Worth the Wait
A fox waits a long time to gain his revenge.
A few quick notes about this story. First, this is my entry for the third writing contest for the Writing Challenge group. Second, this story was written in under two hours (not including the three or so days of coming up with other ideas that I set aside) and mostly after my normal bedtime. I have been told I work well under pressure, but I'll let readers decide. *chuckles* I feel a little too tired to be the judge tonight.
Worth the Wait
by Reserved Rodent
Michael had waited.
The fox had burned with hatred and a desire to kill from the instant he was firmly led away from his house as he returned late one night to a wall of flashing lights and cops. Perhaps the grizzly detective had thought it a kindness to keep Michael from seeing his wife and three kits, killed in the home he had worked so hard to give them.
He had still been required to identify the bodies later that night.
The body of his wife had been cleaned up. Nothing could conceal the vicious slash, from her dainty chin down her neck, gaping open where her windpipe and artery had been savaged, thankfully disappearing under the modesty cover the coroner had left on her. At least there was no blood.
His two daughters and son had been peaceful, laying on their slabs. Michael had almost been able to make himself believe they were just sleeping. But they were too still - too cold. There was no blood or visible wounds on his three kits.
It was a small favor, quickly forgotten three days later when he was able to return to his house. While the crime scene had been fully analyzed, blood stains remained in the children's bedrooms. In his bedroom.
If he had known who had taken his family away at that time, Michael would have lain him out and skinned him alive.
The killer had not been found yet, though. So all the widower fox could do was wait. Yet he could not wait in that house.
All through the questions that were asked, through the seemingly endless running in circles that the detectives seemed to do trying to find who had killed his family, Michael waited and grew angrier. He knew they suspected him of having a hand in his family's death. They looked at him with too cold of eyes. They didn't tell him everything they knew. It was a week and a half before it was let slip that all four of them had been sexually assaulted.
All four - the sweet delicate vixen he had fallen in love with and married; his innocent and happy twin daughters; his son who had just learned how to ride a bicycle - had been sexually assaulted before they were killed.
Keeping Luke's identity from the fox was the only reason the hound dog had not been killed brutally before he was arrested. Michael would have done it in a heart beat if he had known.
Instead he had to wait.
He was told that the evidence was solid. The fox was assured that the canine would pay for his crimes and be locked away forever. Public outcry over the viciousness of the crime was going to insure that the courts did everything right and the prosecution assure him that everything would be made right.
Michael was in shock that they could lie to him so easily.
Prison was too kind.
The fox had seriously considered taking a gun or some other weapon to court during the hearings and making things right.
But he had seen something that made him wait.
Luke's family came to show support for him. They claimed the dog they knew could never be so cruel. They claimed he had been set up and ignored all the evidence that the prosecution had to prove the hound's evil ways. They loved him, and he loved them back.
That love, so much like the love he had felt for his own, now deceased for seven months family had made Michael pause and reconsider his plan to kill the hound dog that had raped and slaughtered everything he loved in the world.
So Michael had waited.
And now, smoking a cigarette to calm his nerves after the first step in his vengeance against Luke, he felt happy he had waited.
"Please, please, please let my children go," Luke's wife begged Michael.
The fox blew out a line of smoke. "I wonder if my sweet vixen asked your husband the very same thing. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters any more."
Michael checked her bonds again, as well as the bandages. While he did not want her to escape, which was why he hamstrung her, the fox did not want her to die too soon.
Satisfied, he gagged Luke's wife to stifle her begging screams, then went over to the stove. After turning the gas on full power before grabbing the gas can and moving to through other rooms of the house, leaving a flammable trail in his wake.
The other children were all secure. Frightened, but secure.
The last he checked on, a girl about the age of his son, was sobbing.
"I know you don't understand, child," Michael said. "That is the saddest part of all of this. If not for your father, you and my son might even have grown up to be friends. But your father took my son from me. And now, he must feel what I feel."
The fox finished his path to the back door as he ran out of fuel.
Dropping the empty can by the door, Michael waited a few seconds longer. Finally, he would make Luke pay for taking his family from him.
Vengeance was certainly worth the wait, Michael thought as he flicked his still lit cigarette onto the gas soaked carpet.