FirstLineFiction beta

from Contest #3

I read about it in the paper, in the subway, on my way to work. Until that moment, I had believed that I’d gotten away with it completely, that nobody other than me even realized that it had taken place. With the knowledge that this was no longer true, my entire sense of security dissolved, bubbling through my bloodstream like Alka Seltzer in a glass, sending a shiver through my body as the bubbles dispersed.

For several minutes, I sat with the newspaper open on my lap, weighing the benefits of continuing on to work against the altogether more appealing idea of headlong flight. Would I be able to bluff my way through the days and years ahead, pretending that I was still the man I had been before I became a monster? Or would I be better off to run, to leave all that I had known, all that I had loved, behind as I sought to become someone else? Neither option seemed to be an answer I could live with.

Ah, but maybe that was the crux of it... maybe I had abdicated my right to live with anything. Maybe death was the only way for me to resolve the puzzle of my future, to atone for the past that I had created. If so, then I would choose a quick death at my own hands to avoid the legal death drawn out by lawyers and years, the fate that would surely be mine if the authorities should find that I was the one responsible for the... what was it the press was calling it? My eyes found the word in the headline: Massacre at Owens Mill.

It had been a massacre. I had never meant for it to happen. Not when I woke up that Sunday morning and headed down to breakfast. Not even when I first noticed that my wife was trying to calm my fifteen year old daughter. She was nearly hysterical, my daughter, my Katie. I could barely understand the words that gurgled through the sobs that spasmed her. They were words about pain, words about horror, words that seemed to say she thought her life was over.

I rushed to them, to my wife and my daughter. I demanded that they tell me what had happened. At first, it was as if I wasn't even there, as if there was no room for another person in the drama that was between them. I touched Katie's shoulder, expecting that she would turn to me, as she always does, abandoning her mother's arms for my stronger ones. I was used to being the rock in my daughter's life.

Instead, she screamed.

I drew back, panicked myself now. What had happened? Why was the world reversing on its axis?

"Sandra," I shouted, pulling at my wife's arm, "tell me what is going on. Tell me what happened."

Sandra folded Katie deeper into her embrace, shielding her daughter's face against her breast as she stroked her hair with her free hand. I noticed then that Katie's blouse was torn at her shoulder, and worse, that there was blood staining the skirt that rode her hips, suspended by a zipper halfway fastened. The button at the top was gone.

My stomach cramped, and I tasted bile. I forced a swallow and, after a time, managed to speak in a voice pitched so low I barely recognized it as my own.

"Who hurt you, Katie."

"I didn't ask for it, I didn't, even though they said I did. I never would."

Her voice was muffled against Sandra's breast, but the words were clear enough. I knew what must have happened, but I wanted more than anything I had ever wanted in my life for it not to be true. My daughter, my little angel, had been raped.

"I found her on the floor when I came down this morning," Sandra said, her voice sickeningly flat. "She'd made it home, somehow, but she was just lying there, crying. When I went to her, she started to sob. I finally got her to tell me a little of what happened."

"Did she tell you who?" It was all I could think about.

"She left the dance because she wasn't feeling well, and a boy she barely knows offered to give her a ride home. But instead he took her to a place where older boys were doing drugs. She tried to leave, but they..."

"Where is this place? Who was there?"

I would listen to nothing but what I wanted... what I needed... to know. It took some time for Katie to tell it, through choked-back sobs and fits of shaking, but finally I knew enough. I left them there in the kitchen and went upstairs to prepare.

Perhaps you, too, are wondering why I acted as I did then. Why didn't I call the police, as my wife begged me to do? Why didn't I let the authorities rip my daughter from her mother's arms, take her to a cold room, examine her, ask her questions, destroy any sense of security left to her? Why didn't I let them question her, and disbelieve her, and investigate her for her own past sins? They would want to know details of her life; was she a virgin, was she a slut, had she asked for what she had gotten. They would want to know things that I, her father, did not want them to know; did not want to know myself.

Still, it would have been the right thing to do, to call the authorities, to let them deal with what had happened. I wasn't thinking about the "right" thing, though. I was thinking about my little girl.

I was thinking about revenge.

