Carrot Top whipped his head in my direction and then immediately took off running. I guess he didn’t want to pick on anyone his own size. The girl got up and dusted herself off. It didn’t look like any damage was done to her aside from a red mark on her arm and a little bit of gravel in her curly brown hair. She looked at me like a deer in headlights, and her entire body was trembling, but she was safe. I could’ve just let the guy run off back to whatever hole he crawled out of, but I was feeling righteous that morning.
He had just made it to the end of the block and turned right when I started chasing him. It was almost funny how slow he was. I felt like I was chasing down an unruly child, but he was going to get more than a spanking when I caught up to him. I closed in on him in under a minute. The terror in his face intensified each time he looked back and saw that I was ten yards closer to him. The final time he looked back, I was right up against him, and two balls of sludge engulfed his feet and brought him crashing to the ground.
I loomed over him like fucking Jason Vorhees. He tried to crawl away, but his legs were anchored to the sidewalk. He was like a dinosaur that fell into a tar pit, hopeless to escape.
“You like hurting people?” I said. “Does it make you feel like a big, strong man?”
He stammered for a moment, wide-eyed, before he could finally spit out a sentence.
“What the fuck are you?” he said.
“Just a guy out for a morning stroll,” I replied. “So, what did you plan on doing to that woman before I ruined your fun?”
“Man, I’m homeless!” he said. “People don’t give shit to us out here. I either have to steal or starve! I just wanted to get some food!” Tears started to stream down his face.
I stomped on his left leg and it snapped like a twig under my foot. He cried out in agony for a split second before I sealed his mouth shut with a squirt of black gunk.
“Bullshit,” I said. “Do I look like a fucking idiot to you? I’ve heard every story there is to hear on these streets. Shit, I’ve told a couple of them. That girl weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. You could’ve easily just snatched her purse and ran if that’s all you wanted to—”
He wasn’t listening to me. Instead, he was squirming desperately on the sidewalk, clawing at the gunk on his mouth like an animal. I had used a little too much and it was covering his mouth and nose so that he couldn’t breathe.
“Shit.”
The shit was really on there; he couldn’t get it off no matter how hard he tried. Death by suffocating felt a little over the top. He was a piece of shit, but he wasn’t fucking Jeffrey Dahmer or anything like that. So I did the nice thing and kicked him in the back of the head, snapping his neck and killing him instantly.
My mark tickled the entire right half of my body like it was congratulating me on a job well done.
“Fuck yourself,” I said to my marred, blackened hand.
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Carrot Top didn’t deserve to die. Even if the whole spiel about needing food was a lie — which may or may not have been the case — he deserved a thorough ass-whooping at most. That’s what I intended on giving him, but I was reckless. Precision strikes with mounds of goop weren’t exactly easy. Now there was a corpse in front of me, crooked and open-eyed, because I didn’t think before I acted.
Or was I being manipulated from the inside?
My next thought had me asking the same question. I realized that I wanted to feel bad about ending the man’s life, but I didn’t — not really. I didn’t feel anything at all about it. Looking at his lifeless body felt like looking at an opossum that had been hit by a car. There was the slightest tinge of sadness in my chest if I really tried to feel something, but I wouldn’t have a problem walking by it and continuing on with my day. I may not even think about it thirty seconds later.
Did I not care because he was a piece of shit, or did I not care because of the cancer on my arm?
After unsticking the corpse’s legs from the ground and carefully storing him in a nearby dumpster, I continued my walk back to the apartment and concluded that it was probably a little bit of both. Up until fairly recently, the thought of killing anyone for any reason was completely ridiculous. I never entertained the thought, not genuinely. But in the last couple of weeks I killed dozens of people — like, serial killer levels. Did I give a shit?
It was a peaceful walk under an orange sky. The air already felt palpably warm on my skin. I passed a few early risers walking down the street. A couple of them made eye contact with me and it made me feel like they knew what I had just done, even though that was ridiculous. I upped the speed of my gait until I was at the apartment.
Anita was already up, sitting on the couch and drinking a cup of black coffee, but Caleb was still in bed. She barely looked in my direction when I came through the door. Moving a little bit closer, I saw that she looked exhausted.
“I’ve got a couple of potential leads,” she said, still looking at the morning news on the TV. “Nothing solid yet, but I’m going to look into them today.”
“I think you might need some sleep first,” I said as I took a seat on the couch next to her and propped my feet up on the coffee table. I knew she really was exhausted because she didn’t bitch at me for doing that.
“Maybe I’ll sleep when I know I’m safe, and that my kids are safe. Not today.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, and we both just listened to a blonde lady on the TV drone on about a stabbing in a town called Sugar Land.
“How’s your head?” she finally said.
“Better, I think,” I replied. “Nothing for you two to worry about.”
“It’s not on the top of my list of concerns at the moment, but you did scare the shit out of us. Especially Caleb. The kid thinks you’re Superman, and nobody likes to see Superman vulnerable.”
“I’m about the farthest thing from Superman there is,” I half-chuckled, half-scoffed.
“No you’re not.”
It didn’t sound like a compliment. Without saying anything else, she got up, put her empty coffee cup in the sink, and went into her room, closing the door behind her.
I sat in the living room with only my thoughts and the blonde news lady for company. My mind wandered back to Carrot Top and the unanswered question: did I give a shit about killing people? Would I even care if they were innocent? It was impossible to say, but I couldn’t help but torture myself with the questions. I wished I gave a shit — did that count?
I also couldn’t stop thinking about how haggard Anita looked. Newt was dead, and she and Caleb were being hunted, all because of me. There weren’t enough boxing lessons in the world to make me strong enough to save them. Was I really going to let them die to avoid killing other people when I barely even felt bad about it? Was my abstract sense of moral integrity really more important than their lives? Than my own life? I could still act like I gave a shit about the lives of innocent people while killing pieces of shit like Carrot Top, right? What’s wrong with a little vigilante justice that would make me powerful beyond human comprehension and save my family’s lives?
Who’s thinking these thoughts?