I Am Ready
rating: +28+x

There is a man
In my attic
Walking around
With a soft patter
With a loud clatter

They brought my cat back
With an espionage bug
So I wrung its neck
With a harsh crack
And a soft snap

There is a man outside
In a lab coat
Talking into a cell phone
In German
And he uses words like
‘Eindringen’
‘Geheimnis’
And ‘termination’
And I know what that means
Oh yes, oh yes
I can see his cigarette through the dark
And the smoke
Of the monkey
At his side
Who peers in through my window
When he knows I’m looking

There are at least a thousand men in suits
All over town
Waiting for me to pass by
And to look down
They have a laser device
To scan my eye
And a pill
That will make me forget
Everything
That I have learned
About them
And their evil
Their experiments
And unwarranted merriments
They throw people to the lions
For science

But I know words, my dear
Words that they fear
Words like
‘Gears’
‘Kondraki’
‘173’, ‘231’, ‘343’
And ‘682’, too
And I chant
While I wait
For them to leave
They know that I know
And I know
That they know I know
So I will pray and pray and beg
For them to go

They’re digging a tunnel up through my basement
I have heard them, down there
I have put down caltrops
And a Winchester rigged to fire
(I hope they feel lucky)
If they try to come up the stairs
They will be in the crosshairs
Of my Ruger
And my Luger
I have a knife
Oh
How did you guess?
It’s the one they used
To kill my wife
She knew too much

There is a man across the street
He has a moustache
And a sniper rifle
I painted the windows black
And I hid in my bathroom

But I am safe nowhere
A man with tattoos
Was peering up from the bottom of the bowl
I slammed the button, listened for the flow
And wished he would go

I can hear them
Walking around
Above and below
And outside
But I will no longer hide

What I did is for the best
And the people must know
Of these men and their doings
They can come in, slow and steady
I have my gun

I am ready.


Agent McPhelty washed a few splatters of blood from his night-vision goggles in the sink. He shook the droplets off his hands and toweled them off, turning around. The living room in the stairway where clearly visible through the open door. His partner on this specific operation, Agent Konnicker, was standing over the prone corpse of the man he had taken down, his heavy sniping rifle slung over his shoulder. Blood and splinters of skull were alternatively splattered over and embedded in the fine oak planks of the stairs, and the stink of freshly-sheared copper hung in the air like a cloud of miasma.

"Hey Tom," the hefty Texan sniper mumbled through his impressive mustache, "check this out."

He was waving a sheet of A4 paper around. McPhelty snatched it from him, frowning as he looked it over.

"…now what in God's blue heaven is this shit, Bill?"

"I do believe he snapped and wrote hisself a little poem. Found it in his pocket."

McPhelty looked down at the fallen corpse of Richard Daublin, the dead spy. Their hacker would later discover there was at least half a terabyte of sensitive information pertaining to the Foundation scattered on various hard drives through his five laptops, but right now, with most of the top half of his head missing, he didn't look so smart.

"Wouldn't quit my day job, if I were him."

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