Angel of Death

“Let me get that for you, Mrs Gergesty.”

“Oh Duncan, you’re too kind. When I finish here, you’re my replacement?”

“Mrs Gergesty, you know I don’t want that. If I do that, who’ll stop the office groceries from falling out of your arms? Currently, I can help people and not just sit behind a desk. Running a counselling practice in New York has never interested me, just giving people the help they need, that’s all I want.”

“This world needs more people like you, young man; making a mark in your early twenties is really impressive. I keep telling my grandson about you, telling him to learn from you. Instead, he is always on his iPad.”

“You’re grandson is only 11. Don’t worry, if you’re anything to go by he’ll be fine.”

Their walk concludes as they enter the lunch room.

“Where would you like the groceries?”

“Just on the table dear.”

“Would you like some help putting them away?”

“No, that’s okay, you have a client soon anyway. She’s another hurting walk-in; I think the poor youngster has been mistreated. She was very worried about the cost. We reassured her that all of our cases are pro-bono. I then explained to her what that meant.”

“Should I be working with her, from what you’re implying, a man is the worst thing for her currently.”

“No, you’re the best we have. But you’re right, take one of the students - Lexie. She’s bright and learning fast.”

“I’ll get her to do most of the talking, I’ll give her advice when needed.”

With the afternoon sun cascading into Duncan’s small office window, his girlfriend gracefully ambles in.

“I’m always impressed by the number of awards you have. They completely cover your office,” Ava exclaims.

“Thanks, yet I still can’t seem to help everyone. Why not? We had this girl, not 16, come in this morning and she’s been-”

Ava’s soothing voice flows across the room, “You knew that, before taking this job. You knew that some people couldn’t be helped. Yet you took it anyway because that’s the kind of person you are. Now, remember that I’m going to my sister’s place tonight, so I won’t get back until tomorrow. It’s Thursday, so you’ll be going to the soup kitchen tonight?”

“Yeh, so that will help me to feel better.”

“Good, I love you Duncan!”

“Love you too!”

Ava kisses Duncan and strolls out to her car.

Walking home through the night-darkened streets. Duncan’s joyful face moves in and out of visibility from the widely spread orange streetlights.

His smile collapses as he turns the corner. The repetitive New York apartment buildings frame the horrific crime unfolding. The quiet street amplifies its vulgar nature, the vulnerable cries inflame his protective instinct. He starts to run towards the despicable display of evil, the woman screams again. The man slaps her across the face, grabs her arm tighter and continues to pull her into his car.

“Come on b****. I want to give you a good time. Stop squirming, this doesn’t just have to be fun for me.”

Duncan, infuriated by the man’s obscenely vile nature, runs faster than he’d ever run before. The woman screams again, the man’s hand raises in preparation. Duncan bellows, distracting him. He blasts his clenched fist into the unsuspecting jaw, the man falls back, letting go of the woman.

“RUN! DON’T LOOK BACK!”

Duncan advances to the writhing man on the ground, balled in pain. The screams of the man stagger out of his disjointed mouth as Duncan slams his boot into the man’s ribs, the sound of breaking bones fills the dark and silent street. A smile shimmers along Duncan’s face as he sits on the man’s broken ribs, screams turning to gurgles as blood fills the man’s throat. Twisting his upper body around so that the maximum amount of force would be delivered from his fist to the man’s broken face, Duncans rains down blows, his expression growing hard. The man’s face caves in, his groans turn into soft echoes of whimpers. The man lays still, yet Duncan persists. Yelling out the hatred, the desire for justice burning within him all the while pommeling the man’s face.

Duncan stands up, attempting to find his hands under the gloves of blood that adorned him. He looks down, seeing a soup where the man’s face used to be. A twisted smile returns to his face, growing larger and larger. A perverted joy rushes through his being, shattering the fragile mirror of his morality.

“F***, this is power!”

Realisation overwhelms Duncan, his eyes grow wide in terror. His hands shake in panic. His face churns as he looks down again. Horror engulfs his eyes. He looks to his quivering hands, still dripping in blood. His contorting face remains in chaos.

“No, no, no!”

Duncan stumbles back. His breathing intensifies as he runs the remainder of his journey home.

Fumbling with the key in haste, he slams his door as he dashes to the bathroom. Water splashes onto his shirt as he drowns his hands, scrubbing fiercely in the sink, yelling in frustration as the blood persists.

“No. I-I couldn’t have!”

Tears flow down his face as his back slides down the cold wall onto the ground. His face burying into his knees.

“That’s not me, I’m a good person,” he says shakily, attempting a weak smile. The perverted facsimile of a smile cascades into a broken sob, a barrage of tears slides down Duncan’s cheeks.