With my daughter still sobbing in her mother’s arms, I went to the closet at the end of the upstairs hall, pulled it open and shoved aside the winter coats stored there since the onset of spring. My fingers sought the hidden catch, unnoticeable to anyone who didn’t know that it was there, and the false panel at the back of the closet fell open. I chose carefully from the weapons secreted there. I knew they were ready. I kept them cleaned and oiled, as I had learned to keep them when the army trained me as a sniper. I had not fired them in a long time, and I knew that I must have lost the accuracy of aim I had worked so hard to accomplish. But that would not keep me from the work ahead of me.

The weapon I selected was an M40A3 sniper rifle modified for semi automatic action. It wasn’t as accurate at the Spartan MK10 I’d used in Iraq, but it was more easily obtainable through civilian channels and, loaded with 7 mm Remington Magnum cartridges, it would be accurate up to 1,200 meters. I planned to be far closer than that.

The weather was not really cold enough to justify the wearing of an overcoat, but I put one on anyway. I let it serve as a cover for the weapon as I left through the kitchen exit into the garage. Neither Katie nor Sandra asked where I was going… then, or later.

The place that Katie had been taken was some distance beyond the city limits, half way up the coastal mountain range. These mountains were more densely settled than people in the valley often realized, but there were still large tracts of forest where people seldom ventured. There were also, I knew from occasional pieces in the news, hidden marijuana farms it was best to avoid. The abandoned lumber mill where Katie had been taken was on the edge of one such farm.

Katie had been able to give me directions that were clear enough to take me to the lake near which the mill was situated. Whether she had been there before, whether drugs were part of her life, these were questions that would wait until later. Right now, the only thing that mattered was what had been done to her.

I maneuvered my car as far as I could off the dirt road I had been traveling, knowing the road itself probably skirted the mill.  Getting out as quietly as I could, I opened the trunk and pulled out my rifle, leaving my overcoat in its place. The coat would only get in the way. I could smell bacon frying. Figuring that the odor must be coming from the only place I knew to be occupied in the area, I began a stealthy progress in the direction of the smell

Owens Mill was not a large building, and from the outside it looked exactly like what it was supposed to be, a long abandoned structure that had never been more than rustic. But the element that was using it now had a different agenda than its original builders. They had managed to turn the interior into a fairly habitable living space. I could see three of them through the window of what was clearly the kitchen area. But I would need to complete my reconnaissance before I acted.

It was easy to stay hidden in the trees that ringed the mill. It was to the benefit of those using the place that the foliage was thick. It would keep any but the most determined away from the area. It did not stop me. I was able to observe the three sides that did not front on the lake, noting any points of possible exit. The windows were all barred. There were two doors, but I could see that one had been barricaded from inside, probably to make it impossible for law enforcement agencies to enter from more than one point. It also made it impossible for those inside to leave.

By the time I returned to my original position near the kitchen window, three more were gathered at the rough wooden table and breakfast was being served. My job was damnably easy. The rifle’s semi automatic action allowed me to take the first two down before they could react. I lost sight of the others as they ducked or ran to other rooms for cover. But each time one grew careless enough to appear, or tried to fire back through the barred windows, I shot again. As far as I was concerned, I had all day. When one of them tried to make a run for it through the only available door, he was an easy target. By the time I decided I would need to go inside to finish the job, there was only one left alive. I shot him as he cowered next to the stove. He was wearing the silver cross I had given Katie for her last birthday.

Yes, I was the judge and the executioner. Were they all guilty? I don’t know. But I doubt that any of them were completely innocent.

Before I left the mill, I wiped down any surface that Katie might have touched. No one must ever know that she had been there. I took Katie’s necklace with me, along with all my spent shell casings. I disposed of them, and the rifle, but I will never say how or where.

As for me, I had simply done what I was trained to do, first in Kuwait, and later, when my reserve unit was called up, in Iraq during the second Gulf War. It was a solution that seemed both quicker and cleaner than any other.

The subway came to my stop. I folded the newspaper and left it there on the seat beside me. I had a decision to make before I walked the rest of the way to my office. Someone had discovered what I had left up there on the mountain. Six bodies, each of them shot, and each of them bearing the special mark of my retribution. Could I live with what I had done? Would it be better for me to turn myself in? Could I run away or end my life, as I had thought of at first? Or should I simply go to work, continue to live my life, a middle aged husband and father, no different from any normal man?

 

back to Contest #3