Page 39 of Intrepid

The stranger’s voice slapped me in the face, while his words crawled across my skin, burrowing in long-forgotten wounds.

Anger settled deep into my bones, eating away at the ivory, while I listened to the joke he exchanged with the bartender.

I’d not heard that voice in nearly a decade, yet it stirred in my gut, setting my teeth on edge. I closed my eyes, clinching them shut to stamp out the visuals taunting my thoughts.

A blade slicing across his fat neck, like a razor slicing open the belly of a caterpillar.

The warm crackle of flames consuming his pale, greasy skin.

My fingers curled around the edge of the table, as my stomach pulled at my spine, begging to rise up from the chair and act on my urges.

‘In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.’

The words of my uncle seeped into the chaos swirling inside my head, reverberating off my skull.

‘The Lord is your avenger,’ he’d once said to me.

He’d been a man of few words, but those I remembered most profoundly because they came from the Bible. As far as I knew, the only thing he ever worshipped in my time with him had been fast women and a full bottle of Jack.

I released the edge of the table, taking deep breaths to calm my nerves. The stranger at the bar, the Joker, would never recognize me after so long. It’d been almost ten years, and I wasn’t the same boy. Years of therapy, hard work, and Uncle Hank’s guidance had helped seal those wounds, and I wouldn’t tear them open again. Not when my whole life sat before me—a blank page that I could write any way I chose.

A chill skittered down my spine, like death’s cold breath, and I raised my gaze to see a boy sitting beside the stranger at the bar. He was so out of place there, it would’ve been laughable if the sight of him didn’t freak me the fuck out.

My heart slammed against my ribs, and I squeezed my eyes shut to make him disappear. He never came to me in public places like those. Only when I was drunk, or on the verge of sleep, and that cold chill lingered in my bones. I’d done three shots, but I didn’t feel drunk, definitely not drunk enough to be seeing the kid right then.

Any minute, he’d break into those loud, agonizing screams that kept me awake all night.

“Not now,” I muttered to myself, my whole body shivering from the cold.

“Hey, man, can I bum a smoke?”

I exhaled a shaky breath and opened my eyes to find the heavyset guy standing alongside the table. A patch covered his left eye, the evidence of my father’s attempt to kill him. An attempt that ultimately cost him his own life.

The boy still sat at the bar, silently staring at me, as if waiting to see what I’d do. I glanced around at the few patrons, drinking and talking, going about their business.

No one seemed to notice the kid.

“I’m willing to give you a buck for it.” The stranger brandished his wallet, and thumbed a dollar from the few bills, handing it to me. “Got a fifteen-hour flight, and I just smoked my last one.”

The boy tipped his head around the man’s body, watching me. Silently.

My eyes slid toward the stranger before me then back to my smokes. “Yeah. I’ll join you.”

I rose up from the table, tossing a couple of bills to pay for my drinks, and followed the man toward the smoker’s lounge, leaving my ticket behind.

* * *

I’d never killed a man before, though I’d dreamed of the moment for what seemed like a lifetime.

There was so much blood. Everywhere. I was up to my elbows in it, as I rubbed the strangers blood along my forearm, as if I could wipe away the stain. It was fascinating, the way it was so difficult to wash off the skin, like nature’s way of marking the guilty.

The guy lay beneath me, tied to the springs of a rusted metal bedframe I’d scrounged from inside the abandoned house that I’d turned into my own makeshift surgical room. The gurgling of fluids he hacked up interrupted his deep, throaty cries that failed to elicit a single ounce of empathy in me.

The sight of him, though, was another story, and I swallowed hard as the acids climbed my throat.

Kicking my head to the side, I heaved the last meal I’d eaten onto the concrete, the sour scent mingling with that of the blood and sweat and mold. I spent the next two minutes spitting away the last stringy vines clinging to my face, to avoid having to drag my mouth across my bloody arm. That was the thing about taking life, for those of us who didn’t do it for amusement. Physically, it was as easy as one well-placed slice, but mentally, it was a fucking wonder I hadn’t blacked out yet. I may have been cold to his cries, but I certainly wasn’t cold to the act itself.

At first, I’d mistaken it for the fear of getting caught, but it was more than that. There was a small part of our humanity that begged us to forgive someone, just before making that one fatal jerk of the hand, severing a vital organ. For me, the screaming voices, and not just the ones from my own past, trampled those pleas to dust and sealed the guy’s fate.