Chapter 3: Rise
Everyone was rattled up by the noises of the 'monster' hiding in their backyard. Kevin was no exception. It was late, though, and he chose sleep as the best option aside from panicking and crying. He tried to find a bed among the tree branches, soft, yet cutting, sand and the wreckage of the behemoth plane that once carried him and many others in the sky. Remembering that, even if landing on a remote island in the middle of the pacific gave you tabula rasa, the things he did would be with him forever, etched in the cold, hard stone slab he called his conscience and inked with blood.
"KEVIN, YOU OPEN THIS GODDAMN DOOR RIGHT NOW!" cried a voice that boomed through the barred door. Fists pounded furiously. The chair, the piece of wood, the books, they all were about to give way to the behemoth's astonishing strength.
Kevin sat down miserably in the bed that once belonged to his sister, staring at the 9mm he held in his hand. Separating himself from the banging and shouting just a couple feet away, he loaded in a new clip at the bottom of the gun and pulled back the recoil. He stood up and had his gun in hand, at the ready. He moved the chair over and the entire door crashed open. A hulking man with orange-brown hair trimmed neatly into a buzz cut stumbled into the room, startled at the sudden release of the door. Shaking himself from the impact, he straightened himself up.
"What the FUCK were you doing?!" he cried. "I'm your goddamn father! You best listen to every-FUCKING-word I have to say!"
Just then, Kevin raised the gun to his father's face.
Staring down the barrel of the gun, he couldn't help but laugh.
"My sissy-ass son… packing heat. I bet you don't even know how to use the fucking…"
"Shut up." His lip quavered and his arm trembled. His moral values and his conscience told him that killing a man was not the answer. But his head and gut was ready to pull the trigger and end the nightmare.
"HAH! You don't have the guts. You were just like your momma. A wimp. She didn't fight back. Look how she ended up…"
"YOU SHUT THE FUCK UP, RIGHT NOW!" he exclaimed.
"Well, well. You've got some bark. I always knew you'd turn out better than your little sister would. Which is why I saved you for last."
"Oh, you're not going to get the better of me," he said. "You killed Polly because she SAW you kill mom in cold blood. She was only eight."
"We going to be reciting monologues back and forth or are we going to make progress?" He reached into his back pocket. "Last chance, son. You can end me like a man or die like a coward."
And so he pulled the trigger back. The shot echoed in the cold, damp walls and reverberated throughout the house – and his body. The recoil was not much physically, but mentally, he completely shut down. He was a killer for life, so it was written in the slab of his mind.