Gunshots ricochet through the halls. Bullets ripple through bodies, tear through organs, imbed themselves in bones. Men scream—not groan or grunt, but scream—before their voices halt, suddenly stop as their hearts sputter and give up. Nameless, faceless men, men paid for their ability to stand in the way, men compensated for losing limbs and accepting handcuffs, men who were never meant to matter. They die in agony, choking on their own blood, with no amount of credit for their sacrifice.

When the gunfire is put out, the hero tosses his rifle to the floor. It crashes into the marble, clack-clacking into a growing pool of blood, a pool contributed to by too many. The hero pulls a pistol from a shoulder holster hidden underneath a black leather trench coat, a high caliber weapon whose recoil alone is capable of breaking bone. Turning the muzzle on those few left standing, the hero squeezes the trigger, the gun spitting bullets that collide into their targets with concussive force. One man is vaulted over an expensive couch, his inertia meshing with that of the bullet, the two objects becoming one as they reach terminal velocity. The last man standing—other than the hero of course—accepts a bullet to the chest, its momentum carrying his heavy body through the back door, glass tinkling onto the concrete porch outside. The hero steps out of the mansion, his boots crunching bloody shards.

If this were a film, the camera would be focused on those boots. It would close up on the hero’s feet before panning up onto the tactical cargo pants, tracking up to a blood-spattered t-shirt underneath a signature trench coat. Slowly, the camera would focus on his face, a shallow cut above his right eyebrow the only indication he had just endured a firefight. If this were a film, that face might belong to Arnold or Bruce or Sly. Maybe it would be Denzel’s face or Marky Mark’s or Wesley’s. That face could even belong to Dolph or Jean Claude or Steven. If this were a film, it wouldn’t be the first time you’re seeing that face, wouldn’t be the first time you’re seeing the hero. You would have watched him get kicked off the police force for botching an operation, his captain mentioning something about his military record, in the first act, some mission that had to do with capturing a drug kingpin. You would have seen that drug lord kidnap his wife or his lover or his daughter or his fucking cat. You would have followed his rampaging carnage as he set out to get revenge, watched as he broke all the rules of engagement, his quest culminating in this storming-of-the-castle moment.

This isn’t a film, though, is it?

To be a film, there would have to be a camera following the actors around a set, but there isn’t one. There is just a man soaked to the bone in blood, his own and that of others, standing in the backyard of a mansion. No director is around to yell cut or action, no operators holding boom mics to capture the hero’s one-liners, no catered lunch just out of the camera’s view for actors and extras to gorge themselves on. To be a film, there would have to be an audience interested, would have to be a you watching as the action unfolds, invested in seeing the hero get his revenge. But you don’t exist. You’re as fake as the hero’s backstory as a police officer.

The hero wobbles outside on legs unsure of their ability to hold up his weight. He’s lost so much blood, bullets lodged in his torso and arms keeping him from bleeding out completely. His face is raw hamburger, wet meat and torn muscle visible through ruined flesh, the result of heavy fists and heavier boots that succeeded in taking chunks out of him. You can’t see Arnold or Denzel or Keanu under all the trauma. His right eye is gone, sacrificed to a well-placed gunshot, the bones of his cheek and nose peeking out through tattered skin and blood. Heroic no longer describes him all that well, if it ever actually did.

“Twenty men, trained killers all, just like you,” an older woman says, seated at a glass table on the porch. She’s staring at the stately pool, her eyes refusing to acknowledge the dying hero trembling several feet from her. “Did she send anyone but you?”

The woman—the villain, if this were a film—is layered in opulence. Her cream-colored dress costs more than most midsize sedans and is encrusted with more diamonds than someone with a six-figure annual income could conceivably ever afford in their lifetime. She sips a mimosa—one part fresh squeezed oranges, three parts imported vodka—from a crystalline glass. There’s one ring on the pinkie of her left hand, a subtle ruby embedded in silver, and a watch made of white gold on her right wrist.

