The Desert Standoff

can’t stop going any more than she can stop crying.
Somewhere behind her she hears pops going off and she can only hope that it’s the man in black who is the one firing the gun and not the other way around.
Natalie runs until she feels like she is going to vibrate into pieces when the headlights of a minivan finally come into view. she stands in the dead center of the road, waving her arms above her head like a crazy person, sobbing the whole time as the minivan slows to a stop and she pounds on the windows, hoping to be given a ride. She almost collapses in elation when the door unlocks and she throws herself inside. “Turn around!” she commands, and, much to her surprise, they listen. It seems to be an elderly couple, and the woman in the passenger seat is literally clutching at her pearls as Natalie brings her legs up to her chest and bites down on her finger to keep from thinking. To keep from feeling anything else at all.

  8 Nathan
T he dismissal isn’t what he thought it was going to be. Nathan has spent so much time attempting to figure out what is going to happen to him since he got that final message. Despite all of the waffling back and forth in an effort to determine what they were going to do to him, and if in fact there was even a peaceful resolution to the contract that he has been living, this was never an outcome that he imagined. The most likely, the one he thought about the most, was receiving a message to the effect of “Good Job,” and then, once he finished reading the words, something would emit from his phone to cause him to forget the whole thing had ever happened. Nathan never expected to wake up again.
Instead, he woke up to a message with another set of coordinates unlike anything that he has ever gotten before. Never in all of his years working for the company has he been directed to a helicopter pad. Never has he worked with another person, so as he arrives today to a helicopter pad that is already roaring with the sound of blades warming up for takeoff, he is surprised to see a man in a perfectly pressed white suit standing just beside the helicopter. Nathan finds it strange the way that the mass amounts of wind don’t seem to be ruffling his hair in the slightest. There is another man in a white suit in the pilot's chair, but he wears very dark sunglasses to where it is impossible to see his eyes. Nathan expected to be nervous, but instead he felt nothing as he left the keys sitting in the front seat of the black car that he drove here. He doesn’t hesitate or even bother to take anything with him as he heads toward the helicopter. This is the first time he’s ever had cause to wonder what might happen if he attempts to refuse this mission. What if he just got right back into that car and drove away? What if he decided that he doesn’t want to have anything to do with this, whatever they might have in store for him, and just ran in the opposite direction? Would they follow him? Has he done something so heinous to deserve to have an escort to his next job?
However, a part of Nathan knows there will not be another job and whatever location he is about to be taken to is going to be his last. The man doesn’t greet him as he approaches, he says nothing but gestures to Nathan’s seat on the inside of the helicopter, and Nathan does as he is asked. The man hands Nathan a headset without a microphone and then puts on one his own head before getting into the helicopter and buckling in.
It’s only a short journey to their destination, but Nathan thinks it’s rather nice to be able to stare at the city from a bird’s eye view like this. He never would have seen something like this without the company he assumes. No matter what life it was they plucked him from, it certainly wouldn’t have been something that allowed him to travel across the country as much as he has. Does the company have a retirement program or does it simply decommission them all? Nathan knows in his gut that he is about to find out exactly what happens when an operative is no longer useful to the company. Perhaps he is simply getting too old. The questions in his mind quiet as they pull higher into the sky and Nathan is lost in the view, wanting to take in everything he sees. He sits quietly with his hands folded in his lap and waits for the helicopter to touch down once more. This time it’s on a private helicopter pad on top of a very tall building. Nathan doesn’t even want to look over the edge to see how many floors up they must be. The man in the white suit doesn’t bother getting out of the helicopter, but Nathan assumes he is supposed to, so he does. There are two more identical looking men in white suits standing on either side of a pair of double doors. They look almost the same as the man in the helicopter. How strange. Perhaps they are triplets. Perhaps the company insists on hiring people who look alike or, even more likely, they simply changed the faces of these particular operatives to make sure that they all look the same.
Nathan starts towards the doors and they are opened for him before he even gets there. As he steps inside he can hear the helicopter start to whir and pull away from the building off to whatever its next destination might be. Inside of his pants pocket,