the Suq al-Hamidiya might be the best place to start observations.
"There's a man, people call him al' Alīm, who could help you point out the right people to get pieces of information about the whereabouts of your target!" Now he stood inside Damascus' most famous bazaar, letting his gaze wander over the vendors present and their goods in order to search for al Alīm. The atmosphere was gloomy and he couldn't blame the people here for their strained faces. In the short time since he had arrived and got an idea of the situation, most Syrian cities had been the scene of strikes and brutal battles with security forces. It seemed that the conflict between the Muslim Brotherhood and the government run by the Ba'ath Party had reached a new dimension. A fact that did bother him greatly for he couldn't say for sure whether his target might be taking advantage of the situation in one way or another. Sighing he concentrated on the task at hand, inwardly hoping that he would be able to finish the wretched man off before he seized any chances.
Finding people was something he was used to doing and he was better at it than the majority of world's population. He remembered thinking his abilities were something abnormal. As a child, it had disturbed him when he came to the conclusion that other people just couldn't observe things the way he did. They saw the world in a completely different light and it freaked him out. Shy of his fifteenth birthday he hadn't told a single soul about it, truly believing that no one would understand him. He especially hadn't confided in his family. Neither his older half-brother, nor his father or his stepmother were trustworthy enough. To be honest, it wouldn't have come as a surprise if they had sent him to an asylum the moment he dared to speak of it. His father was a good man, but everything that was even remotely unnatural managed to creep him out. His older half-brother, Will, hated him to the core. The latter couldn't accept the fact that he always bested him at hunting. Every time Will had lost his temper because of it, he'd had to pay for it. His stepmother only got eyes for her own son, Jess.
To cut a long story short: Back then he'd had no one to turn to. If it hadn't been for that strange woman, Ellen, he'd met one afternoon in the woods he would have never gotten to know that there were people out there with the same abilities as his. She had appeared out of thin air, telling him that she had spent quite some time watching his every step. She said she knew what was bothering him and even though he was scared of the woman he found himself listening to her. Ellen didn't reveal everything she knew on that day, but offered him to meet her again, clearly with the intention of telling him more. It was the start of a friendship and the beginning of a new life. She gave him a choice and enough time to mull it over. He didn't need it… By then he'd already made up his mind. He lied to his family about the real reason for his leaving them. They wouldn't have understood at all if he'd told them the truth. He still remembered Will's face the moment he announced he would move out of town in order to take that job a storekeeper had offered him. His half-brother had been happy about him going away, cheering while he packed his belongings into a backpack. "Hope ya stay there an' don' ever think 'bout comin' back, freak. We don' need ya here, Tom…" And Tom didn't. A year after he left home his father died and thus Tom cut the remaining ties to his family.
The man was sitting inside a cafe with his eyes closed and a cup of tea in front of him. Al' Alīm looked like he was asleep, but he knew better. The man was paying close attention to the surrounding chatter. Apparently his nickname did live up to the expectations that came with it. After all you didn't become all-knowing if you weren't able to focus on your surroundings. He didn't dare to approach him. At least six of the other customers signaled trouble to him, so he just waited until Al' Alīm decided to leave the place. Using the masses as his mask, he looked like every other visitor of the bazaar. Getting lost in the shuffle was an absolute necessity when it came to observations. To the masses you had to be none-existent, had to lead a life in the shadows. A person with no name, no face to remember… Tom Dixon was nothing more than a ghost.
"I used to play with my dolls before the rotten came!"
Lyn smiled sadly, tucking away a stray strand of hair behind the girl's ear. She was one of the five people that had managed to survive the journey. There had been more, of course. Some of them got sick, some got mental, others began to pose a threat to the group and a few had the bad luck to get themselves bitten. Lyn and the rest of her companions tried to make sure that these five didn't have to face the same end, but you just couldn't predict the future. If there was one thing the people around her had had to learn the hard way, then it was the fact that death was a certainty. For everyone. Some might die the next day, others after years, but no one could escape death. Neither she nor her companions did fear it though as much as the others. They were used to knowing that their lives could be over all too soon. This knowledge had always been part of their job, even before the dead decided to slop around instead of just resting in peace. After all they had been involved in a war almost as old as time and war always took its toll.
"I had millions of them, Lyn, and I was sad when I had to leave them at home, but I'm not sad anymore 'cause what should I do with them now? I can't eat, or drink them and I can't kill the rotten with them. They are useless. Isn't it funny how the things we used to see as our most precious belongings now are nothing more than worthless trash?" Lyn was about to respond to the girl in front of her, but was hindered from doing so when Mo and the others appeared."Took you quite some time to come back!", she stated, standing up from the spot on the ground where she had made herself comfortable. "Did something happen? Did you run into trouble?" She quickly glanced over her friends, making sure nobody looked hurt. "No!", Mo denied. "Just had to help some poor civilians who got themselves into trouble!"
"You didn't bring them here?" It was an unwritten rule that other survivors, if they didn't prove to pose a danger to the rest of the company, were invited to join them. "They didn't want to. I did offer them to come with us, but they said they had friends out there who they wanted to reunite with!" "Where did you find them? Could you see in which direction they headed?" Lyn turned her head to see Darim coming out of the undergrowth. Earlier that day he had gone with Sarah, one of the survivors they had picked up, to investigate the rest of the vicinity. Sarah, trailing behind him, looked terribly exhausted. Mo, already answering Darim's question, shot her a glance of concern. "Shit…" Darim frowned. "Spill it out, Darim, what's wrong?" "The direction they took is the one that leads straight to a place that is currently overrun by those who returned. We couldn't see much and had to bolt, otherwise we would have been in great danger too, but there were people in there. I don't think it would be a coincidence when those people were said friends your civilians wanted to meet. They are running into hell…"
They let them go. They truly let them go… After what had happened to him earlier, he still couldn't grasp it. Judging by their hoods, their odd garbs and armory he'd already bet on them meaning nothing but trouble. Appearing out of thin air, displaying Christian love? He hadn't been convinced to say the least. Nowadays Charity always came with a high price and Daryl had anticipated the worst. However, nothing of the things he imagined happening did happen in the end. They had stepped aside, accepted them refusing their offer and bid their farewell. "I wonder who they were… Did you notice that they all wore similar clothes? Did remind me of a movie I once watched about a secret organization whose members had a certain dress code!" Abraham didn't look at him or Sarah while he spoke. His eyes were fixed on his hands. "Wasn't only their clothes!", Daryl grumbled. "Each one of them had a fuckin' sword, but I didn' hear them drawin' them when they attacked those assholes! Don' think they made use of their guns either!" "Must have been one of the two. How else could they have killed them?", Sasha chimed in. "Dunno… but s' no sense in ponderin' on it anymore…"