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For a long time, he’d hated nature documentaries. Couldn’t stand them. At school, he was the only one who didn’t rejoice when the teacher would wheel in the big television to show them some film about wildlife. Within every one of them, like clockwork, there would be a scene where some innocent prey animal would be attacked by a predator, and the gentle voice of the narrator would explain how this was just nature, it was just the way of things, it was a necessary part of the cycle of life. And Brad would close his eyes and try to block out the screams of whatever animal that was being devoured was making.
There had been nothing natural about Kate’s death. No matter how many times his father told him this was necessary, no matter how often his brother would tell him it was in the nature of humans to kill lesser animals, he could not accept it. It had not been a slaughter, it had been a murder, a twisted, callous killing of the only one who had ever loved him back. Too often his dreams would be filled with the death cries of his beloved pet, too often he would get flashbacks to his brother’s blood-covered hands. Early on, the glint of a knife could send him into hysterics. The only mercy was that they hadn’t made him eat her, though the smell of braised pork made him nauseous nonetheless. He’d started eating vegetarian as soon as he was out of the house.
If he’d bothered to go to a therapist, the diagnosis would likely have been PTSD. He did not bother to go to a therapist, not once in his life, no matter how often people would recommend it. Therapy was for pussies, his father had once said. It was for weak, soft men. He would not be weak.
*
He is twenty when a college acquaintance shows him rotten.com. “They’ve got some real sick stuff,” the guy says. “Dead bodies and shit. Gore. They say you can even find people doing cannibalism on there.”
They’re sitting in the computer lab, side by side. The boy considers them friends, Brad does not. It doesn’t matter for this occasion, anyway. What matters is the site, with its ambiguously worded links, and the horrors that lie behind them. What matters is the images that load line by line. They make a game out of it—who can find the grossest pictures, who flinches first. There’s a disgusting sort of thrill to it; the adrenaline pumping through his veins making him feel more alive than he has in years. It’s strangely addictive, too. He comes back to the site many times thereafter, staring at photos of motorcycle accidents or people covered in fresh, weeping sores or just plain bizarre things like a man with a parakeet balancing on his erect penis.
After a while, the shocking images become less shocking. The feeling intrigues him. If he could train the part of his brain that recoiled at such vistas to become desensitised to it, how much further could he take that? Could he remove the parts of him that feel altogether? Could he mould his soft flesh into something stronger? Could he become like his father, his brother?
It’s a tempting idea.
*
Brad stared at the paper in front of him. The results of his workplace profile. A harmless, stupid test that didn’t mean anything.
Mouse.
It was a pointless test. Brad knew himself, he knew what kind of employee he was. He’d filled in the test as quickly as possible, not overthinking the questions too much, confident it would reveal what he already knew: that he was ruthless, a real killer, someone who got the job done with no sentimentality at all.
Mouse.
He reread the profile. This couldn’t be right. It was a mistake, a miscalculation.
Humble. Respectful. Honest. A real team player.
Humble, sure, he was never one to brag. There was no need to; better to stay under the radar and make his way to the top quietly. The ones who bragged always fell further, harder. Respectful, maybe. Was it respect that made him manipulate people the way he did? Surely not. Honest—yes, this one was true. He’d always been candid about his goals, however nefarious they might seem to others. He’d never hidden his desire for money, for power, for control.
A real team player. He almost scoffed aloud at the paper. What team player? He was in this for himself.
Except…
Except, a voice in his head that sounded like his brother said, you didn’t kill the pig. You begged me not to kill the game. You love the game, just as you love them.
He pushed the thought away. No. No, this was not who he was. And he would prove it. He just needed some time to form an attack plan, to regain the power his brother had stolen from him. He would save the game, not out of love, but to show his brother he could, that he was wrong about it being time to kill the pig.
He queued up a couple of videos. A mouse getting swooped up by an owl, its sharp talons digging into the mouse’s flesh. A mouse being attacked by a cat, the cat swatting the mouse around like it’s nothing more than a toy. A mouse being devoured whole by a snake. Slowly, as he watched the videos, a sense of calm came over him.
He would not be devoured so easily.
*
He turns twenty-seven, somehow. He didn’t know if he’d make it this far. But he has a job and a boyfriend and a house he bought himself and all is well.
Except for those days when it isn’t well.
