Avenger

Chapter One

Author’s Note

This story is thriller, not horror. It contains depictions of children suffering minor wounds, but there is no graphic violence or sexual content anywhere in this story. This story contains themes of children being kidnapped from their families, which may be distressing for some readers. If you want a more in-depth guide on this, do feel free to message me here on wattpad, I’d be more than happy to answer your questions.

In the event you are about to read on, I just want to say a thank you to you for reading, and I hope I have made a story you enjoy and get something out of it, and that it brings something to your life.
 
Copyright © 2022 Meytaph. All rights reserved.

This story is a work of fiction. All characters, locales, events and incidents are either used in a fictitious manner or are a creation of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to any person living or dead is merely coincidence.
 
Chapter One
I’m not sure if people are born broken or if they become broken, in the case of human monsters. I’ve never been sure, and that’s the truth. I mean, anyone can get broken, sure, but some seem to be that way right from the start. That’s what I mean. I’m sure you’ve known someone like that, or at least have heard of someone. Someone in your town who did something so unspeakable that everyone speaks of it even years after the fact. Men and women who seek people out to murder them. Who lure them away and then permanently take them away from their loved ones. And sometimes I think, even scarier, are the accomplices in these acts.

That’s what I mean about human monsters. I couldn’t tell you exactly how I think people get to be that way or if they come out that way. Everyone seems to have a different opinion, especially since a lot of people are broken by our world and most of them are good people. This is the story of how I got broken, when my son was taken from me. But my friend Mikey Wellis, well, Mikey had always been at least a little bit broken.

I think he probably coulda been patched up. Maybe never fully repairing the cracks but at least filling them in and painting over them so you can only see them when you’re up close. But his parents never really seemed much interested in helping him. To tell you the truth, they never seemed much interested in him or his sister at all. I always got the impression they never really wanted kids in the first place. I couldn’t tell you why they then had them, but some people do that.

I knew Mikey from home. I know how weird that sounds, but here’s the thing. My mother was a child minder, so kids whose parents were still at work when they got out of school would be picked up by my mum and taken to her home instead of being picked up by their own parents and taken to their own home. While I don’t really think that’s a bad thing in and of itself, it always seemed kinda sad to me. Mikey and his sister Lucy were some of those kids.

They were both small and scrawny, often with their clothes a little too short for them and their hair untidy, not from natural curls or waves or frizz, like my own, but from evidently not having been washed or brushed for a few days. When it got to be so bad that it was noticeable, so noticeable that you thought about talking to them about it, they would show up the next day looking immaculately well-cared for.
Me and Mikey were the same age, barely a month apart, so we naturally gravitated towards each other as kids do. I was an only child so I liked having him in the house. Kids come and go in my mother’s line of work, so we didn’t exactly grow up together. But I knew him from about the age of 5 to 11, when we were split up and sent to different secondary schools. We lost contact after that, as people do, but I later heard he was always in trouble. I coulda seen that coming though. I coulda told you that would happen.

I first realised he was a bit broken the summer of the year we met. He was with us more often, on account of his parents being at work during the school summer holidays. I don’t think he ever spent a full day at his own house that summer. We were playing out in the back garden, the air thick and heavy with the water you know is there and feel in your chest with every breath but can’t see.

Mikey had one of the toy buses he’d plucked from the shared toy box and was running over rocks with it, before coming at me with it and pushing it along the ground between my legs as I stood over, proclaiming I was the bridge. Lucy sat not far from us in the sand pit, bunching up sand in her pudgy hand and then letting it fall out again between her fingers.

“Just a minute,” I said, “am thirsty.”
I turned to walk back into the house. Mikey looked up from the ladybird he had positioned in the driving seat of the toy bus.

“You don’t need to go inside for that, you can find water anywhere,” he said loudly.

“No you can’t,” I said.

“I can,” he said, standing up. Soil dropped from his knees, but it had left dirty smudges on his jeans. Mine too, probably. I couldn’t tell you. I never took much notice of that sort of thing when I was a kid.

“Oh really? Then show!” I said, smiling at him.

“Look it’s easy,” he said, moving to a patch of soil closer to the garden gate, which lead out into the quiet street at the back of our house. “Watch this. There’s always water underground if you dig far enough. Watch, it’s easy.”
I walked over to him and squatted down next to him. He had held his fingers out and drilled them down into the soil like tiny prongs of a fork. He heaved up fist full after first full, occasionally getting me to put my hand into the hole to feel how much damper it was getting as he dug.
He made to cut the hole a little wider, before I threw my hand out and grabbed him by the wrist.

“Stop!” I said loudly. “Look, careful, there’s glass.”

Flecks of green dotted against the brown earth shone up at us, glinting in the early sunset like little gems in the wall of a mine. They lead in a path towards our back garden gate, and I could tell someone had smashed a bottle outside and that some of the debris had scattered underneath the fence and into our garden.

“Mum!” I shouted. I turned around and saw a shape move in the kitchen window. “Mum there’s glass!”

I wasn’t scared or anything, but I was a bit of a lazy child and if I could summon my parents by just shouting, I did. They stopped responding to me when I got older though, which I suppose is fair. To be honest I’m not entirely sure why they put up with me as a child. I was very loud and very lazy. I saw her move again in the kitchen, but she must not have heard me because she didn’t come outside.
“Do you know how glass is made?” said Mikey, in a slow voice. I stood up to get a better view of the kitchen window and answered him in the negative.

“They melt sand,” he said, in the same slow voice. It was eerie and not normal for him, so I turned back to him. He was still squatting over the glass, his back turned to me, not looking at me as he spoke. His voice became even slower, quieter, and much more high pitched.

“Many things change. Get different. I will get big one day. So will you. Glass got bigger, because it got melted. Ada, do you think people get bigger if they get melted? Do you think anyone has tried it?”

They say a chill goes down your spine because someone in the future has just walked over your grave. Well, I think they’re wrong. I think a chill goes down your spine because Mikey asked me that question, and the chill that went down my spine then and there at 5 years old was collectively felt by all human kind across time and space.

“No one would do that,” I said stubbornly, “that’s too mean. No one’s that mean.”

“Bad guys are.”

“Mikey, get away from it, it’s sharp and it could cut through a shoe, that’s what my mum says,” I said, stepping towards him. I placed my hands on his shoulders.

“I might get someone melted,” I heard him say quietly. I pulled him back, spun him around, and found him with a large shard of glass in each hand, blood oozing out of his tiny fists, dropping onto the soft earth in bright red droplets that looked all the world like juice from a crushed strawberry.
I screamed for my mother and this time she didn’t fail to come.

I didn’t know at the time that years later I would be hunting him down for kidnapping my son.