The Tears Devourer

XXX

     The cadet reacted in the worst possible way when she heard the boy's tremendous nonsense. At first, she wanted to believe that he was joking, but as a mother, she looked deeply into the lens of his eyes and noticed that the infant didn't flinch when giving such statements, he didn't care what she thought or how she would interpret it. The boy neither laughed nor cried, he just looked at her as if begging her for ideas, help, but the cadet didn't really know what the boy wanted help with.

     By the time Derick's mother walked in, the official novice had already started a fuss, placing Derick on her back and yanking him toward the door, but stopped and suffocated by her own colleagues who didn't buy a word she threw at them.

     The boy denied her, this time he was laughing at what the cadet said, leaving her not only ridiculed but also a complete liar. The mother joined in the spoken brawl, handing out vituperations to anyone who was put in front of her. Maddy pulled on Derick's arm roughly and warned with reporting the officer, threatened to report the entire police force for bearing false testimony against her. With what happened, they didn't even take the delicacy of asking her to accompany them to the department to give an official statement, they simply left as quickly as they arrived.

     "What did you tell them?..." Maddy whispered, sitting on the edge of her bed, realizing that Derick was stalking her.

     "Nothing mom," repeated a high-pitched voice that slowly opened the door to the room.

     "What the f**k did you tell them?!" The lady stood up furiously, tossing what few clothes she had on top of the sheets.

     "I'm sorry mom..." The boy lowered his head but not his gaze. He made a move to raise his arms to defend himself but left them halfway. "Seriously, I haven't told them anything."

     Maddy walked over to the boy, raised her right hand above his head, and slammed it fiercely on her son's cheek. A loud slap threw the little boy to the ground, who only managed to massage the reddened area with the small palms of his hands. Already used to that type of treatment, he knew perfectly well that crying only encouraged his mother to hit him more and more until he shut up or do exactly what she asked him to do.

     "If they come for you, I'll let them take you. I don't care what your father's s**t says, or if he tries to beat me to death like always does... Why don't you tell them that? Hey! Piece of s**t! Why don't you tell them that?!"

     "But my dad is not here..."

     Maddy opened the top drawer of her dresser and pulled out a crumpled piece of paper from inside. He threw it right at his little boy's chest. The boy ironed it with both hands. The letter was from his father, or at least in his name. Derick could already read perfectly for his young age, and he had no trouble deciphering the message. His father was coming home in twelve days.

     'I wish he had died,' they both thought at the same time.

     Maddy remembered few good things about her husband. Like how hard he got to defend her from some jerk, or on hunting weekends with Derick on his back, while he was still a baby. The nights of s*x the first year of marriage, those days when she believed... No, she knew she was happy with him, but she couldn't take advantage of the moment. Life is ironic when you take pills as a young man to have fun on a level that only the mind can handle, but forget the pills you really need so that your life doesn't go to hell. 'A son is not so bad...', she tried to convince herself, when she saw the positive in the pregnancy test, but she could not. Never could.

     When Derick arrived, the outings with friends were over, the whole nights of s*x were over, the spending on weeds and pills that brushed a huge smile on their faces at their pleasure ended. Responsibilities that neither she nor her husband wanted, then fell from the sky and neither knew very well how to carry a tremendous weight on their backs.

     Every day, Maddy had to put up with a drunk who only stopped by when he needed a woman for his needs, or couldn't find where else to eat. He kept the pension money - for his service in the military - in strategic places in the house, and woe to her if she found those hidden lands, woe to her if she demanded something from him...

     Her husband's first service in Mali was hell. Maybe that's why she didn't remember many happy things with him. The nightmares were deeply ingrained in her life, the wailing, the screaming in the bathtub of frustration and terror.

     One night - it must not have been less than three in the morning - he confessed to her in his alcoholic state, the torture processes he had subjected not only to men but also to women and children. He told her through tears how he peeled the arm of a girl only six years old so that her parents would give the exact location of the leader they were looking for. He himself watched his arms as he narrated, how the little girl's tender skin left behind a fleshy layer of white muscle, with random bloody branches. The little girl could not bear the pain at that moment and fainted after a few minutes.

     Which for Killian Peck was a relief for the moment, since the little girl's scream did not allow him to concentrate, and skinning is an art in war, a difficult art to perfect since if you don't take a lot of skin at first, the blade gets lost in the hairs and stops cutting, on the other hand, if you take a lot, you grab the meat and you go to the bone.

     At that moment she knew. Maddy looked in horror and disgust at her husband — who suddenly fell to the carpet and fell asleep, drooling his cheeks with yellowish bile from the vomit that his dizziness caused — and knew he was no longer the Killian she had met in high school. She knew that she had lost it forever and that this new version was not going to please her. And how right she was...

