Blood Men

chapter sixty-four

“I first made the newspapers when I was nine years old. I made them in every city across the country, most of them on the first page. I even made them internationally. In them I was black and white, blurred a little, my face turned in to my father’s chest, people surrounding us. From then on I was shown on TV, in magazines, in more and more papers, always the same photo. I never wanted any of it, I tried to avoid it, but the option wasn’t mine.”

I tell her this but she doesn’t seem interested. I tell her about my mum and my sister but the words go through her. Her eyes are closed and there’s blood all over her. Twenty minutes ago her life was much different, twenty minutes ago she was settling in for the night, a pile of DVDs on the coffee table and a Christmas tree full of blazing lights. I take the car toward town, traffic is thin, everywhere is shut. I’m wearing the clothes from the bank again, the ones with Jodie’s blood on them. I picked them up on the way. This is why I kept them, I realize now. For this moment.

“I was ten years old when the trial began. It was a circus. My mum was still alive, but my sister and me were struggling. Kids would tease us at school. At home, Mum was always yelling at us when she was sober, and crying when she was drunk, and whatever of those two states she was in, you always wished it was the other. Soon the pills and the booze took their toll, but not as quick as she wanted, and when they couldn’t finish the job she used a razor blade. I don’t know how long it took for her to bleed out. She might still even have been alive when we found her. I held my sister’s hand and we watched her pale body, the yelling and the crying gone now.”

The woman is conscious enough to cry, the tears mingling with the blood. There’s a lot of blood but not a lot of damage. It’s all from a head wound. The thing about head wounds is they bleed. A lot. Blood has soaked into the seat, and the woman has wet herself, making it seem like there is much more blood in the footwell than there really is. I tell her about Belinda, about how my sister became a drug addict and died when she was nineteen.

“I was the last of my family,” I say. “Dad’s monster took them all away.”

I keep the car at a constant speed, obeying the law; Edward Hunter was a law-abiding citizen who never did anything wrong in the past and who is now about to correct his future. We reach the center of town. Last time I was here I was running from the police.

“There are people who think that I’m destined to be a man of blood too,” I say, “that the same blood runs through both of us. They’re wrong,” I say.

He wasn’t even my father.

And somehow here I am, your very own monster.

I speed up the car that used to belong to Oliver Church, a nice trajectory ahead now, and I hit the wall of glass and it showers everywhere, it rakes against the car, the world sounds full of screams and the car bounces up off the framework and bounces back down and I slam on the brakes but not before I’ve wedged two desks hard up against the counter. The alarm is instant. The two front tires burst. The front of the car crumples up and the engine stalls. No air bag goes off, but the seat belts stop us from flying out. I look over at my passenger and there are more tears and more blood and I’m pretty sure both of us know that things for her are about to get worse.