In the back alley of a bad neighborhood, two girls were having a fight.

“Let me go, you bitch! You better fucking let me go!” said the bigger of the two girls between her bloodied teeth after Kerri’s arm snaked around her neck and completed the headlock that now firmly held her in place.

Kerri found the other girl’s reaction completely inappropriate. Didn’t she realize the danger she was in right now? A properly cinched headlock could easily cut off blood flow from the carotid artery and induce unconsciousness in moments. That was one of the reasons why it was banned in most competitions. It was dangerous.

Potentially lethal.

The other girl was heavyset. She possessed a thicker and wider body, and she was nearly six inches taller than Kerri was. But her size wasn’t what originally caught Kerri’s attention. It was her aura of confidence, and the scars she had on her hands. This was a lady with swagger; the kind you only developed after a lifetime of getting your way through intimidation and violence.

This was a girl who knew how to throw her weight around.

Her opponents must have all been terrible at fighting, though.

As soon as the fight began, the big girl came charging in at Kerri with a bull rush tackle, clearly intending to quickly bring them both to the ground where she could use her weight to keep Kerri pinned beneath her. Kerri liked that the girl had a good instinct for what her strengths were. Too many times, other women would do something stupid like flail their hands wildly or pull at their opponent’s hair. This chick just skipped the preamble and went straight for the takedown.

The problem was that her technique was awful. She was making a tackling attempt at Kerri’s midsection, like this was a game of American football. The easier and more productive method would have been to aim at Kerri’s lower body, specifically, one of her legs. There was a reason amateur wrestling placed so much emphasis on single-leg takedowns. Destroying your opponent’s balance was the easiest way to get them on the ground.

Then again, as big as she was, maybe this girl was incapable of going lower? After all, the heavier you became, the more pressure you put on your own knees. Maybe her weight and lack of physical conditioning were holding her back? If so, that was a shame.

As the other girl closed in, Kerri stepped in and swung her knee up, and caught her right beneath the jaw with it.

Clack! Her knee connected with such force that Kerri heard the other girl’s mouth snap shut from the impact. That was another thing the big girl had done wrong: breathing out of her mouth. A costly mistake, really. Her jaw was now probably broken.

In the moment of blinding pain that her opponent was probably feeling, Kerri placed her in a headlock, and that was the end of the fight right there. It was a disappointing conclusion. Kerri really thought she was going to be challenged this time.

Oh, well.

“Bitch, I said let go!” the big girl screamed. Now she was trying to punch Kerri in the side, but she didn’t have the leverage to generate enough force for her swings. Kerri sneered and then tightened her grip. Then she began counting in her head, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand…

The big girl was unconscious by the count of six. Kerri gently lowered her to the sidewalk and released her. Her opponent looked almost peaceful there, lying on the sidewalk with blood pooling from her open mouth. Like a wounded little angel.

She’d be in a lot of pain when she awoke. Kerri thought that was funny, so she laughed.

“Get her!” screamed one of the big girl’s three companions who had all been eagerly watching the fight, hoping to see Kerri get mauled. All three of them were now running at her, furious because of what she’d done to their friend.

This was something Kerri didn’t quite understand about other people. How could you witness someone deliver such an effortless and humiliating defeat to another human being and still believe you'd fare better? Why was it so difficult to instill fear in others without the use of a weapon?

It was a real problem.

Kerri called it The Racoon Conundrum.

Racoons could be vicious, terrifying animals when provoked. When one hisses at you and comes running at your legs, your instinct isn’t to stand your ground, it’s to run. However, such behavior was completely illogical; Even a small woman typically outweighed the biggest raccoon by nearly eighty pounds. Humans were also far stronger.

Capitulating to a raccoon was completely ridiculous. Why not simply kick the silly thing?

And yet, the sight of a raccoon approaching him aggressively, was often enough to send a grown man running for safety. Maybe it was the fear of disease or the instinctive realization that agitated wild animals were fearless and would do anything to inflict as much harm as they could.

A sufficiently angry raccoon would do its level best to make you hurt regardless of how big you were. So, people were cautious around them.

That caution was a sort of respect.

Why didn't humans give each other the same courtesy?

These girls had just seen Kerri destroy the biggest, strongest member of their clique. But instead of backing down and acknowledging her obvious superiority, they decided to attack her. Did that make any sense? It didn’t, did it? And yet, here they came, fearlessly throwing themselves at her. Real life was nothing like the comics and movies that Kerri enjoyed. Real life operated on nonsensical principles.

They gave her less respect than a stupid raccoon would receive.

