The left side profile of Lang Kim’s head was square in my sight. The pull of my pointer finger only a fraction of an inch towards me would blast a 5½ inch .50 caliber round through his brain. As I was trained, I lay as a stone, forcing shallow breaths of air in and out of my lungs to minimize movement. There would be no suffering. He wouldn’t know what hit him. I often thought about that split second when life left the bodies of the victims I killed, wondering which realm of the theoretical afterlives their souls entered (heaven, hell, purgatory) – if one existed at all. It didn’t matter. I forced the thought out of my mind. Do not think with your emotions, I was trained. I was a killing machine. Through psychological regimens, I grew numb to the emotional pains that entomb most ordinary people. And as stark a confession it is, I felt free. Free from sorrow, from grief. Guilt was as far away from me about killing as a distant galaxy. I was cold. And had I any emotion in me at all, I would have recognized my state as love, the love of killing without the slightest remorse. I had no wife and no children. An orphan with no-one to experience these things called emotions with; if it were ever possible for them to dwell in me at all.
literally stories 