Beware the Good Samaritan

To say that Bobby and his buddies were not nice people would be a mild understatement. This rowdy bunch of young men had recently made a name for themselves in the inner city as the bunch of thugs that went around mugging strangers, demanding ‘tolls’ of various nature to get through certain parts of town, and beating up the homeless for fun. James and his cohorts weren’t organized enough to be considered a legitimate crew, let alone a viable threat to any real gangs. Especially since whenever a bunch of guys from the cartel paid the area a visit, the teens would scatter like roaches.

Still, that didn’t stop Bobby’s little clique from terrorizing the locals. Especially the homeless folk that visited a particular shelter’s soup kitchen for dinner every night.

And tonight, the pack of vicious punks was beating up an old homeless man right behind that very soup kitchen.

“What’s wrong old man?!” Rick taunted and he kicked the hobo in the stomach, causing the old man to double up on the ground in pain. Rick was Bobby’s de facto second-in-command and always led the beatings while Bobby would kick back and watch his friends beat the useless bums into bloody pulps. “Can’t get a job? Of course you can’t! You’re old worthless street trash!” Rick continued and nodded toward the other two teens present. The other thugs started pummeling the defenseless old man as the hobo curled up into a ball, not even trying to fight back.

‘This is a waste of time,’ Bobby thought in annoyance as he watched his buddies have their fun, ‘I could be banging some stuck-up, prep, school chick right now if it wasn’t for this wrinkled piece of shit.’

“Ahem. Excuse me…”

Bobby was yanked out of his perverted thoughts at the new voice, which was way too close for comfort. He turned and found himself looking up into the black tea-shade-sunglasses of an absurdly tall man. Who the hell was this guy, a white Yao Ming? The gang’s ringleader backed up until he was surrounded by his fellow thugs, who had stopped punching the now barely-conscious hobo and focused their attention on the giant in the alleyway.

“Unless you boys are here for the evening meal, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” the man said calmly as he stared down at the four delinquents with a detached look on his face. For a moment, Bobby felt like he was under a microscope, as if this person was observing him like some sort of lab rat.

Then he realized something: this giant ‘man’ looked too young to be an adult. Not only did his face look like it belonged to an eighteen-year-old, but compared to any of Bobby’s gang, the guy’s body looked like a fucking beanpole with his bulky white-black turtleneck sticking awkwardly out from behind the large kitchen apron he was wearing. The ringleader squinted and spotted the name ‘Gabriel S. Nazareth’ written on a cheap-looking nametag that was clipped onto apron’s neck strap.

‘This dumbfuck’s just some brat from the suburbs volunteering at the soup kitchen!’ Bobby thought as his confidence returned.

“Fuck off kid,” Rick sneered as he popped open his knife and took a threatening step toward the naïve volunteer, who raised a quizzical eyebrow in response, “My buddies and me own this part of town. We do what we damn please, understand?”

“Speaking of which doing what we please,” Bobby added with a smirk, “hand over your wallet. I mean, it’s the least you can do for wasting our time.”

The man tilted his head slightly and gave the four gangbangers a gentle-looking smile. “Sorry, but I can’t do that. And I’m afraid you’ll just have to leave without my wallet. After all, you wouldn’t be want to be caught by the cops, right?” The volunteer replied with a neutral, almost friendly tone in his voice.

“You really are a dipshit,” Bobby sneered as he pulled out his own knife and took a step toward Gabriel, thrusting his knife arm forward in a threatening manner. “The police don’t give a fuck about the homeless, and they don’t give a fuck about this part of town! Now hand over your fucking wal-” the thug stopped mid-threat as he heard the all-too-familiar wail of police sirens approaching.

“No way. No fucking way,” The ringleader muttered in disbelief as he looked toward the narrow street in front of the soup kitchen when the sirens got closer and closer with every second. Then he whirled around and faced the shades-wearing volunteer. “What the hell did you do, you stuck-up little prick?!” Bobby snarled.

