Rain

The rain came down like the sweat off a fat man’s back after a 9-hour session of Plus-Sized Pilates in the middle of Death Valley. Like a cheap whore, it was only a few seconds after it began to pour and the city was already wet, warm, and ready for more, but in a dry city like this, everyone was a cheap whore when the rains came. Every drop was like a 70 degree baptism, the sweet water from the skies washing away the dirt of the surface, and the sins below it. Only a few blocks away, I’d heard the screams of a woman about to get her sweet milky skin carved off of her by some two-bit banger with a Bowie, but the humid air was as quiet as a grave. Whether it was the woman’s grave or the crime’s was anyone’s guess. But even beyond the desperate acts of the villainous and the vile, the whole city was silent. Prostitutes, pushers, pimps, policemen, it didn’t matter in this city. Everyone was frozen and fearful as the rain fell and their own sweat dripped, the very tears of God drenching them as their sins were swept into the gutter. It wasn’t uncommon for even the crudest, rudest bruisers to fall to their knees and beg for forgiveness, tears dripping down their scar-riddled faces from scar-riddled eyes, the saline solution mixing with the sweat and the sins of the city.

I stayed inside the diner I’d parked myself in for the last few hours, sucking down coffee until my hands shook. Everyone else, the cooks and staff and even the old man with a crippled leg, had gone outside to receive the yearly polishing of their soul, save for me. It was funny, come to think of it. When I was a kid, I used to live for the precious few days when the sky would open up and bless the world below it with a liquid rarer than gold. I’d drink the clouds’ divine nectar and run through the raindrops, filled with the pure joy that only a child could feel, long before that euphoria had learned to hide when the sky came looking. Now there was only the acute fear of God that showed its bloodstained face in the rain, terrified that when the Big Man turned his eyes to the Earth to shower us mortals with his tears, he’d see me, and everything I’d done. And that He’d be angry with me, and strike me down with a bolt of lightning before I can circumvent any more of his commandments. He knows I deserve it.

On cue, the clouds flashed white and the world grew still, a model frozen in place for a photograph. I closed my eyes, imagining the tingle of electricity racing through my body, the moment of heat frying me head to toe, reducing all that I was to ash, and then the nothingness of the void enveloping me in sublime cold, shoving me in the back of Heaven’s freezer to chill for all eternity. For an instant, I fooled myself into believing that I’d finally achieved the damnation I’d well and truly earned. When the thunder came like a bass drum rolling down the stairs of creation, I was almost disappointed in karmic injustice of it all, wasting so much energy in a bolt of utter lethality and not even hitting something that deserved it. I wasn’t suicidal, that was for sure. If I wanted to off myself there were plenty of ways to accomplish that without bothering God, but I was sure that I was on some divine death row, clinging desperately to the final vestiges of my lifestyle while the executioner paused to sharpen his axe. And until I felt a brief shock to the back of my neck and faced the consequences of my actions in a moment of wrathful judgement, I’d continue to do dirty work for dirty people.

Nominally, I’d be at home on a night like this, cowering from the patrolling storms as they scoured the city of evil, but the job I’d been given was far too good to pass up, even in the face of such trivial inconveniences as self-assured cosmic vengeance. Some serious looking guys with serious looking guns gave me a briefcase with a stack of neatly pressed bills and a picture of some senator who doesn’t like playing ball with some of the shadier businessmen that frequent the city. Goes by the name of Paul Lobdell, another bleeding heart social activist trying to make a difference in the one place where its guaranteed to never happen. Kind of guy who runs charities, builds homeless shelters, kisses babies and asses in equal measure if it’ll give him an edge on passing his latest bill. To make matters worse, he’s started pushing through laws that manage to piss off on the very businessmen who are rich enough in pocket and poor enough in moral scruples to pick up my tab. The people love him, the city hates him, and he’s belligerently oblivious to it all, poking a sleeping lion with a stick to see what’ll happen. Tonight, the bastard’s gonna hear the lion roar.

