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Bloody Flower – Chapter 14 KRUGER
Violence had been a part of his life, a natural thing, almost, from the dawn of his life. Violence surrounding him in the world, in his community, everywhere. The outside violence, however, did not compare to the violence inside his own home. The more domestic, the more devastating.
I wished I had shielded Drake's eyes. A boy his age should never witness this kind of appalling reality.
The numb feeling I got whenever I saw a woman assailed and scarcely breathing beneath the bloodied fist of a man flooded through my veins. It took all the strength I had to keep still, not crumple beneath my childhood traumas like a blade of grass beneath a stone. I forced myself to stare at the scene splayed out before me, keeping Drake behind at a safe proximity.
The scene was plain, easy to distinguish. Blatant reality glared like a snake coiled and ready to strike.
My target, the man who must have out-weighed three full-grown men, stood straddling a woman, obviously dwarfed by his sheer magnitude. She may as well have been a child, barely sixteen, and barely alive. Veteriage had knuckles the colour of scarlet roses. Why the juxtaposition of roses to blood came to mind, I had no idea. Something about the way her blood dripped from his hand was frighteningly real, frighteningly beautiful in the most gruesome way. Beside the girl was another woman, of equal size and weight, though she looked older than the girl which could only be her daughter. She had not been breathing since the first crack split her broken skull.
Behind me, Drake had sunk to the ground, his knees in the dirt and his face in his hands. I could hear the incoherent stifle of a loud sob filled to the brim with anguish, and horror. Instinctively, I moved in front of the boy, feeling a sort of paternal protection overtake me that I couldn't control. Abbott moved around the corner quietly, nearly gagging at what he saw.
Veteriage glistened grossly, panting, looking down blankly at the shallowly breathing girl beneath him. He waited for a long time before he acknowledged our presence. Even when we engaged him, he was unresponsive.
"Veteriage!" Abbott yelled out to the fat man, gun raised, pointed at his head. No response. "Put your hands up and step away from the girls!" Still no response.
The fat man stepped aside of his own accord, glancing up from the violence only to stare at us with beady black eyes, only for a moment.
I clenched my jaw tightly, fighting the urge to tear across the lot and rip the man apart. The monster inside me was roaring to be unleashed. Clawing at my innards, churning up my flesh from the inside out. He wanted out. And I wanted him out. I could feel my body burning with every negative emotion a human being could feel, and some that only a monster could. I felt like the devil, and I was ready to reap the souls that I so deserved.
I stalked forward, slashing out at Abbott, who tried to stop me. He flew aside when I shoved him, new-found strength flooding my veins. Eyes trained on my kill, I tried desperately not to look at the poor souls bleeding out on the ground. The fat man had sunken to the ground beside the young girl. Her raspy breaths were barely audible above his labored breathing. The closer I got, the more aware he became of me. The look I got from Veteriage as I stood over him let me know that I was in total control now.
Just as it should be.
The ugly thing looked up at me from stroking the pretty-much-dead girl's hair. The forlorn, lost expression on his face told me that he had gone into shock, probably realizing the extent of the thing he had done.
"Doen dit nie… Ontferm…" In the form of a broken sentence, punctuated with long gasps for breath, he managed to beg for mercy. "Please…"
For some bizarre reason, I could not look at him with pity. The blood on his hands was just too real; undoubted, undisputed, irrefutable evidence of his criminality. The begging look in his eyes was something I was used to, something I was used to ignoring.
Sometimes it helped to be a human cold bank.
"Ja," I started, inviting a hopeful look on the red and sweaty face. Then, I raised my handgun, the one with the tiny 2mm bullets in it, the one that hardly made a splash, so to say. I felt my lips curl up in a Cheshire grin, savouring that delicious moment of hope being expertly dashed before I told him, "Not a chance." In a second, he was alive, and in the next, he was dead. One practiced shot was all I had ever needed to bring down the boar. One of such proximity was too good to fuck up. There was something about being close that made the kill all the better.
His deadweight hit the ground with an audible thud. The tiny hole in his eye socket had a tiny trail of bright red blood pouring from it. It trickled over the bridge of his nose and settled with a puff of dust on the ground, pooling unhurriedly into a small, scarlet puddle.
I looked down on him uninterestedly. Rather, I found my eyes focused on the girl on the ground. During my reaping, she had died quietly, without a sound. Her eyes were partially closed, her blonde hair mussed and sticky with blood. Her thin body was laid in a sprawl, her limbs stuck outwards in horrid and unnatural positions. She had been broken with the crowbar that lay several yards away from the scene. The mother, whose skull was agape, a wide hole perforating her crown, had her eyes stared upwards blankly, mouth gaping in a silent scream. I couldn't help but feel a slight pain in my chest when I looked at the girl.
