"Your father was a ruthless bastard..." My uncle Jimmy used to say after he'd had a few drinks in him. "We had M16's and grenades and he used to use a knife. Moved like a shadow at midnight." That New York cop accent slipping through though he's been living in California for the past 20 something years. I smile at him with practiced affection at his tale. He doesn't know that I know something: The truth about him and my father. Both my parents are dead. They had died in a vicious car accident leaving me to the only person that my family would have trusted: My uncle Jimmy Dons. After their death he took me and moved to the west coast in an attempt to start a new life and give me a shot at something normal. My name is Jack DeMonstros, 21 years old. Yeah, I know. Hell of a name. But we'll come back to that later. "After the war we'd come home and they called us 'Baby killers'! Can you believe that bullshit?!? Worse than that they could only give us jobs as cops!" I sip my beer and puff on a cigarette as I watch him, drunk and at the grill, in the back of my mind a theater plays all the things that I will make happen. He goes on with tales of the war, reciting them to his cop buddies that surround us in our tiny backyard, people he's known for years. The spatula in his hand is waved around like he was drawing the pictures of his narrative, and sometimes it was a rifle, sometimes a handgun, all to illustrate the story he was weaving at the time.
Before I was born my uncle and my father served in the war together. After that they became cops. After that my uncle became corrupt, trying to take my father with him into the depths. My father refused. So they staged a coupe. My mother and father were shot down and pushed off a bridge in their car somewhere in New York. My uncle pulled the trigger. He thought it was the end of it. But plans had already been made. Three years ago a box showed up on my doorstep, no return address, no postage. I managed to open the chest and inside were things that changed my life: Videos made by my parents. They explained what had happened to them, what they saw coming, and videos that trained me. Trained me to be a killer like my father. For three years I've studied them intensely, learning every trick, every word memorized. And soon I became like my father. Soon the blades in the box that was sent to me, 20 plus years later, by my parents, were second nature to me. Every night before I'd gone to bed, for three years, I'd watched a video of them both, telling me they loved me.
He hadn't even noticed that I'd been wearing the very cross necklace my father wore all those years ago. Didn't notice the extra inch or two of muscle I'd put on for the deed yet to be done. He would. I had them all here. Every one of them that took that which was most precious to me before I ever knew them. Now was the time. My empty beer bottle shattered against the floor as I launched myself forward, they never saw it coming. The blade on my hip was out and working, spilling blood and viscera, entering soft, screaming flesh as I dispatched them all. The metallic smell of what they'd spilled by my hand filled my nose, pushing me onward. My uncle Jimmy was stunned to see such violence from his frail, antisocial, quiet spoken nephew. My shoes squished audibly against the soil now soaked with crimson as I approached him, eyes wide in disbelief. He uttered one word: Why? The handle of my knife, my father's knife, came down on his head with a sick thud. He was unconscious. I dragged the rest of the bodies into the kitchen and arranged them, as I'd been told. Then drug my uncle to the den. My muscles quaked and shivered as I peeled the soaking shirt off myself while I tied him to a chair. He'd get his answer soon. While he slept I poured gasoline all over the house, all over his dead friends, all over him.
He woke with a groggy moan, seeking to move his immobilized limbs, but couldn't. I sat in a chair across him, shirtless, the cross hanging from my neck in a gentle sway. He asked why I'd done all this in a slur. With a grunt I turned him to face our TV and without a word let the videos my father and mother made all those years ago do the explaining. He was wide awake, making excuses, justifying his actions, pleading with me, then cursing me. It had been somewhere near ten o'clock at night when I began this spree of violence, but it was dawn by the time he rattled out his last breath. I took the knife with me, cleaning it, and storing it in my coat as I breathed one last, deep sigh, and tossed the lit match into the house he'd built. A house of lies and deceit. I only stayed a few minutes to make sure the flames engulfed and consumed everything inside before taking the few thousand dollars that were in the trunk and walking away. The last words to leave my mouth that night were the words my father had said from beyond the grave: "Revenge takes time, cunning, strength, and in the end the undying belief in the truth." I walked away from my life. Walked away from the lies. And into the night I disappeared with my hand gripping my father's cross tight, giving me the ability to start anew. Revenge is never easy. But it is very, very, gratifying.
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