Notes From The Underground

CHAPTER TWENTYSIX

I've never thought too much about death. I mean, I always figured I would live fast and die young. It always seemed my fate, my gut feeling always had told me so. I never believed I would live to adulthood, and yet here I am. I'm a little less than a year away from being twenty-one, I have a three year old son, and a job, a fiance. I seem to be living the typical adult life. Why aren't I dead yet?

Maybe it was a good thing I wasn't dead. Maybe God had some otherworldly plan for me. Perhaps I'd believe that if I had any sort of faith that God does exist in the first place. I wish I was religious, I could use it as a cop out to excuse my actions and die peacefully with the comfort of thinking I would go to heaven for eternal bliss. Oh how I wish, instead I am trapped in the knowledge of not knowing what may come after death. I would prefer to have faith, to know what would happen once I died. Or, think I know. 

I've never seen death in real life. Sure, I had seen it in films and read about it in magazines and short stories, heard about it on the news. But seeing an actor who's still alive covered in fake blood, or hearing about a murder or a suicide, or even reading it and picturing it in one's head, is far different than seeing it before your own two eyes. To have the image burned into your memory, forever there, never to leave.

I lived 20 years before I saw it happen for myself. I could have gone my entire life without seeing someone's life taken, seeing someone take their final breath, watching the light drain from their eyes. I could have gone my whole life without the sound of a gunshot ringing through my ears, without knowing and seeing who took the life of another. Yet, here I was forced to witness it.

I go into work everyday. This much you know. I sit down, get high, hang out with my only friends before I walk around town delivering drugs and talking to various workers in the underground. I do small work, but it pays well and I made good friends. It just never occurred to me, the realization of just who it was I was keeping as company.

I walked into the lounge, as soon as the door opened a gunshot rang through the concrete room, a body thudding to the ground. Peach was sat on Brian's lap, his arm extended, his finger lingering over the trigger still. His face was emotionless, his expression was as if he had done it a hundred times before. I knew he had killed, I knew. I just had never seen it, or wanted to believe it. I guess this confirmed it.

I stepped forward slowly, my shoes soaking in blood as I walked over to him. My shoe prints were stained on the concrete floors as I walked, sitting down next to them. I kept my face still, neutral. Whoever just died wasn't my problem, wasn't my fault. While it was unsettling to see someone die, it didn't matter. I didn't know this man. He was twitching, still bleeding out heavily on the floor, the puddle under him getting bigger. Finally, his eyes fluttered shut, his last breath being exhaled, before all that made him living was taken away from him. He looked so young too, 24 at most. Such a pity.

It made me realize how cold I had become towards others. I cared so deeply about those I kept around, about those who I considered myself to love. Yet, this stranger had just died in front of me and I felt nothing. I felt empty, uneasy, but empty nonetheless. This man was no one to me.

"He lost the game." Brian chuckled, tossing his gun to the side of the couch and wrapping his arms around Peach's waist. "Once you lose something, you may never gain it back." I chuckled at his words, looking over at him and narrowing my eyes.

"He lost his life."

"He was dead before I shot him." Brian brushed me off.

He seemed to have no remorse, he knew what he had done. Maybe because he had done it so often, the guilt had subsided. Once you do this so much you never remember your victims. Perhaps, when you quit killing their faces start to come back, the way they smelled, the look in their eyes before you took their life. Once a killer, always a killer, so Brian said. I now understand why. Well, I have a hypothesis.