MY BIRTH NAME IS DAMIAN. Fitting, really, or so I’m told by the woman who named me.
“You’re the devil’s son,” she would spit at me, pointing a shaky finger in my cheek in a drug induced haze whenever I refused to bend to her whim. I can still feel the impression of her fingertip where her nail broke the skin. I go by Blake now; it’s my middle name, chosen by the midwife who brought me back from the dead. My mother couldn’t wait for me to be out of her womb, expelling me too early from her body with the cord wrapped neatly around my neck, almost robbing me of the life I’d been gifted by a drunken fondle in the back of a truck.
They say some people are born with decreased activity in the brain; a cold spot in the front central lobe. Where most people have activity, a hot area giving them feelings, emotions and enabling them to love, there are a rare few who have a cold spot, affecting their ability to feel emotions, empathy. There are theories that serial killers have this cold spot. Psychopaths. That’s why they lack the ability to connect, to care.
I don’t have feelings the way most people do. I may be one of those people/psychopaths. I don’t know. What I do know is I can fuck the woman who claims to love me and leave her before the sweat’s even dried on my skin, knowing she will cry herself to sleep. I can supply my mother with cash to fund her drug habit, hoping this will be the final hit to send her to the afterlife and… I can kill without remorse.
My emotions are corrupted, have been since my life changed in a single night. My ability to give a shit is absent. I don’t care about anyone with the exception of my kid brother, who is the sole reason I became a killer to begin with. Maybe I would have killed no matter what. Some people are born predestined to become evil, to mark the world with their darkness. Some paint the world in techno color, I paint it in red; blood red.
Can circumstances change us? Can the evil doings of others force us to change the path we’re on? To alter the warmth in our souls? Can they dim our light, making us cold, dark, evil? I don’t know. I’ve questioned this before, but now I accept this is who I am. Just like we cannot choose when the sun will rise and when it will set, I could not choose my destiny. It was mapped out for me. When life drowns you in its cruelty, you don’t know which way the current will drag you, or who you’ll be once you re-surface.
What I do know is, my emotions switched off when I came home from a party at eighteen years old, fully expecting a beat down by my Step father for coming home drunk after telling him I wouldn’t be home that night. Instead I found him in my eleven-year-old brother’s bed. I literally felt myself change. A flick of a switch. If there ever was a warm spot, it turned cold in that moment with the rest of me. Reasoning became impossible, questions I never thought I would have to ask raped my once placid mind. Shutters came down inside me, closing over the windows to my soul, changing me forever.
The muffled cries of my brother, muted because his head was pushed into his pillow while his own flesh and blood, the man who created him, the man supposed to protect, love and cherish him was naked above him, changed my direction in life; mine and Ryan’s, creating my step father’s fate in the process.
I didn’t even flinch when I walked up silently behind him. The drunken haze cleared, nothing but rage burned in my veins, a blood red fog clouding my vision. Rage wasn’t an emotion in that moment, it was an entity grown from the darkest depths of my being, vibrating through my skin to be released. Nothing felt more right than allowing it to take control, seek retribution for the abuse we were born into, to let it consume the boy who once lived there, devouring any human part left of my soul.
The darkness I harbored deep inside that we all have under the surface took control. I gripped his head, and with all the strength I had, I twisted until I heard the loud pop, click, snap, whatever you want to call the sound of his neck breaking, ending his life and shutting off his switch to the stained soul inside him.
I dragged his warm, sweaty body away from my brother, out of his room, closing the door behind me. Alcohol and sweat seeped from his pores, assaulting my nose and making my stomach twist with more hate than I knew possible. I dropped him at the top of the stairs and nudged him with my foot. His lifeless body thumped down, landing in a heap at the bottom. The man who gave my brother life, who had been all I knew as a father figure was now nothing but a decomposing body. If I could have killed him again and again, I would have, without hesitation. I went to the shower and turned it on before going back to my brother’s room and scooping up his trembling body. I put him on his feet, told him to shower and promised no one would ever hurt him again.
When I called the police the next morning, telling them I got up to find my dad had an accident, they didn’t question my story that he was a drunk, and no one cared enough to argue foul play. The reports said accidental death. Our father was well known for liking the bottle.
Ryan and I moved in with our waste-of-life mother, and if it wouldn’t have been suspicious for both our parents to have accidents in such a small time frame, I would have killed her too. Instead, I gave her money to disappear for days at a time until I turned twenty-two, finished my degree in criminal justice, joined the police force and got custody of Ryan. Then I paid her to disappear to distant relatives.
I took martial arts classes and shooting lessons after that night. I wanted to be able to protect my brother from any threat. I earned extra money through my computer skills to buy Ryan anything he needed and to support our mother’s habit. Ever since I was little I knew computers. I can hack pretty much any network, and I used that skill to earn petty cash from students wanting grades changed, or finding information on people that was kept in confidential files. I worked solely through my computer; I couldn’t risk my identity being compromised. To contact me you had to already know about me through word of mouth, then email one of my many accounts that would go into spam file I never opened, so if someone stumbled across that email account, it looked inactive on my part.
This system also worked for me when I became a contract killer. I can see the sender’s email address without having to open the email. Just having that small piece of information, I can get into their emails, send viruses that clone their hard drives, giving me access to everything they do, which in turn gives me passwords to their accounts, including their online banking. I can find out every single thing about them and their life with one simple address, and if I find them trustworthy and wealthy enough to afford me, I bring up a chat box, scaring the shit out of them. I have two more chats with them before completing the job they want me for. Then I never speak to them again.
I have only a few rules:
One: Never do more than one job per client. Once they see how easy it is to get away with murder they tend to become a little kill happy. They would have me killing the neighbor for playing music too loud if they could.
Two: Never take a job close to home. When people use the term ‘don’t shit where you eat’ well, I don’t kill where I live. It just makes sense.
Three: No one knows who I am, my name, age, what I look like or if I’m even male; which is why everything is done through an untraceable computer.
I make a shit load for my services. I have to be clever not to flash my cash, swapping my funds into offshore accounts and getting a normal job so I look like everyone else. That’s why I joined the police force; who better to teach you how to kill and how to avoid being caught than the police?
My life course was chosen that night when I was eighteen, when I took a life and didn’t feel remorse. When I overheard some rich college kid telling his friend he would pay a million for someone to kill his overbearing father, I knew he was talking hypothetically but I also knew there were people who would pay for someone to kill for them and right then, in that moment, my career path was chosen. It took me six months in the academy, training, three months field training, two years cut loose on patrol and I made detective at the tender age of twenty-five. I’m the youngest detective to ever be sworn in at our department but I’m good at my job. Just like they train me to be a better killer, who better to find criminals then a master criminal?