Precognition

I’d been watching this man for hours. He seemed so normal. They always did. A few hours ago he had pulled into his driveway and I had hoped that he was alone. No such luck. Two little girls popped out of the back, and a squat woman with brown hair and Jackie O sunglasses exited the passenger door. The girls ran around their parents to the front door giggling. He was laughing at something the squat woman was saying. They looked like such a normal suburban family. He looked like such a normal suburban man. 

The man’s name was Norman Klease. Such a nothing name, yet, in a few months it would be all over the internet. This normal man was going to walk onto a college campus a few miles from here and open fire on a group of people enjoying a live band at the yearly fall festival. 

A few hours later, Norman Klease left his house alone telling me tonight was going to be the night. I followed him even though I already knew where he was going. All the pieces were falling into place. I had scoped out the bar yesterday. An out of the way place called Joe’s Bar. He parked on the side lot and strolled to the front door flipping his keys in his hand, then disappeared inside the building. 

And now, I wait some more. 

In a few hours he is going to stumble out of the bar with a heavy set man in a suit with his arm around Norman. I know this because I’ve seen it. 

I was at home when I felt the vision coming on where I’d see Norman Klease for the first time. I was brewing a pot of coffee and then my vision started to blur around the edges. I lowered myself to the floor, knowing what was coming, as my eyesight shrunk down to a pinhole before disappearing completely. 

That’s when the pain comes. 

It feels like someone grabs my sternum and pulls me through a tiny hole, like the size of a keyhole, my arms, legs and head shoot backward, my bones snap and my flesh feels like it’s being peeled away. Like my body is broken and set on fire. It only lasts a few seconds, but it’s the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced and it never gets any better. It always hurts. 

After those few seconds, I become ethereal, a bodiless projection floating in pitch black. Then the vision starts, a flickering blurry image, like an old film projector, but the movie is being projected through a dirty fish tank. For Norman it was him sitting at a desk typing on his computer, his mailbox, stumbling out of the bar to his car, yelling at somebody at a baseball game wearing a Braves hat, raking leaves in his front yard, and then, as it always did, the picture became clear for the horror. I saw Norman walk onto the campus with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. The courtyard was full of people. He stopped and stared for a long time, before unzipping the bag and pulling out two automatic weapons and opened fire. Then the time stopped, bodies twisted into odd angles, eyes wide, blood spattered, people on top of one another, mouths agape. It stopped time to ensure the gruesome scene was burned into my mind. This time it stayed still for what seemed like minutes, before it rewound playing the whole thing in reverse pulling me back through the keyhole, reassembling me and putting me back in the real world. 

Over the years I’d seen the worst of humankind through these visions. Brutal murders, train derailments, bombings, and mass shootings, but there was something about this one that itched something inside me and made me nauseous. Something horrible. The twisted faces of his victims. The fear. The panic. The pain. Or maybe it was him. The lack of any emotion as he pulled the trigger. And now, after watching him he felt that nausea again. Casually going to a bar weeks before taking so many lives. 

The visions started when I was sixteen years old. Can you imagine that? Learning to drive, nocturnal emissions, uncontrollable acne, plus mind-bending visions. It was a banner year. 

Once they started happening more frequently, I saw doctor after doctor explaining what was happening, but I just got looks of concern and sympathy after there was nothing on the scans they ordered. Their eyes said “Oh, the poor crazy boy.” 

Of course, they asked me to tell them about my visions, to tell them what was going to happen so we could warn the police or the victims, but every time I tried I couldn’t form the words. They would fall apart from my mind that could vividly picture the details I had seen to my mouth which turned to mush. It was only after the event that I could point and say, “That! That’s what I saw!” And they would give me that look again. I tried writing it out but it came out as scribbles and jumbles until after the event, then it would flow out seamlessly and in great detail. I was prescribed a whole pharmacy of pills, but none of it helped, none of them stopped the onslaught of visions. The only solace was that I knew I wasn’t crazy, because I had the proof. Over and over again, the proof was on the internet. The aftermath of the event I’d bore witness to. The aftermath that I could have prevented. 

