THE EMPATH

MAD PASSION

"In another developing story, the police have discovered the body of a city cop in an abandoned building. From what the Nation News has gathered, the body of one Stanley Junior was found tied up, with a note stuffed in his stomach. The cop who is believed to have died from an overdose is believed to have been abducted on his way home. As of the moment, the police are still working on understanding the message from the note which they are yet to disclose..." I had grown to love the morning news especially when they involved me directly. It felt nice to know that I had all the answers the police and the media were so desperately looking for. I would have loved to keep watching, but Oscar kept on tuning the channels and reminding me that I needed to sleep. To get him off my hair, I had to go to bed and after a short while, I fell asleep. My guardian was starting to really grow weary of my behavior. For all he knew, the work of a protector was to keep people safe from the supernatural world. He had never known one to interfere with normal human-to-human problems. According to him, I was supposed to be going after the cleaning crew and leaving the humans to deal with their greed and crap. However, he had also never known a protector who was an Empath too. It was his first time dealing with a special case and so far he had no idea how to go about it. After I fell asleep, he took me to his favorite training spot, a world where everything was perfect. There he tried to make me understand that it was not my duty to protect humanity from its stupidity.

He had a good point and I would have followed his teachings. However, when I asked him what I was supposed to do about the pain the human world caused me, he had no solution to offer. All he could tell me was that he had never encountered a case like mine before and that he needed to think about it deeply. In the meantime, all he had to ask of me was to stop enjoying killing so much as it scared him. He left me to my beauty sleep and while I was at it, I dreamed of the previous night. I saw myself writing the words, "Come, let the sun shine on you, bring it to the light. And the truth shall set you free, or I will keep forcing it on you" it was a message directed to Eddy. Oscar thought that that was just me trying to give Eddy a chance to right his wrongs. However, what he didn't know, was the fact that I had been in Eddy's head and I knew there was no way in God's green earth he could agree to that and so, the whole thing was just but guide to push the police towards finding the truth and warning Eddy that I was coming for him. For the last two kills, I had fed the police the truth on a silver platter and I figured it was time they went out looking for it themselves. I was sure that we were just beginning to have fun and that they would have more and more puzzles going their way. It was high time I trained them. Since I had not slept well for the last three weeks or so, I was asleep all day and a couple of hours into the night. I almost missed my next appointment which was an important part of the truth-seeking puzzle.

I got up at eight and realized that I had no time to make the last-minute plan check. You know, when one is not fully prepared, a mistake is always bound to happen. That was one of the nights that I made a mistake that would almost cost me my life. Tiger was my next victim. As with all the others, I had taken my time to find out all there was to know about him. I knew that he was almost thirty-nine years old, he was a father of three kids whom he had abandoned. I also knew that he had been in seven different relationships since his divorce two years ago and amongst the seven young ladies, only three were accounted for while the other four were considered missing. I had traced down the three who were still alive and one of them was in a coma from what the doctors said was caused by head trauma. She was believed to have been hit by a car as she was walking home from work two months ago. The other two were in hiding as they feared Tiger would go after them since they knew about his dirty business. My trials to talk to them had failed. I would have loved to record their stories just in case and so I was still working on meeting them in person. As for the four that were missing, Oscar assured me that they would never be found and I knew what he meant so I didn't have to bother looking for them. After weighing the evidence I had against my scratchy cat friend, I had concluded that his, were sins punishable with death and I was on my way to deliver my verdict.

The night was a little bit more chill than the previous ones and I had to put on an extra heavy jacket. The last thing I would have wanted was to sneeze or cough at the wrong time as that would complicate my otherwise simple plan. I knew Tiger was stronger than he looked and as usual, I was not looking for a fight or a confrontation. I loved my job quick, swift, and clean. The g**g had so far not known that someone knew about their new warehouse so they had not gone looking for another yet. I parked my van in a different spot just in case one of them had seen it the previous day. I waited in the van while chewing on cashew nuts. By then, I knew turning on the radio was no use as Oscar would end up messing up with it. "Here he comes," Oscar said. The excitement he had the previous day was gone after he had watched me kill Junior in the most cruel way possible and the fact that I even smiled while doing it. He feared me a little and I could tell he was wondering what I had planned to do with Tiger. I reached into my bag, got my protective gear, and finally reached for the syringe containing the tranquilizer ready to go. That was the moment I realized that in my hurry to get out of the house before I was too late, I didn't remember to fill the damn thing up. Oscar saw it too and he couldn't help but wonder. "So, does that mean the big cat gets to breathe for another day?" he has asked. I was never good at canceling plans.

