The Rules of Survival (Mercer #1)

RoS Chapter Thirty Three

Chapter Thirty Three

There's a saying: Death is only the beginning.

I had no idea who said it first, or when it became such a popular catchphrase, but if I ever found the ignorant asshole who originally uttered it, I would strangle the life out of him.

Death was death, plain and simple. It didn't deserve a silver lining, a little slogan after it that attempted to justify it somehow.

Death was permanent. Irrevocable. Something that couldn't be undone. And more so than anything else, it was painful. Painful for the victim if they met a particularly grisly end. Painful for the loved ones left behind who had to pick up the pieces and try to move on.

It was an incomparable acute agony that ripped through your entire body, and if you were particularly unprepared it brought you crashing to your knees and left you gasping for air. If you were extremely vulnerable, you could actually feel your heart fracture into pieces too small to pick up and put back together.

I didn't disagree that death was a beginning of sorts. Only, my bleak reality and other people's delusions of serenity in the afterlife were vastly different.

When Kalen had died, there were definitely several beginnings brought on by his death. The beginning of true poverty and hunger, when I'd fumbled and floundered, scrambling to find a means to support my family. The beginning of unadulterated fear, when I'd been attacked repeatedly and relentlessly by people with nothing but malice and depravity in their hearts, and I realised I didn't have my big brother to go to for help.

And among several other things, there was the beginning of deep, suffocating loneliness. A sense of feeling so trapped inside myself with nobody to turn to for advice, nobody to confide in and whisper my deepest darkest secrets to. Even with everybody else around me, it had always felt like there was a divide there, with me and Kalen on one side, and everyone else on the other. That was all well and good until he died, leaving me stranded and banging on that wall in the hopes someone heard me and reached me.

Likewise, when we'd laid Ray's mother to rest late Friday afternoon, he'd discovered some unwanted beginnings of his own.

The beginning of his transition from boy to man, whether he was ready for it or not. The beginning of having to look out for himself. Of no longer having his mother's wisdom or kind words of praise when he'd done something right, or her resilient strength when he found he just didn't have any of his own.

It was all up to him now, to differentiate right from wrong, to create his own boundaries and limitations, and to live with the consequences of his unsupervised actions.

Yes, I'd promised him I would always be there for him, and yes, I meant every word I'd said. But I was no mother. I was no authority figure. I didn't have the life experience we both desperately needed to draw from in order to help us make informed decisions. That had been buried along with his mother. Buried along with Kalen.

At this point, I was about as lost as Ray was, and the only way we were going to get through this was to fumble in the dark until we found the light switch. At the moment that switch was proving to be rather elusive.

And now, with Justice...

Well, I couldn't even finish the thought in my head. I'd hoped Ray's mother's funeral would be the last one I would attend for a very long time, but then the unthinkable happened.

For the second time in a week I was putting on my tidiest pair of black pants, and the only black blouse I owned. My heart was hollow in my chest, and there was a lump in my throat, so big I couldn't swallow.