The family that preys together…- 10

One floor above where his sons were planning and plotting Gerard sat in his study watching and listening. “Finally,” he murmured under his breath.

He had no qualms about spying on them. That had started years ago, soon after his wife’s untimely death, when he had deemed them old enough to be trained for the game. Crispin had been twenty-three, Bryant just twenty. Both boys had known there was something about their parents that was deeply hidden from them but it still came as a shock the day that Gerard sat them down and explained about the game.------

“It was your mother’s idea actually,” he told them. “You know she had no tolerance for what she called the ‘idiocy of the masses’ when it came to the small, annoying things we’re all faced with day in and day out perpetrated by them.”

“Like able-bodied people who take handicapped spaces,” Crispin said, catching on immediately.

“Precisely. Then, one day she came home to rant and rave at me about something of that order that had gotten her hackles up. ‘I wish we could just kill them all and be done with it,’ she said. And thus the game was born.”

Gerard paused, studying his sons carefully for their reactions. After their initial horror that he and their mother had been involved in murder, many murders in point of fact, they seemed to become intrigued with the idea.

“It started as a sort of joke,” Gerard continued. “We’d vent our frustrations by planning how such and such a person could be done away with without our being caught. Then, as with all such things, we decided to test our theories. After our first success there was no stopping us. We didn’t confine ourselves to just St. Cloud. Too many people going missing would obviously raise red flags within the police community. Minneapolis/St. Paul became our hunting ground, as well as smaller cities in the state when we’d go there on business trips.” When Bryant raised an eyebrow at that Gerard said, “Real business trips, which you know I took several of a year.”

“Now you want us to carry on in your footsteps,” Crispin said cautiously.

Gerard smiled. “I do. Can you think of anything in life more challenging than ridding the world of those idiots that most people find annoying? And doing it successfully.”

And so his sons had become his students and then his partners. Finally he had ‘resigned’ and left the game to them, although he did very occasionally go out on his own when the urge became too strong. So he understood exactly what was bothering Crispin and why. Now all he had to do was decide whether he would allow them to go ‘public’ as Bryant had put it.