I turned in my seat to look out the window. The storm was receding back into the sky, halfheartedly growling at the Earth as it lost ever more of its vigor. Forked tongues of lightning occasionally illuminated the horizon, but the sky above me was home only to slate-gray clouds, threatening to once again assault the mortal world below. Now, I could get to business.

Mr. Lobdell, despite being a veritable paragon of virtue, was still a human when all was said and done. Humans are prone to fallacy and prey to desire, a fact displayed by even this pillar of the community. Some found their guilty pleasures at the bottom of a bottle, others rolled in a joint or dripping from a syringe. Mr. Lobdell found his a few inches inside of a whore. One of the main critiques of his campaign against corruption was how few censures had been placed on prostitution. The official record shows that Lobdell “has yet to find a way to effectively combat the subversive and frankly dangerous market of negotiable affection without displacing the poor and troubled spirits trapped inside this unlawful profession”. The truth of it was that the man’s wife was an old, dried out crone who’d long ago given him the cold shoulder. To compensate for his wife’s inattention, the great golden god himself started poking around the city’s whorehouses, finding quite a bit to like and not a lot of witnesses he couldn’t buy into silence.

Currently, the man was dipping his stick into some girl in a brownstone across the street. I knew the pimp who owned the girl, who told me that Lobdell had paid for an hour with her, and his time was running out. As I adjusted the silenced pistol at my hip, I chuckled at the duplicity of the statement. His time was running out indeed.

If my tip was accurate, Lobdell would be leaving in about ten minutes, walking across the street, right past the diner I’d been sitting in for the better part of the evening, and on to his chauffeured car a couple blocks away. I’d been here long enough to catch any sign of an early exit, and any other ways out of the building were boarded up or involved saying a five floor goodbye as you tried to jump from the rooftop to “safety” (safety being cold, unforgiving pavement 50 feet below). None of Lobdell’s toadies were around, at the behest of the man himself, fearing that any one of them could bring his career to ruin with one well-focused picture. Any potential witnesses had either the good sense to run away or the tact to keep quiet. Lobdell and I were alone together in a crowded street, pawns in a larger game inexorably headed for one another, coming dangerously close to colliding in a flash of flesh and flame.

I stood up from my booth, feeling my legs stretch painfully as they were forced out of inaction. I paid my bill to a sad, heavyset woman in her mid-forties, trapped inside the linoleum-lined cells of the service industry, cursed to forever walk the same tiled floors as she struggled to break even in a broken world. I slipped a hundred dollar bill into the meager tip I’d already left her. Just because I was a bad man didn’t mean I couldn’t be good every once in a while. Considering how I was now a very rich man for a very bad reason, I saw no harm in tipping the karmic scales in my favor, in however insignificant a way.

I stepped outside, feeling the warm, wet air like a kiss on every inch of my skin. The rain was gone, but it’s essence lingered in the air, heavy with heat, drawing drop after drop of sweat from the pedestrians lining the sidewalks. The pavement glistened with the memory of the storm, its watery sheen reflecting the clouds lumbering through the sky. Streetlights and headlights cast a brilliant glare across the asphalt, almost blinding in their luminescence. I crossed over to the brownstone, nodded at the doorman, and stepped into the air conditioned foyer, the humid air’s grasp slipping away like the arms of a desperate lover trying fruitlessly to pull me back into her embrace.

After the living, dancing heat of the night, the dull, air-conditioned lobby was a disappointing substitute. I walked up to the second floor and made my way down the hall to Lobdell’s door. The disturbingly human scents of sweat and sex hung heavily in the air. If I strained my ears, I could hear the muffled grunts and primal moans behind every door, sounds of an act that echoed from the pinnacle of primate evolution back to the basest instincts of the monkeys we once were. I closed my ears. These lovers, however temporarily they would hold that name, deserved their privacy. Besides, I’d already reached the “Presidential Suite”.

The pusher who ran this block had a bit of a sense of humor when it came to his property. The “Presidential Suite” was just a slightly larger room than the rest that were rented out here, with the added benefits of tacky mood lighting and a complimentary pack of cigarettes for afterwards for an extra fifty bucks an hour. I figured luxury was all relative, but the “Suite” didn’t exactly fit into my definition of the word. But I wasn’t here to call B.S on a room sold out for screwing.

