The boy told me that. I truly believed him back then. I can even remember nodding my head in agreement.
They will lose. They always lose. I look back on it now and know it was the heroes that led us to believe that. Comic drawings depicting superpowers and cartoon shows that came on every morning on the weekends. Even if it was naïve, it’s still true. I’ll be damned to admit anything else.
The bad men will always lose.
His large eyes stared back at me from across the cell. He said it like it was a question; after all, I was older by almost a year than him and taller too.
“Yeah,” I told him, my voice scratchy from lack of water. “They always lose.” I think the entire time we were there together, I barely spoke. Those may have been the first words I uttered out loud besides my name. Because he needed to hear it, and deep down inside I needed to hear it too.
He was the one who did the talking. All his stories kept us going.
The boy said that first night, sometimes they win, and that’s what makes them bad guys. Everyone has bad thoughts, but they have to act on them … for someone to truly be bad. He went on and on, but I didn’t respond or agree with that ideology. The boy weaved a story, while I sat against the cold broken stone of reality and let him.
It was only months later when I decided the man who came into the barn every so often with a victim of his own was a bad man. He didn’t prey on little boys like the ones in the cell did, but those women were victims nonetheless.
The first time in the barn, my safe haven and escape, I was shocked and sat in horror because it couldn’t possibly be happening. Not again. The second time, I crawled out and tried to wake the woman the moment the barn closed with that eerie creak from rusted old hinges. I shook her, I did everything I could to get her to move. That’s when I realized I was too late.
What a weak being I was, to shy away until it was too late. Yet that was who I was at my core. It’s what defined me. Both the boy and the woman showed me that. Her blond hair was matted with dirty blood when I realized how lacking I was in morality. Hiding to protect myself while allowing others to perish disgusted me, but that’s what I did.
I didn’t know if the woman was innocent, but the boy was and that’s when I heard his voice again: The bad men always lose. Wasn’t it bad that I didn’t do the right thing? That I wasn’t the hero he’d told stories about. I was nothing like the person he thought I was.
And so I waited and I watched because I wanted the bad man to fall. I thought maybe it would make it right. It would make sense, all of the tragedy would, if only I aided in this man’s demise.
So I waited, I followed, I watched and planned a way to help the good guys bring him down … because back then, I thought there were heroes who wanted to take down men like him. I thought they would listen and they’d bring the monsters to justice.
It didn’t take long before I realized no one would come. They came after me instead. They wouldn’t listen to what I was saying. I was a dirty, lost kid and all they wanted to know was my name. They didn’t listen to me. And I couldn’t bring myself to say my name. They couldn’t take me away. Not when I had so much work to do to make up for the bad things I’d allowed to happen.
I decided I had to be the one. I’d be the reason that bad man would lose.
It would be justice for the boy. All of the bad men need to pay and it started with him.
I hadn’t counted on her sneaking in, her hair in wild curls and the smile on her face so pure and full of hope. It had been so long since I’d seen a smile like that. Shock held me in place as the screwdriver in my hand, the longest one I could find in the abandoned place, slipped to the floor. He would have heard; she