gotta say, at first I wasn’t sure how to feel about my killer. My initial reaction was anger. That fucker! He took my life and he got my stuff. I could see him going through my pockets. That’s my money, asshole! That’s my gun, you piece of shit! But right away someone took a shot at him, and some little astral switch or logic-gate in me flipped. As he dived, lightly grazed, taking cover behind my corpse, I felt a little thrill of glee. I was glad he’d survived. Maybe I deserved to die. Maybe he was better than me. Maybe, just maybe, I’d root for him a while.

Already the memory of me was fading. I got a look at him, as my corpse soaked up a few bullets, and it was like his face was mine now. There was a break in the gunfire. I could see my killer gauging his chances, deciding whether the moment was a fake-out or signaled a reload. He saw his chance. He threw himself over my body, firing with my gun—his gun now. I admit, I was kinda proud of how well he handled it. He seemed way more comfortable with weapons than I had ever been. He’d known right where the last round came from: a little hidey-hole full of shadow, inconspicuous until now, when he filled it with bullets. A dead hand flopped out, blood flowed.

An instant later, I had company.

“He’s pretty good, isn’t he?” I didn’t form the words, but that was the sentiment.

The answer came as the shade of a grudging shrug. The new kill needed a moment to get used to the idea he was dead. Like me, he hadn’t brought any followers with him. Neither of us had stood a chance against our killer.

It was just the two of us, but not for long. Bullets kept flying. And the dead kept filing in. Our killer was an instinct-machine, always moving forward, ruthless. I had forgotten my face by now; I only had his. So did the rest of his followers.

It was all pretty cool. There must have been a dozen of us now, pulled close as if by some special force of attraction, a kind of gravity that drew us to our killer. The mood was a little bit giddy, considering. He was so good that it was thrilling to watch. We felt honored to be part of this. It took a really special killer to finish us off, right? Not just anyone could have done it. His superiority elevated us all. I mean, how could we have expected to survive against this guy? He was naturally superior, so it felt only natural to root for him.

Until he met his killer.

For us, the followers, our sudden shift of allegiance was dizzying but brief. I can’t imagine what it must have been like for him. Not only did he find himself suddenly dead, but there we all were, waiting. There was not a single moment when he might have thought he was special, no time to savor our congratulations on a good run. Instead, everything he’d aimed for was instantly forgotten as he joined our ranks. He was just another spectator now, one of us, and together we had a new killer to follow. A new face to get behind.

The new guy had a huge number of followers already. This was everybody he’d killed up till now, and there were a lot of them. I mean, a lot of us. It was like a big pool of blood absorbing one more droplet. Not much of a moment. The action never ceased, the running and gunning. We had a new hero, superior to the one we had thought supreme. Our old killer’s memory was on the way out. We transferred our loyalty without question, well-trained already to cheer.

And that was good, our detachable loyalty with its universal fit, because new guy didn’t last very long. I don’t think he got even one more kill before he was sucked into the crowd of his former followers, just as we all turned to watch the next guy. Then the one after that.

It became kind of a blur for a while. Entertaining, sure, but...hard to get attached. You had to find the rhythm in it, wait for a lull to see who you were rooting for. If there was time to catch the new top man’s face, you might form a connection. You couldn’t help wanting to read something into it; you couldn’t help relate. This was your guy now. The best of the best. You wanted to cheer them on. It made you feel better about what had happened to you. Like, what chance had you had, really?

And for a time, finally, we had one winner, one killer to follow. We got to hang on his every move and really get to know the guy.

Unfortunately, the reason for the lull was prison. Our guy was locked up. He had plenty of time alone, and we had all the time we needed to sink into him, to wear his face, to study his situation. But it sucked. It wasn’t cool. It wasn’t fun. It was just tedious. All of us were wondering, was this the best he could do? A kind of pressure was building up, and no way to release it. There we floated, the whole vast backlog of murderees in a stagnant plane, watching and waiting with nothing to cheer, no hope of excitement, no change of scene or face.

So as you might imagine, the sucker-punch took us all by surprise. Sneaky as a shiv in the exercise yard. In an instant, after so long without change, we were welcoming our ex-champ, hauling him into our crowded little cul de sac of souls, even as that pocket turned itself inside out and emptied us into the crowd that clung to our killer’s killer. This was another disappointment. There were only a few watchers; we outnumbered them by a lot, and they weren’t exactly welcoming. You could tell they had been thinking they were special, but now they realized they were not. At all.

But the moment of friction didn’t last. Soon we were all sharing the same face. 

After the brief excitement, we settled down to watch our new hero. We wanted more action and we counted on him to bring it.

But we waited a long fucking time. We waited while he sulked and paced the perimeter of cells and empty courtyards. We waited while he sat in solitude. We wondered: What would happen if he offed himself? Would he join us? Then who would we follow? It might have been a cool existential crisis, but we never got to explore it. The prison had made sure no more potential victims crossed his path, and apparently he was not the suicidal type.

It was starting to seem like this was it for us. Our final resting place.

Until the morning they marched him from his cell, with all of us trailing behind, all of us filling the little room where they strapped him to a table. All of us who wore his face pushed close as a doctor fed a needle into his arm. We were tense, expectant, looking at this doctor. Here he was, about to be our next champion. How many had he killed? We couldn’t wait to find out. We needed a new hero, a new face to replace the ones we’d almost forgotten we ever had.

I don’t know about painless, but the execution was quick. Our new member joined us quietly. He didn’t seem to know what had happened. But we weren’t paying any attention to him. We were all waiting for the next transition. Come on, doc, we’re rooting for you.

We waited for our numbers to swell. Would the crowd jump by a dozen? A hundred? How many lives could this one man have taken?

Instead, it was as if our little drop merged with the sea. You might say we were beyond counting, but in fact there was a number, it just kept rising faster than you could track. We looked for our killer, needing a face to glom on to, some kind of person, a hero, a villain, somebody. Had this lone doctor masterminded some kind of massacre, kept it going in secret for thousands of years? Was he some kind of ageless vampire or evil immortal?

Nah. The doctor was an agent, the latest in a long line, an army of them. Without dying, he was already a follower, one of a legion. Our numbers continued to climb, till the tally was more like a shrill scream rising in pitch, soaring toward infinity, fed by executioners and mindless drones alike, by untreated illness and unfed hungers, by forces beyond any caring. What they followed, what we all followed now, was a thing you couldn’t root for. We’ve looked without blinking and we’re sure of it now.

There’s no one at the top. There’s nothing left to follow. There’s not even what you might recognize as us.

Because the state doesn’t have a fucking face.