Mindless Writefaggotry pt. 2

Schlitterbahn, New Braunfels, Texas, 7 years ago.

I wasn't a kid, slathered in sunscreen, waiting in line, about to charge headfirst into the torrent or ride the Master Blaster.

I was the kid in a sweltering hot three piece suit with tie with stacks of hundreds of homemade pamphlets decrying the evils of homosexuality, rock and roll, video games, water parks, fast food, sodas, shorts, dnd, and basically every good thing under the sun, standing at the entrance, wondering what horrible sin I had committed in this life or the last one to be at this point.

Mom and dad said they were off 'preaching', which meant they were in an air-conditioned restaurant or shopping, letting me do their dirty work.

No food. No drink, not even a trip to the water fountain. A gate guard looks at me, sweating to death, with a mixture of disbelief and pity.

I've read the pamphlet. It's basically an invitation to a three hour sermon on how much you suck as a person and how you're going to hell no matter what, Jesus can't help you, and by the way, pay us $50 to spread the bad word.
I have to hand out all of these pamphlets or I get my ass beaten with a belt so badly I can barely walk.

People scowl at me. Some ask me if I believe all of this hateful crap. Others offer me a drink. I know what happens if I accept- 10 licks with the buckle end. One lick for every pamphlet left over.

I wonder if I'm in hell. Feels like it.

Eventually one of the lifeguards gets so pitying of me he tries to force water down my throat. I tell him if I'm not red-faced and raspy, my parents will beat me. He tells me no one is that cruel. I'd laugh if I wasn't so hot- he's never met my parents.

It's when I push away the cup of ice water for the second time my parents return, two hours early.

"What the hell is this?" my dad asks, gesturing to the stack of still unhanded out pamphlets. He doesn't let me respond. He drags me by the arm, ignoring the shouting guard, and throws me in the car.

(cont.)

My defense- that they didn't give me the full time they said they would to hand out their pamphlets- only gets me backhanded across the face.

Mom holds me down as dad lashes me repeatedly, stopping to punch me as hard as he can. In the face. The back. The gut.

"Disobedience is rebellion and rebellion is the sin of witchcraft. Witchcraft damns your soul to hell! Jesus doesn't love you, and neither do I!"

On and on and on it goes.

I'll spare you the rest of the bloody details. More whipping and punching. A chair got broken.

Dear old mom and dad were what I like to call "Anti-Christians". They took the religion, twisted it into something alien and awful, designed to destroy someone from the inside out, made themselves the chosen prophets who would be spared for their righteous work of telling people "you're damned and there's nothing you can do about it", and they, I believed, genuinely expected to be paid and respected for this.

Saying their style of Christianity- if you could call it that- was controversial was like saying the sun was warmish. To give you an idea of how well we were received, let me give you an example.

We went to Westboro Baptist Church.

Fred Phelps kicked my father out and told him he wasn't welcome there anymore.

The man who protested soldiers funerals and sang songs about homosexuals burning in hell was disgusted by my parents so much he kicked them out after one hour.

They had done a number on me, however. I believed that out of every person in the world, I deserved to be treated this way, to be beaten, punished, preach their word and still go to hell anyway, because the bible they had made for me stated my name as being that of the Unredeemable. Yes. Tailor-made bible just to tell me I was beyond redemption.

I know this sounds like bullshit, and you're talking to someone who just killed twenty-something people, so believe what you want.

What was the final straw, then? What they did to other kids.

I was mowing the lawn when our next door neighbor warned me about Mr. Grausam.

Mr. Grausam had tried to get her son to come over to his house, promising video games and candy. Her son, not being a dumbass, had run the fuck away and warned her. She talked to other parents, and they told similar stories.

One day, he skipped the video games and candy and just pulled a little girl off her bike, clamped a hand over her mouth, and dragged her inside his house.

He let her go before the cops arrived. I heard the gory details when I was passing out pamphlets. Grausam had 'touched her', they said.

I wasn't stupid. I knew that meant he had hurt her in a way she would never really heal from. Her mother wanted Grausam arrested. Her father went over and beat Grausam until a cop pulled him off.

Everyone in the neighborhood wanted Grausam gone.

Everyone but my parents.

How dad had managed to get her out of her parents' sight, I don't know, but he dragged her inside the house, taped her to a chair, gagged her with tape.

