Liam
Ihave been thinking about the first night Mike arrived to live with my family.
It was past midnight when everyone had fallen asleep, and I entered Mike’s room with a plate of food I had stolen from the kitchen and a first aid kit I kept hidden under my bed.
It wasn’t much, but it was the only way I knew how to help him.
He had dared to ask for more food at the dinner table, and my father had taken his anger out on him.
I should have warned him. Even though I was used to that, seeing my cousin on the ground bleeding and screaming as my father’s belt landed repeatedly on his bare back broke something inside me.
I always felt a strong bond with Mike. And as the years have passed, that bond has become unbreakable.
Even though I would kill for him now, back then I was too weak to protect him.
That night, and every night that followed until the fire, I kept my mouth shut.
Because I didn’t know anything else to do, that’s what I had learned my whole life—to stay silent.
“Are you okay?” I asked him, not really expecting an answer. I noticed his eyes glowing from all the tears, but his face was not sad, and he did not seem like he was in pain. He seemed angry. Furious, even. He seemed like he was sitting there making a plan, and that was exactly what he was doing.
“We should kill him,” he said. At first, I thought he surely must be joking. But then the idea started to take root fast inside my own mind the moment the words fell from his lips.
I dropped next to him on the floor. “Should we?” I asked while helping him out of his t-shirt, noticing the bloodstains on it.
“I have a plan,” he told me, as I soaked a cotton ball with alcohol before I started cleaning his wounds.
“Those will need stitches,” I remember saying to him. He didn’t argue. He simply nodded, as if he already knew. “What is the plan?” I questioned as I prepared myself to stitch his skin. A skill no child should have, but I did.
“We will need to find a way to keep everyone else safe and get a gun,” he said, as if it were the most casual plan he could ever conjure. “The gun part is the easy one. There is one in the safe at my house, which now belongs to me. It won’t be hard to get access to it.”
I took out the stitching kit I had asked a nurse to give me after months of hospital visits with the same marks as the ones I was seeing on Mike’s back in that moment.
The woman was kind enough to teach me how to stitch myself, even though she was breaking a number of rules.
I think deep down she knew that if a boy around ten needed that knowledge, things were bad enough to be a matter of life and death.
My parents wouldn't always take me to the hospital. Sometimes it took days of open wounds bleeding through my clothes before my mother would take me.
“This will sting,” I warned him, and I pushed the needle through his skin, stitching it like a ripped hole in one of my t-shirts.
I saw his face twitch with every stitch, and I worked quickly. He said nothing more, but his face told me everything each time the needle went through his skin. I finished, doing the best I could to make sure to keep the wound clean before I dressed it with a bandage.
Not another word was said between us that night. I gathered the rest of the first aid kit while he ate his food. We sat in silence, both lost in our own thoughts, until we fell asleep on opposite sides of the floor.
It was five years later when his plan was executed. Some mistakes happened along the way. We thought we had enough time to get everyone out, but we barely made it out ourselves when the fire claimed the house. My father was lying on the floor, dead after Mike shot him. A revenge well worth it.
The man who is now in front of me reminds me so much of that boy: the same dark gaze full of rage.
A cold expression is firmly placed on his face while we try to change his mind again.
His eyes, though—those are on fire. He wants this woman dead, and I know the reason.
I can’t really argue with him. She looks exactly like my aunt.
This is too risky; the woman looks too much like his mother. Even if he can handle it, in the event her body is found, it is entirely possible we will be brought in for questioning. Even though no one here knows us—for the most part, at least.
That doesn’t mean they can’t somehow link the resemblance of his mother and himself to the woman who turned up dead.
It’s a different era now; technology has advanced.
Everything is digital. It won’t take long before some sort of database links the two cases together.
Both of our prints are in the system from the night of the fire.
Nathan might be the only one who could possibly get away with it, but even that won’t be a guarantee.
Especially if a true crime freak gets interested in a local murder in a town where hardly anything bad ever happens.
This place is peaceful. The criminal activity is so low that I am surprised we have gone unnoticed this long to begin with. This is too risky.
It doesn’t even take an expert to link the cases, really.
The news from back then exists on the internet now.
It isn’t that hard to do a reverse image search and find the photos from the accident.
Mike’s face will be there next to the photos of the people who died in that car.
And whatever post that turns out to be, it sure will be linked to the one about the fire at my house.
Because our hometown reeked with true crime freaks who loved to gossip and blame us for everything that ever happened there.
We have been blamed for deaths years later when we weren’t even in the area to commit them. It’s ridiculous.
“Are you sure you want to choose that one?” Nathan asks once again, and we both know the question is rhetorical at this point. If Mike sets his mind on a victim, that woman will die no matter what.
“Yes, I want to do it tonight,” Mike responds to him.
I rush to argue, because delaying this is the best we can do. “We never hunt so close to the previous one for a reason.” I’m reminding him of the rule we all agreed upon the night after our first chase. It’s not like it will be much help, but right now I will take what I can get.
“Let me stalk her for a few days,” I tell him before he can say anything else. “Let me find out what I can about her before we do anything.”
“I agree. If we do it, we have to do it right,” Nate adds, and Mike lets out a defeated sigh.
“Fine, you can plan this, but I want her dead,” he tells us and storms off once again.
The last few hours have been a rollercoaster of constant fighting and memory trips into nightmares we both have tried to forget.
He seems to ignore both my advice and Nate’s as he paces in the living room now, continuing to mumble about something neither of us seems able to understand.
My eyes meet Nate’s, and we both agree in silence that we cannot avoid this.
We started doing this for Mike. The hunt, the blood spill, and the rush all seemed to calm him down in a way he needed more than anything. We both love him too much not to keep doing this until we either get caught or our own end arrives.
If we are going to do this, we should do it right.
I choose to go to my room for a few hours in hopes of sleeping until night fully sets.
I will start with research; this is how I have always done background checks on our victims. First, I research their lives.
Then I stalk them. And if everything comes back clean, we kidnap them and throw them into the hunting grounds with a set of rules designed only for our entertainment.