Prologue

‘The whole revenge crap…’, a man said, his white shirt completely soaked in blood, ‘There really is nothing at the end, huh?’

He stood up to watch the sun setting outside a barred window, leaving place for the moon to illuminate the inside of the building and the countless corpses laying around at his feet. Each of them had traces of bullet wounds and large gashes in their stomachs or heads from a knife. The man dropped the knife from his hand, letting go of the red piece of metal shakily on the ground. As it dropped, it made an echo throughout the building, filling bloody rooms with anguishing screams as if the souls of which were taken by the knife were finally released from the object.

The man approached a corner of the room and picked up his torn black suit but wore it nonetheless. He reached his hand inside his right pocket and grabbed a packet of cigarettes. He put one in his lips and lit it up with a match he took from his left pocket. As he put the packet back, he took a deep breath, savoring the light perfume of the gray smoke he inhaled and gave a deep sigh.

The corridor was filled with lifeless bodies; some was lying on their back, breathing raggedly with pure expression of agony on their faces, their hands holding on fatal wounds to stop the bleeding. The others, less unfortunate, died without ever seeing their killer. The man in the black suit slowly walked along the corridor. His steps were light despite having received a heavy wound to the leg. The remaining men that were still alive, their fate was already chosen the moment they stepped their foot in the building: certain death. One last man stretched his arm toward a nearby machine gun when his hand was suddenly planted to the cement floor by a knife. He muffled his cries and turned his head to look but before he could beg for mercy, the same knife was yanked out of his hand and to his throat. He coughed out blood as his eyes turned white.

As the bloody man exited the building, he threw away his last cigarette and took off in his car. A black Chevrolet that he bought so long ago was worn out, barely standing and yet still persisted like it was the last trace of its owner’s hope. The man took a glance at the back of the car and heard small laughters of a child. He stopped the car and parked it by a giant plain and buried his sorrow in a river of tears. Laying his head on the wheel, he turned to his right and saw the shadow of his wife. She was smiling, her long blond hair sticking out from her straw hat. She looked at him with her deep green eyes as if telling him to join her. The man reached out his hand to touch her cheek but she quickly dissipated into the air. Irlene… Please don’t leave me… he cried out softly.

He walked out to the plains, fidgeting and limping because of the infected wound he received in the earlier massacre. He walked for how long, he ignored, nothing mattered anymore. He had his revenge and his thirst for blood was finally quenched. When he looked back, he did not see his car anymore, only greenery at the horizon that he could barely perceive in the darkness. Despite his eyes failing him, he still kept going, walking to whenever the wind told him to go. His brown hair swayed lightly in the breeze of the night and despite his blood ridden face, he looked like an average man. Neither tall or short with no special distinction to his face nor figure, he was perfectly normal and average. How did it come to this? He was happy with his family, he had a wife and a child, a house and a life, a job at a nearby convenience store and the money to get by the day. But now, with a gun in the back pocket of his suit, a knife on his belt, he was covered in the blood of the men he had been tracking for so many years. He thought he would feel satisfy drinking the blood of his enemies, gutting them to force them to eat their own intestines and he did for a brief second. The sheer ecstasy when he ripped out the throat of the perpetrator responsible for his endeavor on this bloody path, was gratifyingly orgasmic. But now, there is nothing but an empty void in his stomach that he could not seem to fill no matter how hard he tried. He scratched his hand to feel something but he could not so he scratched his skin, his meat and his bones out but he felt no pain, no pleasure, not a feeling. He stopped in the middle of nowhere and looked around: there was not a single soul. He was finally alone; no one to bother him, to speak to him, to caress his head to comfort him. He went down on his knees and prayed to God for one last time.

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‘Forgive me, God, for all the sins I’ve committed’, he said pleadingly, his head against his hands, ‘But what have I done to deserve all of this?’

He looked up to the sky hoping for an answer in the stars, looking around for a sign and continued: ‘What did I do to deserve this? Answer me! Why did you take my wife and child but not me? Why leave a man to his miserable fate? Why not kill me rather than set me on this path? I didn’t want this… I never wanted this… Never… What will happen now? What am I suppose to do? Give me a sign, please. Tell me there was nothing I could do otherwise. Tell me there was no choice. Tell me the man I killed was the worst piece of garbage in the world!’ He yelled at the top of his lungs, ‘Do not tell me that I am wrong, please!’

He heard no answer and did not mind it. God didn’t exist and he knew it. Self-comforting did not give him any peace of mind. He remembered seeing an eye peeking out of a closet in the room where he killed Don Gana, it was a child’s, and when he cut his throat, a drop of blood touched the child’s cheek and a small yelp was let out. He wondered why he let the child go. It was a foolish thing to do. He will die at the barrel of the one he let escaped and yet he thought he would still do it over again if he had the chance. He wanted to die and only in death could he finally be at peace. He reached his hand inside his black coat and took out a silver gun. He cocked the gun and pointed it to his heart and with a movement of the finger, he pulled the trigger. His body dropped to the ground and upon contact with the earth, made a thumping sound.

People say that when you die, your life flashes through your eyes. For him, he only saw small bits of his most memorable moments: watching the stars with his mother on the grassy yard behind their old house, his first kiss after losing a children game, the first time he laid his eyes on the woman that would later become his wife, his daughter running in a football field, Irlene’s smile and gazes… That was the last thing he saw and it put a smile on his lips as his heart painted the grass in blood. And as he felt the grass tickling his left cheek, he suddenly remembered the kisses from Irlene’s lips until he ultimately took his last breath and die, a crystal down his cheek.