I almost made it to the door, but he caught me, did the same to me.

Then he invited Grausam over.

He began telling the girl that God wanted her to forgive Grausam, and that she needed to tell her mommy and daddy that she had lied, and that she was a bad girl they shouldn't trust, because true forgiveness meant taking someone's sins on yourself. When she shook her head no, he slapped her. Again and again.

Finally, after twenty slaps, she nodded yes.

Then mom suggested that she needed to learn to forgive anything.

I...

I won't say what happened. I won't.

I can't.

My dad gloated to my face when it was done that no one would ever believe me, and took the girl out in a duffel bag to his car with Mr. Grausam.

I never learned her name. We moved shortly after that.

What I did learn was that if this was what my parents considered to be good, evil was preferable.

I grew more rebellious.

I told everyone that would listen about what happened. I told them about the pamphlets. I told them about my parents. I showed teachers scars.

My parents dodged and darted, and somehow managed to avoid going to jail. Our relationship went from burning anger and beating to icy silence.

Silence meant I could think.

Silence meant I could plan.

I wasn't allowed to join the track team, but I ran with them. I wasn't allowed to join the martial arts club or the wrestling team, but I practiced with them.

I sought out the low-lifes and the losers, the people who were one bad day away from either running away or bursting into the cafeteria with a stolen rifle.

I learned how to pick locks. How to start fires. How to get into places physical and virtual I wasn't supposed to. My parents believed themselves to be almost gods, so I decided to become their devil. Their antithesis.

The more confident I got, the more miserable they got. Schadenfraude.

I kept up appearances. Decent to good grades. I kept my nose clean. I vouched for the losers- no, they weren't smoking pot or hacking their grades, sir, they were with me, studying for the dang algebra exam.

I studied karate under ... her.

In exchange for favors, she would teach me the basics. Not the katas, the street survival stuff. The kicks to the inner leg, the knees to the groin, the pressure points, the hit-and-runs.

Some boys had issues with taking advice about fights from a girl. I didn't.

Then she got her head caved in by a bitch who showed up to school just long enough to get suspended again.

I offered my condolences to her parents. Her father, furious and half-drunk, told me he didn't want my fucking sorry.

He wanted that fucking bitch and her fucking family fucking dead, and if I had the fucking balls to do it I could have her fucking college fund so maybe something fucking good could fucking come out of this fucking mess.

I apologize. I believe in accurate quotations.

(cont.)

I wasn't even going to consider it.

He was just angry. Angry at a family that had better lawyers, better bribes to pay the police, better guns, and better experience in finding loopholes in the law, even if your entire family beat a girl to death in broad daylight.

Then my dad said, loud enough for me to hear, that she got what she deserved for not being a "forgiving submissive".

You know how you hear about people snapping?

One last thing driving them completely insane?

I could *feel* the fuse blow. A very loud POP in my mind.

I decided then and there it didn't matter if her father was being serious or if she had a college fund to begin with.

Lots of people were going to die.

A wise man once said "If given a choice of options, always take the crazy one. Nobody ever plans for crazy."

My plan to kill a drug lord's family was scrawled in a notebook hidden under a loose floorboard, cliche as that sounds.

My first impulse was to charge their mansion rambo style. That was suicide. My inspiration for how I attacked the problem came from my science teacher, believe it or not.

He taught us to break projects down into parts, tackling them individually as opposed to one big problem. Divide your enemy, then conquer.

I was going to have to hit my targets in very rapid succession. They may have been scum of the earth drug dealing sociopaths, but they considered each other part of their wealth, and no drug dealer likes having their wealth tampered with.

She had taught me about combos- striking with a series of blows in rapid succession before your opponent could react- the day before she was murdered.

One final lesson to avenge her.

I would need two very specific cellphones for this trick. The bitch's, and one from one of her dad's dealers.

It took calling in several very big favors from my more "law-optional" friends to get a contingent part of my plan as well.

After several days of stalking and breaking curfew so many times my room was stripped down to a bare blanket and a single bulb as punishment, I was ready.

The plan had to go into effect the very next day the bitch came to school. Fortunately, I had three things going for me.

