Trapped animals would gnaw off their own limbs to get free, regardless of the pain. People do that too.

-Jake Kabrinski

It was a beautiful park on the outskirts of the city, in the suburbs. Children laughed as they ran around in the playground, yelling as each other as they enjoyed their childhood. Birds chirped in the background. A perfect picture of happiness.

A boy, not more than 13 years old, stood quietly at one side. He should be with teenagers of his own age, having fun, watching movies, growing up. Yet he was not. He was on a mission. He wore a jacket, within which were several weapons, which no child his age should ever be touching.

He narrowed his eyes as he watched his target approach. A middle aged man with two young children, holding them by their hands as the kids licked at their cones of ice cream. The boy ignored the clenching sensation in his stomach as he watched them laugh with delight at the cold treat.

He had never had ice cream in his life. He wished he did not feel angry. He wished he did not feel envious. The anger, the envy lent him hatred, hatred against the children, for having something he did not, and would never have. He would make them suffer as he did. At least for a while.

“Proceed according to plan.” The radio in his ear crackled. There was an audio microphone and an optical camera on his person, telling his handlers where and exactly what he was doing.

“Understood,” the boy answered. He had his orders. He had to do whatever they told him to, or they would trigger the bomb in his guts. Since that fateful meeting with his father and master, he had killed more than a thousand people in the past year. Sometimes they were in groups, sometimes they were alone. He had been told it was all to solidify his father’s hold on power, killing those who might oppose him in the future. Dangerous figures in politics, business, and the criminal world.

He waited until the man sat down on a bench, and gestured for his two children to go have fun at the playground. Then the boy walked over behind the man, acting as though he was just passing by. One hand reached inside his jacket, pulling out a small gun, equipped with a special tipped dissolving needle. As he walked behind the man, he fired sideways, the needle piercing the man in the neck.

The drug in the needle acted immediately. The target never had a chance. One moment he was breathing, the next he simply slumped over.

The boy continued to walk away calmly, as the man’s two children ran back to him, shouting excitedly. “Papa?” One of them asked. They prodded their father once, then again with worry as they realized he wasn’t reacting.

“Papa!” It was a scream of sheer anguish.

The beautiful sky started to cloud over as 91 left the site of the murder, his eyes cold, his face hard as stone, though his heart was breaking with the children’s cries. He had wanted to make them feel pain, but why did he hurt even worse? Killing the man, hearing their pain, did not make him feel any better.

It never did.

Moments later, it started to rain, as though the skies themselves were weeping for the murdered man and the act of sin itself.

91 was on a bus heading back to his handlers in the city when it happened. A flash of light in the city, a thunderous roar, then the horrifying mushroom cloud which indicated a nuclear explosion.

The other passengers on the bus screamed as they were blinded by the flash, clutching their eyes in agony. 91, guided by some instinct he was not able to explain, had managed to shield his eyes by lowering his head and placing a seat rest between his eyes and the glaring light of a nuclear explosion.

The bus swerved, the driver one of those blinded. It crashed into a building, the front slamming up the sidewalk and into the front of a store. Sparks flew about wildly as metal screeched across metal.

91 looked around, and threw himself out of a window, breaking the glass as he broke through. He rolled away from the bus on the pavement, desperately putting distance between himself and the bus. He did not know why he was doing this. It was as if something in the back of his mind was telling him what to do.

The bus exploded.

He sat on the ground in the small deserted room within the ruins of an abandoned building, looking around him to check on the items he had prepared. His upper body was naked, revealing his lean frame. Most noticeable was the long thin scar across his stomach, somehow overshadowing the numerous other scars, patches, and bullet scar holes on his torso.

A clean knife laid on a rag on his right, while strips of duct tape hung loosely from the side of a table. Several more pieces of clean cloth and bandages laid nearby. There was also a sewing kit with needle and thread, though to use them would be extremely optimistic. He didn’t think he’d be able to go that far. He had been lucky enough to scrounge up these items in light of the terrorist attack.

He tried to control his breathing, and largely succeeded. He took out an entire bottle of painkillers, and swallowed all the contents with a single gulp. Then he took out a small rubber gag, and placed it in his mouth.

He picked up the knife, steeling himself for what he was do to next. He stared at his belly, and drew the knife slowly and carefully across its surface, almost exactly following the scar line, slicing past the skin, revealing his guts and internal organs.

The pain, despite the drugs he had taken, was excruciating. He bit down hard on the gag, groaning against the pain. Sweat beaded on his forehead, and he laid down the knife, then moved his hand into the wound. Color drained out of his face.

If slicing himself apart had hurt, then digging a hand into his own intestines was worse. The sensation of feeling his own hand within his body would have been academic if there wasn’t so much pain.

