Free Silence In Numbers: File One by Jake Taylor

a rooftop as it picked up for a moment before settling down again. The weather seemed to be reacting a bit oddly, but maybe that was just his mind reading too much into things. Nature didn’t care what was going on with humans; it never had.
    Rufus adjusted his shades, appreciating the protection they offered his eyes from the wind at this altitude. It was night so his shades were on a light night vision setting, bathing the world in a faint green glow. He could pick out any detail of the street below, but right now all of those details were boring. A few people walking, some cars, a bus every now and then. Rufus shook his head as he thought about how few people he was seeing. It wasn’t normal, but that was no reason to assume it was because they were somehow “sensing” possible trouble in the air.
    He blamed Captain Samakura for these stray thoughts. He could tell he was trying to have the same “sixth sense” she seemed to have. Ridiculous. He’d seen too much to ignore hers, of course - that was why he was on this rooftop - but no one else had the same ability as far as he knew, even himself.
    His thoughts logically went to his Captain as he sat against a raised vent on the rooftop with his sniper rifle resting on a tripod beside him. He’d always preferred lone work before her, but she was the first person he’d worked for that he was truly able to respect. He respected M of course, but he rarely dealt with M, and he didn’t trust that man enough to work to change that fact. Samakura was different; she’d been in enough different situations to understand how things worked in different walks of life. She’d even understood his own. After another glance at the street below Rufus sat back, allowing himself to follow that line of thought to an examination of his past:
     
    It was seven years ago. Rufus, thirty years old at the time, knocked on a door, smiling before kicking it in. A knife slipped from each sleeve into his hands as he stepped inside and ducked. A shotgun blasted apart the wall over his head and he turned to the right, one hand knocking the barrel upwards and the other gutting the offending criminal. He yanked the shotgun from the dying man’s hands, tossing it behind him and stalking further into the hallway.
    Criminal organizations were always going after each other; after all, they had to compete just as much as any legitimate company, they just sometimes did it a little more brutally (or at least they were more forthcoming about their brutality). For those times when his own organization decided a more violent solution was required, Rufus was often the answer.
    A door in the hallway burst open as an attacker rushed out but Rufus just stepped past him, jamming a knife into his eye socket as he did and leaving it there as he continued on, knowing the man’s screaming was making his targets nervous. He found a doorway at the end of the hall and entered, finding himself face to face with a veritable armory of guns. The criminal he was after stood against the room’s windows; between them were eight armed guards who immediately opened fire.
    Rufus stepped out and pulled the door shut behind him, letting it take the hail of fire. He kept hold of the doorknob and kicked the door off the hinges, rushing into the room with the door as a shield. He slammed it into two men, pushing them further until they smashed through the window, falling with a scream to the streets far below. Rufus shot his left hand out to catch one of the bars that had held the windowpanes together and shot his right hand out to grab one of the falling guns.
    He swung around to the left, narrowly dodging more fire, and opened up on the others who all dived for cover. It was risky, but it worked. Then things got a lot more chaotic.
    Rufus ducked as he heard fire behind him and looked back to see, surprisingly, a woman swinging towards the room on a rappelling wire. He dived to the side as she swung in, landing between him and his