2

I drove for hours, my destination first unknown, but later very clear. I cruised through what passed for red light districts and what passed for prostitutes. These women didn’t charge much, and you definitely got what you paid for.

“Twenty bucks for the lot,” one of them barked into the car as I approached and rolled down the window.

“The lot?”

She gestured to herself, the yellowed fingers on her emaciated hands seemingly pointing out her worth.

“Twenty bucks can buy me a lot in this day and age. What makes you think I should spend it on you?”

“Excuse me?” She was even uglier when she looked confused. She could have made a decent living as an extra in a horror movie, or scaring teenagers away from shopfronts.

“Why should I purchase your services over all of these fine ladies?” I asked, nodding through the front window to the small cluster of half-naked woman gathered around a lamppost and looking like they were one degree away from losing a limb.

“Are you right in the head?”

I couldn’t help but laugh at that one. I rolled up the window and intended to ignore her, but she banged on it. She had an impatient look on her face that made her look even uglier than when she was confused. She really didn’t have much going for her.

“Are you just gonna drive away?” she asked when I rolled the window down again. “Are you just here to fuck with me? I’m a professional woman, you know. I deserve respect.”

I was just fucking with her. I felt better about myself when I talked to people like her. Society was pretty uninspiring to begin with, but people like her were the worst. They were the leeches, the pests. They were not parasites, as many would suggest—parasites are admirable creatures. They take control of the living and they live through them, essentially hiding in the shadows, stealing their nutrients, drinking their life-force. I was a parasite, and I was proud to call myself that, but these, these people would need to go through several stages of evolution to be deemed worthy of kissing the ground that I pissed on.

“You’re a professional, are you? Well, why don’t you give me your business card and I’ll get back to you if—”

I paused when she reached into her bosom and produced a card. At that moment, she had more of my respect than I had ever given to anyone like her. I took the card and gave her a nod of approval.

Touché, you dirty little pest.

She stood back and waited for me to drive away, a proud expression on her gaunt face. That was one of the few expressions that didn’t make her look ugly, but it was also likely to be the one she used the least. I actually felt some sort of inclination to do something with her, even something sexual, but I reminded myself how unpleasant that would be and moved on.

I had a destination by then, but I took things at a leisurely pace, using the time to calm myself and stop myself from doing anything stupid. As superior as I was to many other people in this world, I was still human and therefore susceptible to human emotions. I got angry, I made mistakes. The only difference was that I could often anticipate that anger and act accordingly. I was in tune with my body and could see moments of rage coming. In the newsstand, the anger had been a surprise and I had acted out of line, but those moments were rare.

Even as a child, I had been able to control my emotions more than most, making me infinitely more intelligent and worthy than any of my peers. Of course, I was never deemed to be a particularly intelligent child. The intelligence was there; they just didn’t see it. It was that cognitive superiority that had helped me restrain my anger when Darren and his half-witted friends had beaten me day after day. Instead of acting out, getting involved, and putting my plans into jeopardy, I had let them do as they wanted while I waited and plotted.

I had never excelled in my classes and although it wasn’t intentional, I like to think that my subconscious mind stopped me from doing so, understanding the problems that would arise with being seen as an extraordinary child possessed of the greatly developed brain that I had.

I parked the car in a densely populated car park and made my way into the center of the town. This was a nightlife hotspot, where several residents from nearby towns and villages spent the night on the dance floor. They saw it as the ultimate destination, the entertainment capital of their little world, but only because it had more than one nightclub and most of the bars served neon-colored, gasoline-strength booze for the price of a bottle of pop.

It was late evening and other than the bars and nightclubs nothing was open, indicating the cars in the parking lot belonged to the drinkers and that even without my assistance a few of the dim-witted locals were going to die tonight. I encountered some of them on the street—young males wearing matching short-sleeved shirts, despite the arctic conditions, and stinking to high heaven of knock-off deodorant. They had clearly been bathing in the stuff, but it was probably cheaper than bath foam.

