Here is a short story I wrote about a year ago just for the fun of it. It has vulgar language and violence but I don't know how else to get the idea across. This story contains child abuse so if you are easily offended, please read no further.

there are other chapters but I'll wait and see if anyone is interested in reading them before posting further

Enjoy,
X


Prologue

It isn’t easy living with the fact that you have killed another human being. You see your victim in your dreams, you catch glimpses of them in crowds and in passing cars. Those “glimpses” aren’t really your victim, but the ghosts that your mind perceives in it‘s attempt to accept the reality of what you have done and can never undo.
There are ways to justify the killing so that you can learn to put the murder in the back of your mind. Some people say to themselves that their victim deserved to die or they don’t see the victim as being human. Some murderers except the lord, confess their sins , beg forgiveness and even try to make it up to the families of their victims.
There are others within the human race without a conscience, serial killers, sociopaths and some whose IQ’s are too low to realize the effects of their actions. That type of killer has no angel or devil on their shoulders, no Jimminy Cricket shouting into Pinocchio’s ear. Like Doctor Frankenstein they forge ahead without considering the horror they will unleash on the world. Like stone angels in a cemetery they never look back at what they have done.
I sometime envy those without a conscience, perhaps because mine bothers me so much. Sometime it would be nice to be able to forget, to put the past behind you, never to be remembered. It is our pasts however, that have made us the people we are. It is our ability to remember that allows us to learn from our mistakes. I remember my first kill like I remember my first bicycle, my first kiss and my first love, although not as fondly.
Perhaps your first victim would be easier to forget if he were a stranger passing through town, some homeless man or even a hunter out to bag that first buck of the season. I imagine the murder of a stranger would be much easier to forget than the murder of a loved one, of a family member. I keep telling myself that I can’t forget my first kill because he was a family member, because he loved me so much. The truth about my first kill is that it was a mistake, an accident. I don’t really care that he was family, I don’t care that he loved me. The thing that haunts my memory is the fact that I didn’t actually kill him.
You see, I am not a murderer, I am a killer but in order to be a murderer you have to kill your own kind. Even though I have killed many people in my life I have never killed my kind, mainly because I’ve never met another of my species. All my previous killings are easy to forget but this one death haunts me, but to tell my story I have to start at the beginning.



Chapter one Part one

Most people don’t understand pain, I suppose I do because it‘s all I‘v ever known. It wasn’t the belt leaving whelps on my young flesh that hurt. It wasn’t the nails of her left hand digging into my arm that hurt or the words that she screamed as she beat me.

“You sorry little b*****d! I’ll f**king kill you if you ever do that again.” her voice high pitched and shrill.

The buckle slipped from her grasp but she didn’t stop the beating. The belt buckle tore into my legs and back. I could feel the blood as it bubbled to the surface and raced along my skin toward the floor. I didn’t make a sound, I didn’t cry, my mind was in another place.

My dad wrapped his arms around her pinning her elbows to her sides and lifted her from the floor. His voice was calm as always.

“Alright! That’s enough!” He said. “I think you made your point.”

In the corner of my eye I could see him backing out of my room, my mother still kicking and screaming in his arms. I should have felt thankful. I should have been grateful that he had pulled her away but nothing made since. How did I get to this point? She had said that I had ran away from home. She had screamed as she beat me that if I ever did it again, I’d better not come back.

None of that mattered to me, it didn’t hurt, not the screaming, the red whelps, the scratches where she had held my arm so tight or the cuts from the buckle that had slipped from her grasp. It was the confusion that hurt, it was the fact that I had no idea what was happening. What was this beating for?

I could hear my mother and father arguing through the open door of my room but their words were incoherent. I moved toward my bed, staring out the window into the wintry landscape. The field that had only weeks before held an ocean of windblown corn stood barren and brown under the fall sky. The corn had been harvested. The huge green combines had left only the brown stalks that lined the field like tombstones at a national cemetery. Across the field lay the woods, the forest, it was my place to get away. The forest called to me like the sea calls the rivers, it wasn’t an audible sound but an inner calling. It was a desire like I have never felt for anything else.

A pinch at my side made me look down. The belt had wrapped around me and the tongue of the buckle had pierced my side leaving a small ragged hole. The skin around the hole had swollen and blood trickled from the wound. I thought of volcanoes as I watched the blood lava flow. I cupped my hand over the erupting hole and sat on the edge of my bed.

A cop? Yes, a police officer had brought me home. I remembered. My mind struggled with the thought until his face became clear. Yes, I remembered, I remembered the patrol car as it eased into our driveway, and before that when the officer reported into the microphone that he had found the missing twelve year old boy. But how? Where had he found me?

