Chapter 15: The Reaper’s Feast
The hours faded. Daylight, a blackened sky, an orange glare - all blurred past. Stay awake. Just stay awake. Don’t fall asleep. I didn’t want the nightmares to return. I couldn’t bear to face them again. I was in an empty room. There was no warmth. No furniture. No bed. I had thrown it all out. I laid atop a single, uncomfortable mattress. There was still a ringing in my ears. I could still see the blood. I could still see the boy’s eyes. I could still see his face; torn apart. I held my hands to my face. The gun was on the floor with the ski mask beside me. My eyes were red. I was weeping. I felt as though I had suffered a fate far more devastating than death. I felt as though my soul had decayed. I struggled to breathe. And the demon laughed at me. At my weakness. At my evil.
It treated me like a pitiful wreck. Other times it treated me like a friend.
I was not aware of what day it was. I did not know how many hours had passed. I only knew that people had died; dozens had already fallen. The first day seven known members of Kane’s mob had been massacred. The next over fifteen corpses had littered the ground, and soon after the rest of Luis Kane’s men were buried. An uncertain amount of time later a former frontrunner for Gregory Donovan had been gunned down in a supermarket. Innocent people had been caught in the crossfire. Wounded or dead, I did not know. I blocked it all out while the demon laughed. A car had been blown in public to kill a single family member of Paul Castellano. The blast had injured three other people.
At first erratic, the killing then became relentless. It had almost been as if the intended targets were dead, but the bloodlust was not yet satisfied. The families of Paul Castellano, Gregory Donovan, Paul Castellano and Luis Kane had subsequently been slaughtered. I knew one of the victims: Luis Kane’s pregnant daughter. She was found gutted in her home with her newborn baby still in her arms. Its throat had been slit. The sheer cruelty of the act felt from a different era. Everything that these men once had was now destroyed. All around me the city basked in horror. There was nowhere left to hide. The news told a dark story.
“Terror strikes the streets as mob-related murders escalate to a rate we’ve never experienced before.”
Even after the families had fallen the blood continued to spill. Mobsters, innocents and even police found themselves at the end of the sword. The police themselves were publicly flogged and disgraced. With each passing day they failed to contain the violence. The people protested. The mob had imploded, and its destruction had taken the lives of innocents. The city had fallen into despair; nothing remained but burning ash. All hope had been swept away in a river of blood.
Anthony Cornero had opened the gates of hell. His vengeance, his wrath, had found all those who had dared oppose him. It had found all those who had tried to act, and not submit. It had found the undeserving. It had found the innocent. It had found the city’s beating heart. And he had crushed it in his palm.
“This can only be described as a bloodbath. We urge you to stay off the streets during this hour of crisis. I fear for the safety of everyone in this city.”
War had broken out. The city had gone mad.
The Reaper had its feast.
And it had left me soulless.
“People of our fine city, it is with terrible sadness that I say to you now; this is the darkest day in our history.”
One day I would look back and try to justify all that I had done. I could explain every murder that I had committed. The city was a better place because of the people I’d killed. Jess was safer. But the child; Cornero’s child. I had killed him as a move. A strategy. I had not needed to. I had killed a baby. I had given in to the demon’s whims. And it purred in ecstasy. I could not describe the anguish that I felt. I was something less than human. I realised then that somewhere along the way, I had lost sight of who I was in my struggle - as if I was the villain of the story. I thrashed from side to side, but I knew that there would be no sanctuary from the pain. I would find no peace from the sorrow. I could only watch as it all crumbled to dust.
My mind drifted. When I had been a kid, I had been afraid of the dark. It had terrified me. I had believed that there were monsters out there that only hunted at night. My father had told me that there were no monsters, that all I had to do if I was ever afraid in the darkness again was turn on the light, and see for myself that there was nothing there. Only air. Only emptiness. Only thoughts created by my own imagination. The irony was cold. Now when I turned on the light, I could see the monsters in all of their glory. And I was one of them.
I could never have thought that all those years ago I would grow up to be exactly what I had been terrified of. Nobody knew what they would become one day, but no one ever thought that they would become something repulsive; something evil. No child sat in front of their television and said “Dad, when I grow up I want to be a villain.” That would be as though the kid had watched all of his favourite superhero movies backwards, where the villain broke free from prison and once again wreaked havoc on the city and on the hero’s life. And the movie ended when the villain got the better of him in what was supposed to be their first encounter, but was now their last. But here, in my story, it was as though that kid had not watched the whole movie. It was as though he had stopped before the end when the hero was supposed to save the day, and had left everything still trapped in the nightmare; unresolved. And I was trapped.
