CS: Blood Lines (Cont. II)

After awhile, like all things, however, you become accustomed. You pull the trigger and you see the wet red and all you think is that it’s just another one down. You are no longer fighting for a cause, no longer fighting to stop evil, you are fighting so that you don’t share their fate. You don’t want to wear that look upon your face…the mask of silent death, the final face you ever make. It doesn’t matter that a million others disappear, that they scream, that they plead and beg, that they are young or foolish or have been conned. Children, women, men, they are all the same in the end, same face, same tragedy, same feeling running through your veins. One would think it was a tragedy, but after they have seen it, they don’t feel anything, they don’t think anything. You just forget…But there are still dreams. Dreams coming back, floating through your mind of all the people you’ve killed. Their calm, placid faces greying in the moonlight, all movement gone from their chest, their face, the spark dying in their eyes. You dream of your own death, you dream of their deaths, you dream of the deaths still to come, and you cannot escape them. In the long run, there is no way not to let it get you, but still you keep on killing, thinking the next face will be the last one that needs to be twisted into that wretched nothingness with empty eyes and sour expression and all will be gone from your mind. There has to be a limit to how much the mind can remember, how much it can take before it overloads and dumps all the bad memories. You tell yourself that and then you begin to fight just to keep yourself sane. Sanity has long since past from me. That is not to say I hallucinate, nor talk to myself, nor behave abnormally. No, that sort of sanity remains, perhaps it has been even reinforced by my endeavors. Instead, what I lack is reason. In my mind there is reason, a justification for each act I do. He tried to kill me, he was evil, he was going to kill a friend, an employer, an innocent, an ally. These are the reasons that I pull the trigger, but they are lies. They are all foolish reasons because twenty years earlier I didn’t even know how to kill a man. The thought was a ludicrous thing. And then there was a war and I disappeared into the smoke of bombshells and bullet casings and when I stepped out I couldn’t stop my finger from twitching. It had been pounded into my head, the safety that could be found behind a gun, the safety that could be guaranteed by a gun. It had become all the sanity I would ever need…all the reason I would ever need.

On a night in July I stepped into the house of a man with two children and a wife. He had given forty thousand dollars to charity that year, he had sent his children away to a private boarding school where they were given the highest education. His wife and he were going on a vacation in a month and they were going to spend the rest of their life on an undisclosed island in the Caribbean.

He had grown up in a poor neighborhood in a rural town in Michigan. His father was the town pharmacist and his mother stayed at home and took care of him and his brother who died at the age of twenty-two in a car accident—drunk driving. He had worked hard all through high school, was salutatorian, was given all sorts of scholarships and worked to pay the rest of the way. He bought his own first car. He was on the Dean’s list every single semester of college and graduated with a degree in business and a minor in marketing. He married his high school sweet-heart after graduation and they began their life in New York. He bought his parents a house in Florida and spoiled them for all the things they did for him when he was young, which was nothing more than give him love. They were a happy couple and innocent—all but for the fact that he had destroyed important documents linking his company to a scam, a scam that had cost the government millions. He didn’t know what the documents were, but he had destroyed them and that was all that was needed for me to be sent.

His body was found in bed, stabbed eighteen times and signs of a struggle. Fingerprints were found on the knife which was found in the kitchen sink, his wife’s. They never found the wife, though the bank reported that a large sum of money had been withdrawn that very same day. No one doubted for a moment that it was her and that was the way things worked. I did not exist. The problem was nothing more than a quick fifteen seconds on the news and all was over and done. “Just a simple job.”

But it wasn’t just that simple. She had begged and pleaded and the death was quick, a single bullet in the head and then she was buried in the middle of nowhere. Her car was left to be found by the police: empty. He had screamed and he had struggled against me but it was no use, the first blow had fatally wounded him and he died before the fourth blow, but I kept swinging because I couldn’t stop. It had to look real…and it was real. One cannot wash that image from their dreams, perhaps from their eyes so they do not see it wherever they go, but not from their dreams. It is painted on my eyelids along with a million others, a great tapestry that will be the last thing I ever see when I close my eyes.

Can someone do such things all their life? Yes. And it doesn’t get easier like they say, it just doesn’t seem so unusual. It becomes another tally on the list and is just like all the ones before it. All I have to defend myself is the money I was given and the thought that maybe the world is a better place without them. But it is not. There are those whose death makes the world a better place, but they’re never the ones who we end up killing.

Funnily, I don’t hear their voices. No pleas. No screams. No dying gasps. There is nothing but silence there, like the look upon their face.

I asked a man, another man like me who sat in the middle of a room with a gutwound—the bullet from my gun—what he would say to God when he arrived.

“All it comes down to is…you or them.”

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