The Ultimate Revenge

Lisa came home from work at six to a very romantic dinner her betrothed had so lovingly prepared. It was the fifth anniversary of the day they first met and he had pulled out all the stops; wine, flowers, chocolates, you name it!

‘Honey, I’m home!’ she announced from the door of the open plan living area and saw the beautiful flowers blooming on the mantle, but mike, her fiancé, couldn’t hear her over the new upstairs neighbours music. Mike, being the sweetheart that he was began to plate up his signature dish…...pasta carbonara.

‘Hey babes,’ mike said. Lisa cupped her hand to her ear as she couldn’t hear a word of what rolled off the tongue of the enthusiastic love of her life. He placed two plates of Italian goodness on the table as she took off her coat, draping it off one of the four mismatched chairs.

The pair kissed before sitting down to the amazing meal. Just as they are about to cheers with wine that was already poured, Lisa mouthed, ‘how long has it been playing?’ and gesticulated towards the floor above theirs. Mike rolled his eyes and mouthed, ‘all day!’

Not two mouthfuls into the creamy goodness of the carbonara, Lisa was pissed off with the thump, thump, thump, of the music upstairs and suddenly placed her napkin on the table angrily and left the apartment, pointing at her phone as she went. Once the front door slammed behind her mike thought to himself, ‘there goes sex tonight!’ and continued eating what he would even call his best carbonara yet.

 

As the police wrapped on the door, Lisa and Mike unable to hear them, they went straight up to the obvious source of the problem. They knocked on the door but the door to the ultimate Batchelor pad was open. There were game consoles of every type you could muster, games spilled onto the floor. The sixty-inch TV was mounted to the wall and there were speakers all around the living area to enhance the sound. The chubby one moved over to the Bluetooth speaker and turned it off. To their relief, the thumping music ceased.

‘Finally able to hear myself think!’ the younger one said. They looked around the living area. ‘Man this guy is a slob!’ There were dirty dishes and food-stained clothes everywhere!

They looked at all of the gaming equipment and deduced from some of the papers on his desk that his name was Wilson Thomas, the highly renowned gamer, who made his money from sitting in his underwear playing video games. That’s what the set up screamed, the post confirming. The younger officer was a big fan and logged onto his streaming whenever he got the chance…. he was like a mid in a sweet shop. He quickly regained his composure and helped his partner look for the legendary wilsonsince1985.

As they looked in the bedroom last, they were met with something they had never come across before; wilsonsince1985 was dead on a sea of crimson sheets with today’s newspaper stuck to his body with a knife and a barely noticeable note in his right hand. The note was partially crumpled up in his cold dead hand and they knew that this was one for the detectives.

 

As detective Johnson pulled up to the apartment building, he was impressed that it was a gated community. He himself was in the property market at the minute. He was looking to place his foot on that ladder.

He pulled on a pair of latex gloves as he entered the apartment building, and stepped into the lift, pushing the number six. Classical guitar music played as the lift slowly climbed the floors and he closed his eyes and remembered that that particular piece was one he had played for his sixth-grade classical guitar exam. Unbeknownst to himself he was moving his left hand in time with the music…muscle memory they called it. His reminiscing came to a sudden stop just as he was getting to his favourite part of the piece.

The lift jarred open and detective Johnson was met with a swarm of uniformed police, all in awe of the equipment this guy had. There were a few nerds there who were in their element…and it showed.

‘Detective Johnson,’ the officer who had called in the crime greeted what was a guy he aspired to be. ‘We were called to the scene by some angry neighbours about the noise,’ he explained, ‘and what we found was a dead guy in his bed a newspaper tacked to his body by what we think was a kitchen knife holding a note in his right hand               !’ He smiled.

‘What are you looking for?’ detective Johnson barked, ‘a medal?’ The smile quickly vanished from the young officers face and he left the room hanging his head in shame.

‘What did the note say?’ detective Johnson beckoned him back.

‘We didn’t read it!’ the uniform answered, ‘we didn’t want to tamper with the evidence!’ detective Johnson smiled in admiration.

‘You looking to go down the detective route?’ he asked who he found out to have the unfortunate name of Plank.

‘Yes sir!’ Plank replied puffing his chest out and smiled before walking away.