Gabriel tilted his head to the other side and gave the group of thugs a playful smirk. “The police might not care about the homeless, but they do take notice when someone gives them an anonymous tip that gangbangers are dealing crack cocaine out of the backstreet behind the soup kitchen,” He replied with the same, gentle, friendly voice as before. Bobby had expected the guy to sound condescending or something, but it was the completely opposite. In fact, Gabriel’s voice sounded like he was passively concerned for Bobby and his friends. “Just thought I’d throw that out there.”

Bobby clenched his teeth in rage at Gabriel’s seemingly laidback demeanor. He had this oversized brat at goddamn knife-point, but this prick didn’t seem to give a fuck. To top it off, this guy had the balls to call the pigs on Bobby and his friends, and even tried to pick a fight with them afterwards!

“This isn’t over pencil-dick,” Bobby growled as he pocketed his knife and nodded to his companions, who immediately backed away and slipped out of the alley, leaving Gabriel, the old homeless man, and Bobby the only ones left. “You never shoulda crossed Bobby Fields!” The ringleader snapped as he slowly backed up towards the mouth of the alley. “Next time we meet motherfucker, me and my gang are gonna make you wish you’d never been born! You’re gonna be begging us to kill your punk-ass when we’re through with you! You hear me?!”

With that, the delinquents’ ringleader disappeared into the dim twilight, leaving Gabriel and the injured old homeless man alone in the alley.

“You’re right about one thing, Mister Fields,” Gabriel muttered under his breath as he slowly knelt down and helped the injured old man to his feet, “the next time you and I meet face to face, someone will feel pain beyond their wildest imagination.” His black tea-shades were suddenly illuminated by the streetlight as it turned on in the fading twilight. His circular shades glowed in the reflected light, giving the young man a foreboding appearance, an unsettling vibe began to fill the alleyway.

“Excuse me sonny, but did you say something?” The injured hobo asked, his grizzled, bruised face turning to look up at his gigantic savior.

“It’s nothing sir,” Gabriel replied in a soothing tone, the menacing atmosphere around the two men vanishing as he looked down at the old man with a gentle, concerned look in his eyes. “Come on. Let’s get you inside. I think an old gentleman like you needs a filling meal after something like that…"

Three hours later, Gabriel walked out the front of the soup kitchen with the last of the volunteers as the place shut down for the night. He walked along the sidewalk toward a large black pickup truck parked at the end of the street, wordlessly singing the first couple lines to a tune from an old TV show he used to watch as a child.

"Da da da-da-da da da da da-da-da,

"Da da-da-da da da da-da.

"Du du du duu?

"Du du du duuu…?"

“Hey Gabriel,” A dangerously familiar voice called out to the man. He slowly turned around and watched, as all nine members of Bobby’s little gang emerged from the darkness, and entered the mostly empty parking lot, led by a sadistic-looking Bobby Fields. Gabriel gingerly rubbed his right temple and leaned against the side of the truck, as if trying to massage away an oncoming headache as the menacing thugs closed in for the kill, illuminated by the street’s single flickering streetlamp.

“Remember what I said would happen the next time we met?” Bobby asked with a sneer as he began to drag the business end of an aluminum baseball bat along the gravel of the street once he got within twenty feet of Gabriel. “Now you get to find out firsthand why nobody fucks with me and my buddies!”

Gabriel didn’t respond to the gangbanger’s boasts. Instead he simply stared at the pack of thugs with the same detached, emotionless look he’d given Bobby back in the alley.

And that pissed off Bobby even more.

“What’s wrong Gaby?” The gang’s ringleader said with a mocking tone, trying to get a response from the enormous man. “Is the big tough Good Samaritan so scared that he’s pissing himself?”

“Oh don’t worry,” said an ominous voice from directly behind Bobby and his crew, “I’m sure someone will be pissing themselves soon enough.”

All nine gangbangers turned around in unison and staggered backward in disbelief.

