Vengeance

Today I’ve killed.

My victim’s blood now stains my hands and I can’t wash it away. Consciously, I know to be clean, that my hands are as rosy as those of anyone else but, looking at my reflection I can’t stop myself from seeing the blood on me.

The guilt is consuming me. Could I have stopped him before the final act of this tragedy? Would have been enough to force him to surrender?
Maybe. But I didn’t do any of those.

I could say that when I saw him assaulting that woman , something in me clicked open, the cruel and feral side of me, the merciless beast that every person keep chained in it hearth, in that moment found its freedom.
But it wouldn’t be true.

I followed him, for days, learning his ways, watching his every moves, his every act as he raped those innocents girls.

I never stopped him, then.

I knew I couldn’t risk failure. I told myself that it was a necessary sacrifice so that I could have the possibility to eliminate him once and for all. And so I stood motionless, watching him as he satisfied his ego on those, poor, innocent, immature girls.

I stood motionless as I recorded his every action, studying his tactics, catching each and any detail he performed on his routines. Every time he walked away as a free man, leaving them corrupted in dark alleys, between broken bottles and ponds of corrupted water.

He kept his life that day.

One of the victims, a girl of barely sixteen, commited suicide the following day.

This act reinforced my burning desire of vengeance on that monster. I convinced myself that I was acting for that poor girl, who had committed suicide in order to avoid any more suffering. I swore I would avenge her.

What a foolish thought. To avenge. The girl was dead already, she wasn’t anymore in sufferance for this cruel world.

What was the purpose in avenging her?

They were mere words, lies that I told myself to justify my actions, to justify my desire of seeing that man suffer.

A couple of days later I thought I was ready. I had never stopped shadowing him, even though I was sure of his hunting grounds. Suddenly, as he was moving on the outskirts of his usual spot I saw him assault a woman, an adult woman.

He grabbed her from behind, and he pulled her into the darkness of the alley. I moved calmly, I knew I had time. I needed him to be busy, that he was way too occupied with the victim to notice my approach. As I threw the cigarette butt on the ground, I moved and went into the alley, grabbing the colt .45 out of its holster.

As I neared his lair,I could hear him panting, his throaty breath as he kept raping his victim, howling in pleasure knowing her under him. Knowing that he had forced her body to react at his stimulation. The woman cried hard as she felt her body began to tremble from the stimulation of those expert hands.

I could only imagine the horror of that situation, the feeling of those disgusting hands on your own body as they touch, as they caress and torment the body until, its senses are going in overload, going back to the ancestral reactions, reacting on instincts against the decisions made with our own heads.

I was just behind him, my gun at his head, just a few centimeters from his bare skin. I could have killed him right then, placed an end to his trails of violence.

I thought I knew him... but I didn’t.

I stood paralyzed when I heard him moan in pleasure as a pool of blood surrounded him, as the woman began to tremble from the shock. Her stare closed on mine and her emerald eyes stared at me in pain, as if she was asking me the reason. As if she was condemning me for my inactions.

A few seconds later he extracted a long blade covered in blood from her wide and gravid belly, he stood there, kneeled on the ground looking at the knife as if enthralled, watching as the blood dribbled down from the blade, until he brought some of those vermillion droplets to his lips.

He moaned even louder.

As he was distracted I brought the gun against his head, for a moment he seemed to be confused as he, undoubtedly, felt the cold contact of the metal against his skin but then, as I pulled the trigger, he just collapsed forward, unable to feel anything, anymore.

With a foot I moved him away as I observed the woman corpse on the ground. As I crouched toward her I moved a flock of hair from her face and then the depths of those emerald eyes stroke against me as a sledge hammer.

For I wasn’t any more focused on the killer, but on the victim.

In a moment, all my attention moved to her, as an icy feel ran through my body. I stood there, watching that alabaster face, those rich vermillion lips, those eyes, once alive, that had always greeted me in the morning as I woke up, and in the evening as I went to bed.



The gun escaped from my grasp, touching the ground with a funereal sound, as I realized what my actions had caused. My vision, blurred by tears, as I stared at the cold corpses of the woman I had called wife and of our unborn son, realizing only then, the reason for that glare she had given mi earlier.

She had recognized me and had begged my help.

And I…

I…

…I let her die.