Chill October wind howled past the window beside me, as I stared out at the early flakes of snow melting against the thick pane separating me from the line of jumbo jets out on the tarmac. It’d been a week since I buried my uncle Hank, and the thought of having packed up and sold the last of his shit sat heavy in my gut. The man hadn’t had much in life, but he’d left more than he’d ever taken. Aside from a decade’s worth of advice, and a few ego-cracking bruises of tough love, he’d also willed me the small fortune he’d accumulated in cryptocurrency. A stockpile of cash he’d never bragged about, nor made known at any time during the ten years we’d lived on spam and Wonder bread. I couldn’t have begun to imagine where he’d gotten it, but I kept it stored away in a wallet for the day I’d up and explore the world, as he’d insisted in the letter he left behind.

The plane ticket to Dubai sat on the table beside the empty shots of Jameson whiskey and a full pack of Marlboros. The city was home to one of the tallest cranes in the world, and since I’d climbed damn near every crane and skyscraper in Detroit, I needed something more. Something higher. More dangerous. Something that would make me fall to my knees and thank fucking God I was still alive, because most days, I just couldn’t muster the appreciation.

I stared down at the third shot of the night. With Hank gone, the last string binding me to anyone, or anything, had officially snipped, and I was nothing more than a ghost. Completely alone. No home, no family, no consequences, and as far as the world was concerned, I didn’t exist.

I couldn’t decide if that was a blessing, or a punishment.

As if on cue, an obnoxious laugh reached my ear—one bearing a certain familiarity that tugged at the pit of my gut, dredging up visuals of a man with tattoos across his throat and a snake inked on his hand. Cold branches of fear climbed the back of my neck, and I lifted my own hand to see it trembling.

Another laugh.

I snapped my gaze toward a heavyset guy, sitting at the bar with his back to me. He leaned in toward the bartender, and seconds later, they were both laughing.

“No brain, no pain, that’s what I always say!”

The stranger’s voice slapped me in the face, while his words crawled across my skin, burrowing in long-forgotten wounds.

Anger settled deep into my bones, eating away at the ivory, while I listened to the joke he exchanged with the bartender.

I’d not heard that voice in nearly a decade, yet it stirred in my gut, setting my teeth on edge. I closed my eyes, clinching them shut to stamp out the visuals taunting my thoughts.

A blade slicing across his fat neck, like a razor slicing open the belly of a caterpillar.

The warm crackle of flames consuming his pale, greasy skin.

My fingers curled around the edge of the table, as my stomach pulled at my spine, begging to rise up from the chair and act on my urges.

‘In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.’

The words of my uncle seeped into the chaos swirling inside my head, reverberating off my skull.

‘The Lord is your avenger,’ he’d once said to me.

He’d been a man of few words, but those I remembered most profoundly because they came from the Bible. As far as I knew, the only thing he ever worshipped in my time with him had been fast women and a full bottle of Jack.

I released the edge of the table, taking deep breaths to calm my nerves. The stranger at the bar, the Joker, would never recognize me after so long. It’d been almost ten years, and I wasn’t the same boy. Years of therapy, hard work, and Uncle Hank’s guidance had helped seal those wounds, and I wouldn’t tear them open again. Not when my whole life sat before me—a blank page that I could write any way I chose.

A chill skittered down my spine, like death’s cold breath, and I raised my gaze to see a boy sitting beside the stranger at the bar. He was so out of place there, it would’ve been laughable if the sight of him didn’t freak me the fuck out.

My heart slammed against my ribs, and I squeezed my eyes shut to make him disappear. He never came to me in public places like those. Only when I was drunk, or on the verge of sleep, and that cold chill lingered in my bones. I’d done three shots, but I didn’t feel drunk, definitely not drunk enough to be seeing the kid right then.

Any minute, he’d break into those loud, agonizing screams that kept me awake all night.

“Not now,” I muttered to myself, my whole body shivering from the cold.

“Hey, man, can I bum a smoke?”

I exhaled a shaky breath and opened my eyes to find the heavyset guy standing alongside the table. A patch covered his left eye, the evidence of my father’s attempt to kill him. An attempt that ultimately cost him his own life.

The boy still sat at the bar, silently staring at me, as if waiting to see what I’d do. I glanced around at the few patrons, drinking and talking, going about their business.

No one seemed to notice the kid.

“I’m willing to give you a buck for it.” The stranger brandished his wallet, and thumbed a dollar from the few bills, handing it to me. “Got a fifteen-hour flight, and I just smoked my last one.”

The boy tipped his head around the man’s body, watching me. Silently.

My eyes slid toward the stranger before me then back to my smokes. “Yeah. I’ll join you.”

I rose up from the table, tossing a couple of bills to pay for my drinks, and followed the man toward the smoker’s lounge, leaving my ticket behind.

* * *

I’d never killed a man before, though I’d dreamed of the moment for what seemed like a lifetime.

There was so much blood. Everywhere. I was up to my elbows in it, as I rubbed the strangers blood along my forearm, as if I could wipe away the stain. It was fascinating, the way it was so difficult to wash off the skin, like nature’s way of marking the guilty.

The guy lay beneath me, tied to the springs of a rusted metal bedframe I’d scrounged from inside the abandoned house that I’d turned into my own makeshift surgical room. The gurgling of fluids he hacked up interrupted his deep, throaty cries that failed to elicit a single ounce of empathy in me.

The sight of him, though, was another story, and I swallowed hard as the acids climbed my throat.

