Red Puddles

Prologue

     Blood. It was everywhere. On her clothes, her hands, her legs, even tiny dots on her nose. But it wasn't hers. No, of course, the blood wasn't hers. She stared at the body blankly, waiting for a movement, a breath, a twitch, even. Any viable sign of life, really. Just for a moment, of course. She had to make sure nobody stumbled into the wrong place at the wrong time. It was only 9:16 PM, the time when people would normally be out and about.

  She looked around, ensuring nobody was wandering outside the windows. And then, she did the unexpected. She grinned. Wide and cheerful. She smiled wider, thinking of the pleas her victim had pleaded, the tears that had been wept. She threw her head back and yet again did the unexpected. She laughed. It wasn't a typical laugh, mind you. No, it was a psychotic one. A kind of laugh that would make your skin crawl, make you shudder, and want to run away. But that's what she wanted. She loved being able to have people run away from her. Finding her victims made it so much more fun. She laughed louder but abruptly stopped.

  She had heard something. Of course, she could be losing her mind. But, was that possible? I'm already insane, she thought and laughed some more at the thought. She stopped, looked at the body again, and groaned. She paced the tarp beneath the body, where all the blood had been. It hadn't been a planned murder, but she was always prepared, keeping a tarp on the floor of her apartment instead of a rug. Her mother never questioned it, as she wasn't home enough to notice. She was careful when pacing, making sure she didn't walk on the ground. She didn't need to clean up the blood her shoes would leave, along with herself and the body. That was just too much work, and she only had so much time left. She stopped pacing, bent down to the body's level, and smirked. You had no chance, she thought as she stroked his cheek.

   She had no idea who the person was, but she knew that whoever they were, they had been a man around her age. She'd forgotten how old she was, at this point. With her life- the daily task of taking lives whenever she had been let out, otherwise being trapped in an unknown space, unaware of anything around her- her age was the last of her worries. She'd been created for one thing, and that thing was to kill. It fulfilled her hunger. Made her content. Her fantasies had always been sadistic, in a way. Picturing death and wondering what it felt like, as well as what it felt like to have someone's life in her hands and to take it. Look at me now, she thought. Such an improvement. Going from getting kicked and punched to doing the kicking and punching!

  She snapped back to reality, remembering the mess she had to clean up. She groaned yet again and got to work.