Children of God

Chapter One

When Al and Joe were born, miles apart in different cities, in different parts of the same bent, corrupt country, they never had any inkling that one day, on a soaking wet night, surrounded by semi-oblivious commuters, one of them would kill the other.

 Sure, people kill people every day. They used to say, on average, that there was one murder every ten minutes. Imagine, you could finish eating a good, old fashioned ham and cheese sandwich, and without even knowing it, someone would be lying on a dirty floor halfway across the globe, a bullet socked right in their head. Crime was the blood of the earth, no question about it. As for the blood cells? They were people like Al and Joe.

Al was a stocky guy who would’ve made any football team available had he been interested in anything but crime. He got his kicks by shooting birds in a forest near his house, with a BB gun he’d been given in a misguided attempt to give him something to do. His parents had both been employed in jobs that were great for half the year and terrible for the other half, so they’d been quite happy to let their occasional-piranha of a son out of their hands. One less mouth to feed, one less ass to get out of trouble.

Joe was shorter than Al, but had more or less the same upbringing. The few differences were thus: Joe was the son of an abusive father who worked in a mail room. It seemed cliche, for a man of crime to be brought up and shaped, formed by fists and insults. But Joe, like every other human on the miserable planet, had no control over his upbringing.

Anyway, they were part of “the family”. You see, back in the old days of Prohibition and the like, criminals would gather together to get things done. Nowadays, no one who's done even a whisper wrong will step near each other for fear of the feds sniffing round the place. Robert Henry Christopher Lena saw this, as a young man, and laughed at the idea. And after he had split his sides, he did the sensible thing and started getting together his “family”.

Robert Lena was a man no longer in what the media would call his “prime”. He was 59, grey haired, kinda wrinkled, brown eyes and a pouting mouth. His knuckles bore scars gained twenty years ago, when he’d fought an idiot in a bar who turned out to be an idiot informing for the cops. Ever since then Robert had been wary of letting anyone buy him a drink.

Robert had a wife, aged 52. She was Lea, brown hair, pointy face, startling eyes and an undeniable support for her husband. She went to school with Robert, then grew apart from him in college. But a chance meeting in, of all places, a pie store brought them back together. But inside Lea’s head was the scream of a woman who pined for a lot of stuff, stuff she thought was normal but stuff that Robert would have laughed at had he been able to take a peek into her mind.

Robert and Lea had two kids, both bright young kids who were brought up thinking the most respectable thing they could do was thwack some poor guy over the head with the butt of a gun. There was Maxine who was 17, and Leopold who was 16. Both were never sent to a real school, because Robert was terrified of some plainclothes bringing them on for leverage or something similar. So he got an old woman, Miss Leepowlski, who looked like an owl that had flew into a barn too many. Maxine was the distant child, the one who read more books than an intrigued low-grade student should. Leo was...well, Leo was somebody. And in the world we live, that had to count for something.

Then there was Robert’s brother, Patrick. Patrick was a tall man, an ex-officer who served his country for seven years, with blond hair that could have been grey but no one cared enough to establish a difference. He was a couple of years younger than his sibling, and a couple of miles away in terms of a relationship with him. Many members of the “family” felt Patrick was only there out of a moral obligation, and that at the first sign of trouble Patrick would be the one thrown under the bus without a moment’s hesitation. Patrick was married to Jessica, a woman desperate to get out of Patrick’s arms and into those of a safer life. Jessica had stopped speaking to Patrick months ago, and indeed to anyone else for that matter.