The Woke Assassins

The Woke Assassins

There are more of us than you can ever imagine. Millions all over the world.

We’ve existed in the shadows since the beginning of humanity, in caves, tents, igloos, and teepees.

We are teachers and taxi drivers, actors and accountants. We have jobs, families, and pets. On Saturday morning we mow our lawns. On Saturday night we hunt. We are out in the open and at the same time, invisible.

We are known by many names. In Germany we are called Serienmörder. In Italy we are called assassino seriale. The English language has many words for us, psychopath, sociopath, monster, unconscionable. How has a conscience ever helped anyone?

The term ‘serial killer,’ was not coined until the 1980s.

We have formed a highly exclusive social network with communities in every country. We pay dues and win prizes.

We have rules which must be followed without question for our own safety and an overreaching goal—to eliminate seventy percent of the population by 2040 while, at the same time, making the process fun and complex. You see, humans are destroying the planet with their pollution, overpopulation, strip-malls, high-rise buildings, overfishing the oceans, global warming…the list can go on and on.

Our aim is to bring it back to health.

Big plans are in the works. The next fifteen years will be so exciting.

***

Decades ago, Unit 1 came to understand that most serial killers get caught because they get in a rut and develop a pattern of behavior—only killing certain types of people, taking souvenirs, mutilating the body, torture, and leaving behind far too many clues. Unit 1 came to the realization that we are individuals driven by a force we can neither understand nor control and thus formed the Alliance of Assassins—we were the first AA. And just like the socially acceptable AA—Alcoholics Anonymous, we fully acknowledge our weaknesses, we support and guide one another and use our addiction to better society and the planet.

No one is safe when they are on our radar. We are persistent. We refuse to fail.

***

We are each presented with a list of challenges and each challenge has a different value.

Last week my objective was to eliminate an Asian one-armed man—forty points. First step: find a one-armed man, then kill him, and make it look like suicide.

Unit 4450’s assignment is to eliminate a mother who is in labor in the hospital and make it look like natural causes. Fifty points.

Unit 994,309 accepted the task of derailing an Amtrak train. Nine hundred points. This member is legendary. He or she must be very old to accomplish a record of disappearing more individuals in a single state that any other member on the North American group. Over two thousand people in sparsely populated Alaska. I am in awe of his abilities.

We are the cause of many ‘disasters.’ Airplanes fall into the ocean. The Bermuda Triangle was our creation. In 1966 three Chicago girls disappeared swimming in Lake Michigan. In 1998 two scuba divers were left behind in the Coral Sea.

Covid? Yup, that’s our highly successful invention. We have something similar coming in 2028.

We didn’t bomb the Twin Towers, but we put the idea into the brain of a mad man.

The Chicago Mafia wars of the 1920s? That was our doing.

We started the opioid crisis, and the foolish do-gooders blamed it on physicians when most of the pills are brought in from other countries and sold behind the local dollar store or bodega.

Several years ago, the Vietnam AA group was in a friendly competition with the Malaysian group over total annual kills and was winning until Malaysian Flight 370 disappeared—227 points to Malaysia.

When some bleeding heart makes a big racket about prison overcrowding, we simply start a riot and, voila, more space suddenly becomes available.

We do not eliminate the extreme elderly in nursing homes, the terminally ill, drug addicts, or those living on the street, because it would be a waste of our resources. Nature will do the job for us.

None of the deaths can appear to be related in any way. Eliminating bodies is safest for everyone, but not always possible.

***

Serial killers may not be ‘sane,’ but most are not bat-shit crazy like John Wayne Gacey, Jeffrey Dahmer or Aileen Wuornos. These kinds of sloppy randoms are not members of our organization. They don’t even know we exist. Freaks like that could easily shoot off their mouth in an interrogation room and destroy us all.

***

North America has one group. Russia has seven. China has ten. The members of the various groups connect with each other annually, laptops open, cameras off to discuss progress, recruit and vet new members, and plan around upcoming natural disasters—if it’s hurricane season in the tropics there’s no point in assigning challenges until after November.

This year a member from the North America group suggested that we no longer eliminate humans under the age of twenty-one. That member was from New York and disappeared within the hour. We knew right away that he or she was a spy or an informant. No legitimate serial killer would even suggest we pass up an entire demographic. Babies are some of the worst polluters. They use an average of four thousand diapers before they are toilet-trained.

It takes five hundred years for a disposable diaper to decompose.

***

This year, Unit 7809 is ahead on points, and I fully intend to win this time—the prize is a Rolex watch. So, I’m taking the Thirty-one Day All or Nothing dare. If I don’t complete it, I will lose all the points I’ve accumulated thus far. If I do, I’ll come away with thirty-one thousand points.

The Thirty-one Day All or Nothing dare: I am to travel across the country and eliminate people who seemingly have nothing in common. I am certain that Law Enforcement will never connect the dots, never pick up on the fact that thirty-one people in thirty-one states went missing, and that each had recently entered a writing contest.