My Action Movie Plot: The Ultimate Conspiracy

He had been through a lot. It showed on his face. By this point he'd been stabbed, shot, tortured, and deprived of sleep for 3 of the last 5 days. Worse, he'd watched his friend Jared die from a gunshot that had come without warning; he never had seen the shooter, just Jared falling with a look of disbelief on his face.

The last week had been utter madness and he didn't even know why. One day he was like any other person and suddenly it was as though he'd been plunged into one of those ludicrous action films where the hero was made to suffer so much that you could only imagine that he would sit staring at a wall for weeks rather than pick himself up for a car chase - on foot.

He was not paranoid, but he began to suspect a conspiracy when he had been attacked in the hotel room to which he'd fled after Jared had been shot right in front of his house. How could they have found in him in the anonymity of Vegas, in a hotel room he'd paid for with cash? It was as if the people behind this had intimate knowledge of his every move, even his moods and movements. He'd recently heard of a mysterious agency that gave orders to the NSA, but while it made sense that they might take an interest in world leaders, it made no sense that they'd take an interest in him. He was a nobody. None of this made sense. He was now hiding in public places, sitting at this moment in an iHop which he'd mistaken for an Apple store.

He was desperate to understand who would put him through this kind of hell, who might show this sort of gratuitous cruelty. As he racked his brain for some past mistake, someone he had angered, wondering who could hate him this much, a realization came to him: he had no past to remember. And suddenly it dawned on him who was responsible for his misery: it had to be one of those action film scriptwriters who didn't even have the decency to give him - the main character in this unfolding tragedy - a past.

He knew now who he had to find and kill if he ever expected these repeated attacks to end: the rest of this story was going to be about his hunting down and killing the scriptwriter. The irony of it made him smile, made the pain from his bullet wound temporarily disappear. Never had he felt so certain, so filled with purpose. His life made sense for once. He smiled, took a deep breath, and then a sip of his coffee. He imagined the surprise on the scriptwriter's face when he would look up from his laptop on which he plotted evil to see him, the character on whom he'd inflicted so much pain, the character whose only thought was revenge.

Just then, though, the blogger's henchmen burst into the iHop and, before he could even stand they shot him. The last thought to run through his mind was, "A blogger. I should have known. Couldn't even be bothered to give me a name."