Prologue
Darkness had always lingered in the Fox family. The family heads Mr and Mrs Fox determined that they were only doing what they had to survive, taking the belief that they lived in shades of grey and merely dabbled on the wrong side of the law.
Mrs Raquel Fox danced professionally on the pole, hooked men on the side of the road for some extra finances, and used drugs as a casual hobby and to escape her reality for a few brief moments of delusion. Her clients adored her for her domineering airs, and her alabaster skin and dark hair provided a wish fulfilment for men who wanted to fuck their fairytale princess.
Mr Marco Fox, Raquel’s husband, functioned as a petty small time crook. Thanks to him his children played on threadbare carpets with counterfeit games, rode stolen bikes over the cracked, grey pavements, and watched pirated movies on a fuzzy television. He gave the family their name of Fox, dumping his own surname in favour of it before he’d had his kids. Flioxa, Fonseca, and Flores were names he had donned, the cops figured since they all had the theme of being Spanish and beginning with F that one of them had to be the real one. Marco had chosen to forget which one.
The three children in the Fox family accepted their lives because they didn’t know any better and most of the neighbourhood occupants dallied in some form of crime or another. The Fox children played truant with the neighbours’ kids and roamed the streets as delinquents together, never fearing the law or the criminals because they thought naively that they were the criminals.
When Marco Fox slipped from the grey into a bleak world of poisoned black he unwittingly brought the real criminals down upon his family.
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Jeremy Fox, second child and eldest son of the Fox family, lay in a bedroom he shared with his younger brothers Michael and Alex. His brothers were in the living room watching their Saturday morning cartoons as loudly as possible, which made masturbating to Jeremy’s Nancy Sinatra poster just a little more difficult for the awkward teenager. The squeaky voices of humanoid animals added a disturbing element to Jeremy’s fantasies. He couldn’t blame his siblings for the volume of the t.v as their mother was in the kitchenette, which was just an extension of the living room, drunk off her ass on vodka and offering some loud phone sex to one of her many phone clients.
Jeremy lay in the dark, door shut, and tattered, brown curtains drawn though the window was slightly ajar as it was too humid to keep it shut and the noise of the traffic outside sounded slightly better than the noise of cartoons coming through the thin walls. The sweat trickled down him causing his t-shirt to stick to his chest and he wondered dryly if he might pass out from the heat before he got to climax.
Jeremy tensed as the loud, inane voices of his older sister Kate and her friends Samantha and Isabelle surprised him. There had been no warning, the cartoons were too loud for Jeremy to hear the front door opening.
Sam and Izzy had entered more than a few of Jeremy’s fantasies and hearing their voices, shrill and annoying as they were, caused another to begin. Nancy and her boots went walking, replaced by Sam’s large bust in her tight cheerleader top and Izzy with her long, pink streaked blonde hair and those beautiful, big lips. Jeremy loved thinking about those lips, Izzy had a knack for sucking lollipops nice and slow with those lips, he was convinced it was a deliberate tease. Jeremy wished he could talk to those girls with cool and bravado but they always had him bowing his head, blushing and stammering before scurrying off every time he saw them. This resulted in their merciless teasing and giggling or worse, comments about how he was ‘cute’ and ‘adorable’ as if he were a child or a pet.
Despite his mother dearest’s foul language as she attempted to coax a man into climaxing down the phone, Kate and the girls chose to linger in the kitchenette/living room. Jeremy heard Sam comment on the cartoon as ‘nostalgic’ whilst Izzy cooed over Alex and his ‘adorable baseball cap’.
Jeremy rolled his eyes up to a ceiling spattered with black dots like it had become diseased. He fumbled with his member and tried to think of Sam’s high, pleated skirt but it wasn’t easy when she kept talking about his brother Michael’s adorable curls.
Jeremy froze up as he heard a bang, barely audible over the cartoon. As he tried to work out what the cause could be he heard the voice of his father’s yelling carry through the walls.
“We need to go now! They’re going to kill us!” Even with the distraction of the cartoons and the traffic, Jeremy could still detect the panic in his father’s voice.
The teenager filled with fear, he’d only ever heard irritation or a tired anger from the man, never anything like panic.