I glanced out my second story window again.. From the edge of the bed I could see the road outside the house. A teal Pontiac Tempest made it’s way south along the ribbon of black asphalt and in my mind images began to form. A kind, gentile face swirled into my memory. An elderly lady with a bright smile filled my minds eye. I had stumbled out of the forest onto the road and she and her husband had found me. They had taken me to a little country store and had bought me a soda and some potato chips while they waited for the police to arrive. Had the old man called the police or the store owner? I don’t know and I guess I never will.

I wanted to lay back, I wanted to close my eyes and drift into peaceful sleep, away from this pain. I wanted to sleep the pain away but I knew I couldn’t. I didn’t know if she would be back in here. I didn’t know who would be in here next and I didn’t want to be caught sleeping when the next assault came. It was getting dark outside as the brightness gave way to the peaceful dark. Soon I would have to leave the house anyway. I couldn’t really tell you if it had been a week, a month or even longer but I could tell you that I wasn’t allowed to sleep in the house.

Chapter one Part two

“You little f***in’ %&$!! I aught to kick your ass just for being so f***in’ stupid”
The cruel voice of my older brother James pulled me from the confusion of my memories. My eyes opened and I turned toward him as he made his way across the room.
“What the f*** did you think you were doing? He didn’t want an answer.

I stood, raising my arms in front of me, I knew what was coming. I tried to hit him but he was just to big and his reach to long.

“Do you know how much you worried mom and dad? He yelled, grabbing a hand full of my hair and dragging me away from the bed. Worried? I thought. I can’t imagine them being worried.

I strained against his pull and felt a fist slam into the side of my head.

“They’ve been out looking for your little sorry ass for three days”

Three days?
More fists to my head.

“The f***in’ cops have been here over and over and I’ve had to deal with their bullshit”

A hard punch in the stomach dropped me to the floor, my breath abandoned me as if all the oxygen had left the room. A fist to the back of my skull sent me falling forward on hands and knees. A kick in the ribs rolled me and my back slammed against the wall.

“ and the whole time I had to put up with mom and dads questions.”

James straightened and did a mocking dance, his hands flapping around like fins on a fish.

“Where’s Chuck? What happened to Chuck? Did you do something to Chuck? Chuck, Chuck, Chuck!

His idiocy gave me a chance to regain my breath.

“Like I give a f*** where you are, you stupid motherf***er.”

James’ s expression changed to one of rage, I’d seen it before. He sidestepped, I threw my arms up again but they weren’t enough to stop his size twelve combat boot from catching me on the side of my face. I felt the impact and heard the crunch as the drywall cracked from the force of my head slamming against the wall.

He grabbed my hair again and pulled, dragging me across the hardwood floor. I struggled to get to my feet.

“ I’m sick of looking at your sorry ass.” He shouted as he threw me out of the room.

“Get the f*** out of my room.” He spat, slamming the door.

I leaned against the wall in the hallway, to my left was my parents room. I wondered if they were still in there. I turned to the right and stumbled past the bathroom toward the stairwell.

My room. The words still rang in my ears. This old farmhouse was too small, it always had been. James and I were supposed to share a room, which was part of the reason I wasn’t allowed to sleep in the house.

My bruised ribs ached with each of the thirteen steps as I descended the stair into the kitchen. My dad sat at the table reading the days paper. Behind him my mother stood at the stove. She cooked only for him and herself and I knew better than ask what she was cooking although it did smell wonderful. How long had it been since I had eaten anything? I wandered.

The door leading from the kitchen to the living room was only a few steps away but it seemed so far all of a sudden. I walked silently past the table, hoping no one would notice that I was even there.

“Those hogs ain’t gonna feed themselves boy.” My dads voice was as hard as steel and the tone never changed. It was hard to judge his mood, he was so different from mom and James. Their voices changed in tone and in volume when they were angry about something but not my dads.

I looked up from the floor and saw that he was looking around the paper at me.

“I’ll go feed them now.” I assured, knowing that I really had no choice.

Again I looked toward the floor as I left the kitchen.

“You’d better get that boy out of my site.” I heard my mother say over her shoulder as if the very site of me would stop her heart.

The living room was dark but I didn’t want to bother with turning on a light. The front door was only a few paces away. I grabbed my ragged old coat from the back of the chair where my mother had thrown it. She had seemed so loving and caring when the officer had brought me home. She had carefully removed my coat and had even given me a hug. That hug was like sticking my hand in a fire to me. It was odd, unusual, she had never hugged me before that I could remember.

