The Killer - dead stranger ending

Leaves barely crunched as she joined me at my side as we walked swiftly away from the target house.
"Beautiful." I muttered. She reached her gloved hand over and grasped mine affectionately.

"I knew it would be...I pick the best houses..." Her voice rose slightly, the volume almost yellow. Jami had a
habit of getting excited after a target. She had a horrible habit of getting cocky...not arrogance, but rather a kind of emanating certainty.

And that kind of presumptious confidence, that false security upset me terribly. I was well aware that hubris was alone
capable of destroying the greatest of heros-- even those who wore gloves.

"You were right honey, but come now, let us make flight into this night and leave this place. That house was small and tight.
Such close quarters is like removing one grape from the stem, its impossible to do so without shaking the other grapes."
I let her hand drop back to her side, and quickened my pace to show her that i wasn't fucking around.

"No one saw you though..you gave the 'relax signal'. We conquered another one...what's this?" She had caught up to me, and her
hand had fallen to my cargo pocket.

"A souvenier, baby." I said quietly, as we crossed the street. We had parked the car a good half mile away on the
side of a back road, discreetly out of view from any main streets or residential homes.

"A souvenier? You took something? What the fuck! You know I hate it when you do that shit...we're not thieves.." Her voice
was approaching yellow volume. Not loud, but close enough to unacceptable that I was uncomfortable.

"Lower your voice, babe. I know we're not thieves, we're fucking professionals. This is nothing of value, only--what's it
called? It has emotional value to me?" I turned to Jami as our car came into view, obscurred by looming trees and darkness.

"Sentimental value? I thought we're just having fun."

"Yes-sentimental value...this is a kind of trophy, and we are having fun, but now we can remember our conquests in this foul year of America." I rambled, and was getting close to yellow volume.

"The taking of trophies from the battlefield has been practiced through out human history, demonstrating the dominance over the defeated. The Ottomans cut fifteen thousand ears off the Famagustans." We reached the car. We quietly pulled open the doors, and then slowly let them shut, as we had practiced hundreds of times before. I looked into the mirrors, then started the car and quickly went into drive.

*****************************


Mornings, to me, are always such an apocalyptic time. I've been an insomniac since my teenage years, when I'd lay awake, terrified mostly of everything. The origin and destination of the universe was a troubling notion. Then it became the preoccupation with other people, and how they would view me, how they would interpret myself. Vanity. But I learned not to hate the inevitable.

I haven't learned how to sleep more than 5 hours a night though.

And it would bother me so much, laying awoke as Jami slept peacefully beside me, when early morning light would pour through my blinds, and the cars and trucks would roar down the lonely road loudly in the morning. Heading to work, or whatever it is normal people do early in the morning. Whatever it is they do to justify their existence.

Jami awoke and saw me sitting wide eyed awake in the chair by the window. The shades were half drawn, so I could watch the traffic move below. I didn't know what time it was, but cars were zooming in both directions, although it was still early enough for the sun to be split in a red haze across the summer sky.

"Babe?" She asked, sleep stuck in her throat.

"..I'm here, honey..."

"Can't sleep?" She asked me like the sugar on my cereal.

"No,i just...can't understand this." Struggling for the words. Gasping for them like a swimmer's breath. My leg was shaking nervously, and I felt as though I was definitely yellow.

"What... hon?" Sitting up a little, her hair flows like a gold river in the early morning light. Her soft skin looks so dark in the early morning, she looks so naked, like a child, from her sleep that i feel truly connected with her. Our innocent nakedness joins us at the hip, like the two original youths in the garden of eden.

"Is this what the real world does? Do they do this every morning? Even when i'm not looking--they do this each morning. Why do they bother? Whey do they squander their time, their resources, their being, on stupid shit like this? They shuffle back and forth everyday, huh?"

She's stopped listening a little now, as she sometimes does when I ramble at inconvenient times. The connection is broken, the plug is pulled. Someone has flicked a switch somewhere, and the divinity is gone. She's just a naked blonde girl laying in my expensive bamboo sheets, and I'm just a half crazed lunatic looking out a window during rush hour morning traffic.