The hero shuffles to her table, dragging his left foot behind him as he moves. Shrugging out of his coat, he drapes it on the chair opposite the villain, his shaky frame now obstructing her view of the pool. It requires sustained effort to remove the coat, bullet-riddled appendages stiff with pain and heavy with fatigue getting in the way of basic movement. He can’t rest after sliding out of the thing, so he pulls a roll of duct tape out of one of the pockets, fingers operating with deft care so as not to jar anything that hurts. He places the pistol on the table, directly between himself and the woman he was tasked with eliminating, before taking the duct tape and wrapping it around his most grievous wounds. He starts with his face, using meticulous determination to lock the blood behind the tape, knowing she could grab his gun at any moment and finish what her men had started. It takes more minutes than he has left to encase himself, but adrenaline keeps him breathing and upright for the duration.

If this were a story, this is the part where you would be transported to the past, maybe to the first time he was ever shot, out there in the suck. The words on the page would paint a picture of a desert, hot and wind-scorched, sand-blasted and dead. A lucky shot from an insurgent would catch the hero, the bullet lodging somewhere in his thigh. A field medic would tear into his camis with standard issue scissors, using gauze and pressure to stem the bleeding. The remaining soldiers would find cover behind large rocks or hunker down on the desert floor, providing suppressive fire. Eventually, they would drive the insurgents back. The hero would be awarded a Purple Heart.

If this were a story, paragraphs and sentences would coalesce into an internal monologue about regret. The hero would remember coming back to the states with disdain, a medical discharge keeping him from going career. He would recall the pills, Percocets and OxyContin, the relief that would become addiction, the painkillers that would become heroin. A veteran with an injury and a drug habit wasn’t the most hirable of candidates, the verbs and adjectives swirling into a tirade about the hardships of life after the uniform. The hero would bemoan what employment he could find, the odd jobs and wet work for thugs and pushers, until ultimately landing a solid gig with a cartel. Ink would bleed onto the page in depressing spurts like the blood still seeping from his duct-taped body, outlining the armed extortion and killing he completed to feed a habit and pay bills he had never wanted. The flashback would end with a shuddering sigh, the kind that would rattle his shattered ribs.

This isn’t a story, though, is it?

To be a story, there would have to be words written on the page in angry ink, but there aren’t any. There’s just a man bleeding out and a woman he showed up to kill. To be a story, there would have to a be a reader, have to be a you invested in finding out how the hero got to this point, but you aren’t real. You’re as fake as the hero’s history of addiction or his Purple Heart. You don’t exist to the hero who isn’t really a hero; you are nothing more than the twisted hallucination of a dying man whose life never went the way he expected or wanted. There is no audience interested in his final hour, just as there had been no audience interested in his life up to that hour, no you to mourn his passing. Authorities will find a scene of slaughter when they arrive, his body just one among many, an escalated turf war between rival cartels gone so bloody that nobody made it out alive from this place. He’ll be cremated at some morgue, nobody there to identify the corpse as having belonged to him.

The hero’s, the avenging cop’s, the addicted veteran’s, the hired killer’s, the cold murderer’s life is over, and there is nobody to read his story, to watch his movie, to figure out which facts might actually be facts and which are just delusions of grandeur a dying mind tells itself before the end. There is nobody to share in his pain. The pen breaks, the camera crashes into the manicured lawn, his final breaths comes in heaves, and he knows that he will leave this earth the same way he entered it: blood-soaked and alone. It’s the way everyone dies, lonely and afraid, wishing to a god that surely can’t exist that they had done things differently, but there are no more seconds to waste on regret.

“Well, are you going to do what you came here for?” the woman, the villain who is no more a villain than the hero is a hero, asks. “Or are you just going to bleed all over my porch?”

He grabs the pistol and fires once, the close proximity and high caliber tearing the woman’s jaw off. She careens backward, dead before she hits the concrete. He slumps to the table, dead not long after.