I Am Death

Forty-two

It was coming up to 4:45 a.m. when Hunter finally got back to his one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a dilapidated building in Huntington Park, Southeast LA.

After leaving his office at around 9:00 p.m. the night before, Hunter had decided to drive around the city. He did that often enough. For some reason that not even he could explain, driving around at night through the streets of Los Angeles somehow calmed him. Helped him think.

As he left his office, he could tell that sleep, if it came at all, would’ve been restless and dotted by nightmares. In the morning, he would feel worse than if he’d stayed up all night, so he’d decided to stay up all night.

Hunter aimlessly drove around the streets of Central, East and South LA, then The Harbor and South Bay, before crossing the city all the way over to Santa Monica. The clock on his dashboard read 2:22 a.m. when he finally decided to park his car and go for a walk on the beach.

Hunter loved the beach, but unlike most, he preferred it at night.

He liked watching the sea at that time. The undisturbed sound of waves breaking against the sand, together with the quietness of the early hour, reminded him of his parents and of when he was a little kid.

His father used to work seventy-hour weeks, jumping between two awfully paid jobs. To help out, his mother would take any work that came her way — cleaning, ironing, washing, whatever she could find. Hunter couldn’t remember a weekend when his father wasn’t working, and even then they struggled to make ends meet. But despite their struggle, Hunter’s parents never complained. They played the cards they were dealt and, no matter how bad a hand they got, they always did it with a smile on their faces.

Every Sunday, after Hunter’s father got home from work, they used to go down to the beach. Most times they got there once everyone else had already left and the sun had already set. But Hunter didn’t mind. In fact, he preferred it. It was like the whole beach belonged to him and his parents. After Hunter’s mother passed away, his father never stopped taking him to the beach on Sundays. Sometimes, Hunter would catch his father wiping away tears as he watched the waves break.

As Hunter finally locked his car and made his way up to his apartment, he never noticed the black GMC Yukon hiding in the shadows around the corner from where he’d parked.

Sitting patiently in the driver’s seat, the man observed Hunter with a black look on his face.