The night the hallway smelled of stale coffee and bleach, I knew the air had changed.

The Support Circle met in the second–floor conference room of the old municipal building every Thursday, a half‑lit sanctuary for the people who had watched their spouses, children, friends just… disappear. We were a stitched‑together quilt of grief, each of us clutching a name that no longer answered. The room was always the same: mismatched chairs, a battered coffee table, a whiteboard scrawled with the dates of the missing and the names of the living. No one wore name tags; anonymity was the first rule we taught ourselves.

When Ae​lex Bryan walked in that Thursday, the floorboards announced his arrival before his voice could. He was a thin, wiry man, his hair a careless tumble of ash‑gray that made his cheeks look perpetually sunburned. He wore a cheap leather jacket, the kind that had seen too many bars and too few churches. His smile was a grin that cut, and his eyes flicked over the circle like a predator hunting for a new victim.

He was a bully—self‑appointed, self‑delighted. He had once called the group “a bunch of sorry, grieving losers,” and his jokes always hinged on the fact that he was openly gay in a city that still whispered about his “lifestyle.” He loved the attention, the way his voice rose over ours, the way our discomfort made him feel powerful. He called himself “the arbiter of tragedy,” and every time he said it, the room seemed to shudder.

That night he carried a battered canvas bag stuffed with crumpled bills and a handful of white powder that clinked against a metal spoon. He laughed as he walked, muttering a rhythm that sounded like a chant:

“All the dead, all the gone; I’m the ruler, I’m the pawn.”

He sang it over and over, his words echoing down the empty corridor that led to the building’s back exit. It was a hollow, fluorescent‑lit stretch that smelled of bleach, dust, and something metallic—blood, perhaps, in the memory of the night he’d broken a friend’s jaw in the parking lot two years prior. Everyone in the circle tensed. We’d watched him pepper the city with petty theft, drug runs, and the occasional assault. The missing had increased since he’d gotten a new “job”—the kind where men in suits slipped cash into his bag in exchange for “body count” increases.

It wasn’t that we didn’t know he’d killed before. He’d once strangled a roommate who’d tried to leave, leaving a tiny, shallow mark on the throat that seemed more symbolic than lethal. But the body never turned up. And then the neighborhood kids began disappearing, one after another, as if the city itself was swallowing them whole. It felt like a game, and Ae​lex was the only player who seemed to enjoy the rules.

We moved as a unit, the only people who could—our faces hidden, our hands clenched. We followed him down the corridor, the sound of his chant growing louder, more distorted by the echo. He didn’t notice the shadows gathering behind him, the low thuds of fists wrapping around his slender frame. He was too busy repeating his mantra, his voice cracking like a cracked bell.

“Stop it, Ae​lex,” I heard arla whisper, her voice barely a rasp. She was a mother of three, the youngest gone missing three months ago; her eyes were always rimmed with a raw, grieving red that made the lights in the hallway look harsher. She approached, her hand gripping the small metal pipe she’d kept in her coat pocket—a relic from the night she tried to cut her son’s ties to a street gang. She pressed it against his ribs. He winced, but his chant didn’t falter.

The rest of us moved in, each of us bringing a weapon we’d never imagined using on a stranger: a former nurse’s scalpel, a veteran’s brass knuckles, a disgraced lawyer’s folded legal pad—heavy enough to bruise, not enough to kill. We wanted to teach him a lesson that would echo louder than any chant, we wanted to make him feel the weight of the bodies he’d helped disappear.

His bag of cash slipped from his grip, scattering bills across the linoleum like a twisted confetti. He tried to scramble, his eyes wild and pleading, “I’m only doing what they pay me! I’m not the one—”

We cut him off. “You think you’re an arbiter,” arla snarled, “but you’re just a pawn.”

A sudden scream split the hallway—a sound that wasn’t his chant but a raw, primal agony. It came from the storage closet at the end of the corridor, where the night‑shift custodian kept the building’s maintenance logs. We all froze, the realization striking like a gut punch. The logs showed a string of missing persons, each entry marked with a date and a cryptic code: A‑B‑C. Ae​lex’s initials. He’d been logging the disappearances, like a sickening ledger.

The air grew colder, the fluorescent lights flickering in a rhythm that matched his broken chant. He was on his knees now, his leather jacket torn, the bag of cash emptied, his eyes empty. He whispered, “I’m the only one who sees them. I’m the only one who can give them… peace.”

“Peace?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “You think killing them is peace? You think your tragedy outweighs theirs?”

He laughed, a hollow, ragged sound. “You all have dead people, you think you understand loss. I’m the only one who has nothing left. I can’t be turned into a memory. I’m… I’m the last thing they’ll ever hear. My voice will stay with them forever.”

There was a pause. The room seemed to hold its breath, the chorus of his chant now a trembling echo that barely clung to the walls. I saw arla’s hand tighten on the pipe, the steel glinting in the intermittent light. She leaned forward, close enough that I could see the trembling of his lip as he swallowed, the cold sweat pooling on his forehead. she swung the pipe and it connected with his head blood seeped from his nose as he spun and twisted his neck at a funny angle

“Enough,” she said. “You won’t be the last voice. We’ll be the voices that remember them.”

She pressed the pipe against his throat, a gentle, deliberate pressure—not to kill, but to silence the initial bleed was there however and it only exasperated as the lack of oxygen cut off his brain in flashes of black and white he twitched and throbbed. The world seemed to tilt on that axis, a moment where grief, rage, and fear converged. As his chant faded, his eyes locked on mine, a flash of something—perhaps regret, perhaps pure, unadulterated terror—racing across his face. He breathed his last in a soft exhale that sounded like a sigh.

The corridor fell silent, except for the muted hum of the air vents. The cash lay scattered, the bag empty, the empty promise of an arbiter dissolved in a puddle of ink and blood. The support circle, once a room of whispered names and quiet sobs, now stood united by the weight of an act we never thought we’d commit.

We didn’t call the police. We didn’t leave any evidence. We simply gathered the stuff, folded them, and slipped them into the pockets of our coats. The missing would still be missing, the bodies still unfound, but Ae​lex Bryan would no longer chant his terrible mantra down the hallway. he gave less than no fucks and we gave less than no fucks the same when he died

As I stepped out onto the night‑drenched streets, the city seemed to breathe a little easier, as if a weight had been lifted from its shoulders. The darkness still pressed in, but for the first time in months, the darkness felt less like a void and more like a place we could, finally, confront. i dont know why the assault gave some people a small buzz like they where somehow empowered by it. when the person across is not so different minus probably a psychotic sadism that can be easily switched on. all in all i think it was about saving money, as opposed to paying for the box just turn the screw on the psychotic lunatic down the hallway and see who they attack first. its just that refraction from a rainbow somebody else's rainbow they want me to see. i stamped on the cloth covering bryans head a few times but i think its impulses from his fractured mind. 

We were not the arbiter. We were the keepers of memory. And in a world that tried to erase us, we would remember—no matter how many bodies went missing, no matter how many chants echoed down the corridors,