Wimp

In the state of New Jersey, we have Newark. In an alleyway behind one of the Burger Kings of Newark lay the corpse of 17-year-old Ryan Munch, who just a few hours earlier had been on a mission of great and terrible proportions.

Now, however, he was stone dead, and as the shocked couple eyed his broken face, broken teeth, and broken everything, they thought – however briefly – that he looked more pathetic than anything they had ever seen.

There was something about the scrawny figure of the kid, the gilded bling around his neck and fingers, the filthy hooded sweatshirt, and that his assaulter had just left the body here for everyone to see. It all made the kid’s untimely demise seem very trivial and fitting.

Another rat bites the dust, the couple figured, completely tossing aside any empathy for the boy, and they walked right past Ryan’s body, careful not to step in the blood, not even bothering to call the police. It would be a waste of resources, anyway, like calling an ambulance to deal with a paper cut.

If Ryan were still around to see the world’s reaction – or lack thereof – to his death, he wouldn’t even be surprised. The world had never truly acknowledged his existence, anyway. There were just so many phony bad boys, who put on their fake jewelry and walked aimlessly about the streets like total losers. Society had a surplus of these losers, these wimps.

Ryan had been an insignificant boy, one among thousands of insignificant boys. He had lived in a crummy old apartment, again one among thousands. His father was absent most of the time, and his mother was a drunk, not different in any way, shape, or form from thousands of other parents.

His friends had all been a certain color of trash: white. Their little group had sought to abandon the mediocrity of being white, vying to become part of the hip African American community, as if changing race was as easy as becoming a born-again Christian.

Their moral code and view on life came not from proper education, philosophical thinking, or personal experience, but from music videos on MTV. They would watch some black rapper show off his mansion of hoes while throwing dollar bills around, and the boys thought that was the good life. Wealth and pussy seemed like the only two things worth having.

Like a little girl putting on a dress and calling herself a princess, the boys tried to fake being rich by putting on their spray-painted chains and rings, though they could tell by the giggles of passersby that the bling rarely deceived anyone. Should someone suggest that the boys actually started working for money, they would just laugh at the thought of it. Cool people didn’t work, after all; they spent their days by the pool, getting blowjobs from chicks whose names they couldn’t recall.

Of course, none of the boys actually had a pool, nor a girlfriend, nor any women in their lives apart from their mothers. By their own standards, they were very uncool, but the boys had always been impervious to logic, and they weren’t going to change any time soon.

Without any purpose, they would wander round and round the blocks of town, always believing that a chick who would want to do them was right around the corner. They didn’t bother putting any effort into getting on a girl’s good side, then building a relationship, and then maybe having sex with her. We’ve already established that only losers work.

Anyway, Ryan Munch had been one of these boys, impossible to tell from the rest. Rarely had he tried to think independently, and not a single time had he questioned his purpose in this world. He only cared about fitting in with his badass peers – even though it yielded no apparent benefits to do so, and the kids were only as badass as any group of wannabe gangsters.

Of course, he madly wanted a girlfriend as well, or maybe “girlfriend” was the wrong word. Ryan wanted a sex object, someone he could use and discard as he pleased.

On those long, lonely nights when he had to pleasure himself, Ryan would look through the internet’s vacuum of porn and malware, desperately trying to find someone who would bend over and let him go crazy.

It pained him a great deal that women seemed to steer clear of him, as if he wasn’t someone you’d want to sleep with. Ryan was a good person, he knew, for how could he not be? He would never hit his girlfriend, unless she really asked for it, he would never cheat on her, unless it was with someone really hot, and he would never tell her what she could and couldn’t do in her spare time, unless she was a Belieber.

Ryan didn’t understand why women weren’t crawling at his feet, clenching his legs, because he considered himself the ideal man. In any case, Ryan got an idea one Saturday night while watching the news with his shit-faced mother.

The news reporter spoke of a man who had been incarcerated for the past twelve years following the murder of his wife and child, and while in prison this man had gotten love letters from dozens of mentally unstable women all over the country. Ryan recalled something similar having been the case with Ted Bundy, and Charles Manson had had his own little harem.

Why did all these really horrible men get so much devotion? The obvious answer would be that some women were just crazy, but Ryan wouldn’t settle for such a simple explanation. There had to be some deeper reason for why awful men were so attractive, why sociopathic killers and manipulative loons were boyfriend material. Ryan then arrived at the conclusion that if he became one of these waste-of-life evildoers, he would get all the bitches he could ever dream of!

I’m going to become a serial killer, like Dexter or some shit! Ryan almost shouted, then he remembered that his mother was still relatively conscious. Much like wanting to become a black man, Ryan believed it would be easy to take a life, for it looked easy on TV. You just sneak up behind an unsuspecting victim with your knife, and then you stab that person to death!

Ryan was making plans in his head for how his new career would go, making a masturbatory fantasy out of his grim idea. First, he would kill a bunch of random people, then confess his dark secret to some blonde with huge tits, and then he would have an obedient sex slave for the rest of his days! It was a foolproof plan – if you didn’t consider its flaws, of course.

The very next day, Ryan went to the local hardware store. He hadn’t told his friends that he would be there, as he couldn’t risk them asking why he needed a pair of rubber gloves, black garbage bags, duct tape, a hammer, and for some reason a bottle of potassium nitrate.

