Killers Super Short Stories

If I ride hard and I ride through the night, I’ll reach Barstow by morning.

And there,

There, I’m gonna kill me a man.

Don’t know the guy. Never met him. Never had any hatred for him neither. All I have is his first name, an address, a list of things I’m supposed to say when I kill him.

Every week it’s the same thing. One name, one address, one list of things I forget as soon as I’ve read it to the poor sucker on the wrong end of my twelve gauge. Sometimes the name is someone just a few miles down the road, sometimes halfway across the country. Sometimes the name I get belongs to a girl, sometimes to a little kid, but most of them, most of the names I get are men, mid-thirties or forties, balding, in business or accounting, a job that puts their dirty hands in contact with a lot of easy money.

All of them have one thing in common.

All of them are sick.

The once prosperous city, a testament to man’s creativity and design ingenuity, now lay in ruins, a twisted decaying maze of crumbling buildings and pitted streets that formerly overflowed with prosperity. The previously awe-inspiring skyline was now nothing more than a stark black painting in silhouette on the canvas depicting the smoldering crimson sky. This devastating backdrop served as a haunting reminder of the pure horror that had befallen this once monumental metropolis.

The foul air was redolent with the stench of decay. The only sounds one could hear echoing through the desolate streets and alleyways were the howling of the stagnant wind blowing through the ruined streets and the distant moans and cries of the remaining savages as they preyed upon each other, struggling for survival in this pure Darwinian world, exploding with insanity. In this post-apocalyptic dung heap, where even former predators now lived in fear, where rats and other scavengers thrived on the corpses stacked high in the streets, a veritable wasteland, any sort of hope for civilization was a faded memory, replaced by a desperate struggle for survival. This was a world that had long since forgotten the meaning of peace, love, and caring and had traded for kill or be killed.

Amid the chaos and destruction, three Godless souls could count themselves among those who endured. They were survivors of the holocaust that had wiped out most of the population of the world. They banded together as like minds, albeit minds of the twisted variety. The only reason they still existed was because the three were probably the most vile, soulless people remaining on Earth.