The women were just as bad. Dressed like the prostitute I had run into earlier, only with higher heels and more perfume—a little more upmarket, but probably a lot cheaper. By the end of the night, they would be opening their legs for some deodorant-drenched bro because he bought them a bottle of Barcadi Breezer.

“Take a picture, it lasts longer,” one of the bitches barked when she saw me looking at her legs, visible underneath a ridiculously short skirt and reddened from the intense cold. They looked like a pair of chorizo sausages and probably tasted just as funky.

“You got a problem?” she persisted when I didn’t reply and continued to stare. The night had only just begun but she was already drunk. It was a shame I wouldn’t be there to witness the moment she wet herself, passed out on the street, and was felt up by a horny bouncer with low standards.

“I have many problems,” I told her. “And clearly I’m not the only one.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

She was getting louder and shriller by the moment. She was with two friends, both the same age, with the same dress sense and the same level of drunkenness. She was clearly the outspoken one, the one likely to brand herself as the “crazy one,” which to her was a good thing. She was the one who got drunk every weekend, vomited and shit on herself, and then proclaimed it to be a great night. In her eyes, she was the life and soul of the party, the optimistic and happy one; in the eyes of everyone else, she was a miserable, annoying tart, only devoid of self-loathing because she had yet to realize just how much the world hated her.

“Save your anger for tonight,” I told her. “When the guy you suck off in the alleyway tells you that no, he doesn’t want your phone number and no, he doesn’t want to see you again. Save it for the bouncer who refuses to let you into the club because of the vomit and cum stains on your shirt. Save it for your reflection in the mirror tomorrow morning when you realize that your night on the town cost you half a month’s rent, two friends, a brand new dress, and all the self-esteem you’ve ever managed to muster since you dragged your skanky ass out of high school.”

Her mouth was agape, but her friends were smiling. I had either hit the nail on the head or they had been waiting for someone to put her in her place for a long time. She stuttered and stumbled and then, realizing that she was about to lose face, she increased the volume and the tempo of her voice. “What did you say?”

I laughed, shook my head, and walked away.

“Yeah, you better fucking run,” I heard her shout before immediately bragging to her friends.

I thought about having a drink in one of the clubs, but failed to find one that wasn’t filled with sweaty idiots. Instead I sat on a nearby bench and watched the hordes of revelers go about their business. I saw the worst of the worst, the shit scraped from the barrel of life and left to ferment in this country’s small towns and cities. The vast majority of them were young, often no older than twenty, and a large number were in their early teens. I had no issue with underage drinking, far from it. If these kids were going to turn into their parents, and most of them did, then the sooner they killed themselves, the better.

One of those kids caught my eye, but for reasons that weren’t entirely random. She was young, blonde, cute. She was naturally beautiful, that much was evident, but that beauty had been scarred and blemished by makeup an inch thick. It was obvious that her mother was either just as dimwitted as she was, or that she had passed away years ago and hadn’t been there to tell her daughter the basics of how not to look like a whore.

She was with a couple of female friends and, although it seemed like everyone in the town shopped in the same budget store, she looked a little classier—her clothes matching the beauty that was hidden underneath the layers of powder. Her legs and breasts were showing—most of the latter seemed to be the result of some sort of stuffing, and this hadn’t gone unnoticed by a group of men who were smoking outside one of the clubs. They began catcalling like drunken hyenas as soon as they saw them. The girls ignored them at first, but as they got closer, the calls intensified and the horny males became impatient. I sensed that something was afoot, possibly a show of aggression, or even violence, so my attention was piqued.

Although intimidated and disgusted, the females didn’t stop showing off their plumage—their butts swinging as they walked, their hands stroking the curve of their hips or resting on the bulge of their breasts. The males grew increasingly horny as the females crossed their territory, then the battle began. The alpha male touched the alpha female’s backside. It seemed harmless enough, but in the animal kingdom it is sly and backhanded moves like this that precipitate the biggest conflicts.

“Hey, bitch, it ain’t my fault. If it’s on show then it’s mine to touch.”

The dominant male misjudges the situation and instead of trying to resolve it, his youth and his inexperience only serve to exacerbate it.