"..s'alright, hun. They're not hurting anyone." Her eyes are closed, and after a while she's breathing in a slow, steady rhythm of sleep. Unguarded and unaware in her slumber, i slowly walk over to her. I stand above her, watching her peacefully rest. I envy her ability to leave it all behind to those of us in the world of the waking. I'm jealous. I'm red.

She's wrong. They're hurting themselves. And by that extension, they're hurting me.

I can't help but feel angry and irrelevant. I wondered if I went and got myself a job some place near the city, if I went out and joined the rat race, would I feel better. What if I had to wake up at a certain time almost everyday, and shuffle out the door to the highways like an elephant to die, would I be able to sleep each night? Would I pass for normal?

I sat back down by the window and smoked a cigarette. Watching the traffic crawl by below, horns blasting and radios murmuring bad news. I smiled a bit, thinking of how nothing made Jami happier than moving around furniture in a stranger's home in the dead of the night. No stock market, sports league, or educational degree could touch that simplicity.

I felt a little better, being able to laugh at the rat race. After a while I lay down next to my naked girl and smiled. I was feeling green.


*********************************

I felt Jami smile from her place in the shadows. Her athletic legs moved silently, her breath coming out in slow mist in defiance of the chill of the night. Avoiding the street lamps, adrenaline kept us going. Purpose kept us moving. A dog howled somewhere, and I nodded. I had learned long ago that not everything had a reason. But everything had a purpose.

As we reached the crest of the hill, our target came into view. The silent moon provided a nice spotlight as we starred at the gaping eyes of the windows below.

We had driven past the home many times on this side of town, and I couldn't help but think what it would look like from the inside. Completely confident that we were invisible, that we walked with the shadows, I joined my girl in front of the massive structure. We embraced, and our tongues danced in the meeting of our lips, the taste of blue eagerness on our breaths.

Around the back to a carefully manicured lawn, we carefully found a window as to not set off any motion sensored lights. I produced a screw driver and removed a screen from a window, careful not to bend the plastic or mark the sill. Once the window was up, I entered first.

After an unknown amount of time, I struggled back across the grass, feeling red. Each step was imprinted in the soft ground. In silent disappointment, I reassured myself that I was unhurt. The surprised occupant-his face a mask of light sleeping comedy- had put up a minor fight which I could hardly recall. I remember his form at the stairway, and turning to find Jami already gone. I scrambled to the road, my eyes wide trying to find her.

Approaching the street from the south, I felt the night groan, as though the divine had exhaled. The morning rise was already on the horizon, the night now tainting a purple almost matching the mess on my arms.

Close to the car, I crossed the street out of habit to avoid crunching on dead leaves. Autumn's silent dance with death was a constant, bleak alarm always at hand to betray my presence. As I stepped towards the road, I froze, hearing foot steps. A constant pattern rapidly fired as someone ran towards me. I turned, and saw a female sprinting through the dead leaves.

"Jami!" I hissed.

The woman froze, startled. Settling down reasonably, she hesitantly turned towards me.

"I'm sorry...you scared me!"

"Jami? Where've you been?"

"I'm--I'm sorry...are you okay? You've got blood on you."

The woman approached me, her body clad in tight jogging spandex. My hair had come untucked from my cap, and was matted to my neck. I looked back to the women, her features shifting in the darkness, her hands held up in cautious warning.

Although I knew that I had the wrong person again, it was still so good to see her once again.

I pulled the stained hammer from my pocket, and swung. Again and again, the dismay fading from her face like the color slipping from her lips, the helpless breath of cry singing softly to me like it had done so many times before. The sound of a final breath escaping, the look of dismay in eyes, faint blue dust leaving the twitching wreck-by heart I knew it all.

When it was over, I made my way to the car. I would have to stop and strip my bloody clothing and dispose of it in a fast food dumpster or gas station bathroom. Then I would return home, where I knew Jami would be waiting for me, and I could watch the morning traffic filter through the streets, the sunlight drifting off stray rooftops and birds hiding in the trees from imaginary cats only they could see.

I smiled, feeling green.