"No, it means that we have to improvise," I answered ad made my way out of the van. Tiger was a little bit more vigilant than usual and I knew there was no surprising him. I walked to him from the front as I figured he would be more at ease with that. However, he reached into his belt and took out his g*n. I could tell that he had already fixed the silencer and he was ready to shoot. I couldn't show him that I had seen all that so I kept on walking up to him hoping that he was not going to shoot. I could smell his fear from a distance which was how I knew that any strange movement would see me turned into a sieve. "Hey men, I seem to be lost or something, do you by any chance have a clue as to where 3760 Faraja street is?" I knew by talking up front would put him at ease and make him think that I was scared of him which would in turn boost his confidence a little. I watched as he slowly pushed his g*n back to its place. "Well, you are not all that lost, you will just take a left at that building, walk straight for like ten meters and take another left. Are you new in town?" he asked then showing interest in my old countryside clothes. "Yes, just visiting my girlfriend. You won't believe me if I tell you that I have been wandering through the city for the last four hours, asked the directions from five different people and somehow always ended up even more lost after the explanation," I said and faked an awkward laugh. "I am sorry mate, it happens to the best of us," he tapped me on the shoulder and I seized my opportunity. I pulled his hand, knocked him hard on the chest, and dropped him to the ground. I was first, but he was tactical. Before long we were wrestling on the ground and I had to play my illusion card to overpower him.

After knocking him out and loading him into the van, I had to go back to the street to clean up the blood and check whether I may have dropped a shred of evidence. I couldn't afford to have the police on my a*s again. I had a different plan when it came to Tiger and the old building was not in the picture. The place was guarded seeing to that it had been a scene of crime twice in two weeks. Tiger's sins were a little more complicated and making a perfect staging was going to be tough. I didn't know of any abandoned places in the city, but I knew about the stadium that was being built about two and a half miles from where I had picked Tiger up. I had to keep him tied up tightly at the back of the van since I had no idea how long he would be unconscious. I couldn't afford to fight him again especially since he had already managed to give me a black eye and a bleeding knee. I got to the stadium only a few minutes after midnight. I didn't have much time to waste so I just went straight to work. I poured cold water on Tiger's face and he got up like a wounded tiger, all angry and ready for a comeback, the tight rope on his legs and his own handcuffs on his hand, however, stopped him and the best he could do was roar. I presented him with four choices. The first one, was me putting him down on the field and running him over, the second one was me shooting him in the head with his own g*n, and the third one, and my personal favorite was to cut his throat open. He spent the next few minutes howling curse words at me while assuring me that I would never get away with all of that, but he eventually shut up and started bargaining. I was sharpening the military Knife Robert had given me and as usual, I found myself unconsciously enjoying every bit of the blood-rushing moment.

I could feel my toes moving in excitement, my hands felt a little bit uneasy and my heart was awfully pounding from the thrill. I had missed the smell of blood and just imagining what I was about to do made my mouth water a little. Oscar was saying something about how I looked scary while my guardian was trying to get me to cool off but all I heard was the sound of the file on the blade. I slowly felt myself zooming off until all around it was just me, Tiger, and the blade I was then holding with my right arm. "You have three seconds to decide or I will go on ahead and do it my way," I said with a soft voice almost as if I was talking to a little kid. Everything that was happening around me felt more like a dream and it felt like I was watching myself from outside my body. "Tiger was still talking about giving me money and talking to Eddy so that he would put me in the team amongst other sweet deals but all I could see was his angry veins pumping full of blood and I wanted to watch them bleed. The three seconds were over and I pushed him off the van. I then followed him and slashed his neck with one quick slice while he was still talking. It felt good to hear him beg before, but it felt a hundred times much better to watch him try to talk with blood clogging his throat. I let him bleed out in a bucket that I had purposely brought for that moment until his body was nice and dry. I then went on to put some acid in it and all the blood was gone. The next step was to make sure that I had dipped his legs in the acid until all that was left of him was his waist up. I had brought a classy office chair still wrapped with polythene and I set him on it. I opened his tummy up, put a note and four pictures, and then sew it shut. I dressed him in a clean white shirt and a blue tie.

After I was done with all that, I cleaned up the place, packed my tools, took a picture as usual, and drove home. There was no need to call the police as I knew the stadium workers would be there early in the morning and they would do it for me. By the time I got to the house, I was having a throbbing headache from all the yelling in there. My guardian was furious with my actions and the fact that I had totally disregarded our earlier agreement. I had tried to explain to him that I could not help the things I did the moment right before I was about to take a life but he wouldn't get any of that. He believed I was doing it because I loved to and he explained to me that that was how every destroyer began. Oscar, on the other hand, thought that I was going too far and he suggested that I had to take a step back. The two were killing me and I wished there was a way to get rid of them. At the moment though, I had a black eye to put ice on and a wounded knee to clean and cover. I also needed a long thorough shower to relax and after that, I had to force myself to eat even though I didn't feel like it. It was already morning and I turned on the TV. I couldn't afford to miss the breaking news.