Something about her was all too apropos regarding my own life.
I hadn't noticed Drake come creeping up behind me. I felt his hands grasp at my fatigues, inadvertently pulling at my pant leg. I looked down and saw him staring, horrified at the dead women, and the now fallen beast that had killed them. His dark, reddened eyes stared, his mouth gaping slightly.
I felt the need to say something, anything, to him. "Are you sure you still want to come with me? This is what I do. This is normal." Drake looked up at me with glossy eyes. I tried to stay steadfast. "This ain't the kind of life for you, seuntjie…" He did not lower his gaze. I saw the same steel I had seen before when he stood up to me when we first met. That steel that was the result of a wretched life, that steel that was the only way to be strong when the monster inside wanted to tear you apart. Drake had monsters. I knew that he had probably seen more than an eight year old boy should. I knew he would not leave, not now.
"Then I guess this ain't the life for you, neither, Kruga."
The boy's words struck me like ice cold water. He was right. I hadn't wanted this life, but from the beginning I was meant for it. I was bred for it. Even my name stated that I was a killer. All my life, I had wondered why those that bred me, hated me, why they had called me killer. A boy whose instincts told him to protect himself, to defend himself against the blows to his head and the leather to his back, should not have to question his existence before his fourth birthday. A boy who had to live with the strife of constantly pleading 'why mother, why father' should not feel the need to remove himself from his young, harrowing world, regardless of the hatred around him.
It should not happen.
Not to anyone.
I would not let it happen again.
I crouched beside the boy, who stared at me with a permanent scowl of disbelief in the cruelty of the world below heaven. Without hesitation, he threw himself into me, wrapping his arms tightly around my neck, burying his face in my shoulder, sobbing hard again. Briefly shocked for a moment, I was paralyzed beneath the sudden gesture of trust and affection.
I blinked away a burning tear as I curled my arms around the boy.
"Why did this happen?! Why!"
I could feel the boy's pain like a knife in my stomach, like a sword through my heart. I hugged him tighter. "Shh… Dit is in orde…" I murmured quietly in Afrikaans. I tried to soothe him by speaking in his native tongue, telling him that everything was alright. Nothing would ever be the same for him again.
I now understood.
I understood why the boy and I were so alike, so almost eerily similar.
These were the broken remains of his family.
I had wondered why he had looked down when he asked to come with me. I had wondered why he wanted to come in the first place. It was not because he had nowhere else to go; it was because he knew he was going back to the place he had run away from.
"Drakey…" I tried again to console the crying boy, who had crumpled into my lap. That paternal feeling that had been gnawing at me from the moment the boy said he trusted me welled up inside once again, quelling the rage of the monster for a moment. This is what I had needed since I was torn from her. Distraction. Looking after Drake was all I cared about now. She controlled the monster yes, held its leash and fueled its fire, but so did I. Right now, I was in control of my own being. I was in charge, just as I should always be.
I looked out over the boy's shoulder. In the garden, I spied a flower with spiny-looking petals and a bulbous center. It was a common sugar bush, blooming with large, ice-pink flowers. Their beauty, otherwise unmatched, was demolished due to the sticky scarlet blood dripping from their triangular petals. Looking at them now, I couldn't help the flood of anxiety that washed over my brain, making it boil and sending my heart into a frenzied beat. I couldn't help but think of my flower, my flower that had been uprooted from my very arms, and kept above where I could not reach her.
I shed a tenacious tear and held Drake a little tighter.
About an hour of cleaning up later, Abbott, Crowe and I had cleared the scene, disposing of the evidence of our presence. I told Drake to stay in the Raven, not to come out until we had returned. He sat sullenly, no longer who he was before we dropped in on the family murder. I couldn't help but add another emotion to my growing repertoire; guilt.
It was my fault that Drake had seen what he'd seen, his mother and sister beaten to death by his stepfather. When I asked Drake about why he feigned ignorance when we met, implying that he did not know Veteriage, he looked me straight in the eye, unwavering as always. He said that there was no other way he could know for sure that he was dead. The boy knew all along what he was in for, though he didn't quite expect as much to find his beloved sister and mother dead, beneath the fists of the fat man.
But still, I had allowed him to come.
Drake would open up more about himself, about what series of events had led up to that afternoon, but for now I let him have his peace to come to terms with his new reality, the one without the family that had abandoned him.
I buried my guilt deep, something I was well-practiced at doing. the guilt would always be there, but knowing me, it would fester and bubble until I couldn't control it. I would address it later. For now, I focused on my next paycheck.
We set off for home, but not before we got an urgent message from Elysium.
Someone had fucked up.
Really badly.