ORLANDO HATED CROWDS. He hated them, hated them, hated them with a passion. Maybe it was because of all the lives he’d taken, or maybe it was because of the lives that had been taken from him, but he no longer felt comfortable around groups of people. He had absolutely nothing in common with them.
Other people had lives.
He no longer had one.
Sure, he saw and interacted with students and faculty at the university, but this was the aspect of the job he enjoyed the least. Most of his coworkers thought he was eccentric. “He thinks he’s better than us,” some of them would say. His students, on the other hand, saw him as coldly academic; a slightly younger version of the stuffy old codger who has nothing left to hold on to but pride and an ever-slipping grasp on the subject which he has taug
