The Execution

After everything was polished off and to Clark’s standards, they abducted their first family. Back then, it wasn’t just children; they took whole families, tortured the parents until they were, I don’t know, reformatted to these killers, and then they forced them to kill one of the children. The problem they encountered, though, was that parents weren’t exactly cooperative after you force them to kill their kids. So, gradually, Clark and his crew learned, and they stopped abducting whole families. For a while, they just kidnapped the kids and let the family live in wonder; Clark loved the misery on the Parents’ faces the next day on the nightly news.

But then, the police got involved, thinking there was mass kidnapping, and that some pervert was taking kids and doing god knows what with them. So Clark decided to start killing the parents; if they couldn’t report it, then it’d take longer before there were investigations. And that worked for a while, but they learned, and they kept learning.

They started taking one kid from each house they went after; if there were a boy and a girl, they’d take the boy, because Clark thought girls would turn too easily. If there were two girls, they’d take the younger because she’d be easier to mold into the perfect killer. One thing they learned after there were reports of a serial killer, was that they had to make it look different every time they took another trainee – as they liked to call us. Every now and then, they’d make it look like the kid they took had a mental breakdown and did the killing themselves; or they’d make it look like a robbery.

After six years, they became pros, and were city jumping in order to find their kids. Clark would send ‘agents’ to different states, even, to kidnap kids to train in his dungeon. At eleven years, when their oldest trainee was seventeen, they came to my house.

We lived two states over, and were actually pretty well off. My mother and father, whose names I can’t even remember anymore, were both lawyers; but they didn’t leave us alone often, I know that much. They tucked me and my sister into bed each night – Elise was my sister’s name – and our mom sang her lullabies. When we had nightmares, we’d curl up in their bed and they’d hold us and promise to keep the monsters away.

And then, a month before my seventh birthday, we were having dinner when there was a knock on the door. My parents were often worried about our safety, because they were lawyers and some people hated them, so they sent me and Elise upstairs, just in case. I remember holding Elise close to me, as I did every time we were sent upstairs; although, instead of going to our rooms, we sat at the top of the stair case to watch.

My dad opened the door, and two big, burly men pushed him inside, saying, “Stay quiet. If anyone calls the police, I’ll rip their tongue out. If anybody screams, I’ll rip your tongue out. If anyone does so much as anything other than what I say, I’ll do much worse than you can imagine.” One of the men closed the door behind them, and the one who had spoken pulled my mother into the living room, giving us a perfect line of sight.

My father wasn’t so easily quieted; not like my mother was. “What do you want?” He’d asked them, his voice just barely hinting at his fear.

“Nothing much,” One of the men said, “Where are your kids?”

“They went to stay with their friends.” Our mother spoke, standing up with her back straight, as if she were trying to convince a judge of her client’s innocence. “What do you want?”

“There’s no point in lying to us,” The same man replied, pulling something out of a large, black duffle bag he’d been shouldering; back then I had no idea what it was, but I’ve come to know it as a nine millimeter hand gun with a silencer attached to the barrel. “We’ll kill you either way, true, but we’ll find your kids after.”