I leaned closer to the door, trying to formulate a game plan that left me with a dead senator, not a dead hooker. I heard him in there, a one man chorus of “Ah”s and “Oh”s, just to the left of the girl, providing an accompaniment of her own calculated moans, her client already endlessly malleable yet she kept on stringing him along for more. He was enthralled in a vision of immoral pleasures. Despite his vulnerability, I couldn’t risk taking a shot without killing somebody who didn’t need to die. I opted to wait.

After a while the noise behind the door became little more than white noise, a steady rhythm indistinct from any other noise. I couldn’t tell if I’d waited for 5 minutes or 5 hours, but eventually the sounds hit a collective peak before dying into a kind of palpable silence. I heard Lobdell fumbling with his pants, his zipper buzzing into place, his belt ringing through the still air, the rustle of paper as he hurriedly pulled out a copious wad of cash and placed it on the nightstand. A mumble of thanks came from Lobdell, and footsteps began to patter towards me. I pulled out the .45 at my hip, thumbed the safety, and let the bloodlust I’d held back all night flow like a scarlet river. I stood back from the door, and threw my boot into the door.

The common wooden door, often taken for a mere aperture, becomes a shattering battering ram when 200 pounds of human being is throwing its weight against it. Lobdell learned this from the receiving end, getting a wall of sheer concussive force violently slammed into his face. My first view of the “‘Suite” was of a room with fading wallpaper, an orange light distilled through a filter of acrid smoke, and a fount of blood cascading from Lobdell’s battered face. The girl had been out of the way, enough so that none of the door’s shrapnel could puncture her like it did Lobdell. He fell back, crushing a coffee table under his weight, sending further jagged shards of wood spiraling into the air. His face looked like a nightmare painted by Jackson Pollock, streams and spots of red and purple splayed across a white canvas. It was lopsided, as if the application of a door to his skull had knocked a few pieces out of place.

Lobdell scrambled up, leaning on the wall for support. I threw a fist into his gut, beating the wind and the will out of him, and sending him to the ground, where he began to crawl towards the window in the vain hope that he could dive out to safety. I put a boot-clad foot on his ankle and pressed until I felt something move where it shouldn’t be moving. He cried out, a strangled medley of fear and pain. I placed my foot on the other ankle. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

I rolled Lobdell over onto his back and pointed my gun just south of his scalp. When confronted with the threat of death, humans become acutely aware of just how much they possess, and discover how much of it they are willing to part with to stick firmly to the mortal coil. In Lobdell’s case, he started jabbering about offshore accounts, stock shares, partners, immunities, and the kinds of fantastical figures I’d be an idiot to turn down. I figured I was an idiot, then, as my response was to pull the slide on my piece, feeling the smooth gliding of the mechanisms buried in the steel chassis clicking in concert. Noting my polite refusal, Lobdell did what most others did when they’re finished but don’t seem to get the message, swearing that I “can’t get away with this”, claiming that “the police will find out about this”, and generally hoping that I “burn in hell” like I deserve. As far as I knew, I was indeed going to get away with this, the police would find out until a couple “legitimate businessmen” convinced them otherwise, and I’d long ago accepted that people like me don’t often get to knock on the Pearly Gates I chose the diplomatic reply and sunk a left hook into his jaw until something popped and talking ceased to be an option.

I stood back up, knuckles weary from “debate”, returned a bead to Lobdell’s forehead, and afforded him one last look into the eyes of his killer. I suddenly recalled the politician’s latest bill enacted a slew of new, stricter, gun laws prohibiting the possession of concealed-carry firearms. Even as the thrill of pulling a trigger shot through my veins like gunpowder heroin, the irony was not lost on me.

In a brownstone apartment doubling as a shrine to the oldest profession, the quiet thump of a silenced pistol snuck through the night air. A crimson spray speckled an aging spread of wallpaper. A soul escaped through an exit wound the size of a quarter. A good man died. A bad man lived. And the world kept turning.

