The alien-like sound of a broken radio fills my ears as blood forces its way into my nostrils. The broken notes of music were able to form from the broken radio.

  “God rest ye merry, gentlemen

  Let nothing you dismay

  Remember, Christ, our Saviour

  Was born on Christmas day

  To save us all from Satan's power

  When we were gone astray”

  Glass, metal, blood… laid strewn across fifteen to twenty feet.

  Two corpses.

  One drunk still living.

  With The Devil and a Mad God standing out from time.

  The impact of this event was set in a four-way intercession outside of a town.

  The drunk’s car was a Chevrolet Cavalier and had a side collision with the two corpses’ 1985 Buick Century. The front of the Chevrolet Cavalier had a single scratch on it. The drunk behind the wheel had been asleep for the last 100 feet; he would not know that he had killed two individuals until the following morning.

  The drunk was born in 1942; he turned 55 on July 4th, 1997.

  He had a choice to be made: go to jail or serve his country, and his choice was the rifle twice.

  In his time in Vietnam, he experienced firsthand both the Tet Offensive and the My Lai Massacre.

  During the Tet Offensive he claimed at least five men's lives that he knows of. His base was almost overrun by VC, but the base was able to hold its ground.

  The drunk had no real morality argument against being part of the My Lai Massacre. He killed kids, raped women, and the amount of men he killed he wasn’t even sure. He was never convicted for his actions, and no man cared about what he did; some even congratulated him.

  When his terms were completed, the Drunk's (legal name being Robert Smith) returned to his wife, Mary Smith.

  The two were wed on November 4th, 1967, one month before Robert Smith would be sent to the clusterfuck of Nam.

  Mary Smith, oh Mary, would give birth to the first son of Robert Smith in 1970. Robert's first son would be named after himself, Robert Jr. Smith. Robert and Mary would have four more children throughout the ‘70s.

  Robert would increase his alcohol consumption at a slow incline. By ‘79 Robert would slap around his wife and drink at least one six-pack a night, but that would be on the low end.

  His wife, poor, poor Mary, would stay by the side of Robert for as long as she lived.

  Mary was a sweet girl who fell in love with Robert during high school, where the two first met. She was raised by a conservative father and a religious mother. Mary was raised to be the ideal wife, to be seen but never heard… She was molded since childhood to not have true freedom but one basic off that of marriage… Serving the husband.

  Land of the free—everybody fucking know that ain’t true.

  After college and before Robert's time in war, the two would meet each other again in their hometown. Mary, sweet Mary, her mother was deathly sick, lungs filled with different liquids every few days, and Mary’s mother didn’t believe in any medicine, just the lord. So before Mary's mother (Anna Williams) would shuffle off this mortal coil, Mary rushed into a big wedding with her high school sweetheart.

  Only a few weeks after the engagement and wedding, Mary watched her own mother die alone. Mary was a good-hearted, loving girl that only ever wanted her children to have a good life, and at a certain time, she wished the same for Robert and her.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  On the night of February 8th, 1982, and in the very early morning of the 9th, Mary was found dead in a ditch far from town. It was found she was drugged and raped multiple times; her body left an image that never left any lawman that saw it. All what was know was that she bled out for twenty minutes cold and alone in that damn ditch.

  Poor, poor Mary…

  The town sheriff, Robert Smith, never did find who did it, and to this day no one knows who did except for me and the man who committed it.

  Is that one in the same?

  Robert Smith was never voted off from being sheriff; he held it until he was 54, when he decided to step down. None of his children ever talked to Robert after they were old enough to leave the drunken bastard who would beat his children and wife.

  And on December 4th, 1997, he was on the outskirts of a town he never had a reason to be near; he had drunk enough for any man to take his keys away, but the bartender never did. At 11:45 on December 4th, 1997, a couple was returning from a loveless eighteenth anniversary dinner from the city close by. On this Thursday night Robert had fallen asleep behind the wheel. His foot was on the accelerator, speeding straight down without any headlights on. The married couple drives forward, unable to see Robert speeding down the road. The married couple was in the dead center of the intersection when Robert flew right into their car.

  The wife, who was on the passenger side, was killed first.

