The Santa Sanction

She had Christmas in her crosshairs; Santa in her sights. At this range, she could have even split the twinkle in the old mans eye. Everything was perfect and yet everything felt so terribly wrong.

But what was so special about him? In her work for the Company, she had sent dozens of people to see the Reaper; important people; generals, dictators, freedom fighters and terrorists, princes, presidents, popes and their mistresses, without so much as even blinking but, for some reason, even though it was only a millisecond of movement, she just couldn’t bring herself to pull the trigger.

“Pull yourself together, woman”, thought Epsilon, “The Toy companies are paying for this man’s head and we’re not talking Monopoly money, either. 36 thousand is a lot of playdough”.

“Why do you want to kill Santa Clause, anyhow?”, she’d asked the man from the Toy people, “I thought you guys were all in the same business; bringing joy to the hearts of little children”.

“We’re in business, Miss Blitz", he’d snapped, “But this man; this so-called Saint, is nothing but a filthy communist. He wants to give away toys for free. Free, for heaven’s sake! Do you think that the oil companies would be happy, if someone started giving away oil for free? Hmm? Of course, they wouldn’t ! And yet, every year, our profits are dwindling more and more, just because children are writing to this man for toys instead of pestering their parents to buy them from us”.

“Alright”, she’d said, “I get it. You want to protect the free market but, the way I hear it, this guy could be harder to kill than Castro. I mean, he’s been delivering toys to children for over a thousand years, so it’s going to take more than a bullet through his pointy hat to stop him”.

“We’ve already thought of that, Miss Blitz”, said the Toy exec smugly, opening a metal briefcase full of vials of evil looking red liquid, “There’s only one thing that can kill Santa Clause and that’s Red Mistletoe. It’s completely harmless to you or I but, to Little St Nick, it’s like cyanide, arsenic and snake venom all rolled into one and each of the vials in this case contains the distilled essence of Red Mistletoe, enough to stop a whole platoon of Santas if need be”.

“Okay”, said Epsilon, impressed, “But how am I supposed to find this man. I hear he lives in Lapland somewhere, but no one knows where.”.

The Toy exec started to laugh, “Don’t believe all that Lapland crap, Miss Blitz. Lapland's just a cover; a way of trying to throw us off the scent. No, our man lives in the North Pole alright and we have satellite pictures to prove it. You don’t have to worry about finding him. We’ll give you the coordinates, we’ll fly you out there in a private jet and airlift you when the job is done, if you want. You just have to kill that commie son-of-a-bitch. We want Father Christmas dead, you understand, dead!”.

She’d taken the money as always. The Company had guaranteed her that it was legit,although, at the time, it had all seemed slightly ridiculous, like sending a big game hunter out to bag a unicorn, and now that she had the old man’s jolly, red face within her sights, she almost felt like it must be some kind of a dream but it wasn’t a dream was it? Rather, it was like the murder of a dream or perhaps the annexation of one, for didn’t the Toy companies use Santa as a symbol to market their products, the way the Church had been using the symbol of Christ and Christmas for millennia.

“Perhaps if Christ comes back, the church will pay me to kill him too”, thought Epsilon.

“You’ve done very well so far, Epsilon. Passed every test and surmounted every hurdle”, her unit commander had told her, the day before she left for the Arctic, “Better than any of the other Blitz generation. That’s why we’re entrusting you with this job. It’s very important that you fulfill this contract; that you kill Santa Clause, understand?”.

“Yes sir”, she’d replied, without really thinking; saluting and smiling like a good, wind-up soldier.

“Good girl”, he’d said, “I know you’ll pass with flying colors”.

But now she had him in her sights and he didn’t have a clue, as he gave orders to his green suited elves and petted and stroked his flying reindeer; whispering something in the ear of each one, she couldn’t tell what, and feeding them upon something that looked like hay but which glowed with a bright, beautiful, mesmerizing light.

“Why can’t I kill you?”, she thought, lost inside herself.

Perhaps it was because he was a part of the childhood she had never known. Her father had been a lab-technician; her mother, a test tube. Bred artificially, reared in an incubator, programmed by machines, that had been programmed by machine like men, with all that she needed to know to kill efficiently, the 25th of December had always just been a day like any other to her.

And she might have become a mindless drone like her sisters Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, blindly serving the interests of the Company, but Epsilon had something more than the other Blitz kids.

Unlike them, she had felt lonely in her incubator; afraid of the dark; needing more than just the nutrients through her feeding tube and a program to follow; needing love and loving life.

Suddenly,was he looking at her? Yes, he was. Santa Clause was looking right at her and the gun aimed at his head but he wasn’t moving. He was just smiling and tapping his watch and... why was there something dark and evil about that smile?

“Hello there”, said the old man, behind her, chuckling; his belly shaking like a bowl full of jelly, the way people said it did.

Epsilon rolled over onto her back, still holding the sniper rifle ready to fire.

“You still have a chance to shoot me”, said Santa, “Point blank range and I’m unarmed. It would be very easy just to pull the trigger”.

“How did you get behind me?”, asked Epsilon, “I saw you in the window. How? Was that a double? No one can move that fast!”, she said, bewildered.

“Oh”, said Santa, smirking, “Magic perhaps or perhaps none of this is real. I mean, honestly Epsilon, you don’t really believe in Santa Clause, do you? Now come on. Flying reindeer fed on magic hay? A workshop full of elves? Does any of it seem at all plausible to you?”.

Then Santa Clause, that kind old man, reached into his fur-trimmed pocket and pulled out a revolver. “We call this the Santa Clause test, E.B. A simulated life and career, a sort of life before life, ending in one last mission. It’s a way of testing whether our clones will make suitable killing machines before we let them out of the incubator; before we allow them to be born. If they fail to kill Santa Clause, it means that they’re idealists; dreamers; perhaps even thinkers; not the kind of people that we want working for our company, so then we abort them”.

She heard the bang and smelled the gunsmoke and saw the bullets pierce her flesh but she didn’t feel them because they were only a simulation of bullets; another way of saying GAME OVER, to symbolize the plugs being pulled on her life support machine and the plunging of her head into the darkness of the unborn.

“It doesn’t matter”, she said to the darkness, “I was more alive, inside, than you’ll ever be”.

“Who cares?”, said the darkness, laughing.