As the crime scene investigators were dusting for prints and taking pictures of the dead guy for almost an hour already, detective Johnson decided that it was time to open his dead, stiff hand and see what he was holding. The note simply had two names and a time on it….’Lisa Pug, Mike Reid, 1900’. He looked perplexed. He called officer Plank into the room for the last time.

‘Yes sir?’ Plank asked tentatively.

‘What are the names of the people who called the noise complaint in?’

Plank looked through his notebook and rattled off two names….’Lisa Pug and….’

‘…. Mike Reid?’

‘Yea,’ the officer said with a furrowed brow, ‘how did you know?’

Detective Johnson looked at his watch. It was 1945. ‘What is their apartment number?’

Plank, looked at his notebook again and said, ‘503!’ He looked after the detective quizzically as he ran out of the room and down to the fifth floor. He wrapped on the couples door and it opened without force. He gagged at the bloodbath that met him. No matter how many times he saw it, death was not something he ever got used to seeing.

The woman, Lisa, was the first one he saw. She lay on the sheepskin rug, soaked in blood, and ran over to feel for a pulse…he was too late. He looked around the apartment trying to find this Mike Reid…he didn’t have to look far. With his throat slashed, Mike was sitting on the ground, back to the island with a knife in his gut holding todays newspaper in place. Detective Johnson checked his hands for evidence…and found some.

He gasped as he looked at the bloodied scrap of paper that had one name on it and the time ‘2020’ beside it. He hastily ran out of the room taking his phone out as he ran. He used the stairs as he figured the lift wouldn’t be quick enough. He still had the page in his hand as he jumped into one of the patrol cars that had the keys in the ignition. He turned the engine and with lights and sirens he drove frantically towards the name that was on that piece of paper…. his wife!

‘C’mon honey…. pick up…pick up!’ he kept saying to himself as he frantically made his way across town. He didn’t stop for traffic lights and weaved his way through pedestrians, honking the horn as he went. He looked at his watch, it was 2015, and he had at least another ten minutes’ drive time.

As he tried to cross the bridge, the only bridge over the river Suir for miles, he was cursing and swearing, still redialling his wife’s number over and over again getting the same message as the phone rang out.

‘Hi this is Mary ple….’ He hung up and tried again, ‘c’mon honey!’

Tired of the traffic across the bridge, he boarded the footpath. People were throwing themselves out of his way as he frantically tried to get to his beloved. They were only married four months and he wasn’t going to lose her, not his Mary.

He finally pulled up to the dump Mary wanted to buy and flip, and got out the lights and sirens still blazing. His stomach felt like a ten-ton weight was dropped in it as he saw that the front door was ajar. As he was unarmed, he picked up the baseball bat from the bush in the front of the house, a bat that lay there for exactly this reason.

‘Mary?’ he called out.

He heard a scream coming from the bedroom. He ran up the stairs two steps at a time and opened the bedroom door with the bat, his body against the wall of the hall outside. He could see two hooded figures, one raping his wife, the other masturbating as he watched.

‘Mary?’ he called out again, stopping the men in their tracks. He looked at his watch 2022 and sighed with relief when his new bride called back, ‘Marcus!’

His soul focus was getting to his wife, he didn’t hear the loose floorboard creek, or the heavy breathing of the third man tip toe in his direction, not until he heard the click of the gun’s safety being released beside his ear, the gun barrel resting on the back of his head.

‘Excellent!’ he heard the hooded man behind him say, ‘you got here just in time!’

Marcus surrendered his bat and was led into the bedroom where the other two hooded figures continued to rape his wife. She screamed out for him to help her, but the third man with the gun had him tied up in seconds with cable ties. He walked him over to the seat that the pair would normally put their dirty clothes on after a long day at work. He threw the clothes to the floor and moved the chair so he could watch those monsters sodomize his wife. When he refused to watch, the third guy hit him with the butt of his gun so hard that he could hear ringing in ears and everything went black.

He woke in the bare basement. It was an old house on an abandoned road and Marcus began to scream; for himself and for Mary. He couldn’t open his right eye it was so swollen, but he could hear his wife sob beside him. He felt the cable ties around his wrists and was aware that they hadn’t checked his pockets as his Swiss army knife was burning a hole in his pants.