“My ass is not a fucking toy!”

The fiery female stands her ground, backed by her clan.

“Come on, calm down, I’m only playing. What say we go around the back of the club and I show you just how sorry I am?”

And still, despite the impending violence, the male cannot stop thinking about his penis.

As I sat and grinned to myself, the girl whose ass was at the center of the debate swung for the man whose penis was trying to get inside it. He hadn’t been expecting that. None of his friends had either. It seemed to come as a surprise even to her friends. I know her sort, though: motherless family, a dad in a position of authority, a lot of anger and resentment inside of her. It was only a matter of time. The punch floored the aggressor with the wandering hand and as the girl tended to her knuckles and her friends cheered her on, the boy’s friends wondered if they were going to be next while trying to pretend that they didn’t know the guy on the floor and that his proximity to them was pure coincidence.

I decided to step in, and just as the lad scrambled to his feet and attempted to launch into an attack, I grabbed him and pinned him to the wall with force. The air left his lungs on impact and a gasp erupted behind me as I took everyone by surprise.

“Now then, you weren’t planning on hitting a girl there, were you?”

“She hit me first!” he screamed.

I turned to face the girl whose eyes seemed to twinkle when she saw me. She was impressed and that was just what I wanted. “Is that true?” I asked.

She nodded.

“Now now, you should know the rules, as well,” I told her. “No hitting girls.”

She laughed at that and as I turned to look for the aggressor’s friends, I noticed they had already vanished. I let go of his collar and stepped back, knowing that wouldn’t be the end of it. “Now, piss off and follow your friends to whatever rock they crawl under.”

He paused, looked me over, and then immediately set upon the girl again. I heard her gasp, because even though I knew exactly what he was going to do, she didn’t. I caught him on the jaw before he made it to her and he dropped like a sack of shit. He was out cold, and she was impressed. Job done.

The unconscious guy on the floor—several minutes away from pissing himself and an hour away from having penises drawn on his head by drunken revelers—could have learned a lot from me.

“Thank you,” she said, beaming.

“Nah, you didn’t need me,” I told her. “I saw what you did, you clearly had him.”

She blushed and I met her stare for a moment. I saw her play with her hair, avert her eyes, and generally look like an awkward girl lacking in self-confidence, all signs that she liked me and that my plan had worked. Attraction is a strange beast, but one that is very easy to manipulate. Love and lust cause an increased heart rate, perspiration, and general feelings of unease. These feelings are also stimulated through fear and, if you can scare a girl when she first meets you, then you can trick her mind into thinking she’s in love with you. It’s not quite as simple as that, otherwise rapists would have a very easy job, but those are the basics. The human brain is very stupid. Mine is not, but only because I’m not weakened by love or lust.

“Anyway, I have to go now,” I told her.

“Oh.” She seemed shocked and disappointed. “You’re not coming inside?”

“I’m actually about to call it a night. I’ve been working all day. I just want to kick back, relax, have a few quiet drinks in a quiet environment.” I gestured toward the noise roaring through the closed doors of the club behind us.

“Oh, well, maybe—”

“You can go back to her place,” one of her friends butted in, doing what friends do best.

“No,” she began, defending herself. “I couldn’t ask him, I mean he wouldn’t …”

“If there’s free drink, some peace and quiet, and some company from a brave and beautiful woman, then it could be just what I need,” I said.

She beamed, her eyes glinting. “My family will be there, but they won’t mind if we’re quiet. And I have some whiskey …”

“Perfect, and I’m as quiet as they come. Should I drive or do you want to?”

“You have a car?”

“Of course.”

The smile on her face suggested that the deal was done.

“So, what’s your name, anyway?” she asked as we left her friends to step over the idiot in the doorway and enter the club.

“Darren, you?”

“Anna.”

“Ah, that’s a beautiful name. It suits you.”

“Thanks.”

I was so sickly sweet that I thought I was going to choke on my own affability, but the job was done. She was just the right amount of sweet and naughty; innocent and tainted. And there was something else there, as well, all of which would ensure I would have my satisfaction.