Part 1: It's not the waking up that kills the dream

Consciousness kisses me like a brick to the face. Bloodshot eyes crack open to the cold warmth of fluorescent lighting and nausea. It's morning. I think.

I stare at the dingy yellow paint that covers the ceiling, and the images just won't stop playing: screams, blood, the bodies.

Michele's body.

The baby's body.

Mona's body.

All the flesh of fallen angels.

I sit up, feet flat on the floor. My shoelaces are missing, and so is my belt. If they really thought I wanted that sort of exit, I had more than enough bullets with me yesterday. The fact that I was still breathing should have given them a clue.

I stand, my muscles complaining from the movement, and I stare across the cell at the small plate of bolted-down steel that masquerades as a real mirror. My face is a muted, dull and distorted reflection of reality. I can't disagree.

The days slip by quickly.

In the end, after the gathering of the evidence, an interview with Winterson's son, and a search of Vlad's office at VODKA, the Brass tentatively drop hints that the cop-killing may have been justified, and that the subsequent series of misfortunes fall beneath the security blanket of self-defense.

Eventually, though placed on administrative suspension, I'm released on my own recognizance. Released…

But never free.

If Michele and the baby were the family of my American Dream, Vinnie, Vlad, Woden and Mona were the family of my American Nightmare. And now both were gone, and I was orphaned, abandoned.

Where does the warrior go, when love is gone and there are no more enemies to fight?

I cut through the web of police tape the cordons off the cinder that was once my apartment. I look around numbly, scanning for anything I can salvage, hoping the answer is yes while thankful it might be no. Maybe this is where the past should die, the shards of my former life finally burned away.

I see Michele. I see myself. The edges around the image are scarred by fire and other people's revenge. But she's still there, and we're still smiling. I stoop to grab the photo from the floor, turn, and leave the rest behind.

I hang up the phone with Bravura, finishing my daily check-in. Between now and the review board hearing on Winterson's death I might not be in a cell, but not having anywhere to go and having to report in all the time, I might as well be in prison.

The window of my very temporary apartment looks out onto a brick wall, and I am entombed. Questions and rage roil their way through my mind:

Where do I go from here?

What's left to fight for?

Why?

Why?!

WHY?!

I bang my skull against the wall to punctuate each unanswerable question, gritting my teeth at the pain, stepping back, dizzy. I down some pills for it.

Old habit. Hardly dying.

And for a moment I can't tell if the ringing is in my head or from the phone, but just to be safe, I lift both.

"Yeah?"

"Max Payne?"

"Well, I never take it in small doses…"

"Mr. Payne, my name is Benjamin Doubleday. I represent the estate of Senator Alfred Woden."

Lawyers. I hate lawyers.

"Yeah? There wasn't much of an estate left the last time I saw it. You want to haul me in front of a judge? Take a number."

"You misunderstand the reason for my call, Mr. Payne. I have no instructions to sue you, nor take any, well, negative actions against you."

"Fine. Think positive then. Spill it."

"Well, to be perfectly blunt, I have been designated the executor of Mr. Woden's estate. And you, Mr. Payne, have been named as one of his beneficiaries."

The concept takes a minute to sink in, and once it does the old paranoia returns: riddles within conspiracies within ambushes, Woden's feeble hand reaching from the grave to pull me back in. Just when I thought, prayed, all of it had gone up in smoke.

I look again out the window, my gaze boring into the brick wall of where I'm headed. Fate has signaled a detour. What have I got to lose?

Nothing. My words are sighs.

"When and where?"

(Next to follow soon… -CM)