I looked down on my handiwork. I’d just sent a man on the express flight to the undiscovered country for a case full of green paper. I felt nothing. A job’s a job, not an engagement. In this line of work, you moved on or you went mad, hearing the chorus of the dead echoing in the mausoleum of the mind until you snapped. I had a friend get wheeled off in a straitjacket because he couldn’t forget the faces he’d put bullets through. In the world of professional interment, there was no room for the sentimental.

I recalled that I wasn’t alone in the room. I glanced over at the girl so recently plying her trade before I’d come to practice mine. Her legs were drawn up to her chest, but her body language suggested it was out of self-preservation, not fear. She had never been in any danger from me, but her resolve was somewhat surprising. There was a hardness in her eyes, the leaden gaze of someone who’d seen the world for what it was and resigned themselves to it. She couldn’t have been more than 25, but her face was stony, the spark of life gone at such a young age. It occurred to me that the two of us weren’t very different. We both bent over at the prospect of a paycheck, we both had to kill ourselves inside to serve our profession (she couldn’t love a client and I couldn’t regret a target or else we’d each end up dead), and both of us were forced to live our lives doing bad things for bad people. I left the room feeling sorry for both of us.

I walked outside, feeling the humid air once again wrap itself around me. I heard a distant wail of sirens, but that barely concerned me. By the time they got here, I’d be gone, and the only witness to my murder had been in the game long enough to keep quiet. I could’ve laughed. It was almost too easy, some days, a high profile kill that practically walked into his own death. I started off towards my own apartment, when my blood froze and my body went rigid.

I felt something land on my face. Something that struck like a bullet before slithering off like a shadow. Something as cold as the touch of a corpse. Something I hadn’t felt since I was a child. Rain. And it began to pour.

I looked up. The sky sneered back, baring electric fangs and roaring thunder as the startled mortals below cringed in fear. It bore down on me, rippling and twisting through a menagerie of beastly shapes, growing and discarding limbs at will as it slunk inexorably through the sky. My heart was a timpani playing in overdrive by this point, a sense of impending doom freezing up my joints and choking the air from my lungs. Instinct pulled my hand towards my gun, but I might as well try to shoot the air I was breathing. Realizing this, instinct dragged my heels about, shot me up with a gallon of adrenaline, and sent me sprinting away from the eye of the brewing storm. I knew I was marked for death, but I wasn’t about to hand over my life that easily

Whatever spirit of justice had it in for me didn’t seem willing to let me escape my judgement. The street was still slick from the rain I’d evaded before, slippery as seal skin but harder than steel. My feet were pounding pavement while my head turned to watch the coming clouds, when suddenly the two switched places. Pain blossomed through my back as the sidewalk introduced itself to my spinal cord. My head struck heavily onto the concrete, filling my head with cotton, pain oozing through the pathways of my skull like burning maple syrup. The will to escape slipped away as numbness tingled through my limbs, the icicle of a concussion piercing my cerebral cortex. Still, I forced myself to my feet.

The sky laughed at my efforts to escape, a deep, rumbling chuckle vibrating through the city and rattling my bones in their sockets. The blow to my brain left it as useful as an umbrella in a hurricane, dissonant thoughts dancing about, figurative fireflies flashing briefly through the frontal lobe before becoming lost in the fog of cranial trauma. Rationality had abandoned me, reason had packed its bags, and forethought was on its way out the door. Some stupid, bestial thing stirred my arm to action as it slid to my hip, pulled out the gun, and pointed it to the skies, a meaningless act of defiance in the face of a greater power. The metal was slick to the touch, oiled to be a perfect instrument of discreet, close quarters murder. As the storm boiled overhead, its metal frame became little more than a conductor for a gigawatt of pure energy.

For a brief instant, the world flashed a bright, almost heavenly light, framing every building, every streetlight, every object bared to the sky in a perfect transient moment of still, zen-like pause.