He forced himself past the pain, focusing on his task. He had to find the tiny bomb they had placed within his guts to ensure his loyalty and his subservience. This was his only chance to escape from his handlers. He would not squander it.

It had been a break for him when somebody had set off a nuke in the city his handlers were in. The same EMP fallout which had rendered almost any solid state electronics useless had also temporarily disabled the bomb, but it would reactivate itself fairly soon. Normally, it would automatically explode if he did not report to his handlers after every mission, or if he tried to remove it. And since it was disabled for the moment, he could take it out. But he had to do it now.

Due to the circumstances, there was no way he was going to try approaching a hospital. They would have thought he was crazy. Anyway, the hospitals were overworked with fallout from the war raging all over the planet.

Blood seeped from the open wound, staining red the rags he had placed below himself, but he persisted. The seconds ticked by slowly with agonizing slowness, even as he dug within himself for the bomb.

There! His fingers brushed across a metallic object, attached to his guts with some sort of clamp. His control was slipping, his breath coming in short, painful gasps, and he bit down hard on the gag as he closed his hand around the bomb and pulled.

If it wasn’t for the gag, he would have wailed out loud. He focused on the treat he had given himself earlier in the day, using the lingering taste on his tongue to counter the pain. His first apple, even one that was soft and overripe from too long in the sun, unattended and abandoned after the nuclear explosion. He had never known anything that tasted sweet. It had been a new and enjoyable sensation. It had been a symbolic gesture, a affirmation to himself that he was going to break away and earn his freedom once and for all.

His right hand trembled hard as he pulled the bomb out, along with a mess of blood and some tissue which had grown a protective layer over the bomb. He threw it into a corner, far enough that the explosion wouldn’t affect him if it happened. It was not a powerful bomb, after all. Just enough to blow his innards to pieces and kill him with internal bleeding.

Just a bit more, just a bit more. He was feeling a bit giddy from the blood loss, and his vision was clouding over, a sure sign that he was going to collapse soon. His right hand held the open flaps of skin together while his left hand reached for the nearby strips of duct tape hanging from the table. They had already been cut into suitable pieces, and all he needed to do was to pull them off and tape them over the wound.

It was said that duct tape and bailing wire could fix all problems. What most people didn’t know was that duct tape could fix people up as well. He had to use the tape to stop the bleeding and somewhat seal the open wound before he bled to death.

His hands were shaking badly no matter how he tried to control them, and his breath was strained, making his efforts to control his hands even tougher. He managed to get the first piece of duct tape over the wound, and he pasted it over, but it failed to stick because of the wet blood. He almost gave up then, but then he recalled the hell he had gone through, the bodies of his dead siblings. No, I won’t give up!

The strip of duct tape was dry on one side, and that meant further strips on top managed to hold it in place. He quickly followed with several more strips, slowly staunching the bleeding as the tape sealed the wound. The wound would need stitching with the sewing kit later, but he did not think he could carry on any further.

With the duct tape sealing the wound, he finally collapsed onto the ground, drifting off into a fevered sleep, filled with the voices of the children of the man he had killed a few days ago, as they, along with so many others, had tormented him for the past few days.

The boy known as 91 to those who had raised him walked slowly through the small town, careful not to move too fast or else tear the hasty stitches over his belly. Humanity was a wailing sea of despair around him, flotsam from the ruins of the ravaged world.

Since the first attack, some religious fanatics had declared war on the rest of humanity, throwing around weapons of mass destruction like cheap firecrackers. Menkent’s populated areas had been hit hard early on with nukes and air deployed fuel-air explosives, but it was a minor mercy that biologicals had not been used.

The fanatics in-system had been driven out temporarily, though he was sure they would be back. Everybody was trying to get out in case the fanatics did return with even worse than what they had already inflicted.

People looking at him would have thought him just another 13 year old boy, instead of the cold blooded killer he actually was. But his eyes and face would have given him away.

It had been five days since he had managed to remove the bomb from his guts, and he had spent much of the time recuperating, planning out his next moves. From now on, he could start plotting his revenge. He did not have any definite plans, but he knew he had to grow up first. And that meant finding somewhere off the beaten path. And getting out of the way of the brewing interstellar conflict. It wasn’t his business.

He had quite a bit of money, taken from looting dead bodies despite the stench, the terrible smell, and the deadly radiation. He did not care if he was going to die of cancer down the road. He didn’t plan on living that long. He would leave this planet, covering his tracks in the chaos of refugees fleeing the world.

91 headed to the crowded spaceport, wary of his future and with one hand on his gun. His heart was empty, but his soul was filled with hatred. His fingers twitched often, as though expecting to pull out the gun at any moment and start firing. He disappeared into the crowd, a silent, invisible, and menacing presence.