Taking stock of my situation was surprisingly simple. I wasn't dead, but I was surrounded by flames, corpses, and broken machinery. I hadn't noticed the dead bodies at first but when I stood up they immediately became apparent.

Five rows of corpses were stacked neatly on the floor, tucked into the back of the warehouse and wrapped up in white bags.

“Oh hells, I've been here before.” I spoke.

This was one of the Company’s incineration warehouses. Grunts like me rotated through different jobs, and one of those was dead body disposal.

By the time the Company furnaces were done with the bodies there was nothing left but ash.

The same incinerators that were smashed to pieces and sprinkled across the warehouse.

That explained the fires. They raged before my eyes; broken furnaces left to burn down the warehouse. Whatever had come through here had been big. These things weren't easy to destroy. Neither was their security.

Okay. I had to get out of here.

"Shane, we have to get out of here.” A voice honked into my ear. “Get moving.”

I ignored it.

These places were all built the same. Three exits, one that was a fake entrance, a backdoor, and the emergency exit located by the staff break room.

Flames licked at my feet, and I jolted, jumping back as the walls began to crack around me.

They wouldn't last much longer.

A burst of adrenaline crashed through my veins, and I sprinted toward the back exit. The back was the only area not engulfed in flames, but I made sure to cover my head with my shirt.

It looked stupid, but security cameras were a thing. I also didn't want to die from smoke inhalation.

My eyes could see through the fabric, but I quickly realised it wasn't a cut, it was a bullet hole. I shivered as the memory of being shot ran through my mind.

It was a question for later.

The Company didn't sit around twiddling their thumbs like other companies did. Their security was top notch and they'd be keeping an eye on a burning facility.

An Armament or Clean-up squad would be here soon.

My feet skidded to a halt, and I hooked my toes into the ground as I spotted two guards in Company uniforms at the back entrance.

Both of them were on the ground, dead.

Each one had a pool of blood trickling out onto the ground, one face down in the other face up.

I made my way cautiously toward them.

In a Company facility there was no telling what could have killed them. The guard that was face up had multiple puncture wounds across his body and I shuddered.

“We can use their security passes.” There was a honk from my side.

I wanted to ignore it, but the advice was sound.

The back door had a lock on it, activatable only by a key card or mana key. The key cards also had a unique method of usage, requiring the key card to be swiped several times in succession to work. In other words, only a Company employee could open the door.

Or someone with knowledge of how the Company worked.

I swiped the key card off the dead guard, being careful not to leave fingerprints. I also didn't disturb the body. I’d been shot by the Clean-up division, but these guys were just grunts like I'd been. There was no need to disrespect them in death.

It could have been me in their positions before I'd been fired.

The door was simple enough to manipulate. The key card wasn’t damaged, and I waited with bated breath. For an organisation bathed in secrecy and efficiency they made it more difficult than necessary for their employees to escape a burning building.

For them that was sometimes a bonus.

The security lock turned from red to green and I exhaled. The door opened up to a stairway leading to the surface.

I took a single look back. The facility was on the edge of collapsing on itself. It’d be hell to clean up.

The corpses at the back were on fire.

Whatever had happened here wasn't my concern, the Company would deal with it. Probably with minimum damage to normals. This was my chance to escape.

I bounded up the stairs and through the door that lay beyond. Normally there would be more guards, or at least a person on duty.

The parking lot that the door opened out into was empty.

Strange.

If this was still my job, alarm bells would be going off in my head. The Company didn't leave things to chance. Or unguarded.

Something terrible had happened here. Unseen to the common eye but clear to me.

As it was, I was grateful for the lack of eyes on me. A giant skyscraper in the distance let me know that I was still in the same city as my apartment, and I scurried off into the distance.

There were two things I needed urgently.

Clothes, and a newspaper.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

****

“You can't keep ignoring me, Shane.”

A voice called out to me as I turned a corner, making my way into a darkened alley. Despite what contemporary films showed, alleyways were not the best places to hide. But at least they didn't all have cameras in them.

I don't know when it had turned to night, but I welcomed the dark to hide in.

I didn't have my wallet or phone on me. Both things I'd need for food and shelter. The only way I was getting those back was by breaking into the Clean-up section of the Company and stealing them. That wasn't an option for some as weak as me.

“Hey!”

Something slapped my cheek and I recoiled.

“Finally, some sort of reaction.” There was a honk of amusement from my shoulder.

It was Goosey.

The one-winged stuffed goose was gazing up at me with unblinking eyes. His feathers were brilliant white, as though coated with wax, and his beak tapped against my shoulder.

Each hit confirmed that the talking animal was real. A fact that should have startled me but had been pushed into the back of my mind during the mess.

There was only one thought that broke through my mind.

“I could have been a financial planner.”

The sentence echoed across the brick walls around me. My tone was solemn, and completely serious.

“What?” Goosey gawked at me.

“I have a degree. And the training. But no! Young me had to go for the adventure.” I groaned. “Now my qualifications can't be used to wipe my ass with. I'm officially dead, homeless, and hallucinating about talking geese.”

Not to mention I was talking to myself in a dark alleyway while covered in soot and ash from the flames. I probably had brain damage. My clothes had bullet holes in them, and to my horror they were caked with my dry blood.

I was the perfect picture of insanity.

"How am I even still alive?" I smashed my hand against the alley wall.

Very real pain washed through it.

I felt something press against my arms comfortingly. Feathers. Goosey flapped his wing and let out a soft honk.

“I'm not a hallucination ya daft bugger.” He spoke. “We need to go. The Company might be after you and it's troubling me.”

