I remember the beginning and the end of that night. The middle is hazy with blood and tears that cease to make sense. In truth, I'm afraid to remember. Afraid of what I did to not only the people around me, but myself as well.

After abandoning George's hideout, I fled into the streets, letting the pounding rain wash away all of the people's blood which soaked my clothing. Under yellow lights producing a dozen shadows, I trudged along, hands shoved deeply into my pockets. In the back of my mind, a rumbling of thunder began to build, and I knew there were very few places I could hide where my own insanity would not kill me.

Then, come to me, I mentally whispered. Come and destroy me if you must.

Bums, stretching out their blackened hand, pleaded with me for whatever change that I could spare. After all, I was the one living the life of luxury-wasn't I? I certainly wasn't sitting on a rainy street corner in the middle of the night. For one of the few times, I merely brushed them off, ignoring their insults and requests, instead of chastising at them. My brain was numb with pain, and I didn't want to think or speak.

I didn't want to be.

My feet slapped through puddles forming inside of crevices in the sidewalk, and rainwater dribbled off of the end of my nose that I would wipe at ever occasionally. Throughout my body, a damp chill had overtaken me, and I began to shiver, rubbing my hands over my arms to warm myself. It was one of the few times in my life I had been so utterly miserable.

"You look a little bit cold," a sultry female voice said.

Glancing off to my right, I saw a lady, who appeared older than me, slumped inside of a doorway. She grinned around the end of her burning cigarette before flicking it off into the night. Her hair, dry underneath the overhang of her apartment, was a luminous golden color.

I didn't respond, and instead merely stared, too shocked from all of the past events to speak.

"You need a place to stay?" she asked.

She was a hooker, obviously, but at that moment, I didn't care. I honestly couldn't care. Maybe, I thought, maybe she was exactly the kind of distraction I needed from the pains of my life.

"Yeah," I finally said, my voice seeming ghastly loud in the night. "Yeah, I do."

"You wanna stay with me? My place is warm enough."

I blinked to flick off the raindrops on my eyelashes and sighed as I approached her. No longer was I powerful and mighty. I was lost and alone in a world that had killed me.

As I came closer, she smiled, pleasantly surprised with whatever I appeared to be to her. "My, my, my, you are a pretty one-aren't cha?"

"Good genetics," I mumbled, while she opened her door for me to enter.

A gentle cape of warm air spread over me as I entered the house. It wasn't a nice place by any standards, but it was better than my rickety apartment back with Lia and Jada. No. No more Lia there.

Lia's dead.

There was a bed in the far corner with an accompanying dresser to match. The table across the room from the bed was still littered with what must have been dinner dishes, and I heard the rumbling of a furnace. A trail of goosebumps traveled up my spine, and I hoped that it was merely the chill instead of my fears coming to capture me.

The lady closed the door behind us and gently began to unbutton the top of my jacket, which was so soaked in rain, the bloodstains blended right in. "What's your name, sweetie?" she asked, glancing up at me for a moment as her fingers flew over the buttons and zipper of my jacket.

I didn't answer her at first because I knew that I couldn't tell her my real name. No one could ever know I was Ben, because Ben brought death wherever he went, and I would not allow that to happen again.

"You do have a name-don't you?"

"Mark," I numbly answered. "My name's Mark."

She smiled warmly and slid her long red fingernails through my hair, curling it around the back of my ears. "I'm Samantha, but you can call me Sam." I nodded in acknowledgement as she moved into the kitchen portion of the room and began to heat something on the stove. "You want something to eat? Drink?"

In my soaked shirt and jeans, I just stood there, glassy eyed and trembling. Lia was dead. I had inadvertently killed her. If I hadn't gone after George, she wouldn't have followed along. If I hadn't even come into her life, she never would have died like she did.

Sam came back to me, examining me through sympathetic eyes. I must have looked totally despicable, but she seemed not to notice nor care. After all, I was just another form of cash for her. Nothing more.

Gently, she led me by the hand to the bed, where she instructed me to sit. Barely able to comprehend things on my own, I did as I was told, slouching forward as she bent down and began to unlace my grimy boots. I hoped she wouldn't see any of George's flesh between the rubber soles.

"Anything I can get you?" she asked me, setting my boots and socks over to the side once they were removed.

"No..." I replied.

"Escape? Look's like you need that."

"Yeah, I guess I do."

A smile formed on her thick lips as she nodded in understanding. Slowly, she eased herself onto the bed beside me, tucking her legs up beneath her, and trailed her fingers around the bottom of my shirt as she gazed into my eyes charmingly. "You've got really pretty blue eyes, you know..." she commented.

"Mm-hmm."

Lia was dead. She was never coming back. What had I done?

Sam peeled my shirt off over my head and ran her fingers over my chest, admiring my muscles with the same fascination I had displayed just a few hours ago. Her touch wasn't soft like Jada's or innocent like Lia's, but it was pleasurable enough that I didn't turn away. The cut on my arm was rapidly healing, and even then, Sam didn't notice. "You must work out a lot. Haven't seen a six pack like this in a long time," she murmured, sliding her hands down the ripples of my body until she reached my belt. I stared impassively at her, wanting to burst out in tears or merely commit suicide that Lia's death was my own doing.

