The Execution

It wasn’t that I was afraid. I’d done this before – time, and time again. I’d murdered people by the dozens, and those had been innocent people. I wasn’t afraid of hurting these people, they weren’t innocent. They were anything but, actually. They were murderers, kidnappers, drug dealers, assassins; the worst of the worst.

I wasn’t afraid to kill them; I’d been planning it from the very moment they first kidnapped me.

They’d slaughtered my family, wasn’t it only fair for me to return the favor? I wasn’t afraid to use the skills they’d taught me against them. I wasn’t afraid of what would come after; what’d I do with my life. They taught me all the essentials to be the perfect criminal. That’s what they did. They trained children to become murders, kidnappers, drug dealers and assassins. They’d steal into the night and break into houses, choose a child, and make them watch as they killed their family and robbed their home.

They take the kids to The Crypt once they’re a violent, sobbing mess that’s too distraught to even think about fighting back; not that they could, they always chose kids too young to fight back. Too young to really understand what was happening.

The Crypt was an underground bomb shelter from the 60’s that some paranoid schizo had built over the course of a few years just in case of some nuclear blast from Russia. Apparently, he and his neighbors all worked together to create an underground neighborhood wherein they could raise their kids and live on after the Cold War as if nothing had happened. Like the topsoil wasn’t laden with radioactive poison that would kill them faster than they could say, “Holy shit.”

Their plan, however, seemed to hit nuclear meltdown – I do pride myself on my ability to make jokes at the most inopportune moments – when they locked themselves in without the right amount of food and water. An entire neighborhood died out, and nobody even had the slightest clue, because they were all worried about their own lives. Paranoia had its perks, depending on whose perspective you’re looking in from. In this case, its Clark Wonley’s perspective, as he’s the one who found the entrance to the bomb shelter; as well as the stench of dead bodies. Back then, he’d be in his mid-twenties, and just starting up on his, let’s say, evil deeds.

He’d been in the army at one point, but was dishonorably discharged after – supposedly – accidentally killing three of his comrades. He was a trained fighter and sniper; and to top it all off, he was a ferocious dick. By the time he’d found the bunker, he’d been out of the army for about a year, I think, and was already in the works of his evil corp; I call it that because it’s real name is stupid and I refuse to ever call it something stupid, because it’s genius. A rotten, makes me want to vomit, genius; but genius none the less.

And because Clark doesn’t get his hands dirty, or so he says, he had the few guys he’d recruited clean it out. All the bodies, their sentimental items, clothes, everything; Heirlooms that were deemed worth some serious money, were sold to pawn shops. Everything else was trashed or incinerated; one of Clark’s lackies was the nephew of the owner of a crematorium, and when the place was closed, they’d sneak in and burn everything.

Once all that was done, they polished it off, built in separate cells, because even then Clark knew exactly what he was going to do with his new hide out, and created separate stations for training. See, when I say this bomb shelter was meant for a neighborhood, I mean it was meant for an actual neighborhood, no less than ten families were meant to survive in the underground home, and it sectioned off below what had been three blocks of a neighborhood. Nobody really knows how they’d succeeded in building the shelter, or how it hadn’t fallen in on them over the course of thirty years; just that they’d done it, and they’d succeeded. They’d just forgotten to make an exit; Clark made quick work of adding an exit on, though.