Time stretched like taffy. A 9mm round spiraled past my cheek, slow enough to read the serial number. I slid across a polished bar, two Berettas roaring. The muzzle fire was a strobe. I watched a man's sunglasses shatter in geometric slow motion, the pieces catching the light like broken stars before his body followed the physics of gravity. Action, reaction. Pain, numbness. It was a ballet choreographed by a madman. I was the dancer, and the only music was the spent shells clinking on the marble floor.
"You've been dead for two years, Payne," she hissed, her voice calm, clinical, like a doctor delivering a terminal diagnosis. "Everything you've done—the bullets, the bodies, the trail of chaos—it's the reflex of a corpse." Max Payne 1