Dark Day, Dark Stories

Esta es la introduccion de Max Payne, uno de los mejores juegos que jugue. Es un texto plagado de dolor, oscuridad y al mismo tiempo belleza. En un dia gris como este, nada mejor con un relato gris...

In the backseat of a moving car, I am cut loose from the city. It watches me pass with sharp neon eyes. The night has gilded the skyscrapers in silver. Every brick wall is covered with graffiti. The image of a green "V" with a syringe in the middle, repeated over and over. V for Valkyr. The Drug. The red and blue of the police car's lights flash on the white snow.

Something goes clank in the night, and the sound is close enough to a gunshot to take me back to the beginning. My last meeting with Alex before I went undercover. Sitting in a crummy diner opposite me, he had grinned, a friendly bear, but I had seen it in his eyes.We hadn't been on the side of the winners in a long time. He wasplaying it safe, talking shop:

"To get to the source, we need to get to Jack Lupino. For that, you need the trust of the small-timers in the Punchinello family. Joeyand Virgilio Finito. Lupino's number one man, Vinnie Cognitti. All the wiseguys."

It must have been there. The sign of things to come. Clear in the fear in Alex's eyes, in the darkness of the coffee I was drinking, in the way my Beretta dug painfully into my side. But we were blind to it then, closing our eyes to it. Refusing to see it. Later that night, Max Payne as a DEA special agent was erased from the vast network of databases, and replaced with a new version of me: Max Payne, the career criminal with a mile-long rap sheet.

A couple of days ago it had all come crashing down. The bad things came, like a winter storm. Pushed over the edge, I found myself inthe cold no-man's land between right and wrong. No road-signs. On a crash-course with the Mafia. With nothing to lose. The NYPD was trailing me by the dotted line of empty shell casings that I left behind. I was trying to look for the answers, but every gunshot, instead of closure, was just a hole with more questions leaking out.A spreading labyrinth of questions, like a pool of blood spreading on the snow.

The car stops in the traffic lights. Outside, the light paints snow red, like the whole city was in flames. But inside, in the shadows of the car, it's all done in blues. I know I'm lying to myself.No amount of painkillers can keep this ache away. No lie can hide it. I'm not really in the back seat of this car. It didn't start in the diner with Alex. It started three years ago in my bedroom. And I haven't left that room since. The killer dead at my feet on the floor.

Michelle lying on the bed. Bullet holes like rubies on her chest. Our baby's cry cut short, the absence of it heavy in the air. That gunshot, like an exclamation mark to end it all, the answer to all my questions, had already rung out a long time ago, even its echoes gone. The gun was fused to my hand from that moment on. That room inside me everywhere I go.

Especially now as the city presses close to the windows of the car, its monstrous heartbeat under the tires. My squinted eyes in the rearview mirror. My hands numb and held awkwardly behind my back.Everything that came after that room is a hopeless mess, a chaotic swirl, rising nausea that tastes like rust in my mouth.