I walked the streets, an uneasy feeling coming over me as I watched the strangers pass by, each scowling, some crying. Why had I come to this city you wonder? I don't know. I don't think I ever really thought about it. My confusion with Sin, my self destructive mistakes I'd made, whatever it was that disrupted my thoughts, was all that occupied my mind. The wind became cold very fast, my hands digging into my pockets to protect themselves from the biting chill. I ducked my head down, my eyes glancing from one person to the next as they obliviously passed by me.
Didn't they know what I was? The potential I had to be the murderer of them all? Sleep deprivation haunted me like an old ghost, my eyes heavy, burning and sore. I felt almost drunk, dizzy, seeing the world around me through a daze. But I wouldn't sleep. Oh no. Not I. With every blink of my lids I became all that much more determined that I would die before falling asleep and unleashing whatever hell it was that I caused in that state.
I was positively mad, out of my mind, hallucinating that there were dead people walking among the living around me. I winced as I almost knocked shoulders with a woman, only to pass right through her like air. My body screamed the word 'sleep', but I denied it. I focused my eyes on the sunset, seeing the pinks and oranges that stretched across the sky, sliding behind the skyscrapers and metal buildings.
I looked up, suddenly seeing a man standing about eight feet away from me, eyes wide and body poised as if paralyzed with fear. He raised a quivering finger at me, his chest rising up and down rapidly, his entire body trembling.
"No." He said in a tight voice. "God no……. you're dead."
My temperature dropped at this statement, my mind searching for some sort of answer.
"No," he repeated, shaking his head and falling backwards. "I watched you die. I killed you."
"What the?" But I suddenly realized that he wasn't talking to me but a man standing directly behind me, blood seeping down from his forehead where a bullet hole shone. The creature was a young man, Hispanic looking and rather handsome had it not been for the yellowish tint to his skin and the whites of his green eyes.
"All your sins remembered Odis." Whispered the young man, black drool dripping out from his lips. "Don't you know? I'll stay with you into the bowels of Hell."
The air turned icy, flooding into my lungs like water, suffocating me as I realized the streets were now cluttered with people. Where there had been fifty humans, there were now hundreds. And I knew, in my poisoned mind, that most of these, were dead.
"I had to. I had to." A woman standing across the street sucked in a breath as she held in her arms a tiny, aborted baby that squirmed and shrieked, naked in her palms.
As the first screams erupted, screeching through the echoing silence, the sky turned completely black as if the sun had been torn away. Like someone had turned out a light in a room. Those who didn't scream, held their breath as I did, eyes opening wide to see through the pitch blackness. I felt crowded in, my nerves screaming inside me as the fear took over, as strong as the coldness that sunk into every inch of my body.
"Mister!" Came a childish voice next to me. "Mister help me! Momma's gone and I cant see."
I felt the chubby hands of the little boy grab my wrist, tugging and jumping up and down even as I couldn't see him. I felt the presence of many children suddenly surrounding me, their little voices crying out for their mothers or fathers.
"Hold on." I commanded them sternly. "The night lights will soon be turned on. Just wait for a moment."
"But we cant see!" they screamed.
"I know I know!" I answered. "Just hold on!"
The lights turned on.
The screams filled my body even as they flooded the air. The street light shone over the little boy who held my hand, his eyelids blinking over empty sockets.
"I cant see mister!" he screamed, the blood pouring out of his eyelids. "He took my eyes!"
I tore my hand out of his grip, stumbling backwards as the children surrounded me, all of them little boys with bleeding eyes. Dead children. Stolen away from their families, thrown into a cellar for days, starved, awaken to have their eyes gorged out of their heads.
"He took our eyes!" they screamed in unison, coming towards me as quickly as I could stumble away. "He said he wanted to see the world as we did. To see innocence through our eyes. Give them back to us! Give us our eyes!"
I ran in terror, fleeing through the streets as the chaos took over and in horror, people scattered. The entire city was screaming and through my insane fear I realized quite abruptly that Sin was here. Eyes turned black up to the lashes, blood poured from mouths and eyes, people brutally slaughtering each other.
A man threw another against the branch of a tree, using such incredible force that the bloody stump stuck out of the victim's chest, his limp body quivering as it died. Blood splashed into my eyes as a woman slit her belly open with a pocket knife, her blank eyes staring in fascination at the intestines she held in her hands, playing with the slippery tubes as she fell to the cement, laughing as she died. People began to fall from the sky, jumping out of windows from the buildings. Blood burst into the air, pieces of bodies landing on me, wet and squirming.
All sanity left and I took to the sky, dodging laughing people who cut themselves with office scissors as they fell to their deaths. Bibles were thrown out of buildings, heaping into piles in the streets. I flew, vomiting intensely at the scenes that bore into my memory. Red was everywhere, as men bit their own tongues off in their mouths, chewing them, blood dribbling from the corners of their lips.