Directly behind them, just within the edge of the streetlamp’s light, was a massive black… thing. It looked at least ten feet tall, and had an oddly familiar-shaped head. But what Bobby found most unsettling was the shadowy entity’s face. Its mouth glowed an eerie white and was curled into an inhumanly large leer, and had two big, pupil-less, glowing, white circles where its eyes should’ve been. The entire gang stood in the middle of the street, unsure what to do as a pair of white, glove-like hands rose out of the thing’s forming torso and rubbed its chin as if in thought.

“So many guilty, so little time…” Bobby heard it mutter. What the hell was that supposed to mean? His question was quickly answered as Jamie, the youngest member of his crew, was yanked off his feet and into the air as an enormous shadowy tentacle coiled around his leg and lifted him up to the same level as the creature’s face.

“I really don’t have time to do my whole shtick for you morons, so I’ll keep it short and try to put in a way you idiots can understand,” the shadow creature said, looking down at the rest of Bobby’s gang as his glowing expression changed from leering to a somewhat bored look. “Name’s the Judge. I make sure stupid motherfuckers like you guys get what’s coming to ya. Ya dig it?” The Judge explained with a condescending attitude as three more tentacles rose out of his back and grabbed hold of Jamie’s other limbs. “For example: this boy is guilty of skipping school, disobeying his parents, staying out past curfew, and associating with dipshits like you.”

“What the hell do you know?!” Jamie shouted and struggled against the Judge’s tentacles as his arms and legs were forced into a spread-eagle position as he hung upside down in front of the entity’s face. “Let me go, you overblown shadow puppet!”

The Judge’s leering grin returned as Jamie yelled at him. “Shadow puppet? That’s a new one,” he said with sadistic amusement as the tentacles began to violently pull on Jamie’s body in four different directions, causing the newbie gangbanger to scream in agony as his shoulder and hip joints were painfully yanked out of their respective sockets.

“Fun fact,” the shadow entity said as several more shadowy tendrils rose out of its back and began to pull on Jamie’s body as well, causing the boy to scream even louder, “back in the day, being drawn and quartered involved getting hung until you were mostly dead, then disemboweled, then beheaded, and finally chopped into four pieces.” The Judge’s expression became increasingly sadistic as the young gangbanger stopped screaming and began vomiting blood and his eyes rolled up into his skull. “Personally, I prefer to skip the first three parts and get straight to the quartering. Much more fun that way.” The malicious entity leaned closer to Jamie’s face, its mouth stretched across its entire lower face in a cruel grin.

“Jamie Curtis, I find you guilty. Your sentence…” Without warning, all of the Judge’s tendrils simultaneously yanked on Jamie’s body in a brutal fashion, which ripped the teen’s body into four parts in a gory mess that sprayed his blood and organs all over the other gangbangers. “… Death.”

Bobby stumbled backward in shock, as he watched the gigantic shadow entity violently dismember the youngest member of his crew, without even a shred of remorse. He could hear a couple of the other gangbangers puking in disgust as Jamie’s blood splashed all over them when the Judge held up the teen’s mutilated remains for a few moments, before dropping them in the street. ‘What the hell is going on!? This can’t be happening! Monsters aren’t supposed to be real!’ Bobby thought and continued backing up as the Judge turned his attention back to the rest of the now-traumatized gang and cracked his neck.

“So, who’s ne-” the shadow entity was cut off as a gunshot rang out and a bullet punched a hole through the upper half of the Judge’s right eye. Rick stood near the streetlamp with his .45 caliber Glock in his hands, and proceeded to empty the pistol’s magazine at the Judge's head, turning the monster’s face into Swiss cheese.

“Ha! Not so tough now are you-Whoaa!!” Rick’s boasting was cut short as two of the Judge’s shadowy tendrils grabbed him by the torso and lifted him into the air. “Let me go you freak! I’ll fucking kill you!”

“Sure you will,” the Judge replied as his head suddenly changed, suddenly seeming more wraithlike than the rest of his form. The bullet holes in his face rapidly disappeared as the shadow entity regenerated from the wounds his head had sustained, his entire body returned to its original state a few moments later, now towering over the streetlamp with a squirming Rick in his tendrils.