Not a single second later, decades of bad karma, bad decisions, and bad people came crashing down upon me in a flash of long-delayed cosmic vengeance.

At the instant it struck, I felt a light shock, and my perspective crossed from the possible to the impossible. I suddenly had a view of every aspect of my body, seeing the impact of nature’s full fury focused into a 6 foot tall bag of meat that killed people. I could see my face, distorting into a death mask radiating a cross between fear and surprise, with pain shadowing the ghastly expression. I viewed my heart, ceasing in its rhythmic pulsing as electricity grasped the organ with gnarled hands. My skin was beginning to char in places, blackening as the heat of a false sun bore down upon it. Finally, I drew my vision to my outstretched hand, a silenced pistol clenched within it. The powerful current had traced its way through the gun, leaping from bullet to bullet, setting each of them off in a miniature fireworks display that shredded the weapon and the surrounding hand to bits. It was funny, in a way. The implement of so many others’ demise ending up as my own. It wasn’t really a surprise. Killing machines are designed to take lives, and at the end of the day, it didn’t care whose lives they were. My omniscient view began to slip from my control as I was forced back into my skull to arrive at the verdict of the following moment. As expected, I was found guilty by the jury of the ethereal, and the judge of the clouds sentenced me to death by electrocution with no parole, no re-trial, and no stay of execution. As the thunder’s gavel roared in my ears, a burning, numbing sensation seared through every cell in my body, filling every one of them with an agonizing bolt of sheer pain. And I wasn’t going to die until it had burned out its course.

After an eternity compressed into the space of a second, the pain subsided. A warm nothingness flooded my insides, and time slowed to a crawl as the lightning darted back into the storm front. For a moment, I stood as I had, a mangled hand reaching for the sky, protruding from a charred body seared free of hair and a good deal of skin. The moment quickly slipped into the nebulous past, and gravity’s brute force became the present. My knees ceased to hold my body for the final time, abandoning me to the will of the world. I stumbled for a moment, arm still outstretched, when any residual control I had over myself vanished. Like a marionette with its string cut, I toppled backwards towards the now-fried pavement, my part played out as I tumbled off the mortal set to the backstage of the unknown. I did not feel my body hit the ground, as there was nothing left for it to feel. Instead I saw it as it occurred, the impact of the fall shaking my soul from its spent vessel, soaring now through the asphalt, through the plane of the living, watching as the world was stripped away until all that remained was my former self trapped in an unending void, even that swiftly shrinking to a mere point in the extradimensional graph I now inhabited.

I became aware of a force dragging my free-floating consciousness to some ambiguous destination in this unknown country. At this point, I was sure that this was it for my immortal soul. I’d written a symphony of suffering in the blood of dead men, and it was time to face the music. As my destination approached, I began to feel something approaching if not happiness, then a final, resigned calm. My time was over. I’d made the decisions I’d made, I’d lived all of the life I was allowed, and now it was beyond my control.

At this point, I realized my body, or some approximation, had returned to me. A cold, hard floor caught my feet, which began to draw me forward. With every step, the scenery around me began to coalesce into existence. A heavy coat filled in around me, carrying the same weight of the one I’d worn before my time expired. Denim spilled across my legs, a wash of cloth dripping down like paint on a living canvas. My next footfall stepped into a pair of worn-in black boots. A holster strapped itself to my thigh as I continued down the path to nowhere. The situation reminded me of an airport. I’d stripped down practically naked, everything laid bare until the powers that be decided I could return to decency and continue on my way.

Like water seeping from a nonexistent crevice, color dripped down walls that hadn’t been there a moment ago, outlining a familiar dingy hallway lined with scuffed old doors. Sounds of sex reverberated through the space, moans and groans building up to a deafening crescendo, noise layering upon noise to an unbearable audible peak. Smoky orange light snuck around the edges of a door at the end of the hallway, the dingy light complementing the dingy setting. The brownstone.