He managed to quickly get one of his hands free, the other tied to the main support pole holding up the house. He felt in his pocket for the knife and nonchalantly cut himself free. Then he felt around and found the hands of his dear wife. She squeezed his fingers as he cut her loose too.

The three hooded figures were conversing amongst themselves clueless as Marcus and Mary sat there, their fingers interlocking before he squeezed her hand one last time and got up slowly to fight the three bastards who were interfering with his happiness.

Taking the first one down was easy, he simply used all of those tricks he used in karate, of which he was a black belt, to break his leg. The gun flew across the floor, Mary rising and pressing all of her body weight on it as Marcus took down the other two.

Mary swallowed hard and reached underneath herself where she felt the butt of the gun. She firmly wrapped her fingers around it and aimed it at a hooded figure. The problem was that her husband was moving so quickly, and she had sustained a concussion, that she couldn’t quite manage to tell who was who.

Marcus, who continued to fight with the other two hooded figures couldn’t see out of the corner of his eye the one who originally had the gun, the one whose leg he broke, crawl his way towards his Mary.

When the gun went off, the BANG reverberated around the empty basement like a rocket launching. Both of the hooded men stopped fighting and their attention was drawn to Mary. No one was more surprised than Marcus. Mary, his Mary, had just fired a gun. This was exactly the opposite of what kind of life he wanted for his new bride. To his shock, the guy that was shot rose, and Mary shot him three more times.

Her hands shook as she refocused the gun on the other hooligans, a blood pool forming around their fallen man. They figured that Marcus could take them down on his own but now that Mary had the gun, they surrendered.

To Marcus’s relief, he heard sirens growing ever closer from the distance. Once he had the other two bastards tied up, he ran to his wife and gently took the shaking gun out of her equally shaking hands. ‘It’s ok now honey, everything is going to be ok!’ and she lunged herself into his arms crying, her body convulsing with every breath.

With his colleagues clearing the rest of the old house, Marcus held Mary and held each other and cried together.

When lieutenant Birch placed his hand on Marcus’s shoulder, he jumped.

‘It’s ok detective,’ the lieutenant said softly, ‘you’re both safe now!’

Once Mary was capable of standing on her own, Marcus had a debriefing with the lieutenant as the hostages were taken away in an unmarked police van.

‘You arrested their father three years ago,’ the lieutenant explained, ‘the father is now doing life in Mountjoy because you testified against him in the trial.’

‘Was that the one who ran the human trafficking ring?’

‘Yes!’

‘I always knew that one was going to come back to haunt me, but I never thought they would bring civilians into the equation!’

‘Oh no, he actually didn’t. Mike Reid was one of the jurors on the trial who found their father guilty. The tech guy, he was just a murder for convenience!’

‘What will happen Mary after her killing one of the sons?’

‘It was self-defence…. right?’ the lieutenant was trying his best to put Marcus’s mind at ease.

‘Hell yea!’ Marcus said with gusto, proud of his wife. ‘And the other two?’ Marcus had to ask in case there were more after him.

‘They both will get their day in court, but there were only three sons to our knowledge. My guess is that they will be reunited with daddy dearest!’

‘Do we need to move to a safe house?’ Marcus asked pulling on tufts of his hair in frustration as he paced what once was an empty basement, now a nesting ground for forensics team as they found, marked, photographed and took evidence of every square inch of the place. Marcus was impressed.

 

After what seemed like days, the pair waved goodbye to the last of the forensic investigators, relieved that they had taken the body away and everything, even with finger print dust everywhere, was started to resemble home once more.

‘I am sick of renting!’ Marcus blurted out. ‘Would you be interested in buying the owld place,’ he said as he looked at the old termite damage in the front door frame.

‘I think I’d like to live in a nice cul de sac!’ answered Mary.

‘A cul de sac?’ he turned and looked her in the eye. ‘Only people with kids live in cul de sacs!’

She nodded and smiled. She placed his hand on her stomach, ‘I found out this morning!’ she was grinning from ear to ear. Marcus began to cry with happiness and began to stroke the hair of the mother of his ‘soon to be baby.’

‘A cul de sac it is then!’ he said proudly puffing out his chest.

 

 

 

picture from pixabay