Perversion (Perversion Trilogy #1)
T.M. Frazier
Prologue
For years, the streets of Lacking have run red. The violence escalates with each passing day. Bodies riddled with bullet holes are left to rot on the streets and sidewalks. As a warning. A sign of power.
A message of who really gets to decide who lives and who dies, with each of the three main gangs competing for the honor.
People in this graffiti-covered town fear the constant bloodshed, the never-ending stream of bullets whizzing by, of walking into the wrong territory at the wrong time, wearing the wrong color, or saying the wrong thing. Not pledging the correct allegiance to the person holding the fucking gun in their mouths.
People stop leaving their homes after dark.
Some stop leaving them all together.
The only law here is gang law. Justice comes in the form of a bullet or a blade. It’s the wild west meets the aftermath of the motherfucking apocalypse.
It’s also home.
I am one of the reasons why people are so fearful to leave their own homes.
Murder surges through my veins like a derailed train.
You can’t do something well if you weren’t born with a piece of that something inside of you. If it was anything else, like art or business, people would call what I have a talent. A passion. I’m no fucking artist. I’m no accountant. My business is revenge. It’s what I thrive on. Taking lives to save the lives of those in the brotherhood. To make a point. To send a message.
For the sheer fucking pleasure of it.
It’s what I was made to do.
If this was the Middle Ages, I’m confident I’d be the man in the heavy hood, lobbing people’s heads off at the king’s command. I have the stomach for it. The tenacity.
The desire.
They call me Grim.
I’m the executioner for the Bedlam Brotherhood.
Death is upon you if you see me coming.
Kidding.
You’ll never see me coming.
A truce was reached shortly after the Governor threatened to send in the National Guard.
Since then, all has been quiet.
Too quiet.
If you listen closely you can almost hear the sounds of guns reloading.
Click click clack.
Click click clack.
The truce was for one year.
It’s been ten months.
Click.
Click.
CLACK.
THE PAST
One
Sixteen Years Old
Emma Jean Parish had wild curly hair and an attitude to match.
We met when she forced her pussy on me. Her cat. A mangy little thing with anger issues almost as bad as mine.
It was moving day.
I was loading the single garbage bag containing all my possessions into the car of a stranger named Marci. She’d popped up out of nowhere like the ghost of unwanted children’s past and told me I was coming with her.
Just like that.
From the way Marci talked about her place, I figured it was some sort of transitional home for kids like me. Too old to get adopted and too troubled for anyone to voluntarily take on. I didn’t ask her anything else, not just because I knew I really didn’t have a fucking choice, but because I didn’t talk. It wasn’t that I couldn’t. I just didn’t.
Words don’t mean anything. After you realize that, you find the need to speak more of a bullshit burden than a tool to communicate.
Besides, I was a kid in the system. I went where they took me, and every few months, they took me somewhere new.
Sometimes, I hated it.
Sometimes, I really hated it.
This time was different. In more ways than one. Usually, I was dropped off by my caseworker, and the people receiving me were about as excited as they were about junk mail.
No one has ever come to pick me up before.
As long as she wasn’t sizing me up for a skin suit, it didn’t matter. I was itching to get out of the fucking boys’ home. Especially since I wasn’t really a boy. Even when I was, I never really felt like one.
I was about to go back into the boys' house where Marci was talking to my caseworker about my transition and probably my behavioral problems—record, problem with authority, anger issues, lack of communication skills, etc—when I spotted her.
A girl a few years younger than me, stood across the narrow street looking both ways slowly and cautiously, repeating the process twice more before suddenly sprinting across like it was a busy highway and not a small, unpaved, rarely traveled road.
Crazy, honey-blonde curls stuck out from her head at every angle, a cross between Little Orphan Annie and Medusa. Hair meant for a doll, not a living, breathing, human kid. And this one was cradling a little, tiger-striped pussycat in her arms. Tears streamed down her red blotchy face. Teeth marks marred her bottom lip where she’d been biting down to try and hold back the flood. She wore long, ripped, denim shorts that grazed the top of her knees with an oversized t-shirt tied in a knot at the side of her hip. Whatever logo used to be printed on the front was so faded it was no longer legible.
“Hey mister!” she called, coming to a stop on the sidewalk in front of me.
I looked to my left and right, then over my shoulder, but there was no one else around. I was sixteen. There was no way she could be talking to me, but then she came huffing and puffing right up the driveway until she was standing before me. Her humungous eyes were too big for her face, a deep, tear-filled blue-green.