"Congratulations are in order, Lord John Taylor.  It looks as though you managed to work your way out of the Drought after all..."

The hoarse, gravely and wheezing voice had stuck with John Taylor all day.  The night before - the night he'd retired Pimp Bizkit and re-captured the GZW2K1 World Heavyweight Championship, he'd had an all-too-real dream that, for all he tried, he couldn't get out of his mind.

Now, working on his daily weights routine, he thought about anything other than the terrible, dying voice.  He tried to think of how successful his second run with his Heavyweight Championship of the World would be.  But his mind continued to wander.  Back to last night.  Back to that dream.  Back to that voice.

Chester Browne's voice.

Last night's meeting between the two men - as subconscious and unreal as it was - was too relevant for John to ignore.  He'd gotten asleep at around two in the morning, after Sunday Storm, after his post-match appearances and warm-downs.  After it all, he'd retired to his plush room in the Marina and had dozed off soon thereafter.  That much he knew was fact.  What had followed was far too hazy to classify as anything close to that.

Asleep, he'd found himself in the middle of a war zone.  Neither the exact city nor the exact details of the conflict had been clear, but it'd been absolute mayhem.  Dead soldiers, dead civilians, wrecked cars, wrecked buildings...  Unthinkable carnage.

Actually, now that that he thought about it, he hadn't been quite 'in the middle' of it all.  No, he'd been lying flat on his stomach in a third floor hotel room.  It had been a dingy, squalid place and hadn't been helped at all by the building piles of rubble and corpses outside it.  It certainly had not been the type of place civilised Lord John Taylor would normally frequent.  But this situation had been anything but 'normal'.  Over his shoulder he'd found a heavy rifle of some kind - The model and manufacturer unclear.  It was about then that he'd discovered the cause of much of the violence out on the streets below.

Himself.

Subconsciously, he'd stuck his right eye into the eyepiece and found a nice, fat target out on the street.  With a crack, the enemy soldier had fallen dead.  At least, he'd thought it was the enemy.  That hadn't been clear either.

A monotone voice from behind had unsettled the heavily armed Gunman greatly, "Good shot, my lad."

Instinct and reason had told the impromptu sniper to turn around in search of the voice's source, but the weight of the rifle had crippled him somewhat and he hadn't quite been able to manage it.

"Stop.  Don't strain yourself, son.  Keep your eyes on the target.  You stray away or lose focus for a split second and you'll be finished.  All you've worked and struggled for...  All you've accomplished to get to this one place - Gone."

Absently, Taylor had mumbled something in response.  Thinking back over it now, he was nearly sure that he had simply repeated what his invisible partner had said.

This train of logical and reasonable thought was derailed as the dream became more and more vivid.  The crumbling hotel room around him, the old and withering voice in the back of his ear, the piling bodies out on the street became more and more real.  As absurd and preposterous a situation as it was, Taylor had some primitive urge telling him that this dream of his had actually meant something.  It hadn't been random.  It had been relevant.  It applied to his current situation, but he couldn't quite...

CRRRACK!

The dream again.  A loud shot from a heavy rifle had echoed throughout the night sky.  Towards him.  Before Taylor could even think, the thick slug ripped a hefty chunk out of the window sill just beneath where the tip of his rifle sat.  Covering himself first and foremost, a frantic Taylor had searched around for his attacker.  Down on the streets, the foot soldiers - some muscle-bound, some lanky and skinny, some fat, some tall, some with long white hair, others bald - fired at each other with cheap, off-the-shelf weaponry.  The shot hadn't come from them.  He was sure of it.  It had come from a rifle quite like his own, he deduced - Expensive, rare.  And it had come from considerably higher than the ground.

"There!" exclaimed the voice behind him amidst a flurry of heavy coughing.

Peering cautiously through the eyepiece, Taylor had caught a glimpse of his attacker - a blurry, almost effeminate face in a third-storey window across the street - cowering down and out of sight.  He hadn't looked like a sniper.  He hadn't acted like a sniper.  How the hell had he gotten up there and gotten so close to Taylor with that last shot?