“Richard Donovan, I find you guilty!” The homicidal shadow entity crowed sadistically as his tendrils lifted Rick over the top of the streetlamp. “The sentence: DEATH!” Judge shouted in triumph and slammed the gangbanger’s body down on the streetlight, simultaneously and violently impaling him on the light pole. Rick let out a bloodcurdling scream of pain as he was ruthlessly forced down onto the light itself, which shattered inside his abdomen and cast the entire street into darkness.

Bobby couldn’t stand it anymore. He’d just watched his unofficial second-in-command get brutally murdered by something straight out of a nightmare. To hell with killing that self-righteous Gabriel guy. This shadow monster was probably going to kill everyone on the block at this point, so that meant it was time for Bobby to get the hell out of there. The ringleader turned into the pitch-black night and started to run as the agonized screams of his friends rang out into the night air. However, before he had taken ten steps, something struck Bobby in the back of the head and the self-styled gangbanger dropped to the ground, out cold as his assailant tossed his unconscious body into the back of a large black pickup truck in all the confusion while the Judge ruthlessly slaughtered the six remaining gangbangers.

It was 1:00 AM, when Bobby Fields finally regained consciousness

“Uggh…. What the hell happened...?” the disoriented thug groaned in a numb voice. He opened his eyes for a second and then squeezed them shut, nearly blinded by a bare lightbulb which was hanging directly at his eye level.

‘Where am I?’ The gangbanger thought to himself, and slowly opened his eyes again, letting his vision adjust to the intimidating lighting of his current surroundings. All Bobby could tell was that someone had stripped off his clothes and that his body stretched out in a spread-eagle pose about half a foot off the floor of wherever he was. The lightbulb in front of him barely illuminated anything beyond three feet, covering the remainder of the room in a veil of disturbing darkness.

“Hello? Is anyone here?” Bobby called out, hoping to get a response. It wasn’t that he was scared or anything. It was the fact that he was stark naked and being strung up like some S&M bullshit that was creeping him the fuck out.

“Ah, you’re finally awake,” A disturbingly familiar voice said as the lightbulb was suddenly moved away from Bobby’s face when Gabriel stepped into view, his tea-shades glowing eerily in the light. “I was starting to wonder if I hit you too hard back there…”

Bobby’s jaw dropped open in disbelief when he saw the giant of a man walk into view. Then he burst out laughing at the absurdity of his situation.

“Oh this is just rich!” He chuckled as he looked up at the man’s tea-shade-concealed eyes. “The good Samaritan brat from the soup kitchen has a gay S&M fetish!”

Even though Bobby was laughing, it was just to hide the growing fear of being at the mercy of someone who apparently had no qualms with kidnapping him. “What are you going to do Gabriel? Go all dominatrix on me and then suck me off?” He taunted his kidnapper with a forced sneer, “Or is that sort of thing not kinky enough for you?”

The tall man didn’t seem fazed by Bobby’s insults. Instead, he simply gave the nervous thug the same gentle smile he’d given him back in the alley. “I’m going to let you in on a little secret Mister Fields,” he said calmly as he took an almost threatening step toward the gangbanger, “My name is not Gabriel S. Nazareth.” Then he proceeded to walk past Bobby and added casually, “Please, call me Nazar.”

“Nazar huh?” Bobby repeated, trying to keep his captor talking, as Nazar disappeared back into the black shadows of the room. “What kinda fucked up name is Nazar?”

“Oh, just the name of the Good Samaritan that kidnapped your scum-sucking, hobo-killing, mugger ass before that shadow monster killed you,” Nazar replied as he walked back into Bobby’s field of vision. The young-looking giant was now wearing a large, heavy-duty apron over his clothes. The kind of apron that a butcher would wear when they were about to make a very gory mess. Bobby’s tough-guy act faltered slightly as he watched Nazar slowly put on a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves, before he looked over at Bobby with that same gentle smile.

