Waking up feeling dead, I empathize. Hopefully he gets a good breakfast.

Dead to me is no feeling at all.. but I sense he feels he has swallowed a big pill, some apprehension, but a stronger sense of duty.

Brilliant.

The first paragraph is utterly gripping.

Couple of typos: you need a hyphen in “government-issue”, and you’ve got a “fell” instead of a “feel” in the last paragraph.

The sense of foreboding at the end is thrilling. You have excelled yourself.