They stopped at the double-doored entrance. ‘After you.’ Probey said to Eamon with a gentle flutter of his gloved hand.
Eamon racked his shotgun and pushed his way through the door, unlocked and unblocked. He looked left and right down two wide hallways; empty save for a wheelchair and two tipped over walkers.
Heading down long empty hallways, peering into dark, empty rooms, Eamon was distantly followed by the others. He came to a set of double doors opening into the courtyard. Stepping through the doors, he froze and dropped his gun.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he quietly exclaimed.
A pile of dead pensioners had been erected in the center of the snowy courtyard; built against the flagpole for support. The American flag flapped proudly up above. Every resident of the large retirement home, every employee, every unfortunate visitor… all dead and frozen together in a macabre amalgamation that reached far above the top of Eamon’s head. Wrinkled limbs stuck out of the satanic stack as if to wave all of the good in the world farewell.
Eamon’s heart dropped, feeling deep within its arteries that his wife was entombed within the pile.
A moment flashed in Eamon’s mind. A few months after their wedding; the moment he told Beth his darkest secret.
He was a disaffected youth, scratching at the open sores of society in search of a purpose. The path that ultimately led him to the gang that became his second family started out as one far more isolated and alcohol fueled. He did all he could to live up to the ideal of masculinity that had been implanted within him by his surroundings. He drank hard, he womanized, he started fights; all the while hating himself more and more but deluding himself into thinking the opposite. This is what I’m supposed to do. This is how I’m supposed to feel, he told himself over and over again.
One cold night in Kansas City, a bar fight went too far. Eamon drunkenly threw a right hook into a undeserving lush’s jaw as he had a dozen previous times, only this time, the lush fell in the exact wrong way. The poor sap caught the side of his skull on the edge of a wooden barstool on his way to the floor, and his world went permanently black.
Eamon thought the guy was playing possum at first… until the blood starting creeping across the dirty floor and the other drunks started panicking. Eamon got out of town immediately afterward.
He couldn’t look Beth in the eye when he finished telling her this terrible secret. He was sure she would divorce him and leave as soon as she heard, but he couldn’t keep it from her any longer. He had never told anyone what happened that night, not even his Handbreaker MC comrades who openly spoke of killings carried out by their hands.
But Beth stayed by his side. She knew the man she married wasn’t the same man from that story. She saw the pain on Eamon’s face as he told his secret. She knew it had been eating up at him for years, and to her, he had paid enough for this sin.
Instead of gasping and running off like he expected, she gave him a warm hug and told him he was better now. Eamon had loved Beth with all his heart for years by that point, but that was the moment that convinced him soulmates were real, and that he had found his.
And now his soulmate was butchered and left to rot.
Click Here to read more excerpts.