If you commit a crime in Hub City, it's said the wind will carry your sin to him. Pray the police find you, before He does.
I was a policeman in another life. I can't say I was the best, but I certainly wasn't the worst. In Hub City, it was a brutal life, violent and often meaningless. I was bound by the law and told I would have to obey it to punish the guilty.
I watched the guilty escape more often than not. They laughed, they were bold. They were fearless. I had enough of that. Fate changed that for me. Now I am Hyde. And the guilty no longer get to pretend they are fearless. They fear me. And it is good.
I run, tireless, through the night. I can see them fleeing from the scene of their crime. A brutal thing; rape and murder of young coeds whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I found their prey dying in an alley, too far gone to save. I could smell their attackers all over them. I could see their scent in the air. They were high, a variety of toxins. That does not matter. Nothing can excuse them and nothing will save them.
I can feel my body changing, muscles growing, changing, growing faster. Bones hardening, leaping further and faster. I can see the fender of their car growing closer, I can see their excitement, they are smoking and drinking. They do not see me yet. My footprints tear into the hot tar of the night, my weight nearly three times that of a normal man, my muscle density nearly five times that. My skin is like iron, hard, hot, with a strange chemical stink, like oxidizing metal.
I leap, this time with the intent to stop their car. I land on the hood, from my high arc and drive their engine block into the ground. Their car folds up around me and the two in the front seat, shoot pass me through the windshield, showering me in shards of glass and steaming metal. I consider stopping them. I could have. I don't.
The three in the back seat slam against the front seats. The one riding in the center flies into the front seat and his head lands outside the windshield region. He lies there in shock. I can smell his fear. I can smell the guns in the back seat being drawn, the fumbling, the shock, the terror. I can see it, I can see the faces of the young women these monsters killed. I can feel their terror, smell it on their clothing. I can taste the tang of the blood of the women, still on their clothing.
I hear their guns being cocked. I stride forward, ripping the car in half, the tearing sound of metal drowns out the screams of the monster whose head is slashed apart by the car being shred beneath him.
The two in the back seat mean to shoot their weapons. Their intent was initially clear, but as I tear through the car, they hesitate. Their hesitation is based partially in their belief of the futility of their action. The other is pure fear. They are unable to push their way through the fear which they are usually used to delivering not having.
In another two seconds, it no longer matters. I grab the muzzles of their guns and crush them around their hands. Bones crumble like tissue and their screams rub my nerves wrong, worse than nails on a chalkboard. I want them to stop. Stop screaming, stop, stop, stop.
They stop as I pound them into raw hunks of meat, bloody meat flying everywhere.
The third rider in the backseat was howling and clutching his wounds and bleeding profusely from his face as he sat outside the broken hull of the car. Once he saw me pound his friends into hamburger, he stopped screaming and whimpered quietly as I kick the door off the vehicle and exit. I walk past him toward the two leaders who were flung free. I pick up one. His head lolled to one side at an odd angle.
Dead. Broken neck.
The other, larger, stronger landed, rolled and had a terrible road rash. He got up. One of his hands was a bloody mess. It had been underneath him as he slid. The entire hand was gone, scrapped away as he slid. He reached for his firearm, but it was more than he could manage as I dropped his friend and walked toward him.
He said something, but I don't listen to dead men. There was nothing he could tell me.
I could see the lingering scent of all of the women on him. His hands reeked of violence, the smell of their blood, the oils of their flesh, their fluids were all over him. He lingered, he took his time.
I grabbed him, smacking his gun away. He swung weakly, striking me, but in my current rage, there was nothing he could do to me. I pick him up, raising him over my head and slam him into the ground. I hear his ribs snap. I put my hands on his back and press down. I then drag him across the ground, pressing him harder until a red smear begins to flow behind him. He screams and screams until his lungs were a smear on the ground behind him.
The last one sat in horror. Wiping the blood from his one swollen eye that still worked, he looked at me but realized I had no pity in me. He defiantly raised his chin to me.
I laughed and slapped him in the face, like the young woman he had planned to rape but lost his nerve. His nose was broken, like hers, his facebones shattered, like hers. His eye destroyed, like hers.
I bend over him, whispering. "Tell them. Tell them, these are my streets now. Tell them Hyde is coming."
Hyde © Thaddeus Howze 2011. All Rights Reserved [@ebonstorm]