“But let’s talk about you for a bit,” Nazar said as he turned and faced his captive with his hands folded behind his back.

“Bobby Fields, you and your friends have terrorized the inner city since you turned nineteen,” he stated in a rather relaxed voice, catching Bobby completely off-guard. “In the last five years, you and your so-called crew have mugged men, women, even one of the little old ladies from the retirement home. You’ve randomly forced your victims to 'pay a toll' in order to pass you and your friends without getting hurt. You’ve forced any 'stuck-up bitch' unlucky enough to cross your path to put out for you and your former ‘crew’, and then, either you kill them or blackmail them for it afterwards. You’ve murdered people. And obviously you and your pals seemed to enjoy beating homeless people to death for fun.” Nazar thoughtfully tapped his chin with a latex-covered finger as he glanced up at the ceiling, his black tea-shades glowing eerily in the dim light before he looked back at Bobby, whose mouth was hanging open in shock.

“Did I miss anything?”

“JUST WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU?!” Bobby burst out in panicked confusion, “Some kind wannabe Punisher or some crazy vigilante bullshit?! I’ve never seen you before in my life! How the hell could you know everything I’ve done for the last five years if I just met your freak ass today?!”

The giant of a man simply tapped the side of his face next to his eyes. “No sin can escape my eyes,” he said in a slightly depressed voice and walked toward Bobby, who started struggling against his restraints, “I know about every bad thing you’ve done in your life, Bobby. All the way back to when you were stealing cookies from the cookie jar. It’s the same for every person I look at.” Nazar chuckled in amusement and leaned toward the trapped delinquent. “A normal person would’ve snapped years ago and turned into a violent psychotic killer.”

“Luckily for you, Mister Fields, I’m not normal,” Nazar said casually as he reassuringly patted Bobby on the shoulder. “You see, I’m one of those ‘live and let live, judge not, that ye be not judged’ kind of people. So even though you’re a scumbag who’s done more bad things in five years than most people will ever do in their whole life, I literally can’t hold it against you, because that’s how I am. You might be the worst scum on earth, but that’s just who you are. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Nazar’s tea-shades slipped down his nose a little, revealing a genuinely compassionate look in the young man’s eyes as he looked down at Bobby with a benevolent expression on his face. “Love the sinner, hate the sin.”

A strange sense of relief washed over Bobby as he stared back at Nazar’s soothing explanation. This big pushover wasn’t going to hurt him. After all, Nazar just said he wasn’t going to hold all the stuff Bobby had done against him, right? This was probably just the big guy’s way of trying to push folks back toward the straight and narrow.

‘Hell, now that I think about it,’ He thought and started to relax, thinking that this whole ordeal was almost over, ‘This peace-loving moron rescued me from that Judge monster, right? After all, it’s not like he’s gonna hurt me or anything.’ Bobby’s confidence started to return and he thought, Any second now he’ll go turn on the rest of lights, give me my clothes back and let me go, thinking he’s scared me straight. Then I’ll take out my knife and spill this freak insides all over the fucking floor!’ The thug’s confidence continued to grow, as Nazar reached up with his free hand and pushed his shades back into place and he continued to smile. ‘Keep smiling fucker. Soon, you’re gonna learn that nobody fucks with Bobby J. Fields and lives to tell about it!’

“Love the sinner, hate the sin, huh? Well now, that’s not entirely true...”

The color drained out of Bobby’s face as he heard the Judge’s voice. He watched in horror as the monster which had mercilessly slaughtered his friends slowly rose into view, poking his head up over Nazar’s left shoulder.

All the confidence which had been building up inside Bobby immediately evaporated, and was replaced by sheer horror as the homicidal shadow turned and fixed his pupil-less gaze on the naked delinquent, before giving him a sadistic grin.