“Troubling?” I repeated the word hollowly.

That was an understatement.

I’d worked for four years with the Company. At that time most information had been restricted for me, but I was the kind of guy to learn earlier so I could be lazy later.

What I learnt had never left my lips. I didn't want to end up as another statistic on Clean-up’s desk.

Whoops. Looks like I'd failed at that.

Goosey went still again. He was the spitting image of a stuffed goose.

It was possible I wasn’t hallucinating. Crazier things had happened to me in the last four years. For example, I'd just been shot. Twice.

I crossed through the alleyway into the open street. It was nighttime, which helped hide the blood on my shirt, but I still kept away from the streetlights if I could.

My target was simple.

I needed to know if the Company knew I was alive. I also needed a new shirt.

Both issues could be resolved in the same place.

Thoughts swam through my mind as I walked, resisting stress in favour of logic. Ironically, I reviewed my situation calmly like I'd been taught to by my former employers.

The Company wasn't a business or money-making machine. It was an army. Waves of heavily trained agents dedicated to a single task.

They kept the world in the dark about the existence of monsters.

Or rather, the supernatural.

Like any army the Company had ranks. Lots and lots of ranks. Their weakest employees were labelled as E-tier. Their strongest soldiers went up to A-tier.

The tiers went reverse alphabetically.

E - D - C - B - A.

The closer you were to the beginning of the alphabet the better. It was a simple but effective system.

E-tier grunts were the least of my problems. Those guys were like me. Ordinary humans that had slight touches of the supernatural marking them as different from others. Most were recruited for menial tasks.

Paperwork, IT, cannon fodder, body recovery, systems work, and corpse incineration. The usual things.

The only thing that marked them as different was their varying ability to use mana. It was a hard task to move up in ranks. No matter how strong of a human they were, an E-tier could never compare to a D-tier.

That was because D-tiers weren't human. Not anymore.

The memory of Pete stabbing a tendril through my stomach shot through my mind and I grimaced.

Blood still stained my side and I turned sharply as I spotted the building I was looking for. It had been years since I'd come here, but it still looked the same. A single square box made of bricks. A botched-up renovation had left it with a terrible puke-green paint job.

It was a charity store.

My eyes had adjusted to the dark, spotting the two clothing donation bins.

They were meant for the less fortunate, but right now I qualified enough to take a shirt and maybe pants. I couldn't afford to be picky.

The bins opened up easily enough, and there were several piles of clothes tucked into plastic bags. I ripped open the first one I could find and rummaged through the clothes. Most were donated from parents as their children grew up and were too small for me.

I finally found a plain black shirt one size too large and changed into it. As I changed there was one problem I couldn't avoid thinking about.

My body was perfect.

That wasn't a brag. I didn't have any wounds.

Bullets didn't just leave holes. They destroyed everything around them, blasting through flesh and bone and even staying in the body. Forget walking, I should be in the hospital barely clinging to life.

That wasn't the case here. Or at least, it didn't look like it.

If I still had a bullet or two in me then I wasn't sure where it was. Probably in my head if my situation was anything to go by.

A whisper crossed over my mind. This was only possible for [augmented] individuals. The same process that Pete had undergone to become more than human.

There was a rumour that went around the employee break rooms.

D-tiers and higher were created by consuming the flesh of supernatural creatures.

It couldn't be an easy process or else there'd be more D-tiers, but we knew that if someone was called up for [augmentation] then they weren't coming back. Either they'd ascend to higher tiers or die.

There was no other option between them.

But I'd never even come under the Company’s radar for [augmentation]. They carefully screen all their employees for compatibility with the process. I hadn't made the cut.

"Why are you still here?” Goosey honked angrily into my ear.

I jolted.

He was right. I needed to get moving. The next part of my plan involved stealing.

I took the bloody shirt with me, wrapping it so that the untainted parts were on the outside. I couldn’t leave it somewhere obvious, or I'd give myself away.

My target was a glass case filled with the day's newspapers at the front of the store. I could only see the headlines peeking out, but a quick smash with a street stone brought shards of glass shattering down.

In seconds I was running down the street with a newspaper in my hand.

Did you ever wonder who buys newspapers?

The answer is old people and Company agents.

There were codes hidden on different drop sights, the ciphers known only to Company employees. They didn't contain vital information. Only the basics.

Obituaries and confirmed employee deaths were part of the package. There were also bounties posted, but I ignored those.

The date was plain to see.

It had been four days since I'd been fired. Three nights spent as a corpse. Or in a coma. Or whatever had happened to me after the world went black.

My name was written in the obituaries. Parts had been changed to hide my identity and the true nature of my job, but it was there.

Shane Black. Dead.

Suicide.

“Crap.” I stared at the newspaper. “That absolute bastard.”

There was one piece of information I hadn't been expecting. And it gave me the next destination I had to go to.

****

“This is a bad idea.” The goose honked quietly.

“I don't care.” I said.

The stuffed goose felt warm against my chest, its body tucked under a thick padded jacket and leaving me looking like I’d gained a massive beer gut. I'd gone back to ‘find’ more clothes afterwards. My bloodied shirt had been buried. Goosey’s head poked up from the opening of my shirt and looked out across the distance.

An entire night spent outside wasn't too bad in the warmth of summer, but I didn't want to do it again. I'd need to find funds soon.

I looked at the gathering we’d come to see. Safe enough at a distance.

My eyes followed the procession of people wading over the sacred church ground. They were wearing black, and there were more people than I'd thought.

Figures I hadn't seen in years had shown up. Friends, friends of friends, close family, and even distant relatives. They'd all gathered for a single event.

My funeral.