He squeezed all the stuff into his backpack, not even bothering to arrange it neatly and conveniently. Ryan honestly believed that all the trash he had spent his father’s money on would be sufficient to commit a murder and destroy the evidence. Years of watching the Crime Channel had taught him nothing.

Just walking through the streets with the kill-kit on his back made Ryan feel special, like he was already a hardcore serial killer badass. When someone walked past him, Ryan would giggle to himself, thinking that these people were idiots for not seeing a sociopathic monster right in front of them.

Ryan had not attempted to kill someone yet, nor did he even know who his first victim would be, or where the murder would take place, or when, but the kid had no doubt he could do it. Would someone think about committing murder if they weren’t ready to act upon it?

A few days went by, and Ryan nearly forgot about having assembled the kill-kit, until his half-drunk mother pulled it out from under his bed. She asked him what he needed all the stuff for, and Ryan told her to go suck his dad’s dick – the usual response to a question of hers.

Ryan realized then that he couldn’t put it off any longer. If he didn’t kill someone soon, he would remain a virgin forever. It was getting dark out, so he put on his favorite hooded sweatshirt – the one he never washed – strapped on his backpack, and headed out into night, determined not to come back before he had claimed his first victim.

It was cold as fuck outside, and Ryan wondered if he should have put on a jacket. Of course, that would also have impaired his movement and made him look a lot less badass. The chill didn’t matter anyway, as he was going to warm himself with some exercise soon, by killing a prick and doing a chick. This was the beginning to the rest of life, Ryan thought, and he was certainly right about that.

He walked around for like an hour or so, and while numerous opportunities to swing the hammer at some person’s skull had arisen, Ryan neglected to take advantage of them. The kid told himself that the people he’d met thus far weren’t worthy of dying by his hands, when the truth was that Ryan was just a pussy, not as hardcore as he believed himself to be.

Eventually, Ryan became really hungry, and he decided to eat some fried horsemeat at Burger King – you couldn’t kill someone on an empty stomach, after all. He ate the burger viciously, chewed the fries with malice, and drank the Coke with murderous intent.

He looked around inside the little establishment, searching for potential victims, and then his eyes caught the largest set of breasts he had ever seen, and they were attached to a beautiful blonde just like the ones he would see in porn videos. Ryan was going to get her attention, he was certain of that, but how to do it?

He decided to follow her when she got up and left the joint, keeping at a distance with his eyes locked on her ass. The blonde didn’t seem to pay him any attention, and she just kept walking, going right around the Burger King, into the alleyway.

Ryan was overjoyed she had chosen to go there of all places, and he started planning how he could hook her in. He figured it would go something like this: he would raise his hammer over her head, then drop it when her puppy eyes begged for mercy, and then they would make out right there on the asphalt. This seemed like the most plausible scenario to Ryan.

The blonde turned a corner, and Ryan followed close behind, but when he turned the corner himself, she was gone, and a gang of African American men stood there at a dead end, flexing their muscular bodies in the chill of the night.

They were shooting heroin, clearly not amused that Ryan had walked in on them. Those among the men who were not passed out from the drugs started moving towards Ryan, cracking their knuckles.

“The fuck are you looking at, white boy?!” shouted the largest of them, a man built like a bull and with a ring through his nose. He advanced on Ryan, fists ready to punch the kid into oblivion, eyes radiating pure wrath.

Ryan considered running, but that was not something a serial killer would do, so instead he reached into his backpack to pull out the hammer. He didn’t manage to do more than get hold of the shaft before he was tackled to the ground, though, and our badass serial killer wannabe shat his pants in fear.

The bull put his foot on Ryan’s throat, ready to squash his neck should the kid attempt anything. “You figured you’d just join the party, asshole? Maybe call the cops, huh?!” the bull asked while his friends gathered around Ryan in a semicircle.

“I didn’t see nothing!” Ryan cried, feeling the warmth of his excrement running down his legs, starting to smell it. “Please let me go! I won’t tell no one!”

“What’s that you got there?” asked one of the others, a heavily pierced man with his six-pack visible through the white shirt. He had seen the glimmering head of the hammer, and reaching into Ryan’s backpack, he pulled it out. “Building something?”

“Breaking something, more likely! Hand it over, Jason,” the bull demanded, then turned his eyes back to Ryan. “Thought you’d fuck with us? Bad call, kid. In fact, it was the worst call of your life. This is a mighty fine hammer, though. It looks brand new. It wants to be used, I can imagine.”

“Please don’t kill me!” Ryan begged through his tears. “I’m one of you guys! I’m a winner, unlike all those stupid ass white people, who fuck ugly bitches and go to work every day, living boring fucking lives! I’m not like them, I’m like you! I’m a brother!”

At this comment, the black men giggled, then they laughed raucously to each other, making scathing remarks about the pathetic white boy trying to be like them. When they could laugh no more, the bull raised the hammer above Ryan’s head, and then he said, “You sure about that, white boy? Well, I guess we should test the truth of that. I’m going to crack your skull open with this thing, and if I find that you have a marshmallow center, you ain’t no brother of ours.”

Then the hammer came down.