At first I tried to ignore them, and just accept that I couldn’t really do anything to change these horrors I was forced to watch, and that’s probably how it would have stayed, but my gift was very persuasive. It began to invade my dreams. After the horrible event, I would see the victim’s life as it would have been. These dreams were high resolution constructs of a life that would have been, full of joy and positivity, full of brightness and color. No blurry fish tank projection. I passed it off at first as my subconscious painting an afterlife for the victims and reconciling with the helplessness I felt. I didn’t really believe that, and once I finally started taking action into my own hands the dreams stopped. 

The dream that changed everything was of a woman who I’d seen brutally murdered in a drunken rage by her husband. When she showed up in my dream I knew that my vision had now become reality. She was beautiful with a dark complexion, dark hair, and my dream showed a brightness in her eyes with a smile that was full of warmth and promise. I was shown that she was pregnant, growing larger as the dreams showed me the joy she brought to everyone around her until there was a baby boy in her arms. She was a loving mother who worked tirelessly to make sure her son had everything in life. Images of birthdays, vacations, celebrations, and graduations flashed by always love and warmth and joy. This is how all the dreams were, the best of what would have been. But then I watched as this woman, gray hair, wrinkles, wrapped in a shaw and a red knit cap stood by as that boy she raised was a grown man with children of his own being inaugurated President of the United States. This woman was supposed to give birth to the President. But now she was dead. And I had let it happen. Or at least I hadn’t tried to stop it. 

I woke up crying. That’s when I accepted the weight of my gift.

The noise and the light from the bar door swinging open pulled me out of my memoryscape. There they were, Norman and his counterpart. I grabbed my satchel from the passenger seat and made my way toward the bar door, right towards them as they split and went in different directions. I veered to the left along the wooden floorboards of the bar's covered porch a few paces behind Norman, as I stretched my black leather gloves over my hands.

I quickened my pace. The lights of his car flashed and a quick bleat of the horn broke the silence of the night as he unlocked it. I unzipped the side compartment of my bag exposing strips of duct tape and three full syringes. I closed the distance between us as he reached for his door handle. I kicked him hard in the back of his knee and he went down onto his hands and knees. I pulled the back of his shirt and pulled him up onto his knees, then grabbed his chin and covered his mouth with a strip of duct tape in one seamless motion before plunging the syringe in his neck and injecting the etorphine. Moments later he slumped to the ground. 

He was larger than I thought he was and moving him was going to be a chore. For a moment I considered making it look like a mugging gone wrong, but the etorphine would show up in the autopsy and then more questions would be asked. I don’t like questions. 

I taped his hands and legs together, unsure whether he would wake up before we reached our destination. I heaved his torso into his back seat, then shoved his legs behind, closing the door and retrieving his keys from the ground. I took a moment to look around, but the night was still. Serene. I climbed into the front seat and slid it forward. As I adjusted the mirror I caught my eyes in the reflection, but looking quickly away unsure if I even knew the man behind them any more. I sat for a moment in silence reminding myself of the beautiful woman and her son that never got the chance to be President. My thoughts then turned to the horrors this man would commit in two weeks time and I started the car. 

The place I chose to dispose of the car and the body was a forty-five minute drive. The roads were pitch back country roads in the heart of Georgia. For the first twenty minutes I didn’t see another soul, then I caught headlights coming up behind me in the rearview. My heart sped up. Being pulled over with a man taped up in my back seat was a very precarious situation, and in my years and dozens of, what I like to call corrections, I had never been close to being caught. No police, no innocent people to deal with, nothing. I feel like another part of my gift is the freedom to move and dispose of these murderers, these demons with immunity, invisibly. 

I kept flicking my eyes to the rearview, but the headlights behind me kept their distance and didn’t appear to have any interest in me. I relaxed back into the front seat preparing myself for the act, which I always hated, but there was no other way. I was saving the good people from the bad. 

I turned down the dirt road that I had scoped out a few days prior. With the internet most of my work was done before I showed up in these towns I barely knew, but I still ran through the whole plan before because sometimes roads close, sometimes lakes dry up, and sometimes buildings are no longer where Google says they are. All potential mistakes I’ve almost run into. But not since my first one. That time my lack of planning cost a boy his life. Never again. 

The road was barely a road by the time I got to the place I parked the car. The ground was soft with long grass, reeds, and gnarly roots of the wetland trees surrounding two ruts that the tires rested in. The only light was from the full moon above and the headlights of Norman’s car. He was still passed out in the back, which I assumed was because of the alcohol in his system. Maybe he was already dead. That would be a good surprise. 

