Stephen leaned to the side so he could see past the pimp and get a better look at the woman behind him. With the help of the streetlamp, Stephen saw several dark splotches that someone had done a bad job of covering with makeup. They went down the woman’s arms and legs and were most heavily concentrated on her thighs and right under the outside of her shoulders—almost the same exact spot where Stephen had seen her pimp grabbed her.
“Ayo, gramps! Are you listening to me? I told you she ain’t working right now so quit your starin’.” He said in an aggravated tone as the man waved a hand to get Stephen’s attention.
Without a word, Stephen pointed to the woman.
The pimp turned around and Stephen drew the pistol from between his driver’s seat and the center consol. He pointed it at the gold-embroidered baseball cap. Without giving him a chance to turn fully around, Stephen fired at point-blank range into the man’s temple. As the body collapsed, Stephen slammed his foot on the gas pedal. By some reflex, the man’s lifeless torso held onto the door, and Stephen dragged him for a few feet as he sped off. Stephen felt a rear wheel bump over the body.
Flooded with adrenaline and instant memories of what he’d just done, Stephen struggled to process it all. His ears were ringing from the sound of the gunshot, but somehow, he’d still been able to hear the crunch of bones under the weight of his car. That was followed by an ear-piercing scream that could only have come from the half-dressed woman. Her screams slowly faded, but since there were few other cars on the street, he heard them for almost a mile.
Once he could no longer hear the screams, Stephen began making turns onto random streets, trying to evade any potential pursuer who had seen his last “act of heroism” as he liked to think of it. Yes, more and more he was questioning whether what he was doing was right or wrong.
Stephen headed toward the city center, where he expected to find more people out and about on a Saturday night. Of course, he knew that with more people also came a higher risk of being caught, but those thoughts did not worry him as much as they initially had. He couldn’t tell whether it was because with each murder he enjoyed killing more or that he’d simply accepted that he’d be caught, and he might as well continue until he was.
Glancing around the car, he saw that some blood had spattered throughout the interior, especially on the passenger side. The pimp’s murder brought his total to three, and from his extended time of TV watching, he knew that three murders was the minimum number required to be considered a mass murderer. This meant that the police would work that much harder to capture him. He accepted this fact and continued his late-night vigilantism.
With the four bullets he had left, Stephen figured he could help at least one or two more young ladies and scanned the streets for situations in which he could step in and finish off his night. It became difficult however since downtown was bustling. With a bar or nightclub every block or so, it became almost impossible for Stephen to spot abusive men from his car, so he parked his car in an alley and continued on foot. With gun in his waistband and his sweater concealing it, he looked like an ordinary senior citizen out for an very late-night walk.
He tried to enter a few clubs, where men often groped or maltreated women, but bouncers blocked him—he wasn’t dressed for a nightclub was the excuse they told him. Stephen couldn’t get in anywhere that was still open, and as the night progressed and people began to disappear from the streets, Stephen decided to return to his car and go home while he was still a free man. On the way back, his limp slowly returned, and the subtle pain caused by putting his full weight on his injured hip became noticeable again.
A smile of relief painted itself on Stephen’s face as he spotted the alley where he’d left his car. He took the keys out of his pocket, but before he could open the door, he was distracted by a faint grunting and a brief shriek. Intrigued by what could be making such a noise and the single cry—it was so high-pitched it could have been a wounded cat—Stephen put his keys back in his pocket and walked deeper into the alley. The pain in his injured leg disappeared as he focused on this new mystery.
The alley became brighter as he passed the backdoors of businesses and overflowing trashcans lit by floodlights. His car was a good distance behind him, but he knew he was close to the source of the mysterious sound because the grunt had gotten louder.
He approached a docking bay for trucks and peered around a corner. Five men surrounded a figure he couldn’t see clearly. His throat tightened and his skin crawled as a cold sensation washed over his body. He retreated ever so carefully, doing his best not to be seen—the men outnumbered him and the bullets he had left.
A dim floodlight between two of the docking bays began to flicker. Its flashes mimicked the dull pulse of someone fading in and out of consciousness. Each flash was slightly brighter than the last, and he began to see the faces of the shadowy figures, which only heightened his fear. Just as Stephen was almost out of sight, he caught the glint of golden blond hair.
Stephen’s fear mutated into disgust when Stephen realized what the grunts were. One man stood in front of the girl, pinning her limp body against the loading bay, while he ground his hips against hers. Two other men each held a leg and an arm, spreading them out so their cohort had easy access to what he desired. The men propping the unconscious woman up were encouraging their friend, while the two other men stood a few feet away touching themselves awaiting their turn as if waiting for an open stall in a restroom.
Stephen’s disgust grew as the woman’s legs bounced with each unwanted thrust. The man taking his turn became so aggressive that the ripped panties dangling from her ankle flew off and landed in a small puddle near a drainpipe.
It wasn’t until the man with his cock inside the young woman bent his head down to kiss her neck that Stephen was able to see her face. She looked nothing like any of the women Stephen had been close to in his life, but somehow, he was able to see a part of each of them in her face. It could have been the dim lighting or the beginning of a descent into madness, but as he watched the man devour her neck, the girl’s face began to morph, mimicking the appearance of every woman he’d ever loved and ending with Emily. Even her hair color began to darken and match Emily’s, casting the illusion that he was watching his daughter die. That the exact thing that had taken her from him so many years before was happening all over again.
A tear rolled down his cheek, and the vengeful demon that had been growing within him over the years possessed him once more. Stephen strode toward the men waiting their turn. He no longer tried to conceal his presence, splashing through puddles, and crunching debris underfoot. Even so, by the time the men took notice of him, it was too late. Each took a bullet to the forehead before they even had time to take their hands off their own genitals.
The two shots fired in rapid succession alerted the other men. The one closest to Stephen charged forward and tackled him as he fired another shot. The bullet went wide and struck one of the men as he hurried to pull up his pants. He fell to the ground clutching his leg. Stephen and his assailant hit the pavement side by side. The third man sprinted around the corner and down the alley. Stephen, seeing he was on the verge of escaping, managed to fire his last bullet into the darkness of the alley. While searching for a sign that he’d hit the fleeing man Stephen caught a punch to the jaw, and the man leaped on top of him. With no bullets left, he managed to break free his hand from the man’s grip and pistol whipped his attacker, opening a gash on his cheek. The blow wasn’t enough to knock the man off Stephen, and he quickly wrapped his hands around Stephen’s throat, squeezing with frightening strength.
Stephen flailed his arms frantically, trying to break the man’s grip on his neck, but the man’s strength far surpassed his own. With consciousness slowly fading and blood from the gash on the man’s face falling onto him, Stephen grabbed the man’s head with both hands and plunged his thumbs into his eyes. His eye’s filled with blood and spurted out excess as he shrieked and let go of Stephen’s neck, falling to his side. Clenching his face and howling, he no longer was interested in Stephen.
Stephen got up and walked over to the loading docks in search of something he could use as a weapon. He found a monkey wrench with a red handle leaning up against a garage door. It was caked with dirt and grease from years of use. Exhausted from his struggle with the man lying on the ground and crying tears of blood, Stephen dragged the wrench across the elevated concrete surface of the loading bay. He looked over and saw the wounded man watching in horror and attempting to crawl away as he tried to lift the girls motionless body off of his own.
The metallic scraping seemed to alarm the blinded man, who struggled to get up and run away. He shook his head from side to side, crying out “Please!” tripping over himself in fear.
Stephen swung the wrench so violently that it shattered teeth and broke his jaw in two. The man now lay on his stomach, spitting out shards of broken teeth and blood. Stephen stomped the middle of his back and felt ribs crack. Pinning him to the floor with his foot, Stephen tossed the wrench aside. It landed with a loud clanking sound. He grabbed the man’s arms by the wrists and pulled back with all his strength until he heard two loud pops followed by burbling groans. He was satisfied that he’d dislocated both of his shoulders. The man could do nothing now but lie there in pain as Stephen prepared to finish him off.
Grabbing ahold of his hair from behind, Stephen pulled the man’s head off the asphalt and propped it up by putting the butt of the handle in his mouth, so that it worked almost the same way a kickstand does on a motorcycle. Stephen lifted a leg high in the air and stomped on the back of the man’s skull, sending the wrench through the roof of his mouth and through his brain and colliding at the back of his skull. Stephen felt the metal hit on the back of the man’s skull through the sole of his shoe. The dead man’s head fell to the side, blood from his mouth forming a spreading pool.
Stephen turned his attention to the wounded man who had escaped from under the girl and was trying to limp away. Stephen pulled the wrench out of the dead man’s skull, flinging gore from the handle.
“No, no, no!” The wounded man cried. “Please, man, leave me alone!”
Without saying a word, Stephen swung the wrench, connecting with the knee of the man’s only good leg. The joint broke and he collapsed with a blood-curdling scream. With both legs useless, he attempted to crawl away while Stephen stood behind him with the wrench. With a large thud, Stephen stepped on the back of the man’s shattered knee, holding him in place and causing him to let out an agonizing screech. His cries quickly turned into soft whimpers like a dog that had been chained outside after making a mess in the house. He took some pleasure in seeing that he’d made the wounded man feel as helpless as the woman he and his friends had raped. A glimmer from the corner of his eye caught Stephen’s attention.
He looked over to see the person he’d been doing all this for. She lay on the ground, one leg twisted up underneath her body and the other, a bit scraped up, stretched out. Her torso was partially held up by the wall with her head turned away from him, as if she were looking in that direction. The only part of her that moved was her chest, which rose and fell again ever so gently.
Seeing that the girl still had a chance, Stephen dispensed with torturing the man he’d just paralyzed and instead raised the wrench high above his head and delivered a crushing blow to the back of the man’s skull, killing him instantly.
He dropped the wrench as he watched the life leave the man’s body and rushed over to the unconscious girl. Her shirt had been ripped from the collar, exposing her breasts, and her pants were nowhere to be found. Stephen took off his sweater—he still had on a sleeveless T-shirt underneath—and put it over the young woman. He picked her up and carried her to his car, never once looking back at the corpses he left behind.