THE PIG

The man with the strong shoulders, shifty eyes, and hunched posture had been on my radar for some time. On the surface, he looked innocent, harmless. But those beady eyes hid a ruthless mind; those thin lips had delivered endless pain.

On the surface, he looked harmless. Another face in the crowd. But he was deceptive, devious. He wasn’t just another nobody. He was a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Or more aptly, he was a swine among sheep. A pig in more ways than one.

He was happy-go-lucky most of the time, always making jokes, always smiling, always trying to please people, even if his anxious demeanor meant he wasn’t always successful. But deep down, there was nothing good about him. He was evil—pure, unadulterated. More importantly, he was in my way, and he had to go.

I tracked The Pig down to one of the tenements in town, a stone’s throw from where Neckbeard had met a fitting end, dying in a pool of blood, piss, and excrement. He met someone outside one of the tenement blocks, a man who looked even shiftier and more suspect than he did. The individual wore an oversized hoodie, its equally oversized hood enveloping his features like the cloak of the grim reaper. He greeted The Pig with a handshake—an exchange of drugs, an exchange of information, a meeting of old friends, it was hard to tell. They spoke for several minutes, shooting furtive glances over their shoulders and doing their best to hide their faces when two teenagers left the tenement block and walked straight past them.

The Pig checked his phone several times during the conversation—making notes, sending texts, looking at porn. They shook hands again and finished with a fist-bump, their knuckles pressed together for interminable seconds as the conversation finished. A nod of understanding, a reciprocated gesture, and The Pig was on his way again.

He stopped by newsagents on his way home. He picked up a local newspaper and a refill for his vape and exchanged pleasantries with a young woman who looked like she would rather be somewhere else and talking to someone else. I kept my distance, pretending to be on my phone as I waited around the corner, a baseball cap covering my face, hiding my features.

The Pig’s attention was also on his phone when he stepped out of the newsagents.

“Yes, she has,” he said. “I saw her yesterday and the day before. But I haven’t seen her today.”

He spoke calmly, quietly, but I was close enough to hear most of what he said.

“I’m close. I’ll get what I want. But—no, maybe. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week—look, it’ll happen. I’m not wasting my time here, trust me. It’ll happen.”

He hung up and I felt my anger flare, realizing that my suspicions were correct, and he was up to something. He looked over his shoulder, his eyes fixed directly on me for the shortest of times. I must have said something under my breath, must have made a noise that attracted his eyes to me. I lowered my head just in time, my hands in my pocket, the cap covering my face, using the chilly day to protect me from his prying eyes.

When I eventually lifted my head, I saw that he had stopped staring and was once again walking at a leisurely pace, his suspicions eased. I took an alternative route, nonetheless, going through a housing estate, walking, almost running, to stay ahead of him. There was no need to follow him anymore; I knew where he was going, and I wanted to make sure I got there before him.

I made it to his house before he did and crept around the back, knowing I had between two and three minutes before he was in view, another thirty to forty-five seconds before he was in the house.

The back doors were locked and there were no open windows or loose latches—nothing to tempt me inside, nothing to make my life easier. Defeated, I picked up a large brick sitting by the back door, positioned myself by the window, and waited.

He approached the front door mere seconds later, heavy footfalls slapping the tarmac, crunching the scattered gravel. He cleared his throat, complained about something under his breath. The sound of jangling keys carried on the wind, hollow but vibrant, loud but welcome. Moments later, he was in the house, the front door slammed behind him.

That’s when I threw the brick. It hit the glass with enough force to damage it, a spiderweb of cracks spreading from the point of collision to all four corners, but it didn’t break. The brick bounced and landed with a dull thud on the patio, chipping the white stone slabs underneath.

The wall next to the window hid me from view as I slipped a bowie knife from under my jacket and waited, head pressed against the cool wall, eyes to my left, where a short passage led to the back door.

First came the sound of an internal door opening, then the sound of him yelling, something loud, but incomprehensible, then the sound of the back door opening, feet slapping on concrete. A man on a mission, ready to face whatever mischievous teenager or hopeful burglar had thrown the brick. There was haste and malice in his steps and vengeance on his mind as he focused his attentions on the connecting yards, expecting to see a group of mischievous kids hopping fences.

He must have heard a noise because he stepped out, ready to shout, to yell, to warn, but nothing left his lips.

He didn’t expect the assailant to be much closer to home, and as he raced past my location, I slipped behind him, raised the knife above my head, and drove it down as hard as I could. It sunk into the flesh between his shoulder blades, crunching bone, crushing cartilage, and scraping along his spine as it disappeared almost to the hilt.

He turned to face me as I yanked the blade free, hearing a suction noise, feeling it contact bone.

His mouth was agape, horrified, his words choked. I expected a scream, a violent, angry, verbal assault, but he reacted with surprising speed and calm. He swung for me, finding a degree of strength and agility that the wound in his back should have taken away.

I stumbled back, avoiding the knuckles on his right hand by sheer instinct as a rush of air whizzed past. He also stumbled, but quickly righted himself and threw another punch, and another, windmilling toward me, each swing more erratic and poorly timed than the last.

One punch landed on my shoulder. I blocked another with my forearm, felt a third clip my chin, mere inches from a potential knockout blow.

Blood had soaked his shirt. And the pain must have been immense, but he wasn’t giving up that easily.

I moved back and let him swing. He fired off another half dozen lazy and breathless punches before I moved into the line of fire, shifted sideways, and then stabbed him again.

The blade drove into his upper arm just as he was swinging. It lodged in his flesh. I held tight and he followed through, drawing the blade through his triceps and into his shoulder.

He stopped swinging and tried to grab me, desperate to draw me toward him, and when he couldn’t make contact with his flailing hands, he charged.

It was a staggered, sloppy, and almost drunken movement, and it was just what I needed.

I threw my own punch, an uppercut, a haymaker. The knife punctured the flesh beneath his chin and drove up through his skull, emanating a wet, crunching sound like someone ripping open a packet of fresh meat.

His eyes rolled into the back of his head, his mouth hung open, the bloodied blade visible through the yawning gap. He flopped to his knees. The blade was jammed, lodged in its fleshly sheath. I gripped the handle with one hand, grabbed his hair with my injured hand, and pulled.

It was like he wanted to come with me. The chaos of broken neurons that fired madly in his brain either tried to activate his fight-or-flight response or begged me to finish him off, because as I pulled, he staggered forward on somewhat willing knees. His brain leaked an assortment of fluid through two gaping holes, his eyes flickered maniacally as if trapped in a waking REM state, and he gurgled a series of instinctive obscenities, but he didn’t drop, he didn’t die, and that made it easier for me to lead him into the house and the kitchen.

When I relinquished my grip, taking away the support that had kept him stable, he flopped again, first onto his knees, his hands by his side, his face on the floor as if in prayer, then on his side, kicking, twitching like a diseased rabbit gurgling its last breaths. I shut the door behind me and watched over him until he died, a slow and painful process that took at least twenty minutes. He may have already been dead, operating purely on electrical impulses like some temporarily revived frog in a high school science experiment, but I liked to think that he felt every second of it, that he was conscious and aware as his gaze fixed on mine and he realized I would be the last face he would ever see.