Mission Mercenaries

Prologue

Angel

The sunlight streaming in feels out of place.

Days like today are meant to be shrouded in darkness.

Bad things only happen in the black of night.

That’s how things are supposed to be.

The limited amount of cartoons I’ve watched tells me so.

My experience has been different.

Time of day doesn’t factor into the traumas I’ve endured.

The cartoons lie.

Unlike the bird that gets up and runs away after being hit in the head with an anvil, Momma doesn’t move.

My eyes dart from the pool of red spreading across the floor to the hammer.

Maybe that’s the difference.

Daddy didn’t have an anvil like the coyote had.

Wetness drips down my cheeks, and I swipe at it repeatedly. If Daddy sees, he’ll be angry.

Making Daddy angry is never a good thing.

He’s always angry, though.

At me.

At the world.

But mostly Momma.

Women will never learn.

She had it coming.

If she’d just done what she was told…

Correcting her is the only way she’ll learn.

But Momma never learns.

As her skin turns ashen before my eyes, I know her lessons end today.

“What a fucking waste,” Daddy says with a chuckle, his foot lashing out and hitting Momma’s side.

She doesn’t move like she normally does. She doesn’t cry out in pain. She doesn’t beg him to stop.

The silence is as strange as the sunlight coming in through the curtains.

It doesn’t belong.

“See her?” Daddy snaps. “See how useless women are?”

I nod. I’ve known women are useless for as long as I can remember.

Good for only one thing, Daddy always says.

I don’t know what that one thing is.

Momma wasn’t good at cooking, nor cleaning, nor raising me the way he saw fit.

As the red continues to grow, I still don’t know what Momma was good for.

“Fuck!”

My eyes snap to Daddy, watching as he runs rough, irritated hands over the top of his head.

Wild eyes dart around the room, but this is nothing new. Daddy always looks a little frenzied, a little out of control.

“I have to go,” he snaps. “I’m calling Poppa. He’ll come get you.”

I tremble with the news. His father, Poppa, is worse than Daddy.

Daddy only taught lessons to Momma.

Poppa likes to teach me lessons.

But when I learn, the lessons change. I can never get it right.

Silence swims around me, the soft swish of the ceiling fan the only thing I hear.

The sun rises further, casting shadows over Momma.

The red pooled around her turns black before I’m yanked up from the floor by rough, calloused hands.

“I fucked up with your daddy,” Poppa says, his dark eyes wilder than I’ve ever seen. “I won’t make the same mistake with you.”

I was born Benito Corea.

That person died the day my mother did.

The man I became later is much worse.