Page 40 of Intrepid

Back at the airport, I’d spent a bit of time with the old boy. After a few more shots and another pack of cigarettes, I’d worked up the balls to pretend like I was one of his kind, lamenting about how the world didn’t understand our desires and the need to corrupt innocence. He’d told me of a website, somewhere in the bowels of the dark net, where my every fantasy could come true. Where I could find those innocent young souls in my own city and take my ‘craving’ to the next step.

I didn’t bother to tell him the only thing I craved in that moment was the thrill of watching his eyes widen as I slid a serrated blade across his flesh.

Even still, there was a fine line between wanting and doing, and I didn’t think I’d ultimately have the grit and guts in me to go through with it.

Part of me wondered if I’d made the right choice to stick around, instead of hopping that plane to Dubai.

I’d stored his only remaining eyeball in a small foam cooler filled with ice, which I’d set beside me, leaving a hollow socket that’d tripped my gag reflex a couple times already. Not sure what I’d do with it yet. Maybe I’d feed it to one of the many stray dogs roaming the streets.

Patch covering his other eye, the guy didn’t even look human anymore.

When I’d started with him, I really hadn’t a clue how I’d go about my revenge. So many options. Fast. Slow. Painful. Painless. When it’d come down to it, I’d let my memories guide me, and opted to take an eye for an eye, since that was what they took from my dad before burning him in the house where I grew up.

Seemed fitting.

At the stranger’s head, the picana I’d hooked to a portable generator, as an improvised electrical prod, rested precariously against a wooden block, separating it from the bedsprings. Not as savvy as the closets they’d constructed, but I’d rigged the contraption within a couple of hours, and I was impressed with it.

Each passing second marked my indecision, as I contemplated whether, or not, to keep on. On one hand, I felt like I was doing some poor young kid a favor by killing the piece of shit. Ensuring he’d never hurt another, like Eli, again. On the other, I felt as if I was slipping away from the person my father had intended me to be.

A screeching sound echoed inside my head, distant memories from my past, and I screwed my eyes shut as the noise sharpened into screams. Horrible, pain-filled screams I’d locked away for too long.

The visuals set in next, and I wanted to slice them right out of my skull, but I couldn’t. They played like a movie reel inside a locked projector room.

My father standing inside a circle of flames, the desperation and despair prodding him to his knees.

His cries for mercy vibrating across my bones.

I opened my eyes again, staring down at the man whose lips trembled with his stuttered prayer. Begging me for the mercy he’d refused my father.

Beneath the blood on my forearm, I could just make out the iron cross tattoo and the date of my father’s death.

I flicked the block out from under the charged rod, and the first tap against the metal emitted a spark, which sent the Joker seizing against the springs. With blood-soaked hands, I tapped the last Marlboro from my pack and lit it up, watching him bounce on the bed like a cat across an open-range stove, until at last, I flipped off the generator, shooting one last burst of current, and he stilled.

Though, the rise and fall of his chest told me he was still alive.

Hearty bastard.

He broke into a sob, but not even his pathetic wail could touch me. Somewhere in the last hour, I’d hung my humanity on a hook and made a mental vow to finish the job. Strangest feeling—all that tension and desire to kill him, built up into such explosive magnitudes, and suddenly, staring down at him, all of it dissipated right out of me. The atonement overwhelmed me in such a gentle, calming way.

The kindling piled below him, underneath the bedframe, begged for one single spark. I turned toward the boy beside me, who remained silent—beautifully, blissfully silent. The familiar scar along his cheek roped me into visuals of him lying on a shag carpet floor with a knife trailing down his otherwise flawless skin, the scent of piss and garbage tugging at my throat.

“Is this what you want? Is this what you need me to do?” I flipped the Zippo, lighting up my cigarette, then lifted a small piece of newspaper from the pile sticking out from the bed. The flame caught the end of it, creating a torch that climbed toward my fingers. “There’s no going back after this.”

I thought about that for a moment, as if the first remnants of my soul had begun to slink their way back into my hollow body. There was no going back, because once a person killed a man, they carried the burden of his soul forever.

I withdrew the torch, moving it away from the kindling beneath.

I didn’t want to carry the man’s soul.

The boy’s hand covered mine, his deep, obsidian eyes drilling into me, as though he could see things I didn’t.

He guided my hand forward, and I dropped the flame onto the kindling.

For the next hour, the two of us watched the stranger burn in the flames, and when his body finally began to curl into itself, I pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper and a pen tucked inside my coat. On the blank side of it, I wrote four names: The Joker, The Pawn, The Fox and The John.

I crossed the first name off the list and turned to the boy. Without a word, he pushed to his bare feet and walked off, disappearing into the shadows of the building.

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