Rough

   It was a rough kind of town, but he was a rough kind of man. Each knew the other was dangerous, the only difference was that the man wasn't afraid to die.

   The shifty characters traversing the filthy road kept far to the other side of the way. They knew a soldier, a warrior, when they saw one. They also knew the shape of guns and knives poking shapes in his clothes. But he didn't need weapons to look intimidating. He knew what fear looked like well. He had seen it in everyone's eyes.

                                                                           Except that one girl.

   There must have been something wrong with her. But deep down, he knew there wasn't anything. There wasn't anything wrong with him either. He had been the same. It must have been something inside her, something stronger than what he had seen before.

   Except in himself. He had seen it, he had felt it in himself before. He remembered well his childhood when he first knew what he needed to be. The children had taunted him and hurt him, his parents had watched, and then they had died.

   The children had never stopped taunting, even when they had grown older and into adults. They just couldn't accept him. He scared them, even back then.

   He had to grow up rough. The men in blue had taken him away to that dank place with all the other naughty kids. The kids had asked what he did wrong. He told them that he had killed his parents. It was true. They didn't taunt him there.

   The men in blue came when he was the oldest of the kids; he knew he was no longer a child at that point. Yet he had never been able to pass a test. They were smarter than him. The men in blue had taken him where the men were in camouflauge and he had to run and excercise a lot. The men had yelled so much.

   He went to war then. He knew then that that was what he was born to do. Kill.

   They made him go home after a while. He had continued at home, kept his skills sharp for them when they took him back. They never found the remains of his business. He ate it all and buried the hard bits. In sacks, under the plied up boards under his bed. The girl was different, though.

     A piece of paper fluttered into his vision, interupting his thoughts. It had the girl's picture on it, saying she was missing. He thought she looked better now, with her sheen of frost on her eyelashes which she had only had aquired recently. He remembered when he had shoved her into his freezer in his basement. He had bitten her beautiful fingers of, yet she never screamed once. He didn't like that. Not even when her blood covered the walls did she scream. She only began to struggle when the air in the freezer was breathed up and she was still there, in that airless void.

    His only patient he never cracked. So now he needed another, just to see if he had lost his fire. To hear those wonderful screams.

                                                                 She never did scream.