What had to be done

I was in a warehouse. It was night already and there was no one else there, but I wasn’t afraid. I hadn’t been afraid of anything in a long time, like that part of my brain had withered and died. I heard footsteps and ran up the stairs. There weren't that many people, maybe three or four. I could take three or four. They were kids, I could tell. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. It didn’t matter anyway. I had dealt with younger. 

I jumped down from my place of hiding. My cape helped me glide through the air to the floor, for a moment it always felt like I was truly flying. When I fell I had the pose all ready, butt up, hand on the floor. It already came naturally to me, that pose. The teenagers started screaming like they had seen a ghost. Of course, there was a reason why I called myself Phantom, I was always a fan of musical theater. 

I grinned as one of them tripped and fell right next to me. That would be far too easy. I pulled out my bat. They scrambled to their feet to run away, but I was always faster. The slowest one got it first. He was bleeding on the floor before his friends could help him. After that I got to the next ones. Blood splashing on the walls like a piece of abstract art. Most days no one fights back. Usually they just succumb. Not that day. That day one of them had a knife. 

I stumbled to my side, hand on my stomach. The blood stain started growing quickly spreading through my clothes, through my cape. I fell right where they had dropped their weed. That toxic smell attacking my nostrils. The ungrateful children couldn’t take a lesson sitting down. I had tried to make them learn something and one of the little bitches had stabbed me. But it was all for their good, they would see. 

I didn’t think one of them would call an ambulance. Still, the old sound I knew and the lights flashing red and blue came to further attack my senses. They put me on a gurney and told me to keep breathing. I was out in a few minutes. 

I remembered the last time I had killed. It had been but a couple of weeks before. A quiet night until that moment. I even thought that maybe I wouldn’t have to fight at all. But there are no quiet nights for a hero, only restlessness. 

The boy was young, fourteen, as I heard on the news later. But his age didn’t matter while he was selling on the streets. I found some older men giving him some dollars in an alley. The men got home that day with some broken bones to explain to their wives, but the boy...I caved his head in. Took him off this world before he made irreversible mistakes. It was the better way. 

Before that I had done some killing, not a lot. I tried to only kill when I deemed them unfixable. 

There was the girl though, Morgan Mavis, from the diner. She was chubby and wore her brown hair on a messy braid. I remember thinking she was beautiful. She didn’t think the same of me. At least I believed she didn’t, I could never ask, she was engaged. Still, I went to talk to her one day. She went out for a break and I followed her.  

She saw me and raced, so I raced too. We ran through one street and another, all empty at that time of night. I heard her begin to cry. She was so dramatic, I just wanted a talk. A few minutes into the chase the girl began to scream, scream out loud for the whole world to hear. I ordered her to stop, but she kept asking for help. I begged her to shut up, but she wouldn’t, she just kept exhausting her vocal chords, crying for someone to stop me. 

I couldn’t be stopped, she didn’t know. I was a hero. I was needed. The world needed me. That’s what I was thinking about when I did it. When I grabbed her by the neck and threw her in the darkest corner I could find. I just had to get her to shut up.  I kept squeezing her throat until she did. And she wouldn’t scream anymore, never again. I left her there that day, that was the only time I felt remorse. 

The next day Morgan Mavis was on the news. They used a dumb picture that didn’t do her justice. They brought in her stupid fiance to cry about her for a long boring speech. I was furious, could no one respect her death? I went to my therapist that day and complained about it. She already knew I had done it. She always knew. 

I never went to my therapist again. But her face of disappointment is still burnt in my brain as it rots.

She was a fierce woman. I never had to confess anything to her, yet she understood. Everytime there was a new murder in town she would give me that look. Even, when it wasn’t me. As I said, I didn’t even do that much murder. She knew what I did. She knew about the kids I beat up in alleys. She knew about Calvin, a boy I had left in a comma for a full month. About Jimmy, who had never been able to walk again. About all the others I kept track of in my notebook, users or dealers.

My youngest was a girl named Summer. She died last July, at thirteen. I had never been more sure of a killing. Summer was rich, she went to a good school. She had a future, would have been a lawyer or a doctor, or maybe an engineer. A kid like that could have gone to Harvard. Yet, she was a user. She had no reason to be. That was how I knew I couldn’t just teach her a lesson and save her. 

Summer’s case repercuted. I stayed inside my house for days on end too afraid to run into the police. Afraid they would have somehow recognized a little finger print, or found a hair, or a drop of blood. But they weren’t looking for me. They were sure it had been the girl’s boyfriend. I let him go to jail. He was a lowlife anyway. Would probably have done it if I didn’t beat him to it. 

I talked to my therapist about it, before I killed her. She asked me why I did those things. I answered that someone had to and for that time it just had to be me. She didn’t seem satisfied. She never understood me. That day she recommended regression therapy. It was the last time I cried.

I saw myself as a little kid, the day it all went to shit. It was Halloween and maybe if I had known I would have put on a better costume, but back then I was a knight, swinging a plastic sword at every passerby in the hopes of getting more candy. Dad was there, I looked like him. Maybe I still do. 

I remembered the drizzle that started and made us go home early. I threw a tantrum, given it stopped right as we got there. I should have thrown one about other things, such as my mother's taste for expensive designer drugs and the fact my family was in the brink of bankruptcy because of it. 

That night I was thrown from my bedroom window into the arms of a fireman. Checked for trauma, wrapped in a blanket. They saved no one else, not mother, not father. Weeks later the cause was deemed to be an oven left on, but that wasn’t it. For the rest of my life I knew it had been arson. Someone came for us. Someone got what they wanted. 

I grew up into what I needed back then, a person who would have taught my mother a lesson. That was my last thought as I flatlined from the stab wound. That day the world would lose a hero and wouldn’t even know it. That was tragic, the next day should be a national holiday, there should be a parade. I was a person that would silently be missed by most, not because I was faster or stronger, but because I did what had to be done.