Estimating there were four people inside and that my girl was naturally being kept in the room with the plywood over the window like a caged animal, I moved.
Sticking to the darkest part of the shadows wasn’t something I did intentionally. The dark had a way of gravitating towards me. I used it to cover me as I made my way to the side door and found my initial assumption correct: the dumb fucks inside hadn’t locked it.
Easing the poor excuse of a barrier open, I slipped inside and reclosed it. Laughter sounded from the right…the living room. A pipe groaned as someone shifted closer in a room to my immediate left—a bathroom, I guessed.
Straight ahead of me were half missing stairs that led down to what had to be the basement.
Ascending the short three stairs off to the side of me that led to a small landing, I pushed another door open when I knew it was clear.
I stepped into a small hall that expanded outward into a filthy kitchen. There was a laundry room with a rusted washer and dryer caddy in the corner from where I stood, and another door was wide open across from it.
By the low grunt and pair of jeans I could see around a set of hairy ankles, someone was taking a shit in a toilet that didn’t work. There was a distinct stench emanating through the hall that could only have come from other people having done the same thing before him, and leaving all the feces to build up.
I readied my Glock and eased towards the bathroom. The suppressor wasn’t going to completely silence the shot—this wasn’t an action film—but it would reduce the muzzle flash and confuse the others in the house as to what they’d heard or where it had come from.
The man had his head buried in his hands when I pulled the trigger.
I’d just done him a favor. The kill was fast, instead of fatally wounding.
He didn’t have time to react, and even if he did, it wouldn’t have mattered much.
The bullet burned flesh as it formed a circular hole rimmed with abraded skin right in the top of his dome. It slid right through his hair and muscle, as if it were a silken caress. The casing made quick shrapnel of his calcium, phosphorus, sodium, and collagen case before splitting apart tissue and fibrous membranes.
All that gorgeous handiwork from a little bullet, and he was gone in a fraction of a second, without getting a moment to admire it or feel the inside of his head being ripped apart. The only thing he left behind was the smell of shit and a spray of blood, bone, and brains on the wall.
Hearing what sounded more like a loud door slamming than a gunshot, the other people in the house immediately began to investigate.
I slipped across the hall to the laundry room and waited, placing the Glock in my waist band in place of my ReaperTac.
There was a loud “What the hell?”, before one of them opened the front door, another took the stairs to the second floor, and the third came my direction, calling out the name of his dead friend.
Not getting a response, he peered into the bathroom, recoiling like a spring the second he saw the body slumped at an odd angle.
Before he could react, I moved from my position. He never saw me coming. I clamped a hand over his mouth and nose to shut him the fuck up and muffle the expulsion of air I knew would be coming.
Instead of slicing into his neck, I stabbed my curved stainless steel blade into the side, going through an artery, and gripped the handle a little tighter, dragging downward.
Most of his blood ran down his throat instead of spilling out all over the damn floor. His body lowered with silent spasms. He tried to speak, asphyxiating on his own ichor.
This was always messy, and I tried not to make it too gory.
The method of the kill wasn’t what excited me. Neither did the begging or the torture—not that I didn’t enjoy those aspects of my work. It was the final outcome, death, that made all this worth it.
The moment when someone realized their life was slipping away was my favorite part of the job. No matter what they did or how they lived, death would always show up in the end. I merely helped conduct their souls to the afterlife.
I liked my job. I was good at my job—so fucking good even the devil admired my craft. I had to live in hell, so why not enjoy myself and purge some motherfuckers from it?
I left the man behind and made my way through the rest of the house. Whoever had gone out the front door was nowhere to be seen. He could wait.
Darting towards the stairs, I swapped melees again and popped the man who’d started coming back down as I was going up, sending a slug right be
tween his eyes.
I sidestepped as his body took a tumble past me, landing at an obtuse angle below and leaking blood onto the floor.
At the top step, I saw there was only one closed door out of three. I didn’t even bother trying to undo the excessive number of locks on the outside. I kicked the piece of shit right in.
And there she was.