He feels nothing. A dark curtain has fallen over his eyes and he feels nothing at all. Not for his house. Not for his work. Not for his boyfriend, who tries and tries to get him to smile, to laugh. The light simply isn’t there. It’s funny—all this time he had wanted to dull his feelings, to make himself cold and careless. And now he is, and he wants nothing more than to feel. The absence is so much emptier than he thought it would be.
In that absence, he turns again to shock sites. This time not to dull his senses, but to feel. To feel anything at all, even if that feeling is disgust or fear. And it takes a lot, this time, to feel anything. Simple car crashes don’t do it. He has to get into the spicier stuff. Extreme gore. Images of botched surgeries. Of mutilated bodies. He watches drug cartel executions. Watches Cannibal Holocaust with his boyfriend, who walks out of the room in disgust halfway through. They fight about it later, about Brad’s disgusting little habit. It’s not really what the fight is about, but they both need the smokescreen to avoid talking about the real problems.
He doesn’t feel anything until the break-up. And then it’s like a dam breaks and he feels so much. All the pain comes rushing out. He drowns in it and he wants nothing more than to return to that non-feeling state. He wants to rip out his guts. He wants to take a knife and slice the skin from his face, to be flayed like that saint—who was it? Saint Bartholomew, that’s right. Patron saint of tanners and butchers. Would that he were a butcher, that he had the strength for that. To sink his knife into the flesh of lesser animals.
All he can do is weep.
*
He wasn’t entirely surprised when it all came crashing down for Jo. He’d warned her about attaching herself to Zack, after all. Still, he couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. It was his own weakness that had driven her into Zack’s arms. If he’d just been stronger, if he’d killed the pig… Sure, MQ would have died and Jo would have been out of a job, but at least it would have been his own doing. It would have been a cleaner kill. Not the mess it was now.
He tried to find a way to pin it all on Zack, he really did. But Jo had really been incredibly stupid and Zack incredibly smart. There was no paper trail, nothing to trace her bad decisions back to his brother. He was disappointed. He really thought he’d taught her better than that.
And then a plan began to form. A plan to not only save Jo, but save his reputation. Be the killer shark he knew he was.
*
He is thirty-three and he watches Faces of Death for the first time. It had been on his list for a long while, but he’d avoided it until now for one reason: the animal deaths. All the other stuff—the faked snuff films, the autopsies, the humans attacked by animals—that he could take. But somehow (no, not somehow, he knew exactly why), the sight of an animal dying is too much. Yet when a friend of a friend of a colleague hooks him up with a battered VHS copy of the film, he can’t resist.
The film wastes no time getting into it, one of the very first sections being about dog fights. He wants to close his eyes, but his father’s voice rings in his ear and he forces himself to watch. Then, more animals killing animals: quick shots of snakes and insects feasting on smaller creatures. This, he finds he can take, the animals shown far enough removed from his beloved Kate. The scene changes, and it’s a rooster being beheaded by a stoic-looking woman wielding an axe. It’s grim, but he can’t help but chuckle lightly at the narrator saying he’d prefer to be a vegetarian. Yeah. You and me both, bud.
The scene changes again to a slaughterhouse. Brad pauses the video immediately. Every cell in his body is telling him to stop, to turn the video off, but then he hears his brother’s mocking laugh and he unpauses the film. The movie does not shy away from anything, showing the slaughterhouse in its full gory glory. He feels sick, but hypnotised at the same time, unable to look away. It’s the casual way with which a worker breaks a skull in half. It’s all that meat, nothing but pink flesh filling the screen. It’s the way the organs slither.
He watches that entire section, then runs to the bathroom to throw up.
*
Prison was surprisingly easy. A mere eight months of climbing the social order, pretending to be a model prisoner, and before he knew it he was out again. First thing he did was call some industry contacts—poke around, get a feel for what his options were. The results were… lacking. Of course he knew no company was itching to hire a former felon, but he’d had a good reputation before prison, and he’d assumed at least someone would be willing to make that sacrifice if it meant getting a big hitter like Brad. But nothing. Nada. The only small joy was hearing the hints of fear in the voices of those he called. At least his reputation as a shark was solid. Still, no job. That was a problem.
And then Carol came calling.
His first instinct was to scoff and tell her no. A janitor? Him? The lowest of the low, at his old company no less? It’d be a humiliation. But the more he mulled it over, the more he saw an opportunity. A challenge to sink his teeth into. And so he said yes.
