Death Vendor

Something I scribbled down at 3 am in the morning.

I smoothly slid the clip into my .45 and pulled back the hammer. Morality, no longer a valued consort, screamed incessantly through the dark labyrinth of my mind until every cell in my reticent body vibrated. This was its pitiful resistance against the coming guilt that would soon suffocate me.

 

I rapped my white knuckles on the worn hard wood door until they throbbed red from the impact. Then at that moment of perdition all my body’s complaints faded away and there was nothing but pure adrenaline coursing violently through my veins, carving its artistic path through every nerve ending in my cold body. My senses sharpened with this rush. I stood in avid anticipation as I listened attentively to the dull clicking of latches undone.

 

The door opened. My heart raced, pounding hard against my quickened lungs. I raised my gun, and took a secure footing to brace against the recoil. My finger tightened around the trigger

“Bang, bang, bang” pounding out a three beat rhythm, perfectly timed with the throb of my tattered heart. The tiny fragments of hot lead cut through the stale, insipid air and through the unsuspecting flesh of his upper torso, splattering my impassive face with a collage of his blood. The expression contorting the features of his hardened complexion at that brief instant was priceless. He was purely and simply stunned. I almost smiled. He fell to the floor with the finality of a heavy thud as his lover came screaming into the door way and threw herself on top of him in desperation.

 

 

She was my cue to exit the stage, and so I maundered casually down the buildings synthetically lit corridors with a heartless stride as the fleeting pain of guilt began its quick ascent, threatening my every forward movement. But it was done, another contract filled, another inked name marked off a never ending list in this persistent war: this struggle for blood and retribution.

 

----

 

I awoke trembling, my mouth agape screaming, my skin sickly pale and sticky with collated sweat. His face flickered translucently across the lens of my mind, burnt into my waking vision as though id stared idly at the sun for far too long. A week had passed since his funeral, and still he remained with me, haunting me like some malignant spirit refusing to take rest.

 

The mediocrity of morning sun filtered through apertures of curtain-less windows and stung my nocturnal eyes as I uncoiled from the couch and groped the coffee table for my cigarettes. I withdrew into the cool shadows and lit one, inhaling the soothing promise of an early death, the poison breathing life into the deadened nerve endings of my cold body.

 

My next victim was already inked into the pages of my mind where he would stay until his untimely death. I absently showered and dressed myself in the usual raiment of in-descript black as I sifted possibilities through the filter of my mind. It would have to be cleaner this time; gun fire would not suffice in a heavily populated area, which is where it would happen. And it would happen.