Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,75

did that to innocent people deserved everything they had coming.

It didn’t matter if one or all of them were family.

Looking out as the sun started to set across the city, Jackson thought back to when they were kids. He and Jason were the same age and had grown up together in Staunton, playing football, riding bicycles and staying out late, sneaking into the local cinema to watch R-rated movies. In his wildest dreams, he never could have imagined that the boy he’d known back then would turn into an evil, mass murderer of a man. He remembered sitting next to Jason in the cinema and seeing his cousin’s feet barely touched the floor from his seat, his eyes wide with excitement at the movie playing on the screen, innocent and a good kid.

Jackson sighed and looked at the buildings in the distance. In the years since the rescue, Jason hadn't been in contact once. He would have been well aware by then that his cousin had helped co-ordinate the rescue operation, that he had played a significant part in the fact that he was still alive and not cut up into a hundred pieces by the men whose families he had slaughtered. But he had never once bothered to pick up the phone to thank him for helping to save his sorry ass, not once in the past fifteen years.

Jackson remembered how the kind, fun and intelligent Jason he’d known as a kid had morphed into a spoilt, arrogant and aggressive teenager. He’d lost all his charm and friendliness, and in short, he'd become a real asshole. He was cruel and started bullying other kids, picking on anyone at high school smaller than him. He’d left high school with a shitty diploma and hardly any friends, and the next thing Ryan heard was that Jason had signed up to join the Marine Corps. At the time, Ryan had both figured and hoped the training and discipline might straighten him out and fix his problems. But deep down he’d worried about the thought of Jason with a gun and responsibility. Ryan knew that when Jason had arrived back on US soil after Blackout and signed the same secrecy pledge, he had been honourably discharged. Honourably. Like a damn war hero, his arm in a sling. A second chance, an opportunity to live a full life, a right he had stolen from all those people in that camp that night. And now, fifteen years later, seven more innocent men had died because of his crimes.

Jackson shook his head, looking out at the city. His own blood had butchered those people, the same gene-pool, his own damn cousin. He liked to believe in the goodness of people and that life usually found a balance, but he knew the reality was often far harsher and a lot less romantic. So far today, two men had been shot at close range. Another had been car-bombed. Another sniped. One had committed suicide. And the latest had been hit in a rocket attack.

More bodies. More death. More innocent people dead just because his idiotic cousin wanted to play the hero, go home and brag about how many people he’d killed during the war, forgetting to mention that they were pretty much all women and children. And now, men who had saved his life, men he had never bothered to even look up and thank, all dying because of his drunken stupidity and lust for blood.

But then again, life had sort of found a balance. The supposed glory that had awaited him had never materialised. His marriage had fallen apart almost the moment he got back and his father had turned his back on him, disgusted by what he’d done and the threat he’d posed to his own career. Jackson knew his cousin had been living alone in DC for the past eight years. He had no friends and no money. He worked a dead-end job in a sleazy strip-club far from the wealth and importance of the city, getting fatter and older and watching his life pass him by.

He was so broke he couldn’t even afford to be an alcoholic.

Jackson had caught the CNN report at his office earlier in the day. It said that Jason Carver had been strangled with a wire in his car in the early hours of the morning, no witnesses, no one around to see him die. His funeral would take place sometime in the next two weeks, and Jackson was as