The Burnt and the Burned

She stared at the fire as it raged through the building, watching embers climb up into the air and flit off into its center.  Blood on her face, hair stuck to her mouth and arm held close to her side, hugging it with the other, metal of gun under her finger tips.  She could smell it, the fire raging like a tempestrial storm that swept through everything and everyone in sight.  It was almost like she was paralyzed for a moment, paralyzed by the chaos, the destruction and the rage that burned inside of her.

Death was a kissing god; a kissing god and he kissed her skin up and down with a warmth that spread through the room.  She felt more like a little girl, that little girl falling from the rooftop and on her way down to the earth, crashing like some little angel into death's cold clammy hands waiting to catch her and take her away from the world.  But somehow she had lived, somehow something changed and instead of meeting death, she lived through it.  Damaged and broken, ripped apart at the foundations of her very self.  Every corner of her was cracked, torn, bruised and split.

She let go of her arm and it dropped to her side limp.  Slowly she raised her other hand with the gun still tightly gripped in it and touched her lip with a finger.  It was split on the left side.  A tongue reached out and touched it, as if making sure it was real.  If anything was real anymore, that was a question she wasn't sure she could answer.  Everything seemed so fake, as if nothing could ever be real again.

The building continued to burn down around her, wooden beams creaking as the fire bit into them with ripping teeth.  She managed to shake off the dumb stare on her face for a moment and realized she needed to get out of the building quickly.  Reaching for her limp arm again, she hugged it close to her chest and took off at a run, dropping the gun to the floor.  It made a heavy sound as it smacked into the cement of the room.

Everything was wrong, suddenly, it was all wrong.  She dodged through open doorways and made her way around piles of burning building.  Finally she reached the fire escape, and climbing down it let go at the last rung, falling to the ground and rolling onto her side.  She looked up at the fire in the windows burning out the building from the inside.  In the distance sirens sounded so distant that they could be anywhere but near here.  But she knew better, soon there would be no way to get out if she didn't run now.

So she did: she ran.  Something had snapped in her a long time ago, and every day after that had been filled with death, dead bodies and blood.  She'd met every kind of monster you could imagine: serial killers, rapists, murderers, drug dealers, power addicts, plain psychos, people up so high they thought they couldn't be reached, politicians, corporate scum, gun runners, anything and everyone.  The solution was easy: several bullets, a burning building a knife here and there, shotguns to the face or chest.  The how was easy.

Dragging herself off the street into a building far enough away to be safe, but close enough to watch the fallout.  She stared out a window, propping herself up to keep her arm from being leaned on.  All those tiny people on the ground trying to stop the fire, trying to put it out.  She closed her eyes and felt her teeth grind together.  For a moment she wasn't sure whether to start crying or start laughing.  So she did both, tears rolling down her cheeks from tightly closed eyes as she laughed so loud she couldn't even hear her own thoughts, so hard that her head began to hurt.

There were a string of bloody, gruesome murders that ran up and down both the east and west coat of the US.  And she was the cause of all of them.  They couldn't even figure that out, couldn't piece together the tiny little puzzle she left behind.  The blood on the walls with the samely worded cryptic messages.  Or perhaps they simply didn't want to believe that it could all possibly be the work of a single deranged lunatic.  Maybe it stung their egos to think a single person was out witting all of them, leaving evidence right in front of their faces and yet they still couldn't catch her.

Cain had been a good teacher, too good of a teacher and she had been much more than an excellent student.  In fact she had been so good that the moment, the very second the time came when she finally leaped over that ledge, the edge, the one that separated some odd sense of justice, that odd sense of what was right and wrong - from the point where you could never come back from turning into a monster.  She'd gotten so good at it, that she even managed to stop Cain from killing her.  She had no illusions that he had stopped looking for her.

He'd said something along the lines of, "To get rid of the monsters, you have to become one of them.  Bigger and badder than all the other monsters until none of them are left except you.  That the true monster knows that innocent people and naive people are too easy, and that the true monsters only kills the other monsters because anything less is ridiculous, is pointless."

But somewhere along the way - she had lost it.  Somewhere along the way it had become anyone and anything that got in her way.  No clean, concise wiping monsters out of the world one by one.  Just a big bloody mess all over the place with no one left behind to clean it up.  And as the building burned to the ground, the twelve in six months.  She knew she could never go back again.

Cynthia could never go back to the poor girl who had fallen from a building.  The girl Cain had paid the hospital bills for, whom every day he had come to check on for three months while she lay in a coma.  Whom he had taken into his care and raised, giving her the most normal of a childhood anyone could possibly have.  He'd never hurt her and he'd been like a father to her.  But the day she almost died, the day she should have died, something had already broken in her.  And she knew he knew, when she looked into his eyes after waking from the coma: she knew he'd known.  But he'd taken care of her anyway.

One of these days it would all catch up to her.  But not today, not today as the tears rolled down her face like rain running down a window in the middle of a storm.  They tasted like salt as they ran over her lips and she lay, leaning on the window sill a while longer.  The sprained wrist and broken arm were nothing, nothing at all, compared to the inside of her.