Kerri hated the racoon conundrum.

Her first move was to sidestep the lead attacker’s clumsy roundhouse and respond by thrusting an elbow into the back of her neck. This was another forbidden technique, for a very good reason. Although it was an excellent means of stunning your target, applying too much force to your blow could potentially leave the other person paralyzed for life.

The girl dropped to her face as though her body were boneless. While she lay helpless on the ground, Kerri kicked her in the face and sent a fresh spatter of blood across the sidewalk.

Good hit, she decided.

The other two attacked her at the same time. One grabbed her from behind and tried to apply a chokehold of her own while the other screamed and began scratching at Kerri’s face and slapping at it. Again, not a very good technique at all. Where had these girls learned how to fight?

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For the one trying to choke her from behind, Kerri lowered her hand and gripped her thigh just beneath the shorts she was wearing. Then, she began to squeeze as hard as she could, which was very hard indeed, to the other girl’s detriment. Kerri could feel blood beginning to well beneath her fingertips, as the other girl’s skin was stripped away from her leg.

“Fuuuuuuuck,” the girl shrieked, finally releasing her grip around Kerri’s throat so that she could clutch at her shredded thigh. Kerri quickly delivered a back-thrusting kick, a move more famously known as a mule kick, which caught her wounded target square in the gut and pushed all the air out of her, leaving her gasping for breath on the ground.

That left only one other person standing. Kerri felt something warm on her cheek and carefully touched it.

Blood. The other girl’s wild swipes at her face had drawn blood.

Kerri smiled and savored the stinging sensation when she pressed her finger into it. The wound hadn’t been dealt fairly, but Kerri still gave the remaining girl a courteous nod for having managed to inflict it.

“Think you can do it again?” she asked her.

“Bitch, I’m going to fucking kill you,” the other girl hissed.

The girls in this neighborhood really cursed a lot. Kerri liked that about them.

Kerri found it sad that she couldn’t visit this place more often. She often had extracurricular activities that left her with very little free time in the evening for playing like this. But tomorrow was an extremely important day for her, which meant today would be the last time she’d ever get to come around.

So, she decided to skip school and look for some trouble to get into.

“If you say you’re sorry and kiss my ring, I’ll let you go,” Kerri promised while knowing the other girl would refuse.

“Bitch, I wouldn’t let you go even if you kissed my ass,” the other girl replied.

Kerri grinned and waded in with her fists up, knowing the time for talking had now passed.

What remained wasn’t a fight, so much as it was an execution. With no one else to jump to the other girl’s rescue, Kerri began using her for experimentation. She got all kinds of useful data. How many headbutts a girl that size could take before collapsing. How hard you could punch a nose before it broke. All very practical information.

Kerri had to hand it to her opponent. Whether it was stupidity or sheer toughness, the other girl refused to stay down. She really had no quit in her!

“Why do you keep getting up?” Kerri asked her after she climbed back to her feet for the fourth time.

“Fuck you, this is my neighborhood,” the girl spat out.

“Whaaaaaat?” Kerri asked, surprised, and delighted by her answer.

“I said, fuck you, this is my neighborhood,” the girl repeated.

So, it was pride, Kerri thought happily.

Kerri understood pride. Sometimes it seemed that pride was the only thing she understood. Pride was the privilege of the strong and the capable. Pride was for the talented. Kerri felt a lot of pride in herself. She was good at a lot of things, and that meant that she was better than a lot of other people.

But this girl wasn’t like her. Her pride was different. She wasn’t fighting to display her superiority. She was fighting because she loved her friends, and she loved her home. In other words, she was fighting in defense of others. Kerri had assumed that her group had jumped her because they were sore losers about their friend being defeated.

But that wasn’t the case at all. She realized that now. Their actions had been motivated by fear. Fear that she would hurt that big girl even more after putting her on the pavement.

They’d been trying to protect her. That made their actions selfless. No, it made them heroic.

Kerri loved heroes. She loved them more than anyone else in the world.

Loved hurting them, that was.

She grinned with malicious joy and began destroying her opponent.

The attacks Kerri threw were delivered too quickly for the other girl to avoid. They were devastating open-palmed strikes aimed at her opponent’s ears, the hinge of her jaw, her injured nose, and her cheekbones. Areas where percussive damage inflicted more pain than a simple punch would have.

A few moments of this barrage were enough to put her on her back.

This time, she didn’t get back up.

Kerri knelt and kissed the other girl on her forehead. Then she patted her cheek affectionately and slipped her feet back into her flipflops. She had to go home now, and she’d have to make two transfers to catch the train that would take her back to her own neighborhood.