The girls had fallen silent and Jeremy imagined them looking at his father with bewilderment, Kate folding her arms and almost scowling as she usually did when she figured her father was high on drugs again. Jeremy could almost visual the awkward smile Izzy probably gave, she always tried to ease an uncomfortable situation with a light hearted touch of humour. Sam probably looked slightly scared, the Fox patriarch alarmed her at the best of times.
Jeremy strained to hear, now plagued with the sound of his heart’s frantic beating coupling with the other distractions of noise in the air. His dark eyes went wide as screams of terror filled the air.
The screams sounded out so suddenly it took a few seconds before Jeremy even realised how close the fresh sounds of intrusion were. Whatever trouble his father had come to warn them about he had inadvertently brought to them.
Jeremy heard his father’s frightened protests, a ramble of pleas in Spanish whilst his mother cursed someone out boldly, scolding them as if they were an irritation not a threat.
Jeremy’s mouth turned dry and his heart leapt into his throat. There were male’s voices answering, too quiet for Jeremy to make out their words as still the damn cartoons played. A chorus of whimpers answered, sounds of fear from the girls and Jeremy’s brothers. Jeremy could make no sense of it.
BANG! BANG!
Jeremy knew the repetitive sound that sent a painful ringing through his ears, he had heard it often enough on television and even once or twice echoing over the traffic at night from some distant alleyway. One could never mistake the sound of gunshots.
The resulting cries of pain informed Jeremy that his father had gotten shot down in the fury of bullets.
Mrs. Fox yelled at the intruders defiantly. “YOU BASTARDS!” They became her last words, audible even over the television, the cries of the boys and the girls, and the traffic outside. Jeremy heard them as clearly as if he had been standing there beside her. The slurring tease her voice normally held had been sobered up by her husband’s sudden death.
Jeremy didn’t hear what followed, there was no gunshot just more screams, the girls and one from his mother that sounded distorted and faded quickly.
The boys screamed this time, then they sobbed and wailed, too young to know that when there were girls you had to act brave. It was something they would never get to learn.
Someone had finally turned the television off and now Jeremy could hear the hidden assailants giving leering remarks. Suddenly Jeremy wanted the innocent sound of cartoons back. He made out four male voices, four horsemen to wield despair on the Fox household.
Jeremy knew he should go out there, that he should be brave. He heard his baby brothers cry and his sister and her friends beg and whimper. He knew he should be the man of the house, the man to protect them but he felt afraid. A deep, sick fear travelled through him and had him shaking uncontrollably as it grasped at him and filled him like a choking breath of smoke.
“Shut them up,” one man complained.
The quick pops of bullets shattered through the air again. Only when the apartment suddenly became absent of the wails of his brothers did Jeremy realise who the man had been complaining about.
Jeremy visualised brains on the floor, childhood dead and two kids out of this world before they had even learned what living in it was really about.
Jeremy lost it then, the fear completely took over, a demon dominating him into cowardice. He crept from the bed as quickly and quietly as he could manage, glad that his feet were bare thanks to the heat as he knew his shoes would have made a noise on the wooden floorboards. He felt an odd gratitude that his father had never fixed the wardrobe he shared with his brothers, and that the doors remained slightly askew and ajar. It meant he had only to ease one back without the risk of the telltale click if he had had to open it.
Jay climbed into the wardrobe and almost drowned under a wave of nauseating heat and an oppressing darkness. He slumped down at the back behind his second hand jeans and on top of the boys’ scuffed trainers, wincing as he heard the faint sound of the rubber of the trainers giving way to his weight. He shut his eyes, hugged himself close and prayed to God that he wouldn’t be found as he listened to his sister and her friends making muffled gasps whilst men grunted over them.
Tears leaked down Jeremy’s pallid face as he imagined what was happening to the girls.
His legs turned warm as he pissed and soiled himself in the wardrobe. Snot slipped down to soak his philtrum as he shook his head weakly and hated himself for doing nothing as the girls were suddenly allowed to scream. Jeremy had never heard screams like theirs before, they weren’t just cries of pain, they were something worse, full of that animalistic fear no one thinks they will ever feel. The same fear crippled Jeremy, a fear that made mice of men and clung to them for years after, making them jump at every loud noise, turn at every shadow and long for some non-existent mother figure to come and hug them close and promise safety. That Virgin Mary figure some people looked to, that fictional woman of warmth and love.
