Punisher

Writing exercise.

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I lost enough that I don’t feel too bad about killing people.

The government turned me into a trained killer, and I made a career of being able to take a man down from just under two thousand meters. The military owned me and my trigger finger for fifteen years. When I was free, I made a silent promise to my wife that I’d never pick up a gun again.

I had to pretend to be normal after the horrors of war.

Two years after I retired, we had a break in. I was gone for less dangerous government work so my wife was left home with the kids. I returned to find her lifeless body on our bed, her clothes torn and her open eyes wide with horror. My kids fared no better.

Something broken in my then. Death was too good for those son of a bitches, but I was bringing it to them anyway.

I promised I’d only find the guys that did it. My aim was justice with a healthy dose of revenge.

It wasn’t hard to find the first man. He was low level pissant holed up in some shithole building. I made him kneel on the grimy concrete and put a bullet in his skull. The brain matter was indistinguishable from the garbage decorating the ground. I made sure he gave up his partners before I did the deed.

Picking them off one by one gave me purpose. I took sick pleasure in listening to them beg for their lives. They didn’t extend my wife that mercy in her last moments and I made sure to remind them of that fact before I put them down.

I should’ve stopped, but that blood lust rose fast. Killing for a living can’t be turned off no matter what you try. The first touch of death and you jumped back in the fray. I’d gone from a man to a god with the power to end lives. There was no turning back.

To control it, I only hunted those who I deemed evil. Drug dealers, murders, rapists. I was judge, jury, and executioner. Death personified.

I’d deposit the low life in the city dump because that’s where garbage belonged. Easy clean up and the streets were better for it.

Things got a little hazy after I killed an innocent man. I didn’t do my research before I tracked him down.

I’d taken him from his home, driven him to my camp where I like to get their confession, and strung him up by his ankles. He’d begged me, telling me a story about being at the wrong place at the wrong time. A story I’ve heard so often I can recite it by heart

I felt nothing when I pulled the trigger. Feeling remorse for a criminal was impossible. He was just another scumbag I was getting off the streets. Until I found out the truth

His death hit the papers two days later with a picture of the man who really committed the crime. I can spot evil, but I missed this one by a mile.

Now I have another thing to atone for in my life.