Aside from the scratches on her face, Kerri didn’t look any different from any other uptown teenager. Her skirt hadn’t even been ruffled during the altercation. It was a shame though; she would have loved to have gotten a few scars. The news said this side of town was filled with crime and violence, but so far, the worst she’d received while playing here had been scratches like these.

It was kind of a letdown.

It would have been nice if they had knives, she thought, wistfully.

Knives probably wouldn’t have made a difference with that group of girls, though. Weapons in hand or not, the sad truth was that they hadn’t been good opponents. Bluntly speaking, they’d been trash. None of them had been enough to get her heart racing.

Well, except perhaps that last girl.

She’d been fun.

Righteousness had an allure that couldn’t be matched. Genuinely good people drew Kerri to them like a moth to a lit candle. She wanted to see them, know them, and touch them. But mostly, she just wanted to hurt them. Physically, emotionally, spiritually. Ideally, all three at once, really. Heroic spirits brought out a powerful desire within her…

…to crush them.

She had her reasons, and they weren’t good reasons at all. Her self-awareness made her happy. Knowing that she wasn’t a good person was what made her feel comfortable in her own skin. A creature like her needed to exist in opposition to something. That was the only way it could survive.

But Kerri wasn’t willing to settle for mere survival. She wanted to thrive.

She arrived home, kissed her parents in greeting, grabbed a snack and then marched into her room to watch television.

Kerri was an intelligent girl who kept up on world events and enjoyed reading. She had a reputation for being quiet and studious. That’s why it would have surprised many of the people who knew her at school to see her eagerly watching an old episode of the mighty morphin’ power rangers.

It was an absolute classic, too. One of her favorites. It was the second season premiere when Lord Zedd first appeared and mercilessly destroyed the ranger’s command center and murdered their dinozord companions. Lord Zedd was a great villain, unlike the first season’s Rita. He was a frightening monster with no redeeming qualities hindering his actions.

It was too bad that outraged parents who were angered by how Zedd frightened their children began complaining to the network, and demanded he be toned down. The writers complied by making him more bungling and comedic. It completely ruined his character.

Kids ruined everything.

“Hey, pumpkin. Did you go to school today?” asked Kerri’s father later that evening, as they sat at the table to eat.

“Yeah. Why?” Kerri asked as she cut into her grilled steak. She preferred her meat rare and bloody. Her mother once asked how she could eat something that undercooked, and she responded by saying “I like pretending I can hear it cry.”

Her mother stopped talking to her for a while after that.

“Are you being honest, young lady? The school called today to ask where you were,” her father said with a frown.

“There’s another girl in my homeroom named Carrie with a C. She didn’t show up today. I think Mr. Rickson got our names mixed up,” Kerri replied. She’d learned how to lie without blinking years ago and was very good at it.

It was enough to convince her father.

“Okay. Well, let’s make sure we get this sorted. I tried to tell him that skipping class just isn’t something you would do, but he was insistent. Tch, fella talked to me like I don’t even know my own daughter.”

You don’t know me, thought Kerri. You have no idea what I’m like.

“My girl is on the student council and gets straight A’s. Does she sound like someone who’d play hooky?” her father continued with a disbelieving tilt of his head. “But I guess some teacher who only spends an hour a day with her, knows her better than I do.”

Hey, Daddy. Today I bashed a girl’s face in for fun. I wanted to stick around and play with her blood, but I didn’t have the time. I value nothing and respect no one. Tomorrow, I’m going to do something terrible for no good reason. I’m already imagining what your face will look like when the reporters begin asking why you didn’t stop me in time and I’m doing my best not to laugh. That’s the girl you raised.

“Daddy, be nice. Teaching is a hard job. I saw in the news that they aren’t paid fairly for all that they do, and that our state government keeps making all these awful new laws that make things so much harder for them. It’s so sad,” Kerri said while wearing a compassionate expression on her face.

“I suppose you’re right,” her father said. “You know what, Kerri? I’m proud of you for thinking of others. You really are a good person.”

Kerri gave her dad a happy smile and thought, Fuck you, no I’m not.

__

Long after her parents had turned in for the night, Kerri sat on her bed, feeling too wired to sleep.

Tomorrow was a big day for her. The most important day of her life. She couldn’t fall asleep if she wanted to. So, she decided to stay awake for as long as possible and focus on visualizing her goal.

Tomorrow really was a big day.

After all, that was when she’d decided to die.

She was so over life on Earth.

She had a plan…