Reborn

It seems like cold coffee is a metaphor in Charlie’s life. That metaphor being that everything with a good warm feeling eventually decreases, and goes cold. Across the street, the XXX-Theater neon sign flashes off and on, making a disappearing and reappearing silhouette on the side of the joint. The waitress comes over and fills hot coffee into Charlie’s cup.

“Would you like the house special pie this evening?” she says.

“No, thank you.” he says.

He could feel the waitress stare at him. Not just her stares, but everyone else in the joint, too. He knew they all were staring at his forehead, with the huge scar. Charlie, didn’t care if they stared. He welcomed it.

Most of these people in the diner you could tell made their living doing night jobs. The place was filled with factory work shirts, trucker chain wallets, and guitar cases from the street musicians. The diner looked like any other waffle house within the Louisville-metro area: urine smells, ugly brown-plaid wallpaper, dim lighting, and a jukebox in the corner blasting out old country songs. Charlie never really gave the atmosphere of the place much thought.

The only thing Charlie is focusing on is the Russian SV-98 sniper rifle that is buried beneath some bed sheets in the back of his van. The same sheets he and his wife laid together in, side by side for ten years. In fact, she is the one to blame for everything. In Charlie’s mind she started the snowball effect which led to this moment. Not even the truckers, drunks, and creatures of the night that shared the same air in this little diner could take Charlie’s mind off the sensation of his life’s miseries.

Charlie Styles was a serial killer, no doubt about it. Within less than a year he has killed dozens people, most done execution style. Charlie’s favorite thing to do was to shot them in the back of their heads, with wrist and feet bound by rope. When the police and detectives found his victims bodies, not only where they lying down in a pool of blood, but most of the time Charlie cut the eyes out of their sockets, too.

Most in America would say that Charlie, if ever caught, deserved the death penalty. But Charlie didn’t see it that way at all. Charlie revered himself as an angel.

An angel of death.

To look at him, one wouldn’t think he was up to no good, besides the huge scar on the side of his head. One glance at the guy he would just look like a normal forty year old man, with fair height, built body, and a receding brown hairline.

As he sipped his coffee, Charlie began to think back to last year, when his “rebirth” as he likes to call it, occurred. The events which lead to this moment rewind in his head, like a VHS tape.
He remembered what it felt like to loose his wife, kids, and job. The pain, and suffering that it caused him. But most of all, he remembered the bullet he blasted inside his skull, and how it felt almost like a baptism.

His thoughts began to race back to that day.

As he sat inside his car on the brown leather seats, he reached for glove box. Deep down he knew this was the answer. Inside was his fathers Smith & Wesson pistol he gave to him before he died. Charlie took gun out of the glove box. Between his fingers, he could feel the plastic with rubber overmold. Gently he stuck the gun up to his head, and pulled the trigger.

That was last year, and it seemed like a decade ago.

So, there he was, drinking shitty coffee, in a shitty little diner. Thoughts began racing through his head, as his chest moved up and down from breathing. Sure he was breathing air, but he was still dead.

His hand rested against his cheek, and every insignificant move he made with his fingers he could feel the brush of his five o’clock shadow. He tried to remember how many bullets he had left in the Russian. Was it three, or was it five? No matter, he still had his stolen five inch Smith & Wesson tucked safely inside his jacket pocket, whose chambers were loaded with maximum power.

One his way out, for no apparent reason, he took the revolver to the waitress’s head and blew out her skull. The blood splattered the desert case behind the counter. The drunks, and creatures of the night screamed in horror, as they watched this patron saint of the food service take her last order, forever.