BANG! Jeremy felt like his ears would bleed soon with the impact of the noise. It ended Sam, no more pom-pom waving for her. Jeremy’s eyes burned as he felt pathetic and cursed himself because that was all he knew about her, all he could recall, and all he could think of as the life was blasted out of her.
BANG! Izzy next. Now Jeremy would never know if those lips could do more than suck lollipops. How disgusting that his thoughts of her last moments should be so demeaning and selfish but Hell that was all he knew of that girl.
How unfair that the only one to bear witness on their deaths should be a hormonal teenager who just moments before had been conjuring sexual fantasies about them. Wrong place, wrong time, Jeremy repeated it as a mantra as he waited for the final gunshot.
Kate and he had never been close; in fact he mostly hated her because as soon as he had hit his teenager years Kate had become cruel with her teasing and mocked him for his puberty. Yet the tears flowed hard for her as he heard her scream. He was her brother, he should have protected her. He knew he would only be shot down and fail in his efforts and yet he hated himself because he did not try. He could die brave and not live as a guilty coward.
Jeremy did nothing.
BANG!
Jeremy turned numb and thought sardonically that should she rest in peace now but he wondered how in the hell she could do that after what had happened? He swallowed down a sob, terrified of betraying his presence.
They searched the house, ransacked it in fact but Jeremy didn’t know what for. He almost passed out when they entered his room. The stench of faeces filled his nostrils and he became terrified they would smell it too as he saw their shadows through the tiny gap in the wardrobe doors. They counted the beds, looked at the photos and made grumblings about him as they wondered if he might be out. Certainty that they would open the doors and find him overcame him.
Someone muttered about the police coming as the sounds of sirens filled the air. The sirens had been sounding for ten minutes now, getting closer with each second but Jeremy hadn’t noticed them until the voice mentioned them. Now he could hear them, so wonderfully close, singing out to him like the bells of Heaven.
The men panicked and moved on, giving up on the lone survivor.
Only ten minutes passed after the murderous foursome finally left the Fox home before the police arrived. The initial responders didn’t look too hard beyond the bodies, they just called homicide and stood on guard by the massacre, wincing at the stench of flesh spoiling in the heat. Another thirty minutes drifted by before the detectives came. They almost missed Jeremy too but one dogged detective who had counted the corpses noticed the photos and the beds. He thought to open the wardrobe doors and end Jeremy’s nightmare or at least a part of it.
The detective, Esteban Valdez, found the soiled sobbing teenager within the wardrobe and brought him out. Despite the heat, Detective Valdez found Jeremy quivering, prompting him to wrap the child up in his coat. Gently, he pressed Jeremy against his chest as he carried him out of the flat, making damn sure Jeremy didn’t see the bodies.
It would be a few hours before Jeremy learned that one body was missing and hadn’t turned up hiding in the house like him. Kate Fox wasn’t resting in peace.
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Detective Valdez accompanied Jeremy to the hospital and became his one steady companion throughout the ordeal, his guardian, his knight. They forged an uneasy bond born from bloodshed and death.
Jeremy, now alone in the world, looked up to Detective Valdez and thought of being him, of being a man who could bring his family’s murderers to justice, a man with a gun that meant he could sleep at night, a man who stepped into a room full of corpses and didn’t feel fear.
Despite Jeremy’s instant idolisation Esteban Valdez was no white knight, rather he existed as a complicated man weary of the system. Pitying the orphan, he became Jeremy’s mentor and always kept an eye on him when the boy went into the system.
Over the years, Detective Valdez worked his way up in his field and he guided Jeremy to the law that he served and that served him back. As he rose ranks he guided Jeremy to the morbid ways of the world as well. He taught Jeremy how to reach the career he now desired but he also taught him how to survive in a world that devoured the weak, and that sometimes surviving meant breaking the law. Justice, vengeance, Jeremy forgot it all under Detective Valdez’ wing, all he cared about was feeling safe again and never, ever experiencing that bone-chilling, blood freezing fear again.
