Blood on My Hands: the chilling tale of a child assassin

#### Part I

The day I was born, my father was passed out drunk. My mother, with only the company of our neighbour, gave birth to me in a run down basement that they called home. In the 9 years that I lived there, there was not a single day my father was not stumbling around or passed our.

I credit a number of skills that I honed later in life to those first few years. The ability to anticipate a slap, how to protect, provoke, and fight back. And most of all, how to take a punch.

The neighbourhood that we lived in was overrun with children, drunks, and rats, so no one noticed when I only sporadically showed up to the run down school. And even less people noticed when I disappeared all together.

The winter after I turned 9 was hard - we had no power because we couldn’t pay the bills. Any money that we did get went towards my father’s drinking habit.

I don’t know where my father got a gun. That January night was the fist time my mother or I had ever seen it. He was drunk, as per usual, and was waving it around. My mother had already suffered a blow to the head earlier that evening and was begging him to put it done, but to no avail. When she tried to reach for it, he grabbed her arm. It was during the struggle that the gun went off. My mother fell to the ground.

I watched all this from the kitchen doorway. My mind knew what had happened - the blood seeped into the carpet as she lay still on the floor, but I didn’t move. I didn’t run towards her in attempts to help or comfort. I didn’t run away in fear. I just stood there.

My father stepped over her body and stumbled past me to grab another beer from the fridge. I continued the rest of the evening on autopilot. I fixed myself dinner, as I always did, locked the front door, and went up to my room.

The next morning, when I woke up, my mother’s body was gone. I don’t know if my father had come to his senses enough to call someone, or if the cops, who had absolutely no interest in what happened on this side of the river, had taken her body away, ruling it as a suicide or an accident. All I knew was that my father was never charged, my mother was gone, and I had to get the Hell out of there.

The couple days a week that I actually went to school, I would notice this gentleman watching from across the street. He was dressed in expensive clothing and most definitely stood out in this neighbourhood.

I didn’t know what he wanted and I had heard enough stories of rich people and what they do with children from the street, but anything had to be better that how my life was at that moment. Or so I thought.

Instead of going into the old brick school building that next morning, I walked across the street to him. Now, I wasn’t a confident child, and was still in a daze from having seen my mother murdered, but I figured I could ask for money, do whatever he wanted, and leave town before my father realized.

“Excuse me, sir,” I mumbled, approaching him. He smiled at me, a gesture I had perceived as friendly, but later realized was predatory.

“Do you have any spare change?”

This wasn’t the first time I had begged for money. On the bad days, I would beg or steal anything I could to give to my mother for food before my father found out.

The gentleman’s answer surprised me. It was the exact words I had dreamed of hearing. Later, I learned that he had been watching me, and would always know the right words to use.

“Are you looking to get out of here?”

He went on to explain that he could give me a better life. He owned a mansion in the capital, which turned out to be true, and he could teach me how to take revenge on my father. There was no way he could have known my father’s actions of the previous night. Actually, now thinking about it, maybe he did, but I’m sure the various bruises and broken bones told the story themselves.

He gave me a cheeseburger and a cookie, as well as the possibility of a new life. It was no surprise when I willingly got into the passagner seat of his car.

If the police weren’t going to investigate a woman’s murder, they certainly weren’t going to look into the disappearance of a child.

So that was the last time anyone ever heard of David Montgomery.

#### Part II

My memories of the first few days in the next portion of my life are vague. You would think that these would be the most pivotal days, the days when everything changed. The days when I went from being a scared little boy to, well, a revenge driven angry kid.

The room was dark. At the time, I didn’t know if it was a dungeon, a cellar, or a broom closet. There were no chains, no bed, just a chair and a bucket. I don’t know how long I was down there. It might have been 2 days, it might have 2 weeks. Papa would come in and tie a blind fold over my eyes. Despite being terrified, I didn’t fight back. Maybe even then, I knew it wouldn’t do any good. Or maybe there was a sliver of ice in me that wanted to know if he would keep his promise - my father would pay.

It was probably about half a dozen times that I got blindfolded and led to a wide open space. I later learned that this was a training room.

Despite being starved, scared, and terribly scrawny, I was determined to prove myself. We worked on stance, blocking, and punches. Papa didn’t hold back against me, and it was weeks before I ever landed my first blow. At the end of a training session, battered, bruised, and bloody, I would receive a piece of bread and a bottle of water before being redirected to my room.

It wasn’t long before I was upgraded to a room with a bed and a window, with bars, but still. The room wasn’t large, but it was bigger than any I had seen before. A robin’s egg blue covered the walls - to anyone else, this gloomy bare room might have felt like a prison, but to me, it represented freedom. And freedom, in the loosest sense of the word, it was. I called that room home for the next nine or so years.

I came out of the dark in multiple senses, not only in a very literal sense that my sleeping quarters now had lights, but also learning a bit more about my purpose - or Papa’s purpose for me.

The training, right from the beginning, was both physically and verbally abusive. It was to make me stronger, Papa claimed, and it did. Papa would come at me with knives, drawing blood, all the while reminding me what my father had done, the harm he had cause  and  how people like him had to pay. The anger burned inside me, sending me into an uncontrollable rage, fists flying, attempting to strike where ever possible, trying to make the pain stop  but I failed. The pain just kept coming, and I learned to hone that anger into a weapon. A weapon with which I would soon inflict unmeasurable amount of my own pain onto others.

Children, especially 10-year-olds who are filled with this much anger, are incredibly easy to mold. Papa knew this and used it to his advantage. I wasn’t his first, not by any means, his last. It was only a couple of weeks before I got to meet my predecessors.

My room was 2 staircases and a hallway from the training room. I was not to stray from this path or there would be consequences. Given the injuries I had already acquired just from training, I could only imagine what they might be.

One morning, about a month after my arrival, Papa was not at the training room. This in itself was not abnormal. He often had business he had to take care of and I was expected to continue training on my own. As I prepared to do so, a young man, about 10 years older than myself, came in. I was too stunned to speak. I had heard the faint dim of voices  throughout the house, but for some reason hadn’t really put together that other people might live here. My food got delivered to outside my room, and the only person I had ever seen was Papa. It was a huge house, and from the amount of locked doors and expensive antiques, I assumed like a mansion.

I continued to stare at the stranger as he approached me. He was dressed in loose athletic clothing was tossed a baton back and forth between his hands.

“Well, kid, let’s see what you’ve got.” My defense reflexes kicked in moments before the wooden stick would have struck me across the face. I caught it on my forearm instead. Barely noticing the welt forming, I was already attempting to parry his next attack.

The fact that this fight was rather unfair didn’t cross my mind. That was one thing Papa had stated right at the beginning. I would likely be smaller, and for the time being, weaker, that my opponent, so what I lacked in size ad strength, I would have to make up in agility, speed, and cunningness.

My opponent was twice my age, twice my speed, and probably at least triple my skill - my only goal was to avoid the most severe strikes, such as the ones to the face, neck, and groin.

The fight, if one could even call it that, barely lasted a minute, before I was on my back. My opponent offered me a hand up. I eyed him warily, ignoring the hand and using the wall to steady myself. Another one of Papa’s lessons: don’t trust anyone. There was no tapping out in a fight, and no letting our guard down unless one of you is dead.

With my back firmly against the wall, I stared at the young man. I was in pain and unsure of what was to follow,  though in truth, his next words were not what I expected.