I fought with the old hand-me-down coat and managed to get it on. I opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch. I took a deep breath of the cold night air and felt it run through me. I was out, out of that house. None of them would come outside, not after dark, not in the cold. I was outside in the fresh air, the smell of evergreens filled the air and I breathed them in. I was no longer cooped up in that musky old house, I was outside where I belonged and I knew that until daybreak, I was free.

Chapter one Part three

The humid summer sky had pulled back it’s blanket of haze and given way to the cool air moving down from the north. The ring of humidity that had circled the moon all summer was gone and the moon hung in her full brazen glory against the pristine black sky.

I loved these nights, when the moon shown so brightly that the very darkness was open like gazing into a crystal clear lake. Everything became visible, every blade of grass, every tree branch. Every shadow had its own life as a small breeze brushed the branches of the trees and created a dark dance.

Any other night I would have felt relieved and even excited to be outside but tonight the night seemed to hold no peace. James had said that I was gone for three days but I couldn’t remember any of it. Why couldn’t I remember? I stepped down from the porch and started walking to the edge of the field. An old dirt road cut a path around the edge of the field and led to the pig pen and the shed were the feed was stored. I followed the road out of habit and tried to remember the past three days.

Broken bits of fragmented memory were all I could grasp, I could see myself standing in a swampy pool of stagnant, still, black water. Confused and alone in the dark and having no idea how I had gotten there. I could remember climbing out of the mire and collapsing by the trunk of an old walnut tree.

I heard a rustling in the brush beside the road and stopped, peering into the dark but seeing nothing. If anything was in the woods I couldn’t see it. I continued on the path thinking back to laying on the ground at the base of that tree. I had awakened covered in leaves. How long had I lain there? A day, two? I decided that there was no way I could know and I pushed the thought from me. What had happened before that, before the stagnant pool?

A huge shadowy beast tore from the underbrush behind me, it’s feet pounding on the heavily packed ground. A long low guttural grunt gave way to a high pitched squeal as it’s immense form hurled past me on my left. Startled by the sudden appearance of such a massive animal, I jumped back, turning toward the frightening creature. Several more beasts followed close behind.

I felt relief flush over me with the realization that it was the old bore hog rushing along the fence line in it’s greedy attempt to be the first at the feed trough. I had been so deep in thought that I hadn’t even realized that I had turned the corner of the road and was now walking along the edge of the pig pen.

“Damn Chuck! Get a hold of yourself.” I said aloud as I tried to calm my racing heart.

I turned at the end of the fence, the hogs grunted and shoved for dominance of the trough, their heads down, their noses searching for food not yet there. I walked to the shed. There had been a barn with a loft years ago, built in the forties. Two sheds had been added to one side of the barn in the sixties. The barn had rotted and was in danger of falling and my father had pulled it down two years earlier, now only the two smaller sheds remained. I entered the shed to the right, it was where we kept the burlap bags of dried corn and 55 gallon drums of slop that my father collected from local restaurants.

In the dark of the shed I found the bucket and moved toward the bags of corn. I couldn’t see anything other than the moonlight slicing through the cracks of the old weathered outer walls. On the top of one bag was the coffee can I used to scoop out the corn. I sat the bucket beside the bag, I picked up the can and opened the bag. I took out three scoops of corn and added them to the bucket. I twisted the top of the bag and placed the coffee can back on top.

I made my way over to one of the barrels and removed the top. The putrid smell of grease water and old food filled the room. It wasn’t as bad as when it rotted in the summer, then the smell would almost take my breath but in cooler weather this rancid mess didn’t draw fly’s as much. I used the smaller bucket that I kept hanging on a nail to scoop out the concoction and pour it on top of the dried corn. I replaced the smaller bucket and the barrels lid and exited the shed with my bucket of slop.
Some people will tell you that a pig is smarter than a dog but you would never get me to agree with that. Hogs will eat anything and if you get an arm or leg to close to the trough when you dump the slop they can even drag you in. I learned that the hard way. Two months ago I put my foot on the fence for balance while I dumped the slop into the trough, one of the sows grabbed my foot and tore the end off a leather boot. I had always tried to dump the slop into the trough away from their search but I had learned from that experience and now dumped it into the trough and even on top of their heads if they didn’t move them, which they never did.

I carried the bucket back to the shed and left it by the door. The shed to the left of the feed shed was used for storage of most of the broken farm junk that my dad planned to but never seemed to fix. In cold weather I sometime slept in that shed but I hated the thought of rats and other animals that were drawn by the smell of the slop, crawling over me in my sleep. It wasn’t one of my favorite places and since it was such a beautiful night, I decider that I would sleep outside tonight.

