• -------Her name was Rachel. She lived in upper west Pennsylvania. She worked as a manicurist, before everything happened. She had two kids. No husband. Widower, in fact. But, of course, Kendal knew none of this. Nor did he care. She was simple another victim to him. Just another survivor of the devastating war that destroyed half the world. Just another "walking, talking, blood packet," as Ken put it. And, as he plunged his knife into her temple, two words that he'd said many times before drifted past his conscious mind: two words that kept him from realizing that she was human; two words that would be thought again and again; "Big Deal."

    -------He had thought them when he killed old man Stemplar - "Sir Simplton" as the kids called him, for he thought he was a knight in the middle ages. "Daughter had to hire a body building nurse to keep him from hurting himself," Sean Kingsly said once - in his older residence. He muttered them under his breath as he threw his teacher over the edge of the New York Bridge. And Kendal thought them with a grin as he watched the bomb go off in his old high school. Killing was his knack, his thing. And he did it with a great smile on his face.

    -------But, his smile was gone this mid-summer morning. As he lay in this valley, redwood trees watching at him like giants; silently judging him, waiting for him to die under his overturned car. Suddenly, as he watched the world grow darker, the faces of all those he had killed, all those lives he ended without so much as a pang of guilt, drifted into his sight. The trees grew an evil smirk on them, and then he was no longer in the mountainous woods, no longer under his red Camry, no longer surrounded by trees, but instead he was in a dark room, surrounded by the hundreds he had killed; the spirits of his victims.

    -------Their grins grew devilish, like that of the Cheshire cat. Their accusing eyes filled with hatred, dark joy, and gave Kendal a deep, cold feeling of dread. His time was up, and it's best that it be by those he had taken like the reaper he had pretended to be. The darkness descended upon him, his sight becoming hazing, blurry. But their eyes... their eyes stayed perfectly clear right to the end. And, as he drew in his last breath, the taste of blood on his tongue, the two words drifted into his mind. The Cat-like grins seemed to mouth it as he thought it slowly. "Big Deal..."