Russell:

I was standing right beside my father the night he was murdered, his blood wet on my hands as he slid to the ground. By the time the mugs got there, the lynch mob had melted away: turned into faceless, nameless voices that scattered in the misty New Orleans midnight. On the surface it looked like just another violent pro-death rally, spurred by radical activists. That was the way the mugs saw it. They said that people like to commit their evil acts in the dark—it works like an eraser, covers your tracks, destroys the evidence. When the world hides in black velvet, good people forget what separates them from the monsters.

Problem is we’re all really monsters. And it doesn’t matter if it’s day or night. Evil flows through the streets of this city like a tidal wave, steady and constant.

But I didn’t know that back then. I was only seventeen.

I was too young to see the irony behind a family of One-Timers holding the key to resurrection. Didn’t realize that one of my ancestors passed down a legacy that none of us wanted—a trillion-dollar empire that went against everything we believed in.

Chaz was convinced that the leader of the rally was one of the elders down at First United Baptist. But the guy had an alibi. Supposedly, he and half the church attended a baptism that night, over at Lake Pontchartrain. Somehow it never seemed strange to the mugs that the water in the bay was about fifty-five degrees that October, or that there were toxic warnings posted all up and down the polluted beachfront.

I guess if you have enough people to stand up for you, it doesn’t matter if you’re guilty or innocent.

The bottom line is my father’s murderers were never caught.

That was the year my father had started training me to take over the business when he was gone. Neither one of us had expected it to happen so soon, although he had gotten plenty of death threats over the years. Sometimes he would laugh and mention one at the dinner table. “You won’t believe the latest ‘Your Life Is History’ letter I got today,” he would say casually, right in between “Would you pass the rice?” and, “Did you boys remember to wash the isolation chamber?” But I could always tell by the look on Mom’s face that it wasn’t a joke, that there really were people out there who hated us enough to kill us. People who pretended to be our friends when they saw us on the street, who smiled and waved during Mardi Gras.

And then, a month before Dad was killed, I saw one of our accusers for myself, up close and all-too-personal. A man wandered into the warehouse one night, after everyone else was gone, when shadows covered the streets and the seductive music from the French Quarter beckoned. I thought he was lost at first, this strange-looking man, his fleshy bald head covered with metal studs, his heavy lidded eyes cloudy and unfocused. He wore a long dark coat, so I couldn’t see him very well, although I sensed a growing tension within him, like expanding muscles were rippling beneath transparent skin. I wondered if he was a suicide cult member, one of those miscreants who gets high on rapid death and resurrection.

Then I overheