Page 93 of Monsters

He had taken to strangulation, his favorite.

He grunted, squeezing the life out of the teenage boy beneath him. Mason desperately clawed at his attacker but to no avail. He saw me, standing shakily, the knife clutched with both hands.

“Do it!” he mouthed his instruction. His face beet red, cut open and bloodied. He was barely recognizable. “Do it,” he said again as his eyes rolled to the back of his head.

I acted out of fear.

I acted out of love.

I lifted my weapon high knowing my brother was only seconds from death. Roaring to life, I plunged the knife into Borelli’s back.

It felt surreal, the knife cutting through human flesh only for it to achieve nothing. Borelli hadn’t loosened his grip on Mason. I became primal, a fearful animal determined to protect what’s his against an unwanted predator. Pulling the knife free, I struck again. When nothing happened, I fell into a desperate frenzy. I stabbed the man over and over until finally, like a wild beast acknowledging defeat, he collapsed on top of Mason, his back a mass of torn flesh and blood.

Blood had sprayed over me during the assault, my hands coated in the sticky mess. I could taste it on my tongue and feel it clumped on my eyelashes. Before shock set in, I heaved Borelli off my gasping brother.

I stood, numb to the carnage.

The life had been sucked clean out of me.

I was now sixteen and a murderer.

~

“Lucas. Lucas!” Mason called, pulling me from the darkness.

I’d fainted. Sitting propped up against the island bench, Mason kneeled in front, running a wet tea-towel over my face. “There you are,” he said, smiling through a mouthful of blood.

“What happened?”

He didn’t need to answer, and for my benefit, he wasn’t going to. I could see for myself. Anthony Borelli’s large body lay dead at the base of the stairs. The house looked like a scene from a massacre, the knife I’d used to end his life now lying abandoned on the floor like it was just some other object.

“Hey,” Mason gently shook my shoulders until I turned my gaze back to him. “Don’t go there, brother. You saved my life. You saved all of our lives. It had to be done. Do you understand?” He waited expectantly, and all I could do was blink. “Lucas! Do you understand? You did what you had to.”

“Yes,” I muttered robotically. Nothing could ever convince me that what I’d done was okay.

Soft wails filtered from the living room. My mom sat on the sofa rocking back and forth, staring at the rug as if somehow it was going to give her some answers.

“She woke up not long ago,” Mason muttered. “Crawled over to him, cried, and then moved over to the sofa to cry some more.”

My heart twisted hearing that. She was happy to cry over a monster. And yet, she didn’t care enough to check on her children. I was broken by this. This wasn’t the mother who had raised me.

“Ignore her,” Mason encouraged while heaving me to my feet. We turned to face Borelli, both overwhelmed with the amount of blood and gore.

“What are we gonna do?” I asked weakly.

“We’re gonna get rid of him.”

“What do you mean? We can’t just get rid of him. People will come looking.” I was becoming frantic. Frantic because I was the one who repeatedly drove the knife into his back. “They’ll trace him back to us.”

“No one is going to trace anything back to us. He took Mom’s car when he last left, and he returned in Mom’s car. There’s no bus ticket and no vehicle of his own to dispose of. The fucker barely left a trace.”

I was unconvinced. Just as I was about everything else to do with this.

“Stay here and watch Mom.”

I watched numbly as my brother ran out the back door and into the rain. He disappeared, and I began to shiver uncontrollably.

Mason barged back through the door holding a blue tarpaulin Dad had used to patch the roof once when a storm tore through. “We’ll wrap him in this,” he said, laying it out as best he could before gripping Borelli’s shoulder. “Grab his legs and roll him onto the edge.”

Doing as I was told, I waited for Mason to count to three before we rolled the dead weight onto the tarpaulin. Borelli’s hand flopped onto my foot, and I shuddered. It was a hand that had caused so much pain and injury. A hand that had connected on many occasions with my face. And now it was lifeless. Useless.

We moved robotically until Borelli was in place. All I wanted to do was curl up under my blanket and cry. Instead, my mother’s cries grew louder as she mourned for a man who cared nothing for her. She had turned a blind eye to her children being assaulted, and now she had the nerve to behave as if she had raised monsters for children who’d taken the love of her life away. I had blood on my hands, and she was still blinded by love.

“Lucas. Hey? Look at me…” Mason gripped my face until our eyes met. “He was going to kill me.” He glanced down at the rolled tarpaulin. “The fucker deserved to die.” A wide smile formed, and Mason laughed maniacally as if the whole thing entertained him. “You fucking did it like a pro, brother.”

“What?” I spat, angrily. How could he see humor in this? “This isn’t funny, Mason. I… I just fucking killed a man.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, sobering up more so for my fragile state. “That could be me in there right now if it weren’t for you.”

I took an urgent step away, my stomach lurching. Lunging for the sink, I brought up the night’s devastation. Mason saw this as being something honorable, something that would define us as men. I saw this as a terrible mistake done in the heat of the moment to save the ones I loved. No matter which way I looked at it, killing Anthony Borelli was a life sentence.

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