Avenged

Trigger Warning: Gore / Violence Against Children

As a homicide detective, I thought I had seen it all until, one day, I came across a sight I never thought I’d see. The bodies of multiple children were thrown into a pile on the outskirts of the town. I felt knots form from my stomach to my throat as my partner and I investigated the bodies; the children were tortured before they were shot in the back of their heads. They were all minorities, so we started cracking down on supremacists and other gangs in the area, but every route we took led us to an impasse.

As we ran around in circles, the bodies kept piling up every other week. By the time the second month rolled around, we were staring at a three-digit body count. I saw their faces every time my head hit the pillow, and I stared at the ceiling for hours, hoping and wishing to get my hands on those responsible. I could barely even eat anymore. My partner’s hopes of catching the murderers slowly eroded as this dragged on, but I doubled my work hours to sift through all the fine details. And then I found it: there was a connection between several victims and a doctor—he received monthly payments from a shell corporation.

I requested my colleagues’ help with tracking the true identity of the source, and it led us to a local politician. We commenced an investigation into his financial dealings and found that he had set his sights on several lands where minorities lived. A year ago, he had sent fake businessmen to those areas to persuade the residents to sell their properties, but the majority of them had refused. The men had returned several more times within the month that followed, but since the residents never changed their minds, they had retreated and planned their schemes for the following year.

When our captain caught wind of the progress we had made, he immediately summoned my partner and I to his office and asked us to discontinue our investigation. I questioned his reasoning, and all he had to say was that it would cause a racial incident since the politician in question had lost his parents in an uprising that happened thirty years ago. I asked him how what happened decades ago justified what he was doing now, and all he had to say was that it was something beyond our control. I refused to let go of the case, and he ordered me to turn in my gun and badge. I was suspended for a month. My partner told him he would also be requesting suspension and threw his gun and badge onto the captain’s desk. We stormed out of the building together.

I hated the look in the captain’s eyes. After all the death we had witnessed, I couldn’t comprehend how he could dismiss everything so easily. I wanted to wring the life out of his throat—see how he’d feel being another body in a pile. All of them, I wanted to murder all of them with my bare hands and pile up their bodies in the middle of the town. My partner saw the distortions on my face and said he’d take the wheel. We went straight to a bar and emptied two bottles. My partner only took three shots; I gulped down the rest. He drove me back home and said he’d call me when he got home.

Once I was in my bed, all those images began to flood my mind again. It had been a week since I last slept. I felt the world around me twist and turn as the engine sounds in the distance dissolved into a whirling haze. I suddenly felt my vision sink deep into my body, losing sight of the world before me. A week passed without any activity, but one day, I woke up to my partner calling and asking me to look at the news. I was shocked and amazed at what I saw: ten of the politician’s henchmen had been murdered and put on display in a pile in the middle of the town. They had been tortured twice as much as all those children were before being shot in the back of their heads. The monsters were finally getting what they deserved. My partner and I grabbed drinks again that night in celebration of the turning of the tide.

Another week passed, and I woke up again to a call from my partner telling me to watch the news. The killer had struck once again. Ten more bodies were put on display, this time more disfigured than the previous pile. Their bodies bore deep lacerations from head to toe, and instead of being shot in the head, their throats had been slit open. I was glad there was someone out there to do the dirty work that I couldn’t. What good was the law if it didn’t help those that needed it the most? I hoped to see that politician on the screen next.

My wish came true during the third week: the politician’s head was put on a pole next to his dismembered body, found not far from the police station itself. That day, my partner said he wanted to show me something. He drove me to the outskirts of the town in the evening and led me to a cabin in the woods. When I asked him why he had brought me there, he simply smiled and opened the door to reveal the walls decorated with photos of the politician and his henchmen covered in their own blood. He said he took the snaps before he killed them, and that he wanted me to see the photos before he got rid of them. I couldn’t believe that he was the vigilante, but I was glad that he was the one who avenged all those families.