A million murders were swirling inside
Darren’s head, countless victims of a young man’s intense dreams, but no one
would likely have ever known about his secret life had a craniotomy to remove an
abnormal growth on his brain not opened the contents of his macabre mind. It’s as if the demons spilled out of him and
retreated to the corners of the surgery room to await orders. Sure enough, about six weeks later, after he
recovered from the operation, Darren, a computer programmer by day and visionary by night, set aside his
laptop, grabbed weapons he had stored in a locked crate in the garage, and went
on a rampage one sunny Saturday afternoon, killing everyone within a hundred-yard
radius of his condo: about thirteen people to be exact, including two infants in
a double stroller. He had had visions of
an apocalypse and himself as an avenging angel of darkness, with blood literally
flowing in the gutters and fiery-eyed vultures feasting upon a mountain of rotting corpses.Darren was a romantic who fell in love, not with an idea, much less a woman, but with an abiding image that had captivated him since childhood. His love affair ended, as it were, when he ran back into his condo upon hearing sirens and fired a glock pistol into the roof of his mouth. A SWAT team found him on his bed, with a fatal gun wound to the head, part of his brain splattered on the bedroom walls which were largely covered by posters depicting dark scenes of his imagining. Some people believe that heaven is the fulfillment of your greatest pleasures, a metaphysical place where you can indulge the desires of your heart from everlasting to everlasting. Perhaps Darren, or his spirit at least, sits astride a sanguinary mass of severed heads and sawed-off torsos even as we speak, committing a million murders with sadistic glee.
