The air reeked of iron and fire, like an abandoned slaughterhouse. We slumped against the steel wall of an elevator shaft, soaked in sweat, or blood, or both.
"Hell of a heroic tale," my friend laughed like a failed bank robber. "Swiss-cheesed bodies for one lousy life. If this goes on my epitaph, they won't even bother writing it."
I stared at him, lungs wheezing like broken bellows. The "rescue" had nearly turned us into nightmare specimens on an operating table. My gut still churned at the thought. But my mouth said: "Don't flatter yourself. You can't even afford a grave, much less a tombstone."
He narrowed his eyes, bloody fingers sketching symbols in the air as if sealing a contract. "We need a pact. Otherwise, next time, we'll meet again on an autopsy table."
"A pact?" I sneered, throat burning like acid. "Who's gonna witness it? Nightmare agents? Or those lunatic brain surgeons?"
"No witnesses," he said, raising two fingers like an oath. "Just us. You save me, I save you. Even if one day we have to kill each other, we get through everything else first."
I hesitated, remembering the day he once shot me. That gunshot was a shadow between us. Yet now, bleeding and broken, his eyes were sharp and true. The joke wrote itself: in a collapsing world, trust had become the most expensive luxury.
"Fine." I finally stretched out my hand, the blood in my palm glistening red. "Since our lives are already second-hand, let's sell them again."
Our hands clasped. Blood mixed like cheap cocktails—bitter, burning.
"Deal." He grinned like a corpse risen from a grave. "From now on: you die, I live. Or I die, you live. But nobody else gets the satisfaction."
"Comforting," I rasped, my laugh scraping like rusted wire.
The pact had no law, no ritual, no future. But it gave us, for one moment, a common enemy and a blurred path forward.
Sirens wailed again, sharp as a clown's whistle. The Bureau's hunters were closing in, their footsteps a funeral march.
My friend grabbed a fallen rifle and tossed me another. "Come on, brother. Our blood pact needs bodies for a signature."
The gun was cold, heavier than the oath.
"Fine. Kill them first. Doubt each other later." I forced a smile, feeling like a bankrupt lawyer signing a crooked contract.
We walked down the dust-and-blood-stained corridor.Behind us, the scent of the pact lingered—bitter, absurd, irrevocable.
It was a joke. But one that could only end with blood.