I opened the back door and shined a small flashlight over his body. His chest was still rising and falling. So much for good luck. 

I stood outside the open back door that I saw his daughter jump out of earlier that day. The thought of his girls and his wife made me pause. I lowered the flashlight and the gun and closed my eyes, the sound of insects rising and falling in waves echoing through the trees. The massacre flashed in my mind. People scattering, eyes wide, mouths agape, blood everywhere, and the switch flipped. I opened my eyes and pointed the light and gun at Norman. 

“Stop!” a voice shouted. I jumped, keeping the gun trained on Norman, but cowering back from the noise at the same time. A figure was running towards me, flashlight bobbing through the darkness until a moment later it was pointed directly in my eyes. “Stop right there,” the voice said again, but this time I noticed a shake in it. “Put the gun down.” 

“I’m sorry friend, but I can’t do that,” I said calmly. He had startled me, but it only lasted a moment. I was immune. Invisible. 

The man stopped 30 paces from me. He was dressed in all black and he was slightly smaller in stature than me. I was squinting against the light trying to make him out. 

“I’m not your fucking friend you psycho,” he said, and I realized the shake wasn’t nerves, it was adrenaline. This man disliked me. I scoured my mind but couldn't place his voice, nor his silhouette. 

I lowered my gun and turned my light in his direction. I didn’t want to hurt this man, but this situation was becoming tenuous. “Can you lower your gun and get your light out of my eyes?” To my surprise he lowered the flashlight slightly and under the moon I could make out his features. He was thin, with a strong jaw, cleanly shaven, but didn’t give the impression of law enforcement or military. I don’t know why, perhaps it was how he carried himself. Like he felt uncomfortable with the weapon in his hand. 

“I know who you are,” he said. “I know what you’ve done.” 

I nodded, considered it for a second, then said, “I highly doubt that.” 

“I was a few days behind you outside of Cincinnati, and then in that apartment building in Philadelphia, I showed up as the cleaning crew arrived, but it was the last one I got the closest. I showed up at your hotel room minutes after you took off.” He paused, then added, “In Baton Rouge.” 

This caught me off guard. Who was this man? He missed a few cities in his timeline, but I had been to all of those places in the last six months. My throat dried out and my heart picked up speed. I was at a loss. I didn’t know the best next thing to say. I landed on, “You’ve been looking for me?” 

“Put the gun down and step away from the car.” 

I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t let Norman get away. “What’s your name?” I was the one with the shake in my voice now. 

The man held his ground, “Put the gun down.”

“I can’t do that,” I needed him to understand, he didn’t know who this man was, what he was going to do. “This is a bad man. He’s going to do bad things. I…” the details of the masacre clear in my head would not turn into words, “I…he, it’s going to be really bad.” 

“He’s a bad man?” the man actually laughed, a vile laugh full of hatred. “He couldn’t do anything that’s half as bad as you.” He took a step toward me and for the first time in a long time I felt fear. “I told you I know who you are. I’ve seen you. I’ve seen you murdering innocent people. Stalking them, following them, and killing them.” 

He took another step toward me and I raised my gun, but it did not deter him.

“For years now I’ve been haunted by visions of you, and now here you are, in the flesh. And you’re just a man.” 

“Visions?” The word caught me off guard.

“I don’t want to kill you, but I will.”

I’m confused now, “What do you mean visions?” 

He quickly taps his flashlight against his head, “I see you.” He points the flashlight back at me and somehow I know what he’s going to say next, “But nobody believes me.” 

“I believe you!” I blurt out, “The people I kill, they’re all going to do the bad things and I see them, I have visions of them,” and for the first time since I was a kid I feel connected to somebody, “so I had to stop them, before they can hurt anyone.” 

“But they hadn’t done anything yet,” he said dismissively, “you have, now put the gun down.” 

And just like that he was just another person that didn’t understand. 

That’s when Norman, with feet taped together kicked me hard in the gut and I fell to the ground, the air knocked out of me. The man was on top of me in an instant, and there was nothing I could do. The last thing I remember was the flashlight coming towards me. 

Two weeks later, as I sat in my personal padded cell I felt it coming on as my sight blurred around the edges. I gripped the metal frame of the bed in anticipation. It always hurt.