Pulling the black cloth over his face, aligning the holes so that his vision remains unimpaired. Acceptance clothes Duncan’s body as he prepares for another violent and death-ridden night. Duncan knows there is evil in this world, he works with the results of its handiwork every day through his clientele of broken people. He always deals with the aftermath, now he’s stopping the pain before it transpires. He is fixing the world that some benevolent creator has neglected. Some papers call him “The Dangerous Vigilante”, others name him an unsung hero stopping violence, drug gangs, rape and other twisted perversions. But to him, he is the only light fighting the darkness; as one paper so correctly proclaims, he had become the Angel of Death.

Pulling off the bloody cloth veiling his face and pushing it deep into his briefcase, he walks up the stairs to his apartment. Looking down, he scowls at his bloodstained black jeans, a result of the night’s activities. Wiping ferociously, the stain merely spreads as fresh blood continues to flow, courtesy of a stealthy laceration left behind by the whisper of a blade’s deadly dance. Product of a virtuoso of combat, beyond the realm of mere street brawlers, with dexterity beyond expectation.

The ridges of his brow deepen as his unsettling thoughts claw their way back to that ominous encounter, weaving a web of unease and foreboding around him. In the past 3 years, he’d been hurt, but his determination and growing skill always allowed him to exterminate nefarious individuals. That time and those low-level thugs had allowed him to perfect his dark craft. However, this encounter forced him to retreat. The experienced fighter remained alive, possibly still causing havoc. He throws his worries off with a shudder. Attempting to numb out the pain so that she wouldn’t notice his fresh wounds, he continues up the stairs. Ava couldn’t know; if she knew, she could be in danger, and what she thought of him would shatter and crumble, leaving their relationship in ashes; the only thing tethering him to sanity would collapse.

Pushing these depressing thoughts out of his mind, he walks down the hallway, his soft shoes making barely a sound in the mute corridor. The apartment building is always frozen in the darkest hours of the night.

After the customary use of the apartment key, Duncan opens the door to his safe haven. As the door swings open, an acrid smell invades his perception, causing him to stumble under its strength. Fear encapsulates his heart as he sees a pile of blankets in the middle of the living room, blood cascading from something underneath. Charging over, the vile stench attempting to hold him down under its ever growing-will. His body starts to shake under his dread. He grabs one side of the blankets, the once smooth fabric feeling coarse in his hands. They fly off the object as he casts them aside. His knees slam against the tiles as he crumbles down. Salt-drenched suffering flows down the contorted expression of a broken man. Duncan’s vision strobes in and out. Sharp beaks claw at his chest, knives dance across his back. His mind dragged through a field of broken glass.

Duncan starts punching the grey-tiled floor. Twisting his upper body around so that the maximum amount of force would be delivered from his fist to the ground, Duncan rains down blows, his expression growing distorted. Eventually, his knuckles collapse, the bones pounded to dust, the pain flares across his body from the activity. Yet it is merely a drop of blood in an ocean of torment. He gazes upon the black and crimson mass again. He searches, his eyes darting around. He finds what he is searching for. He reminds himself what it had looked like before, but it causes another onslaught of fiery tears. What was now beaten, stabbed and burnt, used to be soft, kind and joyful. Her face had been that of sunshine, warm and life-giving. Her now singed hair once flowed down her back like bright rays of light. Her stunningly emerald eyes had filled any room she entered with a natural peace. Now, she lay there, in a clump of flesh and blood. Her face, almost unrecognisable. In front of Duncan lay the remains of his beloved Ava. Wails of deep mourning fly around the apartment, never ceasing and always accompanied by a torrential downpour of melancholic rain.

A ringtone reverberates around the room, the wooden coffee table amplifying the vibrations. Finding the phone, his finger moving sluggishly, he answers.

“Ah, you must be the Angel of Death, it’s a pleasure to finally meet you,” the smug voice says.

Duncan replies in a hoarse voice dripping with rage “Who are you?!”

Ava’s screams emanate from the phone. His heart fractures into a cloud of pulverised fragments, scattered across the ground like sorrowful dust.

The screams stop, the smug voice continues “You have seen and heard of what I can do. Tonight you attempted to stop one of my men. You have irritatingly been doing this for too long. Your brash heroism is bad for business. So I sent a message. You could have stopped fighting my men earlier, you could have come home and saved her. Her long and torturous death is on your hands. To think that her last thought was that you lied to her for years, that the one person she loved most was a bloodthirsty slaughterer whilst feigning to be a knight in shining armour. That must’ve crushed her for she died much easier than we thought, only lasting 3 hours. She trusted you with everything, in return you gave her a long, tortuous and lonely death; what a savagely deep betrayal.”

A rage beyond all understanding, a roaring inferno far eclipsing anything Duncan had ever felt before encapsulates him. His body continuously trembling from the sheer weight of his wrath and agonising anguish. Duncan’s eyes grow hard and an angered shell grows around them. His face describes his life plummeting to a pure barbaric lust for blood.

Duncan’s quiet and slow voice only amplifies his passionate loathing, “No pit in hell, no lap of a mother, no army, no love or religion, no weapon or shield, will stop me from slowly carving you into pieces. You will die, nothing you can do will stop me. No god can protect you nor the might of any human. For you are a dead man walking.”