The weather change surprised him, and he got soaked walking to his car.

 

            He could not care less. Being wet, being dry, being alive, being dead. What difference does it make anyways when no one cares about you, why would you care for yourself?

 

That is how he thought.

 

It shielded him from everything, but it also depraved him of any parcel of humanity that might have been left intact even after so many years of a truly tough life.

 

But how could anyone really blame him, humanity had rejected him long before he rejected it.

 

            Or at least that is how he felt, he did not feel morally bound to any principles this so-called civilization put forth, because no one had ever applied those to him. How could you refrain from hitting someone when nobody had stopped to think twice before beating you? How could you feel guilty for stealing something when everything you had already been stolen from you?

 

And so, he walked in a path of shallow darkness and crime, perhaps hoping one day things would be better. Perhaps not.

 

            Short with thick black hair and angry sunken eyes he was the kind of man you would see on the news walking in handcuffs to be tried for murder, and who would look in the camera with such hatred and fire in his eyes that everyone who saw him would instantly be wishing him for the death penalty.

 

            In fact, it was the general impression he gave to mostly everybody, that of a dangerous felon. But he thought of himself very differently, he perceived his actions as legitimate and necessary for his own survival. He was merely, in his eyes, a wounded victim of the world desperately trying to stay afloat in a murky sea of people.

 

Any action is justified, when in your mind, your life hangs in the balance.

 

            Thunder was roaring in the black clouded sky as he reached for his keys under the rain. He looked extremely out of place, standing next to his rusted gray Honda with his ragged jeans in this old part of town where the upper-class youngsters mingled with the up-and-coming professionals. He felt like a scarecrow, dressed in soaked rags, seeing them walk off the rain in style with their black umbrellas, ties, and fancy dresses, laughing out in the night on their way to expensive night clubs.

 

            He quietly sat in the car thinking of how he hated them, and as he removed the Beretta from his belt, he thought of how he could have one or two in this thunder without ever being noticed.

 

But it did not quite fit in his agenda, and even though his anger sometimes felt uncontrollable, he was far from impulsive. He drove past them with a slight smile. The grin of gods, the grin men have on their face when they know they have the power of life or death on their neighbors, and would not mind using it.

 

            A power to which thousands of great men and warriors have succumbed throughout history, and of which they never had enough.

 

An unquenchable thirst for the fear in the enemy's eyes. So impossible to extinguish that soon enough everyone turns into a worthy enemy. This kind of addiction turned noble kings into tyrants and honorable warriors into blood-drunken murderers, how could a troubled man like him look past such irresistible power, the sole thing god reserved to himself. He possibly couldn't.

 

If one's hope for love has been repeatedly crushed, then the only option remains to inflict pain and fear on all of those who denied him the one thing every human being needs.

 

And so, he did.

 

            He followed the water line from the old downtown, along the port and under the bridge, all the way to his apartment in the east. He felt much more at ease in this area where he didn't stand out amongst the middle-class construction and factory workers. They wore the same jeans and t-shirts as him, drove the same aged cars, and lived in the same crappy apartments. He didn't hate them as much as he did everyone else, but he didn't push it as far as liking them.

 

He wasn't crazy after all, he very well knew that liking people only gets you betrayed, backstabbed and left in the dust. He had learned this lesson very early in his life.

 

            He pushed the golden key, turned the lock, and slightly opened the front door. He then slipped his fingers down in the shadows behind the door frame and carefully unhinged the tripwire from the pin.

 

He crawled in and shut the door behind him before replacing the wire in place.

 

In the slight moonlight, you could see a translucid fishing line glimmering, all the way to the safety pin of a dark brown fragmentation grenade secured on the wall in a glass jar filled with tiny screws.

 

            The front door was one of many things here not to be touched without permission. After a suspicious glance out the door's tiny window, he went inside and headed straight for his bed. His head was heavy like a giant anvil and he was surprised the bed didn't collapse as he simply fell down onto it. Indolently kicking his shoes off he pulled the covers over his head and fell asleep immediately.

 

            He always did when he was coming back from her office. These sessions were getting progressively more tiring and all he could do afterward was sleep it off. Like he presently was, with his dirty clothes still on, soaking wet from his tenebrous long hair all the way down to his socks.