One, she was only coming to get some assignments to do/ignore during her suspension. Two, she had a very specific beverage preference, and when denied it, she had thrown a screaming shit-fit that got the cops called. The bitch loved her Dr. Pepper, 20 oz. bottle, and God help you if you bought the last one from the vending machine. Three, she drove her own little luxury car up to the school.

I waited until she entered the office next to the closest machine. Into the drop slot of the machine went a cold Dr. Pepper, perforated at the neck by a single hypodermic needle puncture.

Another smarter, less impulsive person would have asked themselves, "why is my favorite drink waiting for me in a conveniently nearby machine, already paid for and much colder than the machine normally is?"

The bitch wasn't that smart. She was chugging as she walked out. I followed her.

One part roofie, two parts sleeping aid. She wasn't aware enough to protest the explanation I was sent by her dad to bring her to a surprise party, but we were going to play a trick and she was going to pop out of the trunk.

Imagine something with me.

Imagine having a bound, drugged daughter of a drug lord in the trunk of a car you've stolen and have no registration for, driving downtown to the gym one of his best dealers works out at, to steal his cell phone, not knowing how long the drug lasts, when her father expects her home, or what the hell to say to any cops that pull you over.

I made sure to empty my bowels and bladder beforehand.

I wish I could say it took some great con job to get the dealer's cell phone out of his locker. It didn't. I went in, took a seat, watched him go to a locker to put away a towel, then go to the pool to swim and hit on the girls there.

I heard later, after I had robbed his locker for his wallet and phone, he tore the place apart looking for them.

The trunk was banging and thumping all the way to the abandoned warehouse one of my friends had told me about. The drug had lasted, as my friend had promised, "long enough".

I almost regret tipping the cops off about him. Almost.

I was holding a gas can and an old aluminum baseball bat when I opened the trunk. I think she knew what was coming, because the screams left my ears ringing minutes after I had taped her mouth shut.

I texted her father, via her phone, several panicked, badly spelled messages that everyone at the school had videos of what they'd done. I got the replies I needed- insistence that she keep to the story the lawyer told her to: that it was someone else. That it was a setup. That they were framed. I kept at it for a while, making sure her cell phone was full of details a detective would love to see.

That being done, it was time for the gritty part.

You know what the hardest part about beating someone with a baseball bat is? Not the first blow- anger helps with that. Nor the second, or third, or tenth. Hate helps with those.

It's the 45th, 67th, and so on. I suppose I didn't really need to, but I wanted to make a point.

Hurt my friends, pay the price.

Her jaw was broken when I ripped off the tape, both eyes were swollen shut. She said she was sorry, over and over, as I poured the gasoline on her.

I told her I didn't care, lit a match, tossed it... and regretted my decision.

Never, ever, ever burn someone alive ungagged if you can help it. The satisfaction is vastly outweighed by the noise- the "oh God, someone in the next county will hear this" noise.

I then remembered, as she was cooking, that I had forgotten a very crucial part of my brilliant evil plan.

I started a two way text between her phone and the dealers', posing on her phone as a third party connected to the dealer, making a fast and furious conversation that this phantom third guy had taken care of the boss' daughter, and they'd split the take when they got to Las Vegas.

The reason for all this was, as the more astute among you have already guessed, to create a fictional third party headed in a direction I wasn't. A wild goose chase for any investigators to fruitlessly pursue. I used the dealer's phone to instruct this third party to destroy the bitch's phone, a command I conveniently failed to follow through on.

Convuleted? Yes. But I was 15. So sue me.

I stripped naked, threw my clothes on her smoldering remains, doused them with more gas.

Baby wipes and a spare set of clothes. James Bond I was not, but I could improvise. I left the bitch's phone and the dealer's wallet in the car, but took his phone. That, I still needed.

I made sure everything I wore was ash before I started running towards the abandoned gas station another friend had sworn on his grandmother's grave he'd be waiting at.

He was. He was kind enough to just do as I asked and take me to his house to let me crash. We later told my parents, now utterly apathetic to me, that I was studying with him and I was feeling ill.

He told reporters several years later, through tears, he's not sure who paid for his college tuition, but he blesses them.

Right back at ya, buddy. Right back at ya.

Phase two.

I texted the now crispy bitch's dad, via his dealer's cell phone, that he has her, and he wanted a hundred grand for her.

I wisely muted and blocked the incoming calls. The messages left were a mixture of spanish, english profanities, and what I can only describe as pure rage language. I told him to meet him at his house with the cash.