“Oh God what is that thi-ugh!” He started to say but let out a grunt of pain as the pale giant’s hand clamped down on his shoulder like a vice. Bobby’s eyes darted from the Judge’s leering face back to Nazar, and his fear grew by several dozen orders of magnitude when he saw that the man’s gentle, soothing smile had grown into a subtle, menacing smirk which seemed to glow white in the ominous shadow that now covered his face.

“Unfortunately, the Judge is right,” Nazar said in a disturbingly neutral tone as he slowly pushed Bobby’s body backward, the restraints keeping him aloft moving the thug back until he was at the edge of the light’s reach, “I’m only human. And much as I wish I could forgive people for every kind of sin there is in the world, I have one little problem. You see Bobby, there is one particular type of crime that I simply refuse to tolerate.”

Bobby trembled in terror as he listened to Nazar speak. He could tell instinctively that his captor considered him one of those “unforgivable sinners”, but Bobby had no idea what Nazar was talking about. “W-What c-crime i-is that?” The now-terrified thug stammered, unable to maintain his tough-guy front any longer.

“Allow me answer that question with a different question,” Nazar replied as he let go of Bobby’s shoulder and folded his arms across his chest. “Do the names Abigail Krueger, Natalie Englund, Emily or Kristina mean anything to you?” He asked, his normal tone containing a rather sinister quality to it.

“Y-Yeah, s-sure I remember them,” the terror-stricken thug replied immediately, eager to answer Nazar’s question. “They were all snobbish prep school bitches that I’ve banged at one time or another. W-What do those little sluts have to do with this?!” Bobby demanded as his eyes darted between Nazar and the Judge in desperate confusion.

Nazar tilted his head to the side and glared at the terrified thug in disgust. “Those ‘little sluts’ that you are referring to were only twelve to fourteen years old.” He unfolded his arms and leaned in close to Bobby’s face as the Judge handed him something out of Bobby’s view. “There is one type of repulsive person who I refuse to let exist in this world,” Nazar said, his head blocking out Bobby’s view of the lightbulb, which cast his entire face in an ominous shadow, “and that is the sick fuck child molesters like you, Mister Fields.”

“OH FOR FUCKS SAKE!” Bobby cried out in disbelief, forgetting his situation entirely, “Those goddamn bitches and their stupid skimpy uniforms were practically asking to for me to fuck them!” Then the thug realized what he had said and a look of absolute, unbridled terror appeared on his face as he watched Nazar produce a large hunting knife from behind his back.

Suddenly Bobby realized what the apron and gloves were for. “Oh God please! You can’t-Mhhhf!” He started to beg, only to be cut short as a large black shadowy tentacle quickly burst out of Nazar’s right shoulder and wrapped itself around his head in an impromptu gag.

“Funny,” Nazar said, his usual gentle voice returning as he ran a gloved fingertip down the side of the knife and his mouth curled into a small leering smile, “those little girls tried to say the same things when you raped them, but you forced them all to stay quiet while you got off molesting them.”

He looked at Bobby, the cold, seething rage in his eyes barely hidden behind his tea-shade sunglasses, which had begun glowing white even though there was no light to illuminate them. “You never gave them a chance to beg for mercy, so you won’t get a chance to beg either.” Then Nazar grabbed hold of Bobby’s right arm with one hand and held the business edge of the knife down against the thug’s bare skin, which resulted in a horrified whimper from child molester.

“If you think I’m about to chop you into little bits with this Mister Fields, you can relax,” Nazar commented with a sadistic leer on his face, “This knife is used for skinning, not chopping. But don’t worry Bobby; I fully plan on castrating your repulsive dick just so I can make you can choke on it like every single innocent girl you violated.”

“Now then, shall we get started on your sendoff to Hell?”

Bobby let out a muffled scream of terror as the knife cut into his wrist and began to peel the skin off his arm. Nazar ignored the child molester’s cries of pain and began to wordlessly sing again in an unnervingly soft voice as he got to work.

“Da da da-da-da da da da da-da-da,

"Da da-da-da da da da-da.

"Du du du duu?

"Du du du duuu…?”