With keen expertise, Sam undid my belt and the rest of my pants until they laid in a heap on the floor, and I was sitting naked on her bed, watching her perform a striptease that seemed to block out all of my pain. She was a hooker. She had slept with more men than I could rationally count. She probably contained every imaginable sexual disease, but I didn't care.

I no longer cared about anything.

Somehow, we both ended up naked, and I was leaning over her. By that point in my lustful rendezvous, I was absolutely delirious and hardly conscious of what I was doing anymore. Frantically, I kissed her neck, sucking on the soft skin and nibbling on her earlobes. Underneath me, she wrapped her legs around my back, pulling me closer to her, and sighed in satisfaction. I was just another dumb male who needed a female to screw.

Business as usual.

As she drew me closer, I felt the heat radiating from between her legs and I went mad with desire. No longer able to contain myself, I took her with genetic powered ferocity. She gasped, unprepared for me, and slowly, I began to thrust. Her nails raked my back, sending shivers of pain that only excited me even more. Over and over we moved together until it became only one desperate attempt at releasing the pain. Groaning, I pumped her body until she could no longer simply gasp. She began to swear. Then she began to scream, but I didn't really care as to what she wanted. I would get what I wanted.

Between my own climax and the rapidly approaching mental storm, I drove into her like I had driven the knife into George's body, resulting in such a rush of feeling that I began to relive those last moments.

Wrapping my hands around Sam's neck, I rocked back and forth, bellowing at her because, in my disillusioned eyes, she was George and I was once again killing him.

"You bastard," I hissed, tightening my grip. "You bastard..."

She gave a strangled choke that sounded like "Mark", but I didn't care to hear her. After several blind moments, I stopped my thrusting when I realized that she was no longer responding. Pulling out of her as sexual fluid and blood spilled onto the bed sheets, I whispered her name. Gently, I poked her shoulder. "Sam?...Sam?" Then, when the full realization slapped me in the face, I could only gape at her in horror.

I had murdered her.

Choking back a scream, I stumbled back into my clothing, heavy with rain and my weapons, all while close to vomiting. You fool, I growled to myself, you are the cause of death. And you thought an alias could protect you. Trembling, I disappeared out onto the streets.

Somewhere during the black hours, I meandered my way into a sleazy bar squished between a souvenir store and bagel shop. After shoving a fistful of money at the bartender, I began to drink. If a whore couldn't block out my agony, then alcohol most certainly would. Put me right into a coma, and at last my pain would be removed.

I drank with a great gusto as a dehydrated man ready to die, gulping down the shots of strong alcoholic drinks without names that were handed to me in little glasses. Even when the room started to spin around me, and the pounding sound of blood in my head was the only thing I could truly recognize, I didn't stop. Faces and music smeared together around me, but I ignored it all in my stupor. The lights were so bright that I had to close my eyes just to ward off that pain, and I nearly stopped drinking because the music was hurting my ears. While reaching for another drink, my hand accidentally missed, and the glass ended up toppling over onto the bar. The liquid, glistening under the light, snaked down the countertop, yet I merely reached for another shot.

Suddenly, a strong hand came down over my wrist, preventing me from grasping my glass, and I looked upward to see the person clutching my arm. At first the face of the person swirled in my vision, and then I heard their voice.

"Stop it, right now."

The voice was female and spoken with a slight accent that I was unable to pinpoint in my drunkenness. "Let me go," I slurred and tried to pry her fingers away.

"Listen to me, Ben."

The utterance of my name sobered me up enough to peer through my alcohol inflicted fog at her. Bright blue hair was the first thing I noticed, and horrified, I wrenched my arm out of her grasp.

"Get the hell away from me," I warned, lurching unsteadily back. Accidentally, I bumped into a table, resulting in some harsh words from the men sitting there as their glasses clattered to the floor and smashed into hundreds of pieces.

Blue Girl reached out her hand towards me in an almost pleading fashion. "Ben..."

"Get away from me!" I bellowed, terrified of her and the secrets behind that damned blue hair.

"Look, I just want-"

"No!" I cried, throwing my hands over my ears. "No! No! No!" And with that, I scrabbled away from her and into the night.

Like a lunatic, I ran down the streets, resulting in terrified gasps from bums and hookers who wondered why such a finely dressed man was swearing about the "Blue Lady". I fell once or twice, resulting in a bloody lip and twisted ankle. Somehow, I found myself in a blind alley, slumped over a garbage pail where rotted carcasses of kittens and puppies were eaten by fat New York City rats. If I looked close enough, I knew that there was probably a human child amidst the scoria.

A caustic whip lashed throughout me, causing me to tightly grab onto the sides of the receptacle, understanding what was coming. Vomiting, my body spasmodically arched as my last meal erupted from my stomach, splattering the sides of the garbage can. The acid burned my throat, but even after my stomach was empty, the muscles still kept contracting, wanting to rid my body of every ounce of energy I had.

After the dry heaves ended, I collapsed onto the dirty ground, shaking and moaning like a drug addict in withdrawal. Covering my head up with my hands, I allowed the storm to emerge in its full rapture, pummeling my mind with thunder and darkness. It tore through my brain, destroying all emotion until I was just a shivering mass of fleshy tears. Since all of my resolves were annihilated anyhow, I allowed myself to finally acknowledge the words I had never told her, knowing that she could hear me from wherever she danced now.

Between the tears and thunder, and before I slipped into exhausted blackness, my lips managed to whisper, "Lia...I love you..."