Eric pulled his father into his arms. I watched as he threw his head back and screamed. Uncle Bill’s eyes were wide open and his chest housed a fuck-off hole, blood pouring to the ground.
Gone.
Charlie was bent over Uncle Trevor, his forehead pressed against his father’s. Charlie’s arms shook as Uncle Trevor stared unseeing at the ceiling. Charlie shook him, but there was no life left in his body.
Gone.
Vinnie stood over his dad. His shoulder-length blond hair was slicked with red. His hands and white shirt were coated with his father’s blood. “Dad,” he said, his voice barely loud enough to break through the ringing in my ears. “Dad! Get up!” he shouted. But when I looked down, Uncle Winston was in the fucking worst state of them all. Half his head was missing; another bullet had shattered his cheek, collapsing his face. “Dad, fucking get up!” Vinnie shouted, his cheeks reddening and his neck bulging with veins.
Vinnie crouched down and lifted Uncle Winston in his arms. “Save him,” he said to me. It was the thing to make me fucking slam back into the here and now. “Artie. Save him for me. Please.”
“I … I …” I couldn’t fucking finish off my words. Charlie was suddenly beside me. I looked at my cousin, then followed his blank eyes. My shocked stare locked on Freddie, who was carrying my dad.
“He’s still got a pulse!” Freddie said urgently, streams of tears cutting track marks through the blood on his cheeks. “Arthur, he’s still fucking alive! Quick!”
Like my heart had been stabbed with a shot of adrenaline, I grabbed my dad and ran for the van. “Get them and let’s go!” I shouted. I laid Dad down on the bench seat and didn’t even look up as my brothers put their dads’ bodies in the back too.
“Fucking drive!” I shouted to the driver and pressed my hand over my dad’s chest to try and stop the blood. “Freddie, ring the doc. Tell him he needs to be at the church in the next five minutes or I’ll fucking slit his throat.” My dad’s face was white, the blood draining from his body. I wanted him to open his eyes. I wanted him to speak and say that this shitshow was going to be okay. But he stayed silent. He fucking stayed silent.
I looked up and saw my brothers holding their dads.
“They’re gone,” Charlie said, his voice sounding like a fucking scream in the van. “They’ve all fucking gone.”
“Artie,” Vinnie said, holding his dad to his chest. Half of Uncle Winston’s skull was missing. Those Red bastards had taken half his fucking head. “He’s going cold. Dad’s going cold.”
Eric was staring at nothing, lost to his shock and grief. He held his dad in his arms, but didn’t have no fucking words.
I didn’t know what the fuck to do. They were all waiting for me, looking at me, and I didn’t know what the fuck to do!
The van stopped, and the driver opened the door. Another car pulled up. I grabbed my gun, ready to fucking fire, but the doctor stepped out. His eyes went huge when we left the van, our old men in our arms.
“He’s still alive,” I said to the doc and ran for the front door. I slammed through and rushed my old man to his bedroom, and the doc and the nurse he brought immediately started working on him.
They stripped him of his clothes and washed him down to see the damage. Freddie stood beside me as all my old man’s bullet wounds were bared. Hole after hole littered his body from where those cunts had shot through our entire firm. My dad … our uncles …
A loud, shrill scream ripped through the church. It was one of the girls. Uncontrollable screams and cries and sobs drifted down the hallway. “I need to operate,” the doctor we paid a fuck-ton of money to said to me.
“Then fucking operate!” I shouted, and Freddie backed me away.
“He needs a hospital. I can’t do it here.”
I pointed in the doc’s face, close to strangling the fucker. “Here. No fucking hospitals. No fucking police. You’ll do it here. And you’ll fucking save him, or I’ll kill you myself.”
The nurse ran to the car, pushing the scared-as-shit doctor into motion. The doctor turned and started readying my dad for surgery. The nurse came running back through, and they got to work on my old man.
“It’s not sanitary,” the nurse whispered to the doctor. “This bed isn’t sterile.”
The doctor cut me a quick glance. “It doesn’t matter. We just have to bloody save him.”
“Artie.” Freddie put a hand on my chest. “We need to leave them to it. They’ll work better if we aren’t in the room.”
My feet ground to a halt as I watched them cut my old man open, wires and tubes being stuck into him. As much as I wanted to stay, I let Freddie pull me into the hallway. He guided me toward the living room and opened the door. It was empty.
He thrust a whisky into my hand. “Drink it. Bloody drink it, Artie!” I did as Freddie said, but I felt something shifting inside me. Something locking up and turning to fucking steel. Like whatever oxygen I had in my body was being smothered, leaving only death in its wake.
Death. Everything was fucking death.
I didn’t know how much whisky I drank. I didn’t know how much time passed, but my brothers finally entered the room. I looked at Charlie and Vinnie and Eric. Their faces were fucking devastated. Charlie shook his head at me, and it hit me all over again.
They were dead. All my uncles. They were fucking dead. The leaders of the Adley firm, gunned down in cold blood by the Russians.
“Uncle Alfie?” Eric asked.
“Getting operated on,” Freddie answered for me. Dad was practically Freddie’s dad too. Had been for the longest fucking time. I lifted my head and looked at Freddie. His hand shook as he lifted his whisky to his mouth.
I heard footsteps behind us, and the girls walked slowly inside. Vera and Ronnie were managing to hold their shit together. Betsy’s face was wet with tears, her skin pale. Her arms were wrapped round herself. Charlie pulled his sister into his arms, keeping her close.
“What now?” Vera asked, and I felt a strange kind of fire igniting inside me. A fucking wildfire that had managed to spread out to the rest of my body before Vera had even stopped speaking.
“Artie?” I whipped my head around to see my grandma in the doorway. She kept her head high, her expression like fucking stone. Grandma was the hardest fucker I’d ever met. Seventy years old but only looked fifty. Grey hair, but styled well. She was dressed in smart black trousers and a white blouse. I shook my head. Her body flinched like she’d just taken a bullet herself. My dad and Uncle Trevor were her sons, but our other uncles were practically her kids too.
Grandma kept her shit together. Then, “I need to see them.” She turned and walked down the hallway. As she retreated, my hands started shaking. Not from fear or shock. But from the motherfucking venom that had filled my bones down to the fucking marrow. At the memory of our family dead on the ground, their blood seeping onto the filthy warehouse floor.
Kings taken out like animals.
I felt like I was being remade and reformed, with the fire from hell itself replacing my blood. I felt numb. Felt any fucking humanity I had left burn away to ashes, and I knew the moment I gave my soul to the fucking devil.
Blood.