It never ended well for me, as I always lost, but today felt different. It had been six months since the last visitors and then there had been two of them. I hadn't stood a chance and it had been a near thing that I had even survived. As it was I had been unable to walk for a month and my broken ribs had made my ordeal last well into the winter.
I didn't care about the beating I would receive though. What was happening was wrong and, Creator help me, I'd never stop fighting out against it!
In the here and now though I relished the feel of bludgeoning in the face of the man I straddled on the floor. With every strike of my fist and corresponding splatter of blood I felt a small retribution of revenge for all the times before, when it had been me being hit and kicked about on the floor.
The men who came to visit my mother almost got as much satisfaction out of beating me up as they did from playing around with my mother. That thought spurred me on to greater depths of hatred and I grasped the man's head and smashed it backward against the floor repeatedly.
Dimly, through the blood wrath that clouded my mind, I heard my name being called and the feel of someone tugging at my shoulder.
"Rollan! Rollan stop!"
Numbly, I lifted my head to meet my mother's eyes. She was down on her knees beside me. At her urging I let go of the man, who lay still on the floor beneath me.
Her face bound up with worry, my mother began feeling at the man's throat, in search of a pulse. She brought her hand, now wet with the man's blood, away from his throat with a shocked gasp, "You killed him!"
I should feel something at that knowledge, but so help me I didn't. In fact I felt completely empty of caring about anything.
One thing I did know, though, was that I was glad this man was dead. He deserved to die. All of his kind did.
I heard a noise at the door behind me and then my father's voice screeched out, "What have you done, boy?"
Bitterly I spoke into the silence that followed, "What you should have done years ago!"
I started to turn to face whatever abuse he might deal out, but I wasn't prepared for the sudden jerk on my shirt by my mother or her deafening screams into my face, "You fool! Look at what you've done! You've messed up everything! Now they'll kill all of us!"