No one could live with what I had done, without being tainted. Whatever Hell was, wherever it was, I had signed my name on the dotted line. There would be no coming back from what I’d done. There was nothing left that remained of me. I wept and wept until I no longer could. I laid in the light, and when it passed I laid in the dark. I truly was dead. My stomach pained from hunger and my throat was parched. I wished for death’s embrace.
Yet I knew, down in my core, that I wasn’t finished yet.
I still needed the demon’s strength.
I cursed myself for being pathetic. I cursed myself for wasting time here stricken with pain while Jess waited. The remnants of Jack Mercer were weak. I called on the demon now, at the pit of my grief. I felt an inkling of strength creep back into my body. I moved. I brought myself to my feet. Fatigue and weakness caused me to stagger, but I caught myself. My head pounded. I felt sick. I reached down to pick up the gun. I left the room. With each step that I took, I fed off the demon’s strength. Soon the hunger became distant, the thirst irrelevant and the ache in my head nonexistent. And I was a vessel to a darker power.
I reached my car and switched it on. Without any thought or hesitation I sped towards Anthony Cornero’s home. I drove dangerously fast; my fury rose to the surface. It ended tonight. All of it. I did not care how long I had to wait. Eventually he would return home. I would just wait. The minutes passed. I was dislodged from time. Floating. It was all so surreal. I saw Cornero’s home approaching. I screeched to a halt. I got out of my car. I walked without feeling the ground beneath me. I saw only Cornero’s car parked in the driveway. I climbed over the wall. I dropped heavily to the ground and staggered. I regained my composure and battled through my fatigue. I got to the front door. I raised the butt of my gun and slammed it against the door, violently knocking. I didn’t hear anything on the other side. I grit my teeth. Venom flooded my veins. The anger intensified to uncontrollable levels. I stepped back. I viciously threw my leg out and kicked the door under its handle. It burst open in splinters. I raised my gun.
And I saw Anthony Cornero in mid-approach with a look of shock on his face. He looked a haunted man. The menacing figure I had faced before was now a shadow.
“You...”
The demon threw me aside.
“It is simply not possible. You drowned!”
I smiled, “Unlike Icarus I know how to swim.”
Cornero backed away. I pointed the gun at his heart. I wanted to wrench it out.
“I’m sorry that I had to kill your son.”
Cornero stared. The shock set
in. The disbelief. And then the rage. He let out a horrifying scream and charged at me. Foolish. The demon was at the helm. Not Jack Mercer. The distance was too close to try for a shot. And if I missed he’d be on me. I swerved to the left and kicked out at the back of his leg. He stumbled and I grabbed the scruff of his neck, using every ounce of strength that I had to slam him against the wall. He hit it hard and lost his footing. I trained the gun on his head.
“I can still kill your wife.”
He stopped moving, slumped and gazed into the barrel. He leaned his back up against the wall.
“How did you survive certain death, Mercer?”
“Maybe I’ll tell you. Maybe I won’t. You’ll never know.”
He closed his eyes.
“I see now. You murdered my boy to force my hand. You knew I thought you dead...you knew how I would retaliate. You fooled me into believing in an invisible enemy; to make me see a threat when I looked at my own men. You made me kill them all for you. And I obliged to your plan like a scene from a play.”
He opened his eerie eyes again, and I saw their icy grey core.
“I could never have anticipated it...the sheer amount of blood under your name, Mercer.”
I did not answer.
“What was it all for? Was all of this for nothing but common revenge?”
I pointed the gun between his eyes.
“Are you sorry for murdering my wife Nicole?”
Cornero said nothing. The anger burst forth.
“You fucking deserve it! You murdered my family! You took away everything that I had!”
“You were never going to learn. I’m not sorry for what happened, Mercer. Salvatore was right about you. He’d always been right about you. You were an undisciplined, callous hothead too stupid to understand that you were playing hero in a city where there are none. You ignored all of our warnings, and I had no choice but to wade in when you nearly destroyed my most prized possession: the surveillance room in that warehouse.”
I didn’t care anymore about that. I only had one thing in my mind.
“You admit it then. You killed my wife?”
Cornero looked straight into my eyes.
“No.”
My body went numb. No, no, no. It was impossible. It was not possible. It had to be him. It could be no one else.
“You fucking liar!”
