Paul Cleave - Blood Men

“I really don’t know,” I say.

“I don’t think she would,” Schroder says. “I very much doubt she wants you to kill in her name, especially somebody who never hurt you. I think she wants what she always wanted from you-to be nothing like your father.”

I lower the knife and open my hand.

What are you doing?

I’m not sure what I’m doing. The blade hits the floor, chips the linoleum, and falls on its side. I step back from the woman. She had no strength earlier, but she finds it now to crawl away from me as fast as she can. Two officers come out of nowhere and scoop her up and help her outside. Another two officers move in right behind Schroder, their guns raised and pointing at me. There are patrol cars outside that I didn’t even notice pull up.

There’s another way to be with Sam and Jodie. Pick the knife back up.

“What?”

“Huh?” Schroder asks.

Pick it up and attack them. Make them open fire. You’ll be with Sam and Jodie again. It will all be better. If you’re going to be a pussy for your entire life and ignore everything I want, then put us both out of our misery. Grab that knife.

I look down at the knife. Schroder watches me look down at it and comes forward.

“Ain’t going to happen,” he says, and he kicks it away. “It’s the easy way out,” he says. “You think it’s what Jodie and Sam would want you to do?”

I don’t have an answer. He spins me around and handcuffs me and a minute later I’m in the back of a patrol car heading toward my future. Hell, maybe it was even my destiny. Edward the Hunter. I think of the men who wolf-whistled at me at the prison yesterday, I think of seeing the Christchurch Carver, of meeting Theodore Tate. What’s left of the accountant in me tries to calculate what kind of jail time I’d have to do, but fails. The city should be rewarding my monster for what it did, not locking it away. I watch the bank grow smaller behind me, knowing I’m nothing like my dad, knowing I have a monster of my own, a monster that is growing inside me, making me wonder what it’s going to ask of me when I’m back on the outside again.