Taylor curiously asked, "Who is he?"

He got no response, not that he would have listened entirely anyway.  He kept his eye on his ducking and dodging target.  His rival, although probably an amateur, showed a natural, instinctive grace in ducking and diving, his scope appearing every so often as if more trying to get a good look at Taylor than actually trying to shoot him.  Taylor did likewise, until his rival made the mistake of lingering for just a second too long.

On basic instinct, Taylor fired straight at the face in the window, only for his target to dodge it at the last split-second.  As he re-loaded, the face re-appeared and fired three almost back-to-back shots, not one coming anywhere particularly near Taylor.  Still, the fact that he'd been fired at by this complete stranger left him uneasy.

To keep himself happy, Taylor used his last round precisely between the eyes of one of the foot-soldiers.  With that done, he ducked completely out of sight and off to the side to reload. 

[------------]

"Who is he?" asked the kid with the gun, genuinely curious.

The kid hadn't once looked back since he'd been there, opting instead - to Chester's delight - to keep his eye affixed to the eye-piece of the sniper rifle the whole time.  From time to time, the kid would ask a question about the man across the street - "Who is he?, "How did he get up there?" and, Chester's favourite, "How dare he get so close to The Lone Gunman?"

Crazy wasn't the word.  Neither was 'kid', really.  In actual fact, the 'kid' was a heavily sedated thirty-four year old man, totally zoned out atop a surgical table.

Chester never dignified him with a straight answer.

 [------------]

 "The war is over, Jonathan.  We can all go home."

Taylor stared blankly at the hazy, grey-and-white blur a few feet in front of him.  He couldn't tell whether or not he was conscious.  He remembered being at the gym.  But then he remembered some dream he must've had...

It was all quite confusing.

"What?" he asked, sounding far too wormy for his liking.

Condescendingly, the blur said, "Oh, nothing.  I'm simply here to debrief you on a job well done."

"And what's that?  The sniper across the street?  The face in the window?"

The blur laughed, "No, no.  I'm talking about the real world, John.  What you just experienced was simply an analogy of your current professional situation, visualised.  Those foot-soldiers you think you saw?  Take a guess who they are.  The fat soldier with the overly white hair?  The 6'10 soldier with the face-paint?  These are people you see as below you, consciously and subconsciously."

"You're not making any sense," Taylor began, feeling a little blurry himself.  "What are you trying to do?  Why are you here?"

"Where is 'here'?  Tell me that and I'll tell you everything you could possibly want to know."

Taylor thought for a moment.  Then for a moment longer.  He came up with nothing, which absolutely tore him apart inside.

The blur went on, his voice becoming darker, more hoarse.  Older.  "Is 'here' your local gym?  Is it Beaverdam?  Is it-"

"Beaverdam!" Taylor exclaimed, sounding too excited and childlike for a World Heavyweight Champion.  His energy drained itself quickly thereafter as the immediate mention of Beaverdam began to fade and was replaced by the discomfort of not truly knowing what happened there.  "What happened at Beaverdam?  Was I really there?"

The blur didn't give a straight answer this time.  Coldly, it stated that "The face in the window was Vernon Vanderbilt."

What?

Before blurry Taylor could process what he'd just been told, he heard the deafening CRRRACK! of a sniper rifle - close by - and then everything began to fade away as he felt a white-hot slug bury itself in his forehead at the speed of light.  It all became a blur.

[------------]

Like a war veteran upon hearing a gunshot, Taylor screamed a terrible, silent scream as he heard the familiar sound of the GZW2K1 ring bell.  He found himself lying flat on his back in the middle of the ring.  Some unfamiliar theme music poured out of the Public Address system as that rat, Richard Dark, clawed at Taylor's World Heavyweight Championship and handed it to...  No...  No...

Vernon Vanderbilt.  The face in the window.  The guy across the street.  The foot-soldier with an accomplished sniper's instincts.  He'd be a threat, Taylor knew, but it wasn't title threatening.  All he had going for him was hype.  Nothing more.

But once again, that voice, "Get up off that mat and be the champion you were programmed to be, John."

Programmed...