13 | Mike, the night of the fire.
Mike, the night of the fire.
“WAKE UP!”
I shake Liam’s body, trying to wake him from his sleep.
“What?” He asks groggily, and then his eyes fall on the gun in my hand. He quickly understands what I am about to do and gets up from his bed.
We walk fast, with steady steps toward the living room.
His father has Liam’s sister on the ground.
His belt is in his hand, and the poor girl is crying.
He usually hits only Liam and me, but lately, his violence has spread to his daughters.
It is time. He needs to be stopped before anything worse happens to them.
The girl sees me as I approach him from behind. I am pointing the gun at him before I even speak. Her eyes grow wide. She looks at me, ready for what will follow. Even though we never shared the plan with any of them, she already knows what is going to happen. I see it in her eyes.
“Get away from her!” I order, my voice steady.
It reeks of dominance. I am not sure where I found this strength, but it feels right.
He has been tormenting us for years. I allowed this to continue for far too long.
I didn’t wipe my entire family out of existence to trade one horror for another. He has to be stopped tonight.
He turns to look at me and chuckles at the sight of me with a gun. Liam stands beside me, trembling in place, barely keeping himself upright. But he is still here, facing his fear, and that is all that matters right now.
“What do you think you are doing, boy?” he asks. His voice has a mocking tone, as if he believes I can’t do anything to him. That I can’t hurt him. I am just a kid in his eyes.
I have nothing to say to him, but I force myself to speak anyway.
“Get on your knees, or I will shoot!” I warn him, but he laughs in my face.
I am not sure what comes over me, since I wasn’t fully planning to shoot him.
The plan was just to scare him at first—maybe keep him occupied while we got everyone else outside.
As the years passed since the accident, I had decided I didn’t want to take another life.
I just wanted to free us from his torture.
Even though I don’t wish to have more blood on my hands, I somehow find myself pulling the trigger.
The gunshot echoes through the house, and I see his body fall to the ground.
He gasps for air, his hands pressing against the wound as blood spills out.
He is still alive, but barely able to breathe.
I notice I hit him right where I guess his lungs are located.
I know I can’t back out now. I have to finish this.
I turn to see Liam. His sister is now by his side, and he clings to her, hugging her tight as he nods at me.
He forgives me in silence for what I am about to do, and that’s all I need: his forgiveness.
I don’t need him to approve of this, because no one would approve of this.
It’s not a choice you want to make; it’s a choice you are forced into.
I pull the trigger again, and again—until every bullet is inside the man who has been slicing my flesh with his belt every day for the past five years.
He's lying there now, dead. His eyes are still open and empty. They stare back at me, but nothing is there anymore. Not even a trace of a soul—if he ever had one.
I turn to my cousins. “We need to burn the house. Make it look like an accident,” I announce, moving quickly toward the kitchen. I open the cabinets, searching for the gasoline and rubbing alcohol I know my aunt keeps for cleaning.
“I will get the rest of them out!” Liam calls as I start pouring the liquid around the living room moments later. His sister runs in the opposite direction toward the basement. We both know what that means: her father has the little one locked down there again.
I start pouring liquid everywhere—over his body, over the living room furniture.
Everywhere I can. I don’t even think it through before I find the matches in my pocket, light the first one, and let it fall to the ground.
The flames grow fast, and for some reason, it feels like we are suddenly running out of time.
I try to reach the basement to tell them to hurry, but the staircase is already wrapped in fire.
Fuck. This is not how it was supposed to happen.
I should have waited. Why didn’t I wait?
“Liam, there is no time to save them!” He is standing next to me.
“They are coming up! Mom told me!” he claims, but the flames are now approaching the stairs leading to the bedrooms. I know for a fact we need to leave now.
There isn’t enough time. If we don’t leave, we are going to die with them.
They are already gone—I know it in my soul.
More blood is on my hands. More innocent blood.
I will forever be haunted by the lives I took, but I can save Liam.
He is the one person I can save, and I refuse to let him burn. We came too far to let him die.
“Come on, we need to go!” I tell him, pulling him through the smoke as we try to reach the exit. Liam is barely moving; his body goes stiff in my grip as I try to get us out of this house.
We approach the front door, but the flames have claimed it already. It’s burning with the rest of the house. I try to think of a way out. There must be another way. We can’t be doomed to burn alive. This is not how our story ends.
My cousin stays completely frozen, his eyes wandering around the fiery room.
But I don’t give up. I look around desperately, and my eyes fall on a chair that isn't burning yet, right next to a window. The flames haven’t reached that spot, but it won’t be long before they do.
I grab the chair and hurl it through the window, shattering the glass.
“Let’s go,” I say, pushing Liam to climb out.
He gets out first, and I follow right behind. I drag his body along with mine, trying to reach the road. He keeps tripping and falling, but I keep picking him back up. “Just a few more steps, buddy. We’ve got this,” I whisper to him, though I don’t think he hears me.
He is crying and sobbing, collapsing to the ground the moment we reach the pavement. I let him fall apart, because I know how he feels. My own sister’s death still haunts me like it was yesterday, and now their deaths will haunt me too.
“We need to call Nate,” I tell him. Just then, I hear sirens.
Nathan and I had made a plan that Liam doesn’t know about—a backup in case things didn’t go as expected.
Nate's father knows everything. Despite my objections, Nathan said his dad needed to know.
He convinced me that his father would help us, and now I have to believe he was right.
Quickly, the road fills with police cars and fire trucks.
They immediately put us in handcuffs because it seems suspicious to them that we managed to escape while everyone else met their fate inside.
They question us right there. Liam doesn't speak at all, while I answer to the best of my ability, keeping enough confusion in my voice to appear as shocked and traumatized as anyone in this situation would be. Like someone who didn’t just kill a man minutes before the fire started.
Like someone who didn’t light the match that burned an entire family alive.
I have thought about this moment countless times, rehearsing what to say to make sure this looks like an accident.
Meanwhile, Liam stands beside me, frozen.
He isn't crying anymore; his tears have dried.
He just stares at the house, at the firefighters, and at the bodies being wheeled out on stretchers.
I managed to send a text to Nathan right as the police arrived, hoping he will find a way to fix this. We talked about this for months—I know he has a plan of his own. I know everything will be okay, yet it is so hard to believe it in this moment.
Especially because burning the house down wasn’t part of the plan at all.
Killing a man tonight wasn’t the plan either.
The plan was to make sure Liam’s mother fled with his sisters in case we couldn’t stop his father without violence.
Essentially, the goal was to help everyone escape while he was asleep.
They would have left town with resources arranged by Nathan’s family, while Liam and I stayed behind to live at Nathan’s house until graduation.
Nathan had offered us the chance to stay with his family long before he even knew about our plan, but I had insisted that wasn’t enough.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe we should have just moved out.
But then Liam’s mother and sisters would still be trapped under that man’s tyranny.
I’m not sure if that would have been worse than death. I can’t think clearly.
Burning the house to the ground with the family inside wasn’t part of the plan—that’s the only thing I know for sure. I will regret it forever. But even with that weight, a twisted sense of relief warms my chest, knowing that no one will ever hurt my cousin or me again.
I know he doesn’t see it that way right now, and he won’t for years to come. But in my own fucked-up way, I only did this to save him.