God's Whip

Manhattan, Wall Street.

People in suits poured out of the subway station, coffee and briefcases in hand, hurrying along like wind-up machines.

Stock traders, bankers, lawyers, fund managers... These people controlled the lifeblood of the city. Or at least they thought they did.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Sharp gunshots shattered the street's calm. One after another, stockbrokers and bankers in suits fell into pools of blood.

"Ah! Ah!"

The elites screamed and scattered. At a window overlooking the street, Jim emptied a magazine, changed into another set of clothes with practiced ease, then set his assault rifle on fire to destroy it.

The damned lawyer and stockbrokers were finally dead.

It felt incredible.

But there was a banker who deserved to die even more, and he was still alive. Jim couldn't leave it at that.

Ready to die, Jim hurried downstairs and stood on the steps of a bank building. In his hand was a SIG Sauer P226. He had bought the weapons for his amusement on the black market three days ago, spending the last of his savings.

The gun felt cold in his hand, but its weight was reassuring. He had cleaned it that morning for a full half hour, taking out every part, wiping it down, then putting it back together.

The rifling inside the barrel looked new, gleaming coldly.

He looked up at the revolving door before him. Above it hung a gold plaque.

Murray Lynch Investment Bank.

He knew the bank's name all too well. He had kept his money there for ten years, saving every penny from his wages for the mortgage, for retirement, and for his wife Emily's medical bills.

Then a deliberately engineered financial crisis came. The bank collapsed—not really. It took a government bailout, then its executives paid themselves hundreds of millions in bonuses.

His savings were gone. His stocks were gone. The money he had set aside for Emily's treatment was gone.

And the financial adviser who had thumped his chest and told Jim, "Your money is safe," now sat behind that revolving door, earned a million a year, drove a Porsche, and lived in a Long Island mansion.

Jim climbed the steps and pushed through the door, his gaze steady.

The lobby was spacious, with marble floors, crystal chandeliers, and a huge oil painting on the wall.

A man in ancient Roman robes stood on a chariot, spear in hand, his foot planted on an enemy.

Jim didn't recognize the painting, and he didn't care. He wasn't there to admire art.

"Sir, do you have an appointment?" The blonde receptionist looked up with a professional smile.

Jim looked at her, took the gun from his coat pocket, and set it on the reception desk.

Her smile froze.

"Get Murray out here." There was no anger in Jim's voice, no murderous intent, no excess emotion. He sounded calm, nothing like a gun enthusiast who had just gone on a killing spree.

The young woman opened her mouth but made no sound. Her hand trembled as it crept toward the alarm button beneath the desk.

Jim frowned, aimed the gun at her, and barked:

"Don't move unless you want to die right now."

Her hand stopped.

Others in the lobby had seen the gun too. Some stood screaming, some dropped to the floor, and some ran for the door.

The suited crowd surged outside like sardines squeezed from a pipe. Jim didn't look at them.

He hadn't come for them. He had come for Murray.

Murray Chesterfield, forty-seven, CEO of Murray Lynch Investment Bank.

Before the financial crisis, he had packaged his company's assets into high-risk bonds and sold them to clients, then shorted those same bonds. He had made hundreds of millions.

While his clients—ordinary people who trusted him—lost everything, he drank champagne on a beach in the Bahamas, celebrating his early retirement.

Jim's savings were a single grain of sand among the hundreds of millions Murray had made.

But that one grain had been enough to crush Jim.

A graying man in an expensive suit came out to see what was happening. He spotted the gun in Jim's hand, froze for a moment, then quickly raised both hands.

"Don't shoot," he said calmly. "What do you want? Money? I can give you money—"

"I don't want your money." Jim swung the gun away from the receptionist and aimed it at Murray's chest. "I want you to remember a face."

Murray's eyes widened. "What?"

"This person." Jim pulled a photograph from his pocket and tossed it onto the floor.

It showed a woman in her thirties, with thinning hair, sallow skin, and cheekbones jutting from her gaunt face.

