Faceless
The only thing we have to fear is death itself.

They tell me that it’s painless. That whatever it is inside your head that makes you you just pops like a lid on a plastic soda bottle, and you slump over, lifeless. It’s just—with the murders, with no known connection—there’s not much fact tying them together. Nothing of substance to quiet the hysterical rumours, so all I get is second-hand gossip from hysterical housewives and businessmen with even more reason to never go home.
They don’t know what it is, what causes it—if it’s even human. We don’t even know if they’re murders, technically. We just know that sometimes, late at night—a prominent member of this society is found, slumped over, with a look of shock and betrayal etched on their face like it was made of limestone.

Toronto was never supposed to be like this—the divide between us and our neighbors to the South finally multiplied over the past decade, because they never recovered from the financial pratfall their administration forced them into. Rumours continue to spread that a civil war may shatter the country irrevocably, that we’ll get even more refuges than we do now—but another day passes, and America’s death appears to be just another fable that never quite sees the light of day.

    While I’d love to help the Americans with their struggle against their own bureaucracy, I’m trapped—Toronto in particular, and most of Canada to a lesser extent, is going under its own recession, and with these sudden strings of deaths, everyone I know experiences uncertainty when they should know happiness, fear in the face of love, paranoia in the face of contentment.

    Since I don’t know what it is that’s causing this death, I experience the world from behind a protective white mask—it blurs my vision a little, at times, and it makes me feel even more isolated and inhuman. Others I encounter, and speak with, appear to feel the same.

    This isolation, this odd sense of foreboding I’ve gotten all year—it’s made me reconsider my situation in life. I wish I’d’ve met someone, had a child. But if the cause of all this death is some kind of undiscovered virus, or plague, or even something unleashed by the government—I wouldn’t want my child to be infected with it. So perhaps my situational, potential martyrdom could be viewed as a positive… …or maybe I’m just a lonely salesman with an inflated sense of self-importance.

    Toronto Dominion Bank is the first thing I see, when I pull myself out of my private musing—its nearly incalculable height a testament to the achievement man can reach when he really applies himself. It’s also the last thing I see before my eyes are flipped off by some kind of invisible switch in my head—then it’s my ability to think itself that’s gone, and then my coordination…and if I were capable of thought before my head connected with the pavement, I’d wonder why it was here, in such a usually busy part of town, that I will die—with no one around to see me.
    But-…
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These fucking monstrosities get to take away everything that ever mattered to me, do they? My parents weren’t even part of the previous government—and still, the Revolution butchered them like livestock.

So we’ll see how they like a painful, torturous death—one that they’ll never see coming, since you can’t trace a telepathic assault.

The survivors will learn to deal with the fear…spread the fear… adapt to a life of being assaulted by a hate they’ll never be able to identify.

The waste of flesh in front of me—his eyes, partially open, nearly glazed… they’re looking into mine with fading sentience…and I take comfort in the fact that I’m the last living thing they’ll ever see.

Whether he was personally responsible for what happened to Mother and Father or not is irrelevant—he’s related to those who were.

And as such…his blood will be the tithe for their unpunished crime.

And it makes it all the better that he’s the last victim…that no one will ever know me as anything but a possibility, a question mark…a fear without evidence.

Faceless.