Page 88 of Overkill

He laughed, but it was forced. The bravado of a teen.

“He’s not even a fucking Brad, that little cuck shit.”

“Is that…code for something?” I was too fucking old to understand anything that idiot was saying.

“He’s such a fucking shitcel cuck, he’d hand us his money just because he’s so desperate to keep friends. He doesn’t get that he’s just a big fucking loser that’s gonna get railroaded by every real man out there, and he’ll be stuck with our leftovers.”

I didn’t have to understand what he meant to be furious.

“Marc’s a good boy. A bigger man than you’ll ever be,” I sneered.

“Tough fucking words for a Stacy who’s about to be tits up in the water,” he snickered.

He was trying to be tough, but this teenage bullshit this was lost on me.

“Jesus, just put a bullet in my head already,” I groaned.

I was born to argue with annoying men. It was why I wanted to become a lawyer. In a way, I would go out doing something I loved…but I wanted the men I argued with to be coherent.

I was so numb. So broken. So empty, I had nothing left but laughter. I marveled at the stupidity of my own existence.

“I can’t fucking shoot you, you stupid femoid!”

Oh. Ian was an incel.

Great.

He stopped on a familiar pull-off. It was a cliff with a footpath, that wove down to a small inlet. A common place to put kayaks and canoes in the water. The little cut out was a calm place to cast off and have a quiet float down the water.

The water wasn’t quiet tonight, though. The sky was angry, thunder rumbling, lightning flashed. The pending flood made the water roar.

“If I shoot you, then they’ll know you died! You’re so stupid!” He was still talking, but I just stared at him. Not insulted; a bit baffled by the audacity, in fact. “You always thought you were so much better than all of us, didn’t you?”

Was that what this was about? Because I thought I was better than them? After all the ways they treated me like shit, they thought I was the one treating them poorly? Ha!

“Get out.” Ian pointed the gun at my nose, and I stared down the barrel. “You don’t do what I say, and I’ll go after Miriam next. She’s your favorite, isn’t she? Marcus says so.”

Marc…oh, Marc. I had no doubts that he said something like that. That he might have even spoken terribly about me and Miriam. And he wasn’t wrong about my preference. What he was probably wrong about was that I loved him. I loved them both the same, even if it hurt to see his father’s face in his.

I had no choice but to leave the car.

“Miriam thinks she’s too good for us too, but we’ll show her. We’ll show her!” He laughed like a psychopath as he pressed the gun to my lower back, pushing me towards the water.

What was he trying to accomplish with the taunting? His insults to Marc, the threats to Miriam, they would do him no good.

I stopped and stood still, putting my hands on my hips as the rain pelted us.

“What? You think people will believe I drowned after all the drama your family kicked up about Luke? You don’t think it’ll be too much of a coincidence?” I was looking at the water, with Ian at my back. I wondered what happened to him. He’d been a boy once.

An okay boy. Spoiled…

Then he became a rotten man. They shut him up with money, gifts, and whatever he’d wanted. God forbid he ever learned to regulate himself.

“It’ll never happen.” I shivered in the cold, and my fingers grew twitchy, ready to lash at something. Anything. The water came down so hard, I tilted my head forward to keep from waterboarding myself.

“You’re so fucking stupid. Everyone said you were smart, but I knew you weren’t. Books, maybe, but here?” He tapped the pistol against his head, as if pointing to his brain. “This can’t be all books. You need to be smarter than just books.”

It wasn’t hard to be smarter than an object, but I didn’t think that was what he meant. Honor student, my ass…