Ted Bundy: The Greatest Serial Killer that Never Was

People tend to romanticize mercenary life. They look at Boba Fett and Black Widow and think "That's amazing!" as if all we do is fight, fuck, and get paid. But no one ever considers the other stuff. Sure, when it's Will Smith or Margot Robbie on a big screen there's no real risk, just a lot of well-rehearsed choreography and perfectly-timed explosions, but here in the real world it doesn't work like that. I've lost a lot of good friends, and killed a lot of good people, and I have to carry that shit with me every day.

So when some lawyer from the Evergreen Corp told me I had the chance to do something good for a change I took it. Maybe I'm getting soft, or maybe I've had one too many concussions, but for once I wanted to change the world for the better.

Of course, when they told me my assignment was Ted Bundy, the notorious serial killer from the 1970s, I thought they had more than a couple screws lose. But they paid upfront in cash and promised me they'd handle getting me to and from the target, all I'd have to do was take him out and get his brain. The second part was a little weird but, all things considered, I was curious and I'd done a lot worse to people who were a lot better than Ted Bundy. So, I told them I'd do it, they threw me in a pod, and before I knew what was going on I was in the middle of Seattle, Washington holding a newspaper from 1970!

As you can imagine, I was more than a little tripped out, which I suppose was pretty on par for the times, but I was a professional. The lawyer, Mr. Dixon, had written down the time and place I was meant to make contact with Ted and had dropped me in only a few hours before the rendezvous, so I had to think fast.

The file they'd given me said Ted liked to isolate, rape, and kill attractive young women, which he often lured from highly trafficked areas. It seemed he enjoyed the hunt as much as the kill, so just throwing myself at him would likely not work. Of course, I could just kill him outright, but my instructions were very clear: be discrete, be quick, and be certain. As such, I grabbed a low-cut sundress from a local outlet mall before catching the bus to the park where I was scheduled to "run into" one of the most infamous serial killers in American history.

He arrived only a few minutes after me, pulling up in a beat-up, brown Volkswagen Beetle. He was alone, as expected, though I noticed a woman's dress hanging in the rear window. Hopefully I wasn't too late.

A few minutes after he arrived I approached him and asked him for a ride. I told him my boyfriend had left me all alone and no one else was willing to give me one. I gave him my best puppy dog eyes, the last thing so many men before him had seen, and he looked me up and down before giving me an impossibly charming grin and motioning me over to his car. I thanked him and asked for his name. "Ted Bundy," he replied, again flashing his amazing pearly whites before opening the passenger door for me.

We made small talk for a while as I directed him out of town. Once we reached a deserted backroad, I pulled out my silencer, shot him twice in the chest, and once in the crotch for all the vile things he had, or would have, done in the world. A little anticlimactic, I know, but I saw no reason to give such a terrible man a heroes death. He got no time to pray, no time to scream, and no time to beg. If only he'd have had the same decency for his victims.

After that, I drove his car to a nearby river, took the surgical blade Mr. Dixon had given me, and carefully removed Ted Bundy's head from its torso, and I've got to admit, I've never been a sentimental person, but it felt pretty good. I stuffed his body in a trash bag, weighed it down with rocks, and dumped it into the river before heading back to the future to drop off the head and collect the rest of my reward.

I hear the found the body a few weeks later but were never able to ID it. Never found out what happened to the head after I turned it in though. I guess I don't really care anyway. All I know now is I sleep a little better at night knowing that, for once, what I did saved more lives than it cost and maybe, just maybe, made up for some of the horrible shit I'm guilty of too. Then again, maybe all I did was give air so someone even worse than Ted, and maybe all that really matters is that I killed another man who, at the time, had never done anybody any harm, cut off his head, and made him disappear without giving it a second thought. Terrible, right? I guess maybe the life of a mercenary isn't so amazing after all, huh?