I sometime slept behind the shed and this was a good enough night for sleeping under the stars. I made my way around the outside of the shed to where the barn had once stood, turning the last corner I saw a huge black shadow.

crap! I thought. One of the hogs has gotten out of the pen.

I stepped closer and the shadow did the same, as it eased forward it left the shadows and stepped into the light of the full moon. My heart seemed to jump, my throat closed in a spasm that strangled any sound I would have hoped to make. My body tightened, every muscle tensed but my body wouldn’t respond. I was frozen to that spot. I stood there afraid to move as the huge black wolf moved closer.

Chapter one Part four

The night was alive with sights and sounds I had never experienced before. Colors like red and green bled together until they were indistinguishable from one another, while others gained an inner luminescence. The shadows gave up their secrets as the darkness both dulled and brightened.

Sounds surrounded me, things I never knew of became clear and audible. I could here the claws of a Eastern Fence lizard as it scaled the rough bark of a cedar tree. I could hear moles as they scavenged along their underground passages.

The night was filled with new wonders, each deserving closer inspection but it was the smells that demanded the most attention. Just as flipping through a magazine, your mind will pick up certain words. From all the thousands of words in that magazine, you grasp those most familiar. Each scent became like those words, some I recognized while others remained a mystery. The forest was no longer a mixture of unknown scents, they had become separate, individual pieces of an amazing puzzle.

I ran through the forest faster than I had ever run, pushing my body past it’s physical limitations in an effort to keep up with the she wolf. Each time I stopped to catch my breath, she would return. Her eyes glowing metallic green in the moonlight seemed to speak to me. “follow me” they demanded. “I have much to teach you and something you must see for yourself.”

I pushed on, determined not to fall behind. I realized that I was panting as my body tried to draw in the cool night air. Pain clawed at my side as I pushed on, jumping over fallen tree trunks and pushing away branches from in front of me as I ran. I wanted to stop, I wanted to rest and my body urged me to do just that, but I refused to let my body win. I found inner strength and drained it storeroom to keep up with the black wolf.

After what had seemed to be hours, I topped a small hill and saw the she wolf sitting on her haunches by a small stream. I walked to the edge of the water and knelt down for a well deserved drink of the crystal clear water. I began to lap up the water and suddenly realized that the reflection staring back wasn’t mine. I fell backward and crawled away from the stream. I couldn’t believe what my eyes had seen. In disbelief I raised my right hand in front of me. What I saw wasn’t a hand and it wasn’t the paw of a dog or wolf, but a mixture of both.

I turned to the old she wolf and our eyes met. I wanted to ask her what was happening. I wanted to ask her what I had become but the words wouldn’t form. Instead of words I heard myself utter a slow whimper. The she wolf ignored my canine plea, turning her gaze instead to an old oak tree. I looked toward the tree and the night turned to day.

I saw a small boy. Tears streaming down his face as he desperately searched the forest floor. I could feel his pain, his suffering, his despair. He picked up a small stick, looked it over and cast it to the side. He found another and another, throwing them away as the tears flowed down his cheeks. The boy found another stick and bending it in his hands, seemed satisfied. He walked to the base of the old oak tree and sat down. For a while he sat with his arms crossed on his knees, his head resting on his arms. The unheard cries and whimpers faded and the boy grew calm. The boy lifted his head and for a moment seemed peaceful. He looked around the forest and almost smiled.

I turned to the she wolf as if to ask what this was all about but her eyes stared straight at the boy. I turned back to the boy. He had placed the stick he had found on the trigger of a 12 gage shotgun, the barrel of the gun was now in his mouth. I stepped forward, I wanted to shout stop but the word came out only as a sharp bark. With a quick forward jerk of his arm, the boy pushed the stick against the trigger and the shotgun fired.

I felt blood splatter on my face and I turned away from the sickening sight but my instincts forced me to look again. Again the blood hit my face and I reached up to wipe it away. I opened my eyes and found myself lying on the ground behind the feed shed. It had started to rain and the drops hitting my face were enough to wake me. For a moment I sat there in the rain. To the east I could see that the sun was trying to penetrate the cloud cover and I knew it was morning. I wanted to dismiss the memory as a dream, a nightmare but I knew it was real. James had said that I had been missing for three days. I now understood why I had been missing, I knew why I couldn’t remember anything before finding myself in that stagnant pool. That boy with the shotgun in his mouth was me. I had been missing for three days. It had taken me three days to come back from the dead.