Home Invasion
Marco Ricci woke up, as he often did, to find himself sprawled on the floor in an awkward angle, his bony neck teetering on the edge of a spasm. His heart thumped mildly in his chest, like a frozen engine trying to sputter to life. When he tried to get up, he unconsciously swallowed the thick, stannic fluid that was in his mouth; and before his numb tongue uncoiled a response that it was his own blood, the liquid had reached his tummy, causing him to barf into the darkness.
The pain that shot up to his head from his jaw told him he had broken it falling down; it was a throbbing, nauseating pain, but it helped pull some life into him. A moment later, he managed to stand up. His neck creaked like an old wicker chair. A stream of cold air washed against him from a nearby window, mixing with his pain until it was not just throbbing, but exploding like cold-bursts that fried his nerves from inside him.
He reached for the window and banged it shut.
Weird, ghastly shapes floated towards him in the darkness. He swept his pockets and came up with his last remaining bottle of Versed, which had kept him in such bouts of sleepless sleep and warm (almost pleasant) delirium for most of the week. How much of it had he been taking lately? He didn’t know. How much of it was he told would kill him? He didn’t know that, either.
He unscrewed its cap and decided to take a sip right there in the dark. He lifted it to his mouth, and for a second almost froze in place; did he hear it right? What was that sound? No, it wasn’t the Versed — Versed didn’t make sounds like twang or of footfalls echoing in the distance.
His head slowly lifted towards a rectangle of light coming from the floor above him. And in the light, he saw shadows shuffling, shadows that did not belong there.
There’s someone in my house.
He stuffed the drug back in his pocket and used his hands to close his mouth and nose, not daring to breathe. He saw one of the shadows dawdle slowly down the central stairs. Marco waited patiently as he came and stood within a foot of him.
He felt around him for something he could use as a weapon, and his hand grazed on a figurine. A glint of light bounced off it to reveal its dented features — round patches of bronze interspersed with molten darkness. The figurine held something in its hands: it was Saint Thaddeus holding a spear.
Without thinking twice, he picked it up and drove it square into the back of the shadow’s neck.
There was a faint croaking sound as the man choked, trying, as if it mattered, to look at the assailant. Maybe it did, because when the 6-foot-tall figure of the man twisted grotesquely and got a look at Marco, his knees took a cue and buckled, and he crumbled like a sack of sand.
“Who the fuck are you guys?” Marco whispered under his breath.
Even in his dizziness, he knew what he should do. He was not afraid anymore; shooting up to the top of the haze in his mind were painful proportions of anger. And he knew it was not the kind of anger he felt when he stubbed his toe sometimes and wondered if he could burn the world down for it — with this anger he knew he could.
Besides, there was Saint Thaddeus . . .
He bent down and pulled the spear of the Saint from the other guy’s neck. Blood spattered across his face as it came off at once. There were still shadows shuffling in the upstairs room; now one of them came to the top of the stairs.
“Damien?” he called.
Marco had dealt with people like this in the past, and he knew that even the rudest amateurs wore something like a balaclava on their faces before breaking into a house. But these guys hadn’t bothered to wear one — and they didn’t seem to have any weapons, either. So he decided that he was dealing with street scums here — bunch of nobodies who were worse than amateurs, probably junkies, definitely dropouts who hadn’t had two whole years of education.
Either that or —
These guys were the real pros. They had silenced Uzis under their shirts and didn’t intend to leave any witnesses.
Marco waited in the darkness not moving a muscle. The second guy was coming down the stairs, and Marco knew he couldn’t take him when he had the higher ground. When he reached the foot of the staircase, Marco emerged from the shadows and struck him on his head with the figurine.
An anguished cry erupted through the night.
After he collapsed to the floor, Marco placed one foot on his chest and buried the spear right in the dot of his larynx. When he removed it, blood spouted upwards from the hole like a fountain.
Marco knew he needed to act fast; he had no idea how many of them were still in his house. He climbed the stairs as fast as he could and stopped a few feet away from the lighted room. He could hear someone shuffling inside. He took a deep breath and charged inside the room, the dripping figurine raised over his head.
There was a guy in his early twenties crouched behind the bed, crying and wheezing like a badly hurt kid.
“Who the fuck are you man?” the kid yelled, his voice crackling into a feminine pitch as if he was exactly at the cusp of puberty.
Marco Ricci, although he still had the figurine raised in an apparent attack-stance, barely heard the words. He stopped dead in his tracks as he looked at himself in the mirror on the far end of the wall.
Then he dropped Saint Thaddeus to the floor.
The realization made him feel like a horror from his past had caught up with him, and here it was finally going to have its say. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Now he knew why he had thought that these guys were amateurs — it was because it wasn’t their profession; it was his.
The mask wasn’t on their faces, because it was on his.
He took the bottle of the Versed out from his pocket and drank what was left of it. He looked down at the figurine, and Saint Thaddeus seemed to be laughing at him mockingly. Then there were two small, pale hands that stole it from under his feet, but he didn’t care.
The last thing he saw was the spear of Saint Thaddeus turned towards him, then flying at him at a breathtaking pace. He knew the drug would kick in soon and he could go back to sleep. When it finally wore off, he would be at a different place, perhaps in a different city where he wasn’t a monster.
He smiled and closed his eyes.