She lay in a hospital bed, tubes running from her body, her eyes closed. She looked like a corpse that hadn't quite finished dying.

"Her name was Emily. She was my wife." Pain filled Jim's cold eyes. "She lay in the hospital for eight months. The doctors said she needed a new drug. It cost a hundred and twenty thousand dollars a year.

"Insurance wouldn't cover it, and I couldn't afford it. I put all my savings into your fund. You said it was 'guaranteed to make money.' Then your fund blew up, and I lost everything.

"Emily's medication stopped too. She died last week."

Murray was silent for a moment, then spread his hands, his expression cold.

"I... I'm sorry—"

"Of course you are." Jim pulled the trigger.

The gunshot echoed through the lobby like a muffled clap of thunder. Murray toppled backward onto the marble floor, the back of his head striking the threshold with a dull thud.

Blood gushed from his chest and spread across his white shirt like a red flower opening.

Jim didn't give him a second glance. He turned and walked out.

Sirens were already wailing outside. So many sirens, converging from every direction like sharks drawn by the scent of blood.

He tucked the gun back into his pocket, pushed through the door, and stepped into the Manhattan sunlight.

The street had been sealed off. Police cars blocked the intersection, their red and blue lights casting revolving patterns across the buildings.

Officers in bulletproof vests crouched behind car doors, guns raised. A voice boomed through a loudspeaker:

"Drop your weapon! You're surrounded!"

Jim didn't drop it. He fired a shot into the sky.

Bang!

The voice on the loudspeaker stopped for half a second, then returned louder: "Drop your weapon! This is your final warning!"

Jim fired several shots to cover himself, then turned and ran toward another street. He ran fast, not because he was afraid, but because he knew that if they caught him, he would never get out.

He wasn't afraid of prison, but he didn't want to spend the rest of his life there. Before he died, he wanted to kill everyone who deserved it.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Gunfire erupted on the streets of Manhattan. Jim wasn't the one shooting.

The police were. Faced with a serial killer, the officers of free America were all too willing to empty their magazines.

Bullets struck the wall behind Jim, the dumpster beside him, and his arm, spraying chips of masonry and blood.

He didn't look back or pay attention to the gunshot wound in his arm. He fired as he ran.

He crossed one street, then another. The gunfire grew denser, the sirens closer.

He ducked into an alley, climbed over an iron fence, slipped through the entrance of an underground parking garage, and came out the other side.

He had no idea where he was. All he knew was to run, like a rabbit chased by hounds for three days and nights. He no longer watched where he was going or thought about his destination. He just ran.

Then he saw a hotel.

His pace slowed. He remembered a video he had watched that day, one that had gone viral online.

A young man in a bathrobe had slaughtered his way through the police and military outside a hotel, leaving them terrified.

He remembered the comments. Some said the young man was God incarnate. Some said he was a Mutant. Others said he was the whip God had sent to punish this rotten world.

God's Whip.

Jim stood at the corner, breathing hard as he stared at the hotel. Behind him, the sirens drew closer.

He had no time to think. Instinct sent him running toward the hotel.

One of the pursuing officers peered around the corner and saw where Jim was headed. His gaze swept over the hotel the police department had marked as a restricted zone, then he pulled back.

"Target is heading for the Four Seasons Hotel. Repeat, target is entering the restricted zone!"

A burst of noise came over the radio. Someone cried out, and then everything went quiet.

A hoarse voice followed: "...Just confirm the target's location. Don't approach the hotel. Repeat, do not approach the hotel under any circumstances."

Jim saw the officers closing in come to a halt. He could even see the fear on their faces.

They weren't afraid of him. They were afraid of that building. What frightened those officers was the person staying inside the hotel.

They would rather let Jim escape than go near it.

He smiled and glanced back at the police. Then he gripped his gun and headed into the hotel, blood dripping from his right arm.

Drip. Drip.

The more afraid the police were, the more certain he was that he had made the right choice.

God's Whip truly lived up to the name.