“You misunderstand, Mercer. I did not kill your wife. But it was my order.”
I became weightless. I could not believe what I’d heard. The search was over. But I did not feel relief. I did not feel liberated. The demon did not want the man who had merely loaded the gun. It wanted the man who had looked my wife in the eyes and had murdered her as she pleaded to be spared.
“I want a name.”
Cornero did not respond. I gritted my teeth and a wild noise escaped my throat.
“Give me a name or I will kill your wife!”
“You already know the man, Mercer.”
I blinked.
“What?”
“You want his name then?”
I waited. A second of pause. The world was still.
“Nathan Kenway.”
Bullshit.
“Don’t lie to me! That makes no fucking sense! I arrested him before my wife died. He’s in a damn asylum! He’s been there the whole time! It couldn’t have been him.”
“That’s exactly why it is, Mercer. You think with all my resources, all my power, that I can’t get a single man out of there whenever I wish it so? Think about it. It’s brilliant. He’s the perfect killer.”
I went quiet. I tried to interpret Cornero’s words. I struggled to grasp at the straws of reality.
“You want his life too? Have at it. Kill them all. But one of these days you’re going to run dry of men to kill. What happens then? This is what you are now, Mercer. Like me it is what we do. You’re not going to wake up one day and be free of all this. You’ll never just move on. It will chase you, your whole life, like a hungry dog. There is a point of no return for men like us. Look at all the men I killed over the past few days. It didn’t bring my son back. It didn’t even take away the pain. I never feared pain before, even when I always felt it. But now it frightens me more than anything else. Whatever you’re searching for out there, it’s already under the ground.”
“My daughter isn’t dead,” I whispered.
Cornero blinked.
“Where is she?”
“Delusion, Mercer. Whatever convinced you that she’s still alive, shut it off. You can’t bring your daughter back anymore than I can my son.”
“Cornero. I saw her body. I did not even recognise it. I dealt with that pain. I did not retaliate. But three weeks after her death, I got a phone call from my daughter. I heard her voice. I know she’s alive.”
“The mind’s a powerful thing. Just yesterday I imagined that my boy was still with me. I could have sworn that I heard his video game. Only, it was nothing but air. Yet my mind had so clearly convinced me, in one singular moment, that reality was not what it was. How is that possible? Whatever you think you heard on the other end of that line, you didn’t.”
“I know what I heard!”
“Mercer. I personally ordered that execution. You don’t think that I would have made sure it got done? I don’t know what you’re looking to hear or what you think you’re going to find. But you know what? I’ve accepted my son’s death. It’s time you did with your girl.”
I refused. I thought back to the phone call. I hesitated. My mind was hazy. How had it happened? I blinked. I wracked my mind. I tried to recollect the memory.
It had been the early hours of the morning when Jess had called.
No.
It had been before midnight. I was sure.
She had called my mobile phone. No. The home phone. And I had answered.
What had been her first word?
I could not remember.
She had said that she was okay.
Had she? No.
I tried to pull myself together. It was just the fatigue. The hunger. The thirst. After I rested I would remember. I was just not in the right state of mind.
I faced Cornero.
“There is one thing that makes me less of a monster than you.”
His gaze was unwavering.
“I am truly sorry that I had to kill your son.”
Cornero did not react.
“I’m not sorry that I have to kill you.”
He just sat vacantly staring into my eyes with his cold demeanour.
“Do you want my fear? You finally see, don’t you? Power is an addiction, isn’t it? But you’re searching ways off the grid. There’s nothing left to take from me anymore. My wife is gone - I do not know where. She’s here, but she’s not. Her mind is just empty. My son is dead. My men are dead. My power is gone. We’re soulless men, you and I.”
I lowered the gun.
“And what good is life to a man without a soul, Jack Mercer?”
The demon thirsted for blood. I lowered the gun. It would not do. Not for him. I drew my knife. I advanced. The next few moments were a visceral blur. It was as if my mind refused to let me see the blood, or hear the ghastly screams. My hand struck, my eyes saw, but my mind did not acknowledge. But it was soon done. He was gone. The city was free.
But I took no comfort in it. I felt no relief. The demon was not yet satisfied. I was not yet finished. I forced my soul, with every inch of my being, to not think of what he had said about Jess. I held onto the illusion. I held onto what I knew. I focused the last threads of my mind on the man responsible for murdering my wife.
Nathan Kenway.
In this there would be no choice.
I had to kill him.
For Nicole.
For Jess.
And for me.