I felt as though my body was being pulled in a certain direction and as no clear thoughts came to my mind at the time, I followed it blindly. As I watched, those who were left began to burn the bibles in the streets, heaping them into twenty foot piles and igniting them with gasoline that devoured those who hadn't the minds or the desire enough to escape. A man heat duct-taped his family together in the street, dripping rubbing alcohol all over them before igniting a flame that slowly burned them to death.
I was knocked to the ground by a teenage woman falling from a nearby window, holding her infant son in her arms, only to smash into the pavement below. I crawled to my knees, staring at the hairy, naked legs of Shiloh.
"So where's my pizza?" he asked, blood streaming down the inside of his thighs, dried vomit still clutching his chin. I cried out in terror, crab walking away from him, my hands skidding across the soaked ground.
I bumped into a soggy substance, nausea drowning me as I touched the stretched, melted flesh of a burn victim and his wife.
"We forgive you Charlie." They said in haunting voices, their voice boxes burned away. "Come on home now. We put the fire out."
I've never flown so fast in my life, dashing through falling bodies as I fled the scene, my eyes the size of saucers, so scared I was. I came to the end of the city, the outskirts, nearly colliding with Vegeta as he stood there, blazing with energy.
His arms were outstretched, his face twisted with the most menacing of grins. I almost couldn't recognize him, his skin alight with power, his body expanded to an enormous size. For all my fear that I thought couldn't possibly grow any stronger, seeing the sheer craze in his eyes, I nearly passed out.
"Ah, so I see you decided to join my little party Kakarot." He said, his eyes never focusing on me but instead, gazing intently at the burning city.
"Vegeta," I said as calmly as I could muster, hearing the horror in my own voice. "Vegeta we've got to………. We've gotta' help those people."
"Its amazing, is it not?" He said as if he'd never heard me. "The evil in everyone's hearts. Well, everyone is born evil Kakarot, you know that as well as I. Just a little twitch, just a little touch here and there and oh, how you can expand that. It swells, molds, moves like its own master. Takes over the good, the thoughts, the sanity. Just a little bit of evil, no matter how small, can be manipulated. Can be controlled. Evil is a beautiful thing."
"What are you talking about?" I said, my body frozen inside. "Why are you waiting?! We've got to do something!"
"Oh my, but don't you sound like the perfect Saturday morning cartoon hero." He laughed, his arms still spread and a certain pull aiming into him. "Don't you see? They're gone. If you infect a body with evil, swelling the amount that's already there, you take away the soul, the good. They're all DEAD! Mindless moving corpses!"
It finally occurred to me that he was entirely and completely out of his mind, Sin taking over whatever sanity had been there at one point and was now totally absent. I grabbed his arm, pulling him away from the city as best I could.
"We've got to get out of here!" I screamed over the sounds that burst forth from the city. The sky began to lighten. Something worse was happening, people awakening suddenly, becoming conscious of their surroundings. Seeing what they'd done to themselves, to others. Seeing with sane eyes all that had happened.
"Stop!" Vegeta hissed, pulling away from me and glaring venomously. "You're ruining my concentration! I've got to finish what I've started!"
"What………" I whispered, seeing the fumes of what looked like smoke flood out of his body. Shadows moved across the ground towards the city, darkness falling rapidly again. The sobs ceased and the gut wrenching silence began, tinted with crazed laughter in the distance.
"Vegeta….," I breathed one last time, my entire frame trembling as the truth slowly dawned on me. "Vegeta we've got to go. We've got to….." I was losing strength, breathing hard. "Sin. Its here. We've got to get away from Sin."
"Really Kakarot," Vegeta laughed. "you haven't figured it out yet. You truly are the most incompetent creature on this planet. Why, a French poodle might have figured it out by now. Don't you get it you sick little thing?"
He looked wickedly into my eyes, shadows dancing across his face and lights occasionally glimmering off a pair of horns that disappeared and reappeared upon his head.
"I AM SIN!"
I screamed in terror as a torrent of souls was thrown against me, their fingers and hands pushing my chest, throwing me backwards. The sheer force, the sheer magnitude was unlike anything I've ever felt, my skin almost peeling from my bones with the strength. My flesh was instantly blackened and blue with bruises, my muscles bleeding inwardly, deep tissue contusions. I was thrown miles upon miles, the ocean appearing beneath me, the wind tearing strands of my hair out at the speed.
Only as I crash landed against a mountain did they let me go, dissipating in the air, the feeling of their presence vanishing instantaneously, as if it had never been there at all. And in my failure, in my guilt and utter defeat, I just lay there for hours, realizing the stupidity behind everything I had done in the last year. Realizing everything that should have been so obvious.
That thing, that monster, that creature was not Vegeta. Hadn't been Vegeta for years. Whatever it was, was pure, perfect evil. Nothing less. And had I still contents in my stomach, I would have spewed it all out at the fact that I had been this hellion's puppet for so long.
Indeed, I had become the devil's advocate.
