For Love of the Children

FOR LOVE OF THE CHILDREN

Joe looked at his watch. It was nine in the morning.

Time to finish.

Joe stood up, stretching every muscle in his body, and then scratched what he called his middle-aged paunch. Joe has always been on the heavy side, but at forty-seven, he was bordering on the obese.

He still had all his hair, he consoled himself. And it didn't interfere with his present task.

Joe opened the plastic case beside him. He picked it up at the chain sporting store, along with the box of one-seventy grain bullets. When he opened the case, there was a Winchester two seventy rifle inside. Its stock was composite, and the scope attached to it, while not cheap, wasn't top of the line either.

It didn't matter. The scope was sighted to two hundred yards, and the drop off on the ammunition was only a couple of inches until it went past that two hundred and fifty yards. John knew his target would be well within that range.

Joe picked up the wrappers from the junk food and drinks he had been eating the day before and put them in the gray, plastic trash can that he'd been using as a makeshift urinal. John had noticed he was having to piss more often over the last few months. His doctor told him it was the onset of Type II diabetes, and that it would lead to an early death if he didn't address it.

Joe made a promise to himself that he would go on a diet and hit the gym just as soon as the task before him was completed. Who knows, he thought, I might even keep that promise.

Joe left the storage room, plastic case in hand. He was wearing the gray overalls of a maintenance man and, though the upper level of the building was usually empty at this time of the morning, Joe was fairly sure that the overalls were enough to make him invisible to the workers below, if any came upstairs.

Luck was with Joe. He never saw anybody as he ascended the stairs leading to the roof access door.

Joe climbed out on the roof of a small office building that bordered on a residential area. It was seven stories tall, with a collection of offices containing insurance agents, accountants, small-time lawyers and bill collectors. Across the street was a small, middle class elementary school, surrounded by a few older houses in what had once been a cutting edge development. Now it was the home for young couples just getting started and older couples who had moved in years ago but didn't have the money to move out.

The office building contained a number of parents who found the location of the office building convenient both for its closeness to the elementary school and its proximity to their homes.

Joe was sorry that the target of his task, Steve Lansing, didn't work in the office below. It would have made the task that much more rewarding.

Joe looked down at the school yard surrounding the elementary school. It was empty now, but in fifteen minutes it would be overrun with kids. The rooftop itself was bare save for the odd arrangement of vents and pipes found on top of every commercial building. There was one of those trash chutes that led down to a dumpster below. The construction crew that was working on the roof wouldn't be here for another two hours. For now, Joe had the roof to himself.

Joe set himself up at the perch he had picked and waited. As he waited, he thought of Steve Lansing.

There had been seven of them, including Joe, who had worked at Optimum Designs back in the nineties. Joe had been the brains in the operation, the genius who came up with the innovations that drove the company forward.

They had hated him for that. For his superior intellect and skills.

So they mocked him. They laughed at him. And when the dot.com bubble burst, they all got out with at least their shirts, and never looked back to see what had happened to him.

There was nothing for him after that. He had been worth millions on paper.

Now he scraped by, making a living by creating web pages for Mom and Pop stores who wanted to have a presence on the internet.

He knew they were still laughing at him. It didn't matter that they were just as broke as he was after the bubble burst. They still had lives.

But their laughter, their mockery, had denied him a life. It was their fault.

It was all their fault.

Now it was time for them to have that fact brutally thrust upon them.

He could have killed them all, of course. He was smart enough to hunt them down. But he wanted them to suffer in the way he had suffered.

So he took what was most precious in their lives away.

It had taken some time, of course. Joe had to do it so that he couldn't be traced, so that the authorities never saw a pattern. There was always a different city, a different method. A car bomb, a knife attack, a drive-by shooting.

There were always different times, different methods. A month might go between two killings, or two years.

There was only two patterns that Joe adhered to: only the objective of his task was killed, and the party who was meant to be affected knew it wasn't an accident. They didn't know Joe was out there, acting as the finger of Death. But they knew somebody had taken something precious away from them.

Joe waited for the recess bell. It rang on time, and out of the school flooded a throng of wild, shouting children. In the mix was a golden-haired seven year old girl. Her name was Jordan, and she was the apple of Steve Lansing's eyes. Steve might have gone through a bankruptcy, an acrimonious divorce, and a bout with cancer, but he still had Jordan, even if only for two weekends a month.

Joe had discovered early on that no matter where his ex-coworkers were in their lives, their happiness invariaby revolved around the love of their children.

It was almost anti-climatic. Jordan Lansing stood to one side, waiting for her turn on a slide. A slow exhale, a pull of the trigger, and she fell as if all the bones in her body had suddenly dissolved.

Joe quickly wiped down his rifle, picked up the shell casing, and then left everything but the casing on the roof. As the schoolyard below erupted like a disturbed anthill, Joe quickly made his way to the dump chute. After a quick slide into a pile of sheetrock below, Joe got to his feet, his breath ragged.

I am definitely going on that diet now, Joe thought to himself.