Chapter Text
It was when I hit sixth grade that I’d started thinking about how I’d die. I have to admit, I never thought I’d end up going the way I did.
Australia has a heat like no other. The sun in Australia shines brilliantly, it takes the sight and skin of those that walk in its light. You can feel yourself burning if you don’t wear sunscreen, and the heat can get so strong that you can smell it. The heat chokes you, clogs up your throat, makes you breathe fire. And that’s just in the cities. In the outback? The deserts full of spiked plants and animals have a heat so unforgiving, it’s a wonder I lived very long when I went out there with nothing on me. But for all the fire the sun made me breathe, the rage that had kept me going since I was only small burned infinitely hotter. I drove for days with the windows down, and when the car gave out, I travelled on foot. One in front of the other. He wasn’t going to escape this time.
He was hiding out on a cattle farm. He’d left a trail of blood through the sand, only an hour or two ahead of my arrival. I followed the trail, uncaring about trespassing, teeth chattering from the heatstroke and skin pulled tight against the burns from the sun. None of it mattered to me. I wasn’t even me anymore, I hadn’t been for a long time. I was a hound on the hunt, a blood frenzied shark, just a creature with one goal. I wasn’t going to prison for this, no matter how it ended. My end would be here, on this cattle farm, right alongside the man I hunted.
Exeunt omnes.
I’d made my peace with my lot in life and I’d made my peace with the end I’d face. You don’t get to do bad things and live a good life and you certainly don’t get to do bad things and die a good death.
I stumbled across the dry farmland, red sand and little stones getting caught in my shoes. I kicked them off. The hot sand burnt my feet something terrible, and I walked gingerly, but the pain was nothing. The pain was welcome, a tiny taste of what would come for me if there was an afterlife. I eventually came to an old tin shed on a concrete foundation, the door was open and there was blood smeared on the frame of it, like someone had grabbed the frame to steady themselves as they walked in.
This was it. Exeunt omnes.
I didn’t see him straight away when I walked in, my eyes catching all the tools leant against the wall of the shed instead. But I ended up spotting him in the back left corner of the shed, farthest away from the door. His beard was scraggly and he was covered in sweat and dirt, his face gaunt and thin.
“Found you.” I croaked out, stumbling forwards. I reached out to grab the nearest tool lining the wall; a shovel.
“Cops are coming.” He panted. His legs were splayed out in front of him, and it sounded like he hardly had the energy to be scared of me, let alone fight.
I didn’t care.
“Good. Like I’d wanna rot with you.” I spat. “Get up, cunt.” He sneered at me in response, but complied, shifting his long legs underneath him and heaving himself forwards, stumbling to his feet.
“They’ll be here soon.” He warned me. It was good he wasn’t begging. That got boring the second time I’d found him.
“Not soon enough.” I replied. Like the cops could do anything, as if they’d ever done anything before. If they’d just done their jobs, we wouldn’t be here, doing this.
I’d dropped my guard only a second, but he’d seen it, and pulled a knife from god knows where. He swung his arm, catching me in the face, but I hardly felt it. I swung back with the shovel, knocking him to the ground. He was so weak now. And it felt so, so good.
There’s no explaining the feel of winning a fight against someone, of hurting someone. There’s a power to it, a power so strong that even the strongest of wills could fall to it. There’s power you get when people fear you, and all the people that say there isn’t are the ones that haven’t experienced it.
Power corrupts, of course. I’d never had power, and the minute I did… Oh , the minute I’d found that I could make people afraid of me… well, that had been the end, hadn’t it? In this life that I’d already fucked up so much, in the way only people who have also fucked up in the same way could ever hope to understand, with all the bridges I’d been so quick to burn as a young teen. The power of fear feels good to a powerless child who had been the one feeling fear, instead of creating it.
Part of me, at twenty one, was still a powerless child. Each traumatic experience, each horror, froze a part of me at every age I’d experienced it.The sixteen year old part of me relished this.
I swung the shovel down on his leg, the bone creaking but not breaking, and he let out a scream. He scrambled forward, swinging his arm again and catching my leg. I sacrificed the leg to get close up, using the shaft of the shovel to press on his throat as I fell on top of him. We struggled on the ground, him gasping for air, me shaking in effort.
“Just fucking die! Fucking- die!” I roared. The arm with the knife got free and came down on me a few times. I was starting to feel it, and I knew it wouldn’t be long. I couldn’t die without taking him with me, so I caught his arm as it came down again, the knife catching me in the junction of my neck and left shoulder, and I bit down on his hand. It tasted like dirt and salt and blood, and then just blood as I continued biting. Knowing him, the blood was diseased in some way, the dirty fuck. He screamed again, jerking his hand away and letting go of the knife. It clattered to the floor, and there was a brief scuffle for it with him desperately trying to grab it before I did.
He failed, and I held the knife above my head while he reached up for it, long fingers trying to grasp at my short hair to pull me down.
“Please don’t!” He yelled hoarsely. I couldn’t find it in me to smile triumphantly, or even say anything smart at all. I had always imagined I would say something smart before I killed him, but I just didn’t have the energy, or the time.
I brought the knife down, again and again and again and again, his grunts and groans cutting off satisfyingly after the third or fourth swing. I knew I didn’t have a lot of time, so I aimed for fatal parts of his head and neck. The eyes, the temples, the ears, the sides of the neck. I had to make sure he was dead. I had to make sure he was gone. This was my only chance.
I don’t know how long I went at it, but things started to go sideways very quickly. My body seemed to shut down all at once, limbs going limp and head going heavy. I listed to the side, catching myself on my right arm. There was blood everywhere. I knew there would be, I knew that murder was nasty business. You never realise how much blood is in a person until it’s no longer in them.
I crawled my way across the floor, heading to the door of the shed, desperate for some fresh air but there was no escaping the smell of blood. I eventually collapsed and rolled onto my back once I got to the door.
“I got you, motherfucker!” I yelled deliriously, not at anything in particular. “I fucking-” Something between a cough and a groan came out of me unexpectedly, my dry throat catching the words I was going to say. I was so exhausted, and I hurt so bad… My vision was greying out at the edges. I’d never died before, but I reckoned this was it. It wasn’t so bad. There was a bit of a weight lifted off my shoulders. My job was done. There was a slight anxiety that I wouldn’t die before cops and ambos got there, and that I’d be saved and would have to spend the rest of my life in prison, but I could deal with that later.
I lay there for a little while, just dying, listening to the distant sirens coming nearer and nearer. I felt a little sorry for the owners of the property, having to deal with two random psychos killing each other on their land.
Just as my eyes closed, I heard the cars pull up at the front of the property, far from where we were. They'd find us, but it was too late. I knew instinctively, I wouldn’t be saved. The relief was dizzying, though that could also have been the death. It was the last thing I felt, though.
It felt good.
That is, until I woke up on the aisle seat of an aeroplane bound for Forks, Washington, USA.