     By the time Derick was five, Killian was called back to serve. "It's just an old case that I got involved in...", she remembered perfectly the excuse he had given. But she knew the truth: he was already tired of family life, and that was a perfect excuse to go away for a while. He had gotten tired of hitting her to make her see who's boss. He had gotten tired of berating very little Derick to behave like a little man. He had gotten tired of yelling and insulting them so that they know how to recognize what is right and what is wrong. But of course, Derick didn't understand, not because he was just an infant all that time, but because of the example Killian set for him. And from the time he nearly kicked her to death for defending the kid, Maddy just wouldn't mess around anymore, waiting with terror smeared behind her.

     Many times she had even thought about selling the boy to the highest bidder, but if she sold him then she would no longer have someone to unload all the s**t that her husband threw on her. And all that mistreatment and abuse were transformed into an internal vicious circle, where one outraged the other for the personal problems that one caused in the other.

     Twelve days passed like a heavy early morning night. The door didn't ring that morning, it just grunted, as usual when it opened. Maddy woke up, if she ever got to sleep, and stopped her hearing for what was happening in her living room. She heard a heavy suitcase fall to the ground, and rough leather boots hitting the wood as he walked. But those steps, as loud as they sounded, were unbalanced in rhythm. Was drunk...

     The bedroom door slammed open, and Killian entered with one eye more closed than the other. Maddy took the covers in both hands and lifted them up to her mouth as if the piece of cloth defended her from any blow her husband gave her. Killian awkwardly walked over to the dresser, pushed the side closest to her body, leaving the cabinet at an angle to the wall. He reached down and lifted a small board that had previously been part of the floor. He rummaged for a moment, but he didn't seem to find what he expected, and Maddy knew it, knew perfectly well that he would not find anything. In her tension and worry, she neglected that cache of money and forgot to put back the package that her husband left there without imagining that he had any idea of the small space.

     "Where's the bag, honey?..." Killian's eyes were watery and red, and the words came out of his mouth fetid and brittle.

     "I don't know... I don't know what you're talking about..."

     "Where the f**k is the money, woman?!" Peck's voice reached the sky and broke Maddy's chest, fear seeping through every pore of her body.

     "Love... I don't..."

     Killian Peck lunged for the bed and tugged at the fabrics aggressively, leaving his wife even more unprotected. He took her by the ankles with his clawed hands, as if two shackles of pure steel had suddenly caught her. The pull was violent. Maddy felt how everything inside moved, felt like even her soul bounced between her bones. She fell to the ground, followed by a sharp kick in the ribs, which made her gag and gasp immediately. A thousand needles suddenly drove into her skull. Killian had taken her by the hair and was dragging her unapologetically into the living room. She lifted her hand, which thus raised Maddy's sweat and tear-soaked head as well, and threw her angrily against the table. A small crack opened on his wife's forehead after the loud impact against the wood.

     From his room, Derick had already peered through the small opening in his door. He watched the entire show from the front row. He twitched a bit when he saw his father stamping his mother's face against that piece of furniture, but deep inside him something — or someone — was enjoying it. Deep inside him, he wanted to be his father's hand right now.

     After the blow, his father disappeared for an instant, to return to the room this time with a monstrous hammer loaded in his hand. Maddy was trying to get up from her dazed state, so she rested both hands on the table for support. It was then that Killian set up the punch. He raised the hammer high, so high that Derick never believed he could reach it even by jumping, and Peck propelled it fiercely against his wife's fingers.

     Maddy Peck's scream scared off a couple of dogs on the street, and probably a couple of neighbors as well since within minutes a patrol car and an ambulance arrived at the house without warning.

     Killian was pleased. The three middle fingers of the right hand, broken into two pieces each. Not bad for after months without practicing.

     By the time authorities took Maddy and the boy to the hospital, he had already vanished from the scene. Cause of the fracture: a slip down the basement stairs. Or at least that was the version that Maddy Peck gave to those who asked, while Derick didn't say a word. He had witnessed the brawl going unnoticed, he had assimilated what was happening in such a way that according to the logic he built throughout his childhood, all that was correct. Mom misbehaved, and Dad punished her for it.

     This is how Derick Peck was formed since he was basically born, with those scars and those to come. So they guided his hand to the next atrocities he would commit, based on all the hatred he saw. Thus they induced all those sobs and pleas of despair, not only in their next victims but also in their loved ones who never saw them again, satisfying all the remorse that they kept in their hearts. That is how they then created what they would call, in just a couple of more years, the Brooklyn serial killer they failed to catch, the tears devourer who managed to escape.