Page 1 of The Venom We Bleed

1

NOLAN

15 years old…

Most people fear death. When it inevitably comes for them, they cry, kick, scream, and sometimes pray to some otherworldlybeingto help them—to give them just a little more time. I don’t understand why. Clearly no one’s fucking listening. No oneeverlistens.

“Stop screaming!” Lex barks down at the man beneath us covered in his own blood, piss, and vomit. “It’s giving me a fucking headache.”

I have little sympathy for Xavier Pierce, but Lex has even less. When my father doesn’t stop wailing about the gushing wound in his leg where the bone protrudes past the skin, covered in dirt and blood clinging to the pearl-white surface, Lex bends over into the hole and punches him in the head. I repress a snort.

Thud. Thud. Thud.It takes three blows for my father to shut the fuck up. He curls into a ball and tries to hide, covering his head and protecting himself from more of Lex’s wrath. I’m surprised he hasn’t passed out by now.

Thanks to him, I’m intimately aware that broken bones hurt like a bitch. The pain of having one of your bones snapped in half and protrude through your fucking skin rips through your mind and makes it hard to focus on anything else except the fire burning over you. There’s nothing you can do—not unless your father lets your mom help you, lets her drive you to the hospital to get fixed up—but he didn’t because the fucker didn’t want any cops or CPS knocking on his door. Three whole fucking days I’d waited until Mom grew brave enough to sneak me out in the middle of the night.

Now, it’s my turn. I can’t fucking wait to finish him off.

“Where the fuck is G?” I mutter, turning my back on the bloodied and sobbing man.

Almost as soon as I ask that question, a single dull headlight grows visible on the drive and the broken stuttering of a cheap dirt bike announces our friend’s arrival. The headlight bumps up and down as he rides the hills, slowing as he gets to the ramshackle old cabin that Lex had inherited from his folks when they died. No one ever comes out here. No one ever even remembers this place. Not surprising considering his new ‘guardian’ is his aunt who forgets he exists most of the time.

Way to go, justice system; you really pulled through on repeat—first with my dad and then with Lex’s family and G’s. Well, we’ll deal with his dad eventually. Even snot-nosed kids need to practice patience or so my mom says.

I’m grateful for this shithole tonight. It’s far enough away from our town of Silverwood that people hardly recall that there’s a mountain up here with a bunch of hunting cabins. It’s not a good area for hunting anyway—not since a pack of wolves moved in some years back, and there’s no money in hunting up in the boonies anyway. All the rich folks of Silverwood prefer their country clubs and business conferences.

Blackstone Mountain is the perfect place for our purposes, though, especially tonight.

Gio’s dirt bike dies several yards away from where the dilapidated old cabin strikes a haunting figure on the hill, and it’s only then that I realize my father is quiet. I crouch and stare into the hole that we forced him to dig before shoving him into it—the result now being his broken leg.

“He passed out,” Lex says, and I see the truth of his announcement in my father’s limp body. “What a pussy.” My flashlight reveals the blood still oozing down his side. The moon above our heads is hardly enough light to see more than hints of the gruesome scene before us.

“Shit—fuck!” G curses loudly and comes stumbling towards us with two shovels in hand and a backpack. He doesn’t seem to care about being heard. Why should he? There’s no one out here. “Do you know how hard it was to bring this shit back on the bike?” he demands, pushing one handle at Lex before offering the other to me.

I shake my head at him and he groans before dropping the backpack and heading over to the mound of dirt my father had dug up an hour before. The shovel we’d forced him to use lies somewhere on the ground, splintered in several pieces.

The grunts of my best friends, as they begin to sling dirt into the hole, echo up the trees around us. The sound sinks into my ears. I close my eyes as it settles into my muscles and bones, letting it turn into the sensation of pure, unadulterated power. Something I’ve never fucking wielded before, much less over my father—it’s heady, addicting.

Like so many of the deadbeats from Silverwood, Xavier Pierce will simply disappear. No one will look for him or wonder where he went. Everyone will assume he ran off to avoid his responsibilities to my mom who was too good for him and me,the kid who didn’t deserve his wrath. Deep down, everyone will know that we’re better off for his loss.

I hold up a hand to stop the other two. Lex and Gio’s fast shoveling comes to a standstill while I reach into the back waistband of my jeans. The weight of the gun that Darrio Vargas, G’s dad, had given me just yesterday when I’d agreed to work for him is lighter than I expect.

I lift the gun. My father’s eyes flutter open. A part of me had hoped he would remain unconscious for this part. Awake or not, my decision is already made. His flat brown eyes, too much like my own, are fogged over with pain, yet they settle on me as I aim the Glock at him.

My hand doesn’t even shake as I pull the trigger, but he does. The gun jerks in my hand as the gunshot echoes up the giant oaks that surround us and out towards the open field behind Lex's cabin, and I grimace as the kickback vibrates up my arm. Darrio had warned me that it’d do that, but it’s still a bit of a jarring sensation. My father’s body jolts as the bullet slams into his head, sending a spray of crimson liquid out the back of his skull to disappear into the earth. With a combination of the flashlight and the moonlight as my guide, I scan the bits and pieces of brain matter combined with skull fragments embedded into the ground like a halo around his head.

Stabbing the end of his shovel into the dirt, Lex props himself up with folded arms over the handle. I lower the gun. Several minutes pass in silence as the heat from firing it dissipates. Only once it doesn’t feel like a brand in my grip do I tuck it into my waistband, pulling my t-shirt out a bit to cover it.

“That’s it then?” Lex asks, canting his head in my direction.

When I don’t answer, G speaks up. “You’re really gonna work for that bastard?”

My gaze cuts towards him. “It’s not forever,” I assure him. There’s no way in hell I’d ever let myself live under another man’s thumb the way I’ve lived under my father’s.

Gio stares into the darkened hole at the body. I expect to feel something when I follow his gaze. Regret maybe? Remorse or guilt. Yet, only a bone-deep relief fills me. I’ve never been one for sad sack poetry or some shit like what our English teachers force us to read for “education,” but at this moment, I think I truly understand how some skinny starving artist types came up with all of their flowery words.

Writing was their release from a prison only they could see. Mine, it turns out, is killing.

“He’s going to know you shot that gun,” Gio murmurs. “He checks when they’re returned to him.”

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