  The wife was an Asian woman, Japanese to be exact.

  She had given birth to one child that she felt nothing towards or against almost eighteen years prior. Her eyes were hazel brown, and her hair was dark chocolate brown.

  She liked to paint on the side and would work an office job in the city only twenty minutes away.

  She was a good person.

  The husband then died.

  He wore a pair of glasses, a black suit, a black tie, black loafers, a pocket watch, and a pistol.

  He served during all of the Vietnam War; he never raped any civilians and never raped “combatants”. (If such people ever existed.) He never believed in the war, but his father and his father’s father before him had served, so he joined. The husband would stay either in the army or government for the rest of his life.

  He had smoked about five cigarettes every day ever since he was sent to war as a boy. He marries his wife due to impregnating her after a one-night stand. He was stationed in Misawa, Japan and had met his wife there.

  He was smoking a cigarette the night he was hit.

  The cigarette was never finished.

  My eye lay upon the two bodies.

  Conrad and Tsuki.

  “The history lesson was interesting.”

  Konran created a cig and a pipe.

  He threw the cig over and lit his pipe.

  I lit the cig.

  “I’ve been up… Give me a second.”

  I took the cig out of my mouth, walked over to the right side of the road, and puked. I pulled my flask out of my inner pocket, swished it around in my mouth, and spit the liquor out. Then placed the cigarette back in my mouth.

  “Konran, I’ve been up for one hundred and ten hours. I have an awful headache on my right side and am really close to digging a bullet-shaped hole in my skull. Why am I looking at the two people I shared a house with for the first almost eighteen years of my life corpses?”

  Konran started to make smoke rings.

  I took a drag and swig.

  “Why does Vietnam come up so often with you?”

  “It was the war that broke America. If I remember… I don’t need to remember; I have all his memoirs. Conrad served in Nam the whole time. Even if he didn’t believe there was nothing left for him. His parents died when he was in his first term. He was thirty-two in ’79… You gonna answer my question?”

  My clothes had repaired their selves and had removed any blood stains as well.

  “The Devil has grown fed up with killing… is that right?”

  I gaze back at the Conrad and Tsuki.

  “Yeah.”

  My thumb tracked across the words written upon my gilded Zippo lighter: “The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned!” From Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe. The whole quote is "The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike: the devil will come, and Faustus must be damned!” but you can’t fit that on a damn lighter.

  “It didn’t seem like you had much of a problem with putting that woman down like a dog for your own benefit, V. How many people have you personally killed?

  Hundreds,

  Thousands,

  V?

  No man from your world has ever killed as many people by hand. Through systems they have killed much more but through the use of their own bare hands, quote on quote.

  V.

  What about that woman?”

  The car crash was removed from where we stood, and a bridge rose from it.

  “What about this woman that you were to slow… too incompetent to save. You said to yourself that you had never killed someone back on Earth, but you lied. You killed this woman, V. You killed her from your incompetence, and you know that! You tried to redeem yourself by saving that girl back in Weltschmerz, but you failed. You may have saved her, but you stopped caring about that girl when I said what you would have to do. You only cared about gaining the knowledge of every act that could be considered evil or bad in any way because you finally wanted a way to feel like a victim.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about? Of course I don’t care about being a fucking victim!”

  “You’re right… You are right.

  It's even better.

  You don’t care about any human being you have ever met.

  You don’t care about Miyamoto

  You don’t care about Celeste

  And you definitely don’t care about Violet. Come on, V, you didn't even give her a name. That is a human right in your world, and you never took a second to make something up.

  A man who killed thousands of people has no sympathy in their bones.

  When you learn about the death of the people who raised and birthed you. You showed no human emotions at all; every time you said to yourself that you wished you could cry was mere blatant lie.

  People are nothing more than annoyances that could be shut up with a bullet, or they could be helpful tools. In your class you asked the question. “WHAT IS MAN?” V, we both know that you are not. You say that The Devil is a persona, a mask to commit evil acts for the right reason, but you wear no mask.

  You will keep killing people for personal benefit. Because you are not a man, you are The Devil and there can only be one real Devil, V.”

  "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” — Samuel Johnson