Kicking my head to the side, I heaved the last meal I’d eaten onto the concrete, the sour scent mingling with that of the blood and sweat and mold. I spent the next two minutes spitting away the last stringy vines clinging to my face, to avoid having to drag my mouth across my bloody arm. That was the thing about taking life, for those of us who didn’t do it for amusement. Physically, it was as easy as one well-placed slice, but mentally, it was a fucking wonder I hadn’t blacked out yet. I may have been cold to his cries, but I certainly wasn’t cold to the act itself.

At first, I’d mistaken it for the fear of getting caught, but it was more than that. There was a small part of our humanity that begged us to forgive someone, just before making that one fatal jerk of the hand, severing a vital organ. For me, the screaming voices, and not just the ones from my own past, trampled those pleas to dust and sealed the guy’s fate.

Back at the airport, I’d spent a bit of time with the old boy. After a few more shots and another pack of cigarettes, I’d worked up the balls to pretend like I was one of his kind, lamenting about how the world didn’t understand our desires and the need to corrupt innocence. He’d told me of a website, somewhere in the bowels of the dark net, where my every fantasy could come true. Where I could find those innocent young souls in my own city and take my ‘craving’ to the next step.

I didn’t bother to tell him the only thing I craved in that moment was the thrill of watching his eyes widen as I slid a serrated blade across his flesh.

Even still, there was a fine line between wanting and doing, and I didn’t think I’d ultimately have the grit and guts in me to go through with it.

Part of me wondered if I’d made the right choice to stick around, instead of hopping that plane to Dubai.

I’d stored his only remaining eyeball in a small foam cooler filled with ice, which I’d set beside me, leaving a hollow socket that’d tripped my gag reflex a couple times already. Not sure what I’d do with it yet. Maybe I’d feed it to one of the many stray dogs roaming the streets.

Patch covering his other eye, the guy didn’t even look human anymore.

When I’d started with him, I really hadn’t a clue how I’d go about my revenge. So many options. Fast. Slow. Painful. Painless. When it’d come down to it, I’d let my memories guide me, and opted to take an eye for an eye, since that was what they took from my dad before burning him in the house where I grew up.

Seemed fitting.

At the stranger’s head, the picana I’d hooked to a portable generator, as an improvised electrical prod, rested precariously against a wooden block, separating it from the bedsprings. Not as savvy as the closets they’d constructed, but I’d rigged the contraption within a couple of hours, and I was impressed with it.

Each passing second marked my indecision, as I contemplated whether, or not, to keep on. On one hand, I felt like I was doing some poor young kid a favor by killing the piece of shit. Ensuring he’d never hurt another, like Eli, again. On the other, I felt as if I was slipping away from the person my father had intended me to be.

A screeching sound echoed inside my head, distant memories from my past, and I screwed my eyes shut as the noise sharpened into screams. Horrible, pain-filled screams I’d locked away for too long.

The visuals set in next, and I wanted to slice them right out of my skull, but I couldn’t. They played like a movie reel inside a locked projector room.

My father standing inside a circle of flames, the desperation and despair prodding him to his knees.

His cries for mercy vibrating across my bones.

I opened my eyes again, staring down at the man whose lips trembled with his stuttered prayer. Begging me for the mercy he’d refused my father.

Beneath the blood on my forearm, I could just make out the iron cross tattoo and the date of my father’s death.

I flicked the block out from under the charged rod, and the first tap against the metal emitted a spark, which sent the Joker seizing against the springs. With blood-soaked hands, I tapped the last Marlboro from my pack and lit it up, watching him bounce on the bed like a cat across an open-range stove, until at last, I flipped off the generator, shooting one last burst of current, and he stilled.

Though, the rise and fall of his chest told me he was still alive.

Hearty bastard.

He broke into a sob, but not even his pathetic wail could touch me. Somewhere in the last hour, I’d hung my humanity on a hook and made a mental vow to finish the job. Strangest feeling—all that tension and desire to kill him, built up into such explosive magnitudes, and suddenly, staring down at him, all of it dissipated right out of me. The atonement overwhelmed me in such a gentle, calming way.

The kindling piled below him, underneath the bedframe, begged for one single spark. I turned toward the boy beside me, who remained silent—beautifully, blissfully silent. The familiar scar along his cheek roped me into visuals of him lying on a shag carpet floor with a knife trailing down his otherwise flawless skin, the scent of piss and garbage tugging at my throat.

“Is this what you want? Is this what you need me to do?” I flipped the Zippo, lighting up my cigarette, then lifted a small piece of newspaper from the pile sticking out from the bed. The flame caught the end of it, creating a torch that climbed toward my fingers. “There’s no going back after this.”

I thought about that for a moment, as if the first remnants of my soul had begun to slink their way back into my hollow body. There was no going back, because once a person killed a man, they carried the burden of his soul forever.

I withdrew the torch, moving it away from the kindling beneath.

I didn’t want to carry the man’s soul.

The boy’s hand covered mine, his deep, obsidian eyes drilling into me, as though he could see things I didn’t.

He guided my hand forward, and I dropped the flame onto the kindling.

For the next hour, the two of us watched the stranger burn in the flames, and when his body finally began to curl into itself, I pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper and a pen tucked inside my coat. On the blank side of it, I wrote four names: The Joker, The Pawn, The Fox and The John.

I crossed the first name off the list and turned to the boy. Without a word, he pushed to his bare feet and walked off, disappearing into the shadows of the building.