The guns echoed. Bodies lie side-by-side in scarlet pools. Children screamed, women cried, men held their wavering bravado. A policeman rushed through the broken glass doors, gun drawn, fingers shaking. The four masked antagonists raised their pistols in unison. The guns echoed. The policeman fell to the ground with the others in their dark red pools.

The first antagonist was dressed in a tight red shirt and dark faded jeans. The bright red mask he wore bore the word “VICE” written in black running paint. Like the mask of the others, his had no eye or mouth holes. All that was heard from under his mask was his laughter as he pressed the face of a dying man into the slowly growing pool around him.

The second antagonist was a woman dressed in a short black dress and glossy black stilettos. Across her emotionless black mask the word “LUST” was delicately written in sparkling gold ink. She stroked the bodies resting on the marble stained crimson, fondling the hair of lifeless men, caressing the faces of children sprawled on the floor, whispering sweet nothings to women in blood soaked dresses.

The third antagonist was a small boy in loose khaki shorts and a frayed blue hoodie. Struck in bold lettering across his blue mask was the word “BIAS” in bright yellow paint. As the child murder skipped along the floor covered with the dead and dying, he stopped every now and again to kick those he deemed unfit.

The last antagonist was a man larger than the three others put together; his whole body pulsed in his torn white shirt and rough blue jeans as if it were a single muscle. The word “RAGE” was viciously written in black paint in front of a white background of his mask. With his large pulsating arms he snatched bodies of the ground and hurled them across the hall, watching as they smashed into the marble walls.

And so they continued, the things that destroy the lives of so many people. A child dying in his friend’s arms just because they wanted to see who could hold their breath in the longest. A wife shooting her husband just to be with a man she had met only weeks earlier. A teenager dying slowly behind his school while his peers savagely beat him for who he is. An employee waltzing in to his work, guns blazing, taking the lives of mothers and fathers with him as he turns the gun unto himself.

Humans are raw egotistical unthinking beings waiting to be swayed by the first thought forced upon them. All that can be done is hope that that very first thought forced upon them is one of thought, love, understanding, and passivity.