My feet traced the path towards the room that sealed both my fate and Lobdell’s, a living memory replaying in real time. Every step drew me further into the past, every moment familiar yet completely foreign. I stopped before the door. The din of carnal pleasures tore through my eardrums, louder than reality could allow. Here, however, it seemed like reality didn’t hold much water. I stopped walking a step away from the door. I reached out and rested a hand on the doorknob. The ambient noise, deafening beyond comprehension, fell instantly silent. I turned to glance back down the hallway. Nothing of it remained, the doors fallen into the void, the carpet shipped off to the big flooring depot in the sky, the lights forever dimmed in the ravenous blackness of the beyond. I turned back to the door, the darkness belying an unsettling blend of numbingly large and far too small. A power beyond me twisted my hand, turning the knob with a smooth click. My hand guided the door on its hinges as I stepped through to whatever awaited me beyond it.

As expected, the Presidential Suite sat before me, just as destitute as I recalled, but free of people. I stepped into the room before logic had time to warn me against it. The sound of the door slamming sent the hairs on my neck arcing to the base of my skull. I spun around, finding the door solidly shut. I strode back to where I entered. A small thought tried to warn me against doing so, an indistinct memory crying out to deaf ears. As I reached the door, I very quickly learned that I should have listened to myself.

The door flew open on its hinges as I recalled Lobdell tracing the same path through the room, leaving himself with only a fragile wooden portal between himself and me. The door smashed into my face, my mind’s eye seeing the gout of blood erupting from Lobdell’s nose, noting the same fountaining from mine as I careened into the wall. My vision clouded by blood, I had barely a second to catch my breath before a fist slammed into my gut. I collapsed face-first onto the crusty carpet, a spray of blood cascading across the room as the air left my lungs. Before I could recover, a foot landed heavily on my ankle and forced it to one side, popping the joint out of place with an unnatural crunch. A second later, the other ankle met the same fate.

It was surreal, the whole event. I could tell that I was being mauled by the guy who introduced the door to my skull, but anything resembling pain failed to register. It was like a movie, where all the fights, the deaths, the pain, all of them happen to the character, but the actor never feels a thing. If the appetizer of my fate was painless, then I wasn’t looking forward to the main course. A hand grabbed my shoulder and rolled me onto my back, while a boot slammed down onto my ribcage. A rivulet of blood had snaked its way into my eyes, leaving me blinded. I wiped it away with my free hand and looked up at my assailant. I looked over his familiar face, jaw a near-perfect square, his eyes windows into a soul long callused over. A grin worked its way through my gore-caked face. Of course, the perfect killer, the one person you’d least expect to do you in, and yet the most obvious. The only one you know better than anyone else in the world, just as well as they know you. I began to laugh, a low, crackling noise interspersed with great, heaving coughs throwing more blood across the “Suite”. I looked into the face of my killer as I looked down into the face of my target, about to commit the only crime you never got caught for. I was going to kill myself. Over and over and over, a murder-suicide that stretched off into infinity, forever reliving my final trespass as victim and perpetrator.

I kept laughing, a rusty cackle that continued even as I socked myself in the jaw, dislocating the lower half of my face. I saw myself chuckle as I aimed the gun, a tiny voice in my head wondering, after shooting so many people, what getting shot would feel like. I figured I had plenty of time to find out. I felt myself pull the trigger as the laugh continued to fill the room, silenced by a slug of lead.

The pain filled what was left of my skull, drilling through layers of gray matter, fire building in my head as the rest of the body went numb, all connections cut off by the bullet. It was the lightning all over again, its intensity concentrated into a single point making its way out of my head. As it sliced a path into the wall behind me, taking a fair amount of my brain with it, the wound began to grow cold. A feeble giggle still passed my lips as my vision began to fail me. I saw myself turn to the now closed door, reaching for the handle as I kicked the door in, sending shards of wood splintering into the air, mingling with the spray of blood released by my broken nose. I felt it all, the bullet, the door, the kick, sensations all blending into a constant flow of sensations invariably capped by pain. Every few seconds, another bullet began the cycle again, another lead raindrop pooling into a sea of damnation as I murdered myself again, eternally suffering as I made others suffer. The irony was not lost on me.