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.
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.”
“They’re at a friends,” My father insisted.
The man had rolled his eyes, raised the gun, and shot my father. He smiled as my father fell to the floor, blood pouring out of the wound in his head, and turned to my mother. I looked at Elise; Elise looked at me. I got up off the stair, grabbed her hand and ran down the hall to our parents’ room. We both crawled under the bed, and I tried to hold Elise, begging her to stop crying, even though I was crying too.
There was another sound, just like the one that had burst from the gun and killed our father, before footsteps lead up the stairs. I put one hand over Elise’s mouth, and one over my own, as the footsteps grew closer. We didn’t know exactly what was happening, we just knew we were in trouble.
Everything after that happened so fast. Elise was crying too loudly, I was trying to quiet her, and then she was pulled out from under the bed; I followed after her immediately, though not by choice. One of the men was holding her up by her hair, as I was pulled to my feet by the other man. “You know the drill,” The man holding me had said, nodding towards Elise, “Kill her.”
I screamed at them, struggled against my captor, but I was six, and he was a lot older, and a lot stronger. He made me watch as they slit my sisters’ throat.
Elise was only three.
So, I wasn’t afraid. Not of them, not anymore. I was worried it wouldn’t work, and they’d send me to the ‘dungeon’, a dark room they put towards the very back of the facility wherein we’d be locked up and beaten every few hours, and be given no food or water until we were on the brink of death. The Dungeon was how the punished us, because they couldn’t afford to kill us.
Ezra was certain my plan would work, especially with his new promotion.
Ezra was older than me, he’d been in the training program three years longer than I had, and somehow came to be the only friend I had. From my first week, we’d been deigned roommates. Whenever I wasn’t in the dungeon, or learning my place, I was with him. They’d made it some kind of rule that broken kids always roomed with new kids.
At first, we hated each other. I was still in shock over my family, and he was cold, told me to get over it; though, after a while, a long while, we sort of grew on each other. After about three years, it came to be that we only trusted each other. We didn’t really befriend anybody else, because we didn’t know them, we didn’t know what they’d do if we said something about one of the guards – our jokes about how stupid the guards were is probably what made it possible for us to grew as close as we did – or if they’d betray us like so many did to others.
Ezra had actually helped me develop my plan, promised to help me when there was a way for it all to go well; which had been two weeks earlier when he’d been promoted to guard duty. I wasn’t afraid to kill anyone; but I was afraid to get him killed.
“Just do it. I’m early morning shift, Channing. It could work.” Ezra insisted behind his Styrofoam cup of water, “It will work. I’ll have,” He paused as a guard walked toward us, narrowing his eyes down at everyone eating their lunch, “So much fun pulverizing you on the field tonight!”
I rolled my eyes, “It’s not going to happen,” I replied, nodding that the guard had passed, “To both.”
Ezra groaned, setting his cup down and reaching for the piece of stale bread on his plate, ever trying to hide from the lip readers Clark had on his crew, “If anyone should get out of here, it should be you,” He told me, biting into the bread, wrinkling his nose at the texture, though used to it.
“Why?”
“Do we have to go over this every time?” I nodded. “Because if anyone could, it’d be you. As in, you’ve been plotting this for years, and you know every fucking lay out because you’ve risked your life far too many times. You’d think you’d have stopped trying after Dungeon visit five.”
I shrugged, picking up my own cup of water, “The Dungeon sucks, but this place sucks more. I’d rather try, than not try at all.”
“Understandable,” Ezra agreed, looking smug as he gave up on the bread and leaned in closer to me, “Look. Just give it a go. The worst they can do is kill you, and you know that it’s a win win for you. I don’t see why you keep saying no. I’m giving you prime time chances here, buddy.”
“What about you? And everyone else?”
He scoffed, “Everyone else? Their brains are fried, man. They would you give you, and me for that matter, up without a second thought. You know how it is. Betrayal is the sweetest gold.” Suddenly his eyes narrowed as he leaned back, “And me? They’ll send me after you, buddy. I know you best, your patterns, all of that shit Clark’s always talking about. It’ll be easy enough for me.”
“You really want me to do this?”
“Obviously, nitwit.”
“And you’re sure it’s going to work?”
Ezra rolled his eyes and pushed his plate of food away, crossing his arms on the edge of the table, “Obviously, nitwit,” He repeated, looking smug as ever.
“But what about -?”
“They don’t give a shit who comes looking, Channing. You just look like you know what you’re doing, like you do when you’re out there fighting Ari,” I grimaced while he continued on, smirking, “And they’ll do everything you tell them to. And for money… you know what you have to do.”
“Ezra -,”
He sighed, “I know, you don’t want to kill innocent people. But, dude, you’ve done it enough at this point, it won’t really make much of a difference. A few more people will die, sure, but you’ll be free. Just remember to switch out the cash before the cops can put a trace on it. You don’t want useless money.”
I nodded. “Fine. Fine.” I leaned back from the table and reached down for my gloves and sweater, “Tonight. Well, tomorrow morning. Same difference.”
“Idiot.”
“Shut up,” I replied, pushing the plate aside and standing up, “See you later, man.”
“Have fun with Ari.”
“Bite me.”