The beer cans and whiskey bottles were strewn all over my apartment. I had just come back from what most people call “repair” missions. Why they call it repair and not poison the food supply, I will never know.

Been at this for a few years now and it never gets easier. Every time I get one of these offers that is too good to pass up I do the humane thing and kill as many as I can find before poisoning their food source. Food poison is a nasty way to go, so I let ‘em go down fighting.

I guess the reason I feel bad is I know some of the omni soldiers are just doing what they think is right, and a few I know even give out some of their food rations to the orphans that make up most of the neutral cities. I don’t think I would ever sleep if I knew that food I poisoned made it into a starving child’s mouth.

The jobs that are easier but still haunt me are the assassination missions. At least there I am just taking out the head and leaving the underlings to run away. I do not like the fact that once you go omni or clan you can never walk away from it. Some have tried, but they were branded traitors and turncoats.

I looked at it sitting in my lap. I had never been good with guns, but I was assured that at close range even I could not miss with this one. Home Defender, “good for defending homes against mutant and humans alike,” or that is what the advertisement read. What good is home that is haunted by the people you kill.

And why do I kill them? All over some bored AI program that one day decided to cram a bunch of radio transitions together to make a person. Did the AI know it was making life? Did it understand that it was about to bring forth someone who would not want to be on this world, part of this war. I just want to sit on a porch swing and drink iced tea.

Being as big as I am it took almost a months pay to drink enough to get this point. I am not sure why bullets come in boxes of 50, I only needed one. And so before I could clearly think about anything again, I pointed it at the head and squeezed the trigger like the man at the store showed me.

I did hear a click or a bang.

But I did start to hear noises, voices I think, and then a light. I had done it I thought, I had gotten out of the war. The light got closer and became a word. The one word that sent me into the biggest rage I have ever been in.

If you happen to walk by Old Athens hill, and you look to the north side, you will notice a hole, and a sign up that says under construction. That place a small device used to sit, it didn’t do anything really just sat there and opened when the proper DNA sequence was input. And at the top it had a bright sign that read, “Reclaim.”