The Death of a Child

My life has become complicated in the past several weeks. No, that's not quite fair, my life has always been very complicated; but it has taken many interesting turns since my life was saved by a young man dressed in red and two young insurance girls. I have learned many new things and the Christian faith seems to be much more revealed to me since met them. Even my faith in God has grown. As a priest I taught the people, but I could never be sure what I was really saying; or if I really believed what I was teaching. But I'm getting way ahead of my self; my story starts long before I ever met the man known as Vash the Stampede. It begins eight years after the destruction of July...

I first picked up a gun at the age of seven. And I fired it. The shot rang out clear and bold. I remember that the trigger was strangely easy to pull. The bullet hit its target with a dull thud. I laughed. I laughed because that one shot had silenced the sickening trash who had titled himself my guardian. He fell to the ground before me and spoke no more. It was that simple. All the simple troubles of my short life had been solved with that single shot. And so I was free. Yes, tomorrow things would be different...tomorrow. But things always go from bad to worse. My short life of simple troubles became an endless nightmare of killings. I can't escape. The past always catches you in the end.

The reason I killed was also simple. I had been hired because I was the closest one to my guardian. I remember it plainly. One day a tall dark man with red eyes approached me with a proposition. If I completed what he asked I would be paid, and he would take me on as his apprentice. He gave me my morals in life. They all made perfect sense because they were the only thing that I had ever known. "Life is like an incessant series of problems, all difficult with brutally limited choices, and a time limit." The tall dark man with red eyes, who called himself Chapel the Evergreen, looked from me to the target across the room that I had just finished filling with holes. "The worse thing is to make no decision, waiting for the ideal conclusion to present itself." He returned his attention to me. "Make the best choice in a split-second." Then he paused for several long moments, I thought he was done talking so I began to reload the gun, but he put his hand on my shoulder to stop me and continued. "We're not like God, not only are our powers limited but we sometimes have to play the Devil." He looked down into my eyes and for the first time I saw his. Sad, and scared - but at the same time heartless.

I didn't want other kids to grow up like me so I started up and orphanage. It gave my life meaning. I was doing things for the good of others. It was my little bit of happiness. But sometimes I still think...this planet is the worst. It's a horrible planet.

The second man I ever killed was a complete stranger. I was eight and had been training with the man known as Chapel for one year. This time it seemed a nightmare; at first I couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger. The man was crying, begging me not to kill him, exclaiming over and over again that he didn't want to die; that he hadn't done anything. Finally I forced myself to pull the trigger, this time it seemed impossibly stiff, but when it finally gave the shot rang out just as clearly as before. The bullet entered the man's head, just as before; and just as before he fell to the ground dead. I was the only thing that had changed. I cried. I cried because I had killed a man that I had never even met before in cold blood. I didn't know him and as fare as I was concerned he didn't deserve to die.

I turned around, tears streaming down my cheeks, and saw the man called Chapel standing in the doorway. He was looking at me through those impenetrable sun-glasses. He wore a grim smile of satisfaction on his stony face. Ever so slowly he turned and walked out of the room. Still crying I got up to follow, but he closed the door and locked it. He left me in the room with the innocent man I had just killed. I couldn't believe it! I just stood there in shock, even the tears seemed to slow, but when I realized what he had just done I began crying even louder. I was locked in the room, not only with the dead man, but something far worse, myself. My own thoughts tortured me endlessly and for the next forty-eight hours I sat in the room with myself. I cried until I could cry no more; I cried until there was nothing left, nothing but hate. I hated my guardian for causing me to hate him. I hated the money that I had received, thirty double-dollars, it seemed like a lot to a seven year-old. Most of all, I hated Chapel. The man who took me in and began this horrible training after I had completed my mission. The man who had locked me in this room with a putrefying man and my festering conscience. That forty-eight hours would cause me to hate the man known as Chapel for the rest of my life, but even as I speak I see that he did it to teach me to hate. He did it to teach not to care. It was only business, and the man was going to die someday anyway. The human mind is so fragile, especially a child's...

My training lasted for ten terrible years. In that time Chapel was raising me to become none other than him. He posed as a priest. He did not know the word of God, although I didn't know that at the time so I believed everything that he had told me. The fact that killing was a way of life, and that the Bible encouraged it, was ground into my mind from the beginning; his dogma became mine. Than being the cased I was shocked, even disturbed, when, at the age of eighteen, I first set foot inside a church.

Upon the completion of my training one year ago I was given a huge cross wrapped in canvas and bound in leather. Chapel told me that it was my tool for spreading "the good word". At first it was far to heavy for me to simply carry around, I had to drag it everywhere I went and when it came to fighting I nearly got myself killed on more than one occasion because it took me a while to lift the stainless-steel weapon to a decent firing position. However, after a year of hauling that weapon of death with me where ever I went I became very attuned to it's weight. It became as much apart of me as my arms or legs. It was merely an extension of my body. I had it with me the first time I had walked into a real church, and ironically, I had just gotten paid. One man's pain had been my pleasure. In my mind I had been spreading His good word. The preacher, to my surprise and delight, looked like Chapel...that is he dressed like him. The only difference that I could note at the time (other than his height and weight) was that he wore a white collar instead of a black one. The people were all dressed in their best. What's more, they all greeted me with a smile. The beheld me as a visiting minister and nothing more. Some, however, looked with more than a little suspicion when I took a seat in the back pew. I had my cross with me, clothed in cloth and leather as usual, and I noticed also a few interested glances toward it.

The crowed hushed as the preacher began to speak. "We have been talking on the Ten Commandments for the past several weeks, and today we open with one of the most import. Especially on this planet, in this day and age." Ten Commandments? This was something very new to me. All my years of training under Chapel and I had never before heard anything like this. While I was still trying to place that simple sentence into a part of my dogma that made sense the preacher continued, and his words struck me harder and more painfully than I thought even possible. "Thou shall not kill!"

"What the hell!" I yelled before I knew what was going on.

The preacher regarded me for a brief moment then continued. "Thou shall not kill. In this day and age, on this planet, that commandment should be burned into all or our hearts. Since we first arrived here we have been nothing but savages. Reduced to killing one another. Let it be known that those who kill will face eternal damnation in hell! Let your soul be made clean..." He continued to speak but I heard little of what was said. My mind was racing. The very thing I had built my life on was collapsing all around me. I had killed so many men, and women! Chapel had made it a point to have me kill someone, for practice or money, twice a month. I had been doing that for the past ten years! In the past year I have been killing even more than that simply because it's my job. It was how I survived. I survived by the death of others. Others gave their lives, by my choice, so that I would live. So that I could have a place to sleep. Something to eat. Alcohol to drink. I don't know why I first changed so easily; perhaps it was God's will, perhaps it was not, but I changed. After the service, carrying my cross, I went and talked to the preacher. I told him that I had led "a troubled life" and that I wanted to become a real preacher. I spent another year in that little church in December studying the real Bible and the real God. It was very hard for me to accept at first, but as I learned I realized how much more sense it made. I never hung up my guns, for three more years after that I still carried the cross every where I went. I used it only in self defense, or to protect the innocent.

Isn't it funny. You think you have escaped from your past, from all the terrible things that you have done. It never turns out that way though. Just like in everything else, in life your past has a way of catching up with you and becoming your future. There is nothing you can do to stop it. Destiny, no, providence, is what I would call it. Gods will. Perhaps that is why by some trick of the wind, I heard three gunshots from a small down more than ten miles away from where I had been riding my bike through the endless desert. By some terrible whim of mine did I change my course and turn towards that small town; and as the pawn of some greater good, or evil, I found the first true victim of my cross.