"Fuck... why is it so hard?" Morgan took too long to pick the lock on David Chen's apartment door.
He worked the pick and tension wrench with movements that his muscles remembered even when his mind wanted to forget. He felt each pin click into place with the skill of someone who had done this hundreds of times before in his previous life.
CLICK!
"There it is..."
Morgan quietly opened the door and slipped inside, closing it behind him with the same careful control. There was only a little light coming in through the thin curtains in the apartment.
Once his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see clearly. He stood still for a full minute, listening to the silence and taking in the space through sound and shadow before going deeper inside.
Morgan's surveillance showed that Chen's apartment was precisely what he thought it would be. Not flashy, middle-class, and normal in every way that mattered.
A small living room with old furniture, a kitchenette with dirty dishes in the sink, and a bedroom door that was open to show an unmade bed. The kind of place that thousands of people lived in, nothing special or interesting, which made what Morgan was about to do feel worse.
He moved through the dark with practiced ease, checking the simple security measures and finding them laughably lacking. There was no alarm system, no cameras, and only a simple deadbolt that wasn't even locked properly.
Chen felt safe here because he had a new purpose and Murphy's group to protect him. That false sense of safety would be his undoing.
Morgan's breathing was steady and controlled because he had trained for years to learn how to deal with the stress responses of his body. Every little noise was heard with extreme attention.
Under his weight, the floorboards creaked, the refrigerator in the kitchenette hummed in the distance, and the muffled traffic noise from the street below continued. The silence made everything louder, turning normal sounds into possible threats that he quickly wrote down and then ignored.
He started searching the apartment in a methodical way, looking in the most likely places first and then the less likely ones. He opened the drawers with barely a sound and looked through their contents with the small flashlight he took out of his jacket.
These everyday things, like late bills, pictures of family members who probably didn't know he was joining Murphy's inner circle, and takeout menus from cheap restaurants, showed a lot about Chen's life. Morgan saw a journal in the nightstand next to Chen's bed, under a Bible that looked brand new.
Morgan sat on the edge of the bed with a flashlight between his teeth and opened to the most recent entries. Chen's handwriting was neat and clear, reflecting his concern for organization and clarity.
The first entry he found was from three days ago, right after the Council's ordination. "Finally, I get it."
"We weren't spared for no reason. We were picked."
"The weak were taken away so the strong could start over."
"Father Murphy talked about it tonight at the private meeting."
"He said, "Selection gives you strength." "God is trimming people like a gardener trims a tree."
Morgan flipped the page, and with each new entry, his stomach tightened. Chen's change was recorded in real time, and his thoughts were moving toward extremism at an alarming rate.
"Father Murphy taught us about kindness today. Not letting the weak drag us down is true compassion."
"True compassion requires the courage to distinguish between good and bad individuals, identify those who weaken us by instilling doubt in us, and eliminate them for the benefit of the collective."
"For an extended period, I believed that kindness entailed accepting everyone, which led me to be overly tolerant. I now understand the truth. 'Being nice to the weak is being cruel to the strong'."
As Morgan read on, the entries became more and more frantic, and the careful handwriting became less and less careful. "I can finally do something that matters more than me."
"My life finally has a purpose."
"For so long, I felt like I didn't matter and was worthless."
"Now I have a purpose. We need to get to work. Important work. God's work."
The most recent entry was written yesterday, and Morgan had to read it twice before he understood what it meant. "We're starting the process of identifying people next week."
"Father Murphy says we need to make a list of everyone who lives in the area and figure out who needs protection and who doesn't. He calls it 'stewardship of resources'."
"I offered to be responsible for the eastern zone. I won't be weak and let my feelings get in the way of my judgment."
"We need to find the people who survived but shouldn't have, the ones who make everything weaker by being there."
Morgan carefully closed the journal, fighting the urge to throw it across the room. "It really is too late for me..."
"This was proof of corruption and proof that Chen was already committed to the path that would lead to mass murder."
"The journal read like a prophecy of terrible things to come, with each entry taking the writer deeper into the mindset that would eventually lead to the deaths of two hundred people."
"Unfucking believable..."
But it also indicated that Morgan's math was right. Chen wasn't going to change his mind or tone down his opinions.
He was getting closer to violence, and Murphy was giving him the ideas and the structure he needed to make that violence happen in a planned way instead of randomly. Morgan stood in the corner by the door, where he would be hidden when the lights came on but could still see everyone who came in.
He took the knife out of the sheath that was strapped to his ribs and felt its familiar weight in his hand. The blade was simple and useful, made for fighting instead of showing off. It was the kind of weapon that didn't leave any unique marks or signatures.
In the dark, time seemed to go on forever. Morgan looked at his watch every so often and saw the minutes crawl by at a painfully slow pace.
Every minute felt like an hour. Waiting was worse than acting because it gave him time to think, second-guess, and feel the full weight of what he was about to do.
His mind kept going around and around in the same reasons and arguments. In the third month, Chen would kill two hundred and seventeen people.
Families were split up at checkpoints, kids were killed because their parents asked the wrong questions, and teens were shot for smiling at the wrong times during prayers. The mass graves they would find later, where bodies were left to rot in unmarked pits because Chen thought of murder as just another job.
Morgan made himself go over the details again and again to remember why this was necessary. He whispered to himself in the dark, "This is the right way to end for what's to come."
"This is for breaking the cycle..."
"This is the only way to prevent those two hundred people from getting murdered."
But the thoughts that were fighting for his attention won out over his attempts to push them away. "This is murder...."
"Murdering someone who hasn't done anything wrong yet on purpose and with planning. Someone who just found meaning in life after years of not having any."
He wanted his breathing to become irregular and speed up with stress and excitement. Morgan took control of it again by using the skills he had learned in his previous life to control how his body reacted.
The knife felt heavier with each passing minute, as if the weight of what it stood for was becoming real instead of just a figure of speech. Even though the apartment was cool, he was sweating on his forehead.
Morgan used his free hand to wipe it away, then he checked that hand for tremors. He had done worse things before, like killing dozens of transformed people in brutal close-quarters combat.
One human target should be easier and take less emotional strength. But it wasn't easier. It was a million times harder because Chen was a person, wasn't guilty of the crimes Morgan remembered, and was truly happy with the purpose he had found, even though that purpose would eventually lead to horror.
"My morals got manipulated this easily. Do I really have to act not like a real human at this point...?"
Even though he was trained, the sound of keys in the lock made Morgan's heart race. He pressed deeper into the corner, knife in hand, and every muscle in his body was ready to move.
Chen opened the door and let in light from the hallway. Then he reached inside to turn on the light.
After being in the dark for so long, the light that flooded the apartment temporarily blinded him. Morgan's eyes quickly adjusted to the change due to his extensive experience with it.
Chen came in with an energy that seemed almost crazy. He was practically bouncing on his feet, and his face was so bright with excitement that it made Morgan's stomach turn.
"Finally," Chen said to himself as he closed the door.
He was so excited that he couldn't stay quiet even when he was alone. "I finally have a reason to live."
"All those years of teaching, I thought I was making a difference with grades and lesson plans."
"This is real and important because it will change my life!"