Dog Blood

windpipe and choke the life out of this vile, pathetic bastard. But I know it’s not going to happen. Not yet, anyway.
    “Now what I want this morning,” he continues, his voice low and infuriatingly calm, “is just for you to lie still and listen to me. I want to tell you my story. It won’t be anything you haven’t heard a hundred times already. Well, maybe you won’t have heard a story like this, but I’m betting you’ve seen plenty of similar things. Hell, I’m sure you’ve done worse things yourself than what I’m going to tell you. You see, Danny, you and your kind ripped a hole in my life. I lost everything because of you. You tore my world apart.”
    What the hell’s he expecting from me? Pity? An apology? It makes me feel good to know that we’ve made him suffer, and I want to hear more. I want every detail. I want to know exactly how we hurt him and what we did.
    “Picture the scene, Danny,” he begins, his voice almost too calm. “It’s a Friday night, and I’ve just got home from work. I won’t bore you with the details about where I lived and what I used to do for a living before all this because, if I’m being honest, it was boring. Thing is, it was my life and my routine and I was happy with it. And you and your kind took it all away from me.”
    He remains composed, but I sense raw emotion bubbling just under the surface. Is he going to crack? I want to see this bastard’s pain, want to see him hurt. He stops speaking, closes his eyes, takes a breath, and then continues.
    “It was pretty early on, I suppose. You remember what it was like in the early days when we thought there wasn’t really a problem and that the streets were full of copycat vigilantes fighting just because everyone else was? Before we knew that people like you were actually changing? Back in the days before we all got too scared to even look at each other? Remember?”
    He automatically looks at me for a response, but he doesn’t get one.
    “Anyway, like I said, it was a Friday night. We’d just finished eating, and I was watching the news on TV, hearing about how bad everything was starting to get. My wife was in the kitchen, arguing with Keisha, our seventeen-year-old, about going out. She was going through the whole protective mother routine, you know? Telling her how she didn’t like her going into town on weekends anyway, but especially not then with all the trouble going on… you get the picture. Now I’m sitting there with my feet up, trying to block out the noise and concentrate on the TV, but it’s getting louder and louder in there. Keisha’s shouting at Jess, Jess is shouting at Keisha, then Keisha’s shouting back again, and I’m just staring at the screen, wishing they’d both shut up…”
    His voice trails off again, and in the sudden silence I remember all the TV and kid-oriented arguments that used to grind me down in my dead-end former life. I check myself quickly. Am I identifying with this fucker? Maybe that’s what he wants? This is probably just more calculated bullshit to try to get me on his side.
    “The shouting gets louder and louder,” he says, “and I hear the back door swing open, then slam shut. I think that’s it, that Keisha’s stormed out, but then I realize I can still hear both their voices. Then I hear a crash and one of them starts screaming, then a thump and another crash. And then all the screaming stops.”
    He looks straight at me. There are tears rolling down his cheeks. He wipes them away with his sleeve.
    “I get up and start walking toward the kitchen, and there’s this guy just standing there in the middle of the room with his back to me, both my girls lying at his feet. I know they’re dead as soon as I see them. He’s got a baseball bat in his hand, and there’s blood dripping off the end of it. I can only see Keisha’s legs, but Jess is lying on her back, her head just a yard or so from where I’m standing, and her face… Christ, there’s nothing left of it, like her whole skull’s been caved in. Just a dark, bloody hole where that beautiful face used to be…
    “Now our house was just a small, modest place-narrow, middle of the block, you know the type? I start backing away from the kitchen, praying the killer’s not gonna see me. I’m halfway across the living room when he starts to move. We had a closet under the stairs with one of those slatted louver doors. I drop down to my hands and knees, crawl behind the sofa to the