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I was limping home from yet another exciting night. Trying not to wake up my neighbors I pondered the question of why I didn’t try to get an apartment on the bad side of town. Don’t get me wrong the shit that goes down here is pretty bad, but a place with neighbors who don’t care that you’re tracking blood through the hallway. About three feet from unlocking my door, my neighbor opened hers. She’s a nice kid, baked me cupcakes when I first moved in, they weren’t bad. I tried to turn my bruised and bloody face away from her, but she already saw. “Frank, what the fuck?!” I tried to tuck my duffel bag with my assault rifles behind my body, while still trying not to make eye contact with her. Why did I tell her my real name? “It’s okay Kassidy” I tried to assure her “The fuck it is!” “Can you be a little quieter please, I don’t want to wake up the entire floor” I gritted through my teeth. “You need stitches, come inside” she opened her door and gestured in “I don’t need stitches, and if I do I can take care of it myself.” “Trust me I know wounds, you need stitches. In!” she practically shoved me in her apartment, almost causing me to drop the duffel bag. “Couch!” she ordered, as she shut the door. I figured that since I there was no way of escape I better not fight it. Dammit there’s a reason I don’t want attachments, people get fucking hurt because of me. She turned on the lights in her kitchen and used a step stool to grab a first aid kit. For being such a tiny thing, she sure has a way of commanding people into doing things they don’t want to do. I took a look around her apartment and realized, the landlord is ripping me off with the amount I pay in rent. Her place is pretty fucking nice. Outside her living room windows a bright full moon shone through almost blinding me. “You got a nice apartment” I murmured almost wishing she couldn’t hear me. “Thanks, I make do” she sat down next to me smiling, then inspected me looking for stitchable wounds with her eyebrows knitted together in concentration. “Good news” she finally announced, “The only one that needs stitches is this one here on your arm. Switch me places.” She stood up while I scooted to my right, “Now you know it might hurt right?” “Yeah, I know, thanks” “Don’t thank me just yet” She stuck the needle in my arm and I couldn’t help but wince. She was silent trying her best to focus on the actual stitching when I decided to fill the silence. “So where does a pretty girl like you learn to stitch up cuts?” She chuckled, “well based on my unique circumstances I thought I’d learn, but then the situation changed and… there all done” she grinned “12 stitches, but I bet the other guy looks worse huh?” Well considering the guy was dead as a doornail yeah, he was. “What’s your situation?” I inquired as she stood up to put the first aid kit away and clean up. “Well, it’s sort of weird but---” she was cut off by a loud bang, being who I am and what I knew, it was a sniper rifle. I quickly did a mental check, nothing was hurting, so I didn’t get hit. Then I looked to my left and heard a thud. Shit, Kassidy was on the floor with a bullet wound in between her closed eyes. I moved quickly, my back against the wall next to her living room windows and slowly turned my head out to see if whoever did this was still there. The smell of blood permeated from her head. I grabbed my duffel bag I set on her coffee table and loaded one of my ak’s. I looked out the window again, no one was there, not what I could see. I crouched down and kneeled before the window resting the gun on the window sill. There were no other shots, I finally concluded that they did a hit and run. Sent to kill me, and when they thought they hit me they ran, except I wasn’t dead. I set my gun down closing her drapes just in case, and hovered over her body. See this is exactly why I don’t like neighbors, I don’t need civvies getting hurt because of me. She was so nice too, she didn’t deserve this. The blood was pooling like a halo around her head, that means there’s an exit wound, I wonder if I could find the bullet and work from there. As soon as I took a step away from the body… her eyes opened. Okay, now I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies in my lifetime, too much for someone my age, or at all. I’ve never seen a dead body’s eye open like that, maybe it was a reflex, but not like one that I’ve ever seen. I leaned down to get a closer looked it seemed like her eyes were responding to my movement. Holy shit she’s still alive! There’s no way, I can literally see brain matter on her couch. I must be seeing things because her bullet wound looks… healed also. My eyebrows knitted in confusion when she sat straight up and took a deep breath. “Holy shit!” she exclaimed trying to catch up on her breathing, the display made me jump back a bit, I still can’t believe what I saw. She looked around at the pool of blood her head was laying in. “Ah, shit, do you know how hard it is to clean blood out of rugs? It’s very hard.” She touched the back of her head and looked at her hand, “damn, I didn’t want to take a shower tonight, but I guess I have no choice now.” She looked at me like what she was talking about was getting a little mud on her, and not talking about her own blown out brains. She shuffled to her stand on her feet and padded over towards the window, she searched with her eyes for a bit muttering something. “Stupid… assassins… ruining my night… stupid fuckers… trying to kill me and all… need to try harder than a .22 caliber… need to try harder in general… they’re just getting lazy now” My mouth dropped to the floor. My first instinct was to run, but… I don’t know my feet weren’t working, thankfully my mouth was. “What the mother-fucking fuck?!” I finally shouted She turned to look at me and her face wrinkled like she almost forgot that someone else in in the room with her and that this was the most normal thing to happen. “Oh, right, okay, well” she put her hands together and spoke very slowly like I was a kid or something, “A very long time ago, I found out that I can’t die… or be wounded… it’s called a healing factor. You heard of one?” I nodded yes, “Good, sorry for the scare, now I got to clean this mess up. You want to help?” “No!” “Okay then you’re free to go all patched up, see you tomorrow?” “No!” “I… won’t see you tomorrow? Are you going on a trip? Do you want me to pick up your mail?” “The fuck, stop changing the fucking subject! Who the fuck is shooting at you?” “Eh, you know, mafia here, and gangsters there. Supervillains hell bent on revenge, even though I’ve never put on superhero tights in my life” “Why the fuck do they want you dead?” She shrugged as if to say “I don’t know, something about a bet to see who could actually kill me first and use my DNA to create an unkillable army” she crossed the room to the kitchen and grabbed some things underneath the sink. Bleach, hydrogen peroxide, tide stain remover, a scrub brush, and a started to fill up a bucket with water. “I guess since they heard that I was unkillable they wanted to see how unkillable I am” “So people just show up to your place and try to kill you?” “Yeah, but it’s become quite annoying more than anything. Especially this part” She laid some paper towels to soak up the halo of blood on her rug, “But they haven’t gotten me yet!” “Okay,” I can’t quite describe what I was feeling, so I did what any reasonable sane person would do, “Okay, I’m going back to my place and take a nap” “Have fun,” she waved as I left the room. Fucking people with fucking super powers.