--Steve Rice

---1---

It is a rather strange story on how I became what I am, a hunter and killer under the shroud of the nighttime sky. For many nights, the truth has plagued me and many times has drove me to the brink of insanity, if such a thing truly exists. I tend to find it amusing, the insane bantering from people, the myths, the rumors that follow my kind around. I wasn’t always this way. Though it feels like it has been an eternity, I have only been this way for the short period of four years... four of the longest years I have ever lived. Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself, let me bring you up to speed.

It was near the fall of the year. I was nineteen years old, barely out of high school and had no idea as to what life I was to live. I was a showmen when amongst friends, and a recluse when not, I unfortunately spent most of my time heartbroken, depressed, and full of rage. Women have not been kind to me, and they seldom are kind to any teenage male who was not a football player or some other sort of athlete. I was a musician, an artist of all trades, a tragic artist, as it seems now. I have given all hope up of having true love in my life until I met Elizabeth. She was, to me, the perfect example of beauty and was quite the opposite of what I was. Being a whole twelve inches taller then her (me being six foot and six inches) didn’t assist our differences any, but we still were very much in love. Approaching our nine-month anniversary (which in teenage time was practically a lifetime) we ended up coming at odds with each other unfortunately. Most of it was asinine stuff, jealousy and such (all coming from myself), but it was never to the point of breaking our bond. We were inseparable, it was always Elizabeth and I together at every turn, and I would not have ever wanted it any other way. My time with her was like my own personal heaven and I never wished it to end. Several of our fights however had to do with Ryan, a friend of hers in school who she was in denial about. Ryan seemed in love with her, but she could not see this fact, maybe from the outside it is obvious but apparently in the inside it was almost non-existent. This drove me to anger more then once, for Ryan would come up in conversation at the most convenient times. The fact that Ryan was with a girlfriend of a year or so seemed to slip by even Ryan himself when around Elizabeth. I didn’t wish to play the typical macho guy role by forbidding her to speak to him, I wasn’t an over bearing, controlling, Mongoloid; I was not going to be an idiot. Perhaps I should have.

One evening in late January of the New Year, Elizabeth and I got in another argument, with topics ranging from careers and my future, to Ryan’s obsession with her. This fight, unlike most of our others, ended very bitterly and we mutually got off the phone at the same time (to avoid another argument of who hung up on whom first). The phone rang soon after. A friend of mine, Tommy, was on the line:

"Hey, I’m in town for a while, why don’t we hang out for a bit. Get a pizza, check out a movie... um... you there?"

I guess my silence was that noticeable, I explained about the argument with Elizabeth and he proclaimed "Then tonight shall be your night my friend, I’m picking your ass up and we shall drown those blues away in a flurry of Pizza and Mountain Dew."

You see, I was not a drinker, and never have been. I’ve sworn off pollutants such as drugs and alcohol long before I ever even would have had the chance to try them. I half-heartedly agreed and before I knew it, he was at my house, trying to haul me out of the depression that I had sunk in. I hated arguments, and confrontations; I felt they were irrelevant to life. I felt we could all live happy lives coexisting among each other without the use of arguing to get our points across... Sure, I ended up arguing, but the aftermath of arguing is where it usually hit me that I just had an argument and that ended up depressing me. I was a sad individual indeed at times. You may be wondering what this has to do with me becoming what I am... but trust me friends this has everything to do with what I am.

Tommy was seven years my senior; we worked together on a website for about a year or so, and like most things in my life, looked like it may fail. Tommy kept me grounded in reality most of the time, and kept me from doing something stupid (such as closing the site down) and this time he did the same:

"Let it go; this Ryan sounds like a total dick but just ignore him. You know your girlfriend loves you, stupid. You’re one of the most non-guy guys I know. You’re everything a woman wants for some weird reason, go with it." His advice made sense as usual, but I still couldn’t shake the feeling that Ryan wasn’t someone to just ignore. After a few hours of just driving around, it slowly approached midnight and as everything closed around us, and with us still needing something to do, we ended up going to see the midnight movie at the local cinema. When we arrived there was something in the air that was unsettling, I know now that it was the smell of death, but the events of that evening were much more then unsettling.

As we entered the theater, we noticed it was oddly empty something that is not a usual occurrence on a Friday night. I expected the usual drove of Rocky Horror fans lining the hallways of the theater, waiting for the moment to pile in for another week of insane fun, but this was not the case, in fact there was no one in the halls, not even a ticket taker. Tommy seemed to be very uneasy, and if I mentioned any such a thing he would quickly reply "Oh come on, stop making me out to be a pansy..." but I could see the small bit of fear in his eyes. He was not alone, my mind raced with possibilities of where everyone could be. I thought of everything, from a surprise birthday party for an employee, to the theater being held hostage by Libyan terrorists searching for the plutonium that they stole but had stolen from them so that a crazy scientist could make a time machine. In hindsight we should have turned around and walked right out of that building, but we didn’t... we pressed on, searching for some sign of life in the theater.

As we reached the end of the final hallway of the theater, we noticed a door on the right hand side. It swung open a split second later, and in what seemed like slow motion, Chris comes walking out of the door. The anger grew inside of me like a virus. Chris, the very same person who tried to make my life a living hell not a month earlier and then stayed away from me every second after that, this was his doing... another attempt to try and fuck with my mind. That was something I was not going to take from him...