He’d changed, he told everyone. He was a reformed man. Never mind that he technically had taken the fall for someone else and hadn’t done anything wrong at all. Nobody needed to know that detail. He needed to protect his reputation, after all. Thankfully, Jo had good reason to keep her mouth shut. She had genuinely reformed, it seemed. She’d taken his advice to heart and attached herself to someone powerless and weak.
There was a part of him that ached when he saw her, though he would never admit it to anyone, not even himself. He distracted himself by focusing on his goal: to claw his way back to the top. Because he would do it. He’d have to be careful, though. Luckily, his new role as janitor meant he was practically invisible to most people, and a nuisance at best to David. That was fun, fucking with the other man’s head. Made him think of the old days, before prison.
Finding Rachel was a surprise. He’d never really thought about her much, her being a tester and all, but the more time he spent with her, the more he saw an opportunity. He knew her type: all bark, no bite, a lot of big words without the conviction to put them into action. She was the sort that thinks posting long rants about fictional characters was activism, but you’d never see her at a demonstration or rally. All that meant Rachel was the ideal target. She was weak-willed and gullible and more than anything, in need of a strong hand to guide her. And oh, he’d guide her, alright. He’d guide her right to where he wanted her to be.
*
He starts watching more videos of animals killing each other. Starts with insects, because they’re easier. They don’t look like his Kate, look almost alien, and more importantly, they don’t scream when they’re killed. At least not audibly. He moves on to fish, which is fine too. Moves on to birds, which are a little harder to watch, as they do make noises. Then mammals, and this is the hardest part. They’re just so… like her. He watches a lion rip out the throat of a zebra and instantly he’s transported back to that day, back to that dimly lit barn, the smell of straw and blood fresh in his nose. He nearly turns the video off. What is he even doing? What is he hoping to accomplish?
He thinks of her, his sweet little Kate. Thinks of the pain she must’ve felt. He’d watched that day on repeat in his head for over twenty years. The glint of the knife. The fear in her eyes. She’d known what was happening, he is sure of it. She’d seen it coming.
And he’d let it happen.
He shakes his head, trying to repel the memories. This is what it’s about. It’s about taking that memory and moulding it into something he could think back on without crying. He turns back to the video. He can do this. Just like with the other shock sites, he can dull his senses.
He presses play on the video, and he watches.
*
Rachel was so easy to corrupt, it was almost laughable. No, not almost—it is laughable. He couldn’t help but smile whenever he managed to subtly push her into the direction of more and more exploitative money-making schemes. That isn’t to say there weren’t some compromises—unfortunately, Dana was more than happy to help her girlfriend remember that it was Rachel who was really the Head of Monetization. No matter. They still made money hand over fist. Brad was still back where he wanted to be, partnership or no.
And it was… fine. It was all fine.
Thing was, once he’d gotten used to this familiar-yet-new situation, it became boring. Crushingly boring. He’d gone from the lowest of the low to being back in power in record time, but it just didn’t feel as powerful as it once had. In fact, he felt rather like a lobster slowly being cooked. The problem was, now that Rachel had proved that even she could make a million dollars, it became clear to him that anyone could make a million dollars at Mythic Quest. It was simply too big to fail.
He thought about his brother, wondered what he would do.
Kill the pig.
Sure. He could do that. He could destroy MQ. Fill the pig with gold until it bursts, entrails slithering out like they had in that movie. He just… didn’t want to. For some reason. For a lot of reasons, most of which he’d rather die than admit to. Still, something had to change or he would boil to death.
And he sure as hell wasn’t a fucking lobster.
It was Dana, in the end, who provided an out. Of course it was Dana. She’d always stuck out to him more than Rachel. There was something about her, a certain air of I-don’t-give-a-shit that made her so much more palatable than Rachel’s constant need for attention.
Dana had no real power, he knew that. Not yet, anyway. But he would guide her, like he had guided Rachel. Those two lovebirds. He had corrupted one, he could do the same again.
He smiled. He was no mouse, no shark, no lesser animal at all. He was the butcher with his knife and he would carve Mythic Quest into pieces if he had to.
*
He is forty-one and David asks what brings him joy. He doesn’t have to think about it.
“Predator-prey videos,” he says.