Back in the Bright Ages, they used to have a saying: “Where there’s life, there’s hope.”
As it turns out, they were dead wrong.
*****
It was a pretty typical night for me, nothing out of the ordinary. I’d spent a few hours earning my pay, standing around looking tough while the hired help loaded up some crate into an armored truck. No clue what was in the crate - I’m not paid to ask questions, and in my line of work, the less you know, the better. Wouldn’t want the boss to start thinking I was aiming for his spot.
Whatever the delivery was, it went off without a hitch, which meant I’d done my job right. You didn’t hang around in the streets at night longer than necessary, not unless you had a death wish, so I’d booked it out of there as soon as the truck took off, keeping to the shadows as I headed back to the compound. Hadn’t gone two blocks before I felt it - that telltale tingling on the back of my neck, the one that only ever signals trouble. Like I said, a normal night.
Thanks to my highly tuned survival instinct (or maybe just the years of training), I was pretty sure there was something out there in the darkness, something following me, just out of sight. Or more likely, someone, since the worst monsters in this world are definitely human.
I took a few more steps without changing my pace - no point in letting my stalker know he’d been spotted before I had a plan to take him out. And now that I knew he was there, it took me all of two seconds to pinpoint his position - apparently, Mr Skulk-in-the-dark was a mouth breather with a tendency to shuffle his feet. This was gonna be easy, maybe even too easy to be fun. Which sort of sucked; it had been way too long since I’d had a decent challenge in a fight, since I’d danced close enough to death to feel completely alive .
Easing my hands out of my pockets, I slowed down, coming to a halt at the corner of an intersection and peering down each street, sending out the age old signs of someone who is totally lost, and making sure to keep my back to the sounds behind me. In other words, giving whoever was out there the perfect opportunity to take me out.
And of course, he took the bait. I heard his footsteps pick up as he moved towards me, hurrying in for what probably looked like an easy kill, and I added stupid to my description of this guy. This wasn’t just going to be easy, it was child’s play. Literally. I could have taken someone this dumb when I was ten.
The fight (if you could even call it that) lasted less than five seconds - just long enough for me to spin around, catch the arm that was coming down at me with some sort of wicked looking cleaver, flip the guy around, and throw him to the ground, sending the cleaver flying into a nearby stairwell. He landed with a nasty pop and a scream, as his shoulder ripped its way out of the socket, and that was that.
I didn’t kill him; it would have been a waste of effort. He was a dead man the minute his shoulder gave, and I didn’t have to do anything about it except leave him there. The street kids were already creeping out of the alleys as I walked away, ragged and hungry, with bricks and pipes clutched tightly in their hands. He may have been stupid, but he went out like a man, not pleading or screaming. The only sound was a single crunching noise, then the rustle of his body being dragged away.
I didn’t look back, doing the best I could to ignore the scene behind me. It wasn’t that I felt sorry for him - death waits for us all, and he died under the same rule he lived by, the rule we all lived by - kill, or be killed. May the best man win.
And tonight, I was the best man. Tomorrow, it could be me on the ground.
That was why I never looked back, not once, not at any of the hundreds of men I’d killed or left to die. No one wants to see their future laid out before them in bloody detail, and I definitely could do without a gory reminder of what was surely waiting for me down the road. So I moved on, striding down the dismal alleys of a once-great city, watching and waiting, for the next fight, for the next challenge, for the next monster who wanted me dead. Whenever it came, I’d be ready. And they’d be dead.
*****
Welcome to my world - dark, terrifying, and full to the brim of all sorts of evil.
I’ve never known it any other way.
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