By this point, I'm both convinced I'm going to hell and I'm trying to keep from giggling for some reason.

I then text her mother, telling her not to let dad know, but that she's being held at the abandoned warehouse.

Her mother tearfully responds her father had left the house screaming, and I feed her a story- the dealer told her that dad wants his daughter dead because she's a liability, he's paying the dealer to do it, oh mommy please come I'm so scared, and then I stop responding.

It then occurs to me, as I power off the cellphone, that I have the phone of a drug dealer that will very soon be at the epicenter of a murder case.

So, over the next few days, I spent my time discretely getting rid of the phone, piece by piece. Flush a broken part there, toss another in the trash there, shove a piece in the sewer here.

Meanwhile, not to be immodest, hell broke loose.

I found out, through the news and internet, the gory details of what had happened. I like to think Yakety Sax was playing during all of this, because I am somewhat of a fucking horrible person.

The drug lord father bursts into his trusted dealer's apartment screaming for his daughter, the two exchange gunfire, the dealer- and a prostitute- are very bloody swiss cheese, and so begins a fun-filled car chase/shoot out between the police and the father.

The mother apparently drove to the warehouse, found her daughter's car, phone, and her charred remains. She took this about as well as could be expected of a sociopathic drug lord's wife.

The drug lord barricades himself in his mansion against the police a few hours before his wife, screaming and having caused several major car accidents on her way home, charges past the police and into the mansion, somehow not getting shot.

What happened now is a mixture of hearsay and garbled surveillance tapes, but the gist is, she accuses the drug lord of having their daughter killed, the wounded drug lord screams that she's loco, loyal bodyguards and henchman take sides, and everybody starts shooting each other, and the mansion gets set on fire in the process.

All in total, my actions resulted in 34 dead, 12 injured, roughly $3.5 million in property damage done total to the drug lord and the city.

The drug lord dies with a bullet riddled hooker going down on him, the bitch died screaming on fire, the mother went down with several kitchen knifes lodged in her chest and multiple gunshot wounds, but only after shoving a shotgun into her husband's mouth and pulling the trigger, killing him and leaving one of their sons clinically disabled for life due to a piece of his father's skull lodged in his frontal lobe.

I call that episode of my life, "The Aristocrats."

I got roughly 30k from that job, along with the grieving parents' amazement I was able to orchestrate all of that mayhem.

It's amazing what you can do with two cell phones, a baseball bat, and some gasoline.

I swore to myself, having no clue how I survived all of that, I would never do anything like that again. As is pretty obvious, I'm bad at keeping promises to myself.

Really bad.

The rain beats harder against the window.

Back to the present. The adrenaline has worn off. I'm so fucking tired, if a swat team busted it, I'd ask them to let me tuck myself in before they shot me.

Closer and closer calls. I tell myself I'm providing vengeance and closure to those the law can't or won't help. No one but absolute bastards.

I'm not sure if I'm kidding myself anymore.

I look up comments about Croshen online on a laptop.

Most people are still glad he's gone. No clue who paid me, and I'm not really certain I'd care if I could find out.

Next door, lovers bounce against the headboards. A woman squeals, a man groans. Giggling.

Millions of dollars and I'll be living like a rat, scurrying from hole to hole, afraid of the sun.

Before I sleep, I look at one contract that's just come through. It takes a while for the de-encrypter to unscramble it.

I sit up straight, pinch myself to make sure this isn't some weird hallucination dream.

Grausam is out on bail. The client wants him dead, as well as two other people, but makes it clear not to involve their son at all.

I stare at the photos included of the new other targets.

My parents' false smiles bore into me.

I've been putting it off for years. Making excuses. Two of the most evil people I've ever known, and I've given myself every reason to keep running from them.

The pay isn't much. $30,000. 10k a head.

The client, who I know to be one or two grieving parents, tells me how my parents keep contacting them, despite them moving and changing numbers, taunting them that it was their daughter's fault for not forgiving.

I've told myself I'm doing this to give people vengeance and closure.

"This job doesn't require money. Vengeance will be done."

Send.

This is for the little girl.

For her parents.

For the little boy handing out pamphlets.

They will all have closure.

...

Critiques welcome.

So is this going to be a series, or what?