I didn't see the attack coming. Quite the opposite. I'd played the original "Postal" with a gathering distaste for its spree-killer conceit -- it treated good guys like bad guys -- and started the sequel (recently re-released in an expanded edition) with a determination not to kill when I didn't have to kill. Up to this point, I'd been successful. I'd made it through the first of the game's five days without hurting anyone.

When I was fired from my job at game developer Running With Scissors (the actual developer of "Postal 2"), I could have killed my boss in revenge. After all, he'd laughed right in my face after he gave me the boot.

But I just watched as he laughed, rocking back on his heels, and then took my last paycheck from his desk. When the Parents for Decency protesting outside then dropped their picket signs and launched an armed assault on the developer's offices, I escaped through the basement.

At the bank I waited in line, cashed the check, and then rode out a robbery huddled behind a balustrade. I did not loot the open vault, though I did think about it. I did not kill the young woman who cut into line ahead of me, or the police who responded to the robbery.

Some might argue that it doesn't matter whether I killed them or not. I'm a reasonably mature adult and, after all, it's just a game.

But why should I abandon my real-world principles in a virtual world simply because I can do so with impunity? Killing innocent characters makes me feel bad. It's as though a tiny creature with a fragile constitution has been placed in my care, and I've stepped on it. Invariably, my conscience nags at me until I replay the critical scene and spare the innocent. It doesn't make me feel better, but it doesn't make me feel worse.

The following day, my conscience temporarily abandoned me.

Tuesday started out much like any other day in the game. I received four seemingly mundane errands: collect eight signatures on a petition requiring "whiney congressmen to play violent video games," return a library book, get an autograph from celebrity Gary Coleman (who was signing books at the local mall), and confess my sins in church.

I wondered briefly what exactly I was expected to confess. I hadn't done anything wrong.

I had just crossed the giant litter box that passed for the trailer's front yard when I heard music. A band was marching three abreast, more or less, along a nearby street. The six men and three women wore white pants and bright blue tops with gold trim, carried saxophones, and played "Hail to the Red, White and Blue" over and over again.

I stood among passersby on the bleak residential street and watched them for a while. The band turned the corner and headed north, up the empty slope toward a small business district.

An evil thought slipped unbidden into my head.

In my wanderings on the previous day, I'd avoided picking up obvious weapons, but had nevertheless collected the shovel and a gallon can of gasoline. (I'd found the gas can in a neighbor's bathtub. My conscience is oblivious to virtual trespassing.)

When I put the marching band together with the gas can, something clicked, and I acted swiftly and almost without thinking. I restored a saved game from the beginning of the day and, this time, instead of watching the band, I raced ahead of it. When I was far enough ahead that no one could see me, I spread my small store of fuel in loops across the band's path.

Then I stepped back and waited. And when the band entered the section of road where I'd poured the gas, I lit a match.

It was a holocaust. The flames, much more intense than I'd expected, raced along the line of gasoline. When they reached the lead marchers, the marchers instantly burst into flame, as though their uniforms were already soaked in fuel. They ran around screaming and holding their heads. When they bumped into other marchers, the other marchers caught fire and began running and screaming as well. The blaze spread and spread, consuming onlookers and neighbors.

It almost claimed me, but I stepped back and allowed the burning figure to run past me. Standing behind a tree, I stared at the flames and listened to the screams, swept up in corrupt fascination with what I'd done.

Eventually, the gasoline burned itself out, and the fire ran out of victims. I counted 12. Most of the bodies were in the street. Two were huddled in the bushes beside the road. Another was on the porch of a nearby house and another in the doorway, as though the victim had been trying to escape the carnage -- or had just walked in on it.

And one was alive. A red, blistered figure crawled on its belly along the side of the road. Its pain was so palpable that I looked around at the other bodies for a gun to put it out of its misery. (When a character dies, anything it was holding appears beside its body.)

By the time I returned, the figure was dead.

I was numb. I felt like a man who'd intended to light a campfire and had started a forest fire instead. I didn't know what to do and wound up hovering around the scene of my crime, just as real-world arsonists are sometimes said to do. Maybe I wanted to appear innocent -- pretend I was just discovering the bodies. Maybe I just wanted to be caught. What I'd done seemed so spectacularly wrong that it must carry some consequences.

Nothing happened. Passersby who'd been outside the area at the time of the fire were moving in slowly from the residential area to the southwest. They stared unmoved at the corpses, as if they'd walked in on a performance-art piece and didn't quite grasp the scene before them. None of them seemed to connect me with the event.

And there was no sign of police.

Paradise does have a significant police force. On Monday, I'd come to see it as an ally when its officers killed the bank robbers and exchanged fire with people shooting at me.

If those officers had seen my handiwork on Tuesday, they probably would have shot me on sight.

But they didn't see me. Either there weren't any police in the area, or they'd been swept up in the fire. Perhaps it was just as well. In this murderous frame of mind, I might have seen police less as a binary blue line protecting computer-game society and more as another potential bull's-eye, and taken them on as well.

In any case, I had gotten away with murder.

What's the second act to a multiple homicide? I'm ashamed to say so, but my first impulse was to find a larger gas can and a larger parade. The very grotesqueness of the attack was its appeal. I'd created a dark spectacle that rivaled anything I can recall seeing in a game.

In fact, for just a second, I had the sense that I'd broken the game and that something had spilled out of its cracked black heart that "Postal 2" would show to no one else.

At the same time, I was disgusted with myself -- disgusted I had sacrificed my convictions, disgusted with the gruesome method I had chosen, disgusted that part of me wanted to continue in this vein. I had torn a hole in the game and fallen into it, and now I wanted it to be over.

But it wasn't over.

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