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The opening lines to one of my favorite non PC short stories..
AMOK by John Russell

AMOK

Merry saw how the thing was done one steamy hot day at Palembang, and he saw quite stark and plain. He had a first balcony seat to the performance, as you might say, for he was leaning from a raised and shaded veranda on the river street when it happened just below him. Also, by some chance or other, he was almost completely sober at the time. And this is the thing the sobered Merry saw:

From a doorway just across sprang suddenly out and down to the muddy level a little stout-shouldered half-naked Malay with a face mottled and bluish, with foam on his lip a creese in his hand. Forthright he drove into the crowd like a reaper into standing grain. His blade rose and fell in a crimson flicker, and he strode over the bodies of two victims before the people were aware of him and fled streaming through alleys and bolt holes. Then the terrible hoarse cry of the man hunt began to muster, and furious swart figures to start back out of the mass and to line the course with bright points of steel. The murderer neither paused nor turned aside, but held straight on, hewing steadily and silently, until the weapons bristled thick about him and he went down at last like a malignant slug under a tumble of stinging wasps.

Merry resumed breathing with a conscious effort and loosed his clutch of the balcony rail....

“What—was that?” he wanted to know.

A stolid and rather shabby client of the Dutch marine persuasion drew stolidly on a cheroot and[Pg 309] craned over to count the huddled bundles that marked the madman’s path.

“Oh, it iss nothing,” observed this judicious person, who might have been mate, or such, of a country ship. “He got four only. Sometimes they kill eight—twelve—even more, till they get themselves killed. That fellow was just a common fellow.”

“But why—what was he after?”

“Oh, it iss just going amok, you know. That iss a habit wit’ the Malay folk. I have seen them often.”

Still Mr. Merry desired light.

“How can I say?” returned the other. “A native iss always a native, except when he iss only a man an’ a dam’ fool. Perhaps his woman has gone bad on him or he has played his last copper doit at gambling. Maybe he has crazied himself wit’ opium or bhang. Maybe he iss just come to a finish, you know?”

“A finish?” stammered Merry.

“Where he has no more use: where he gets sorry wit’ the world an’ wants to die quick. So he takes his knife an’ runs amok to stab so many people as he can, an’ he don’t care a dam’ if only he makes a big smash. It is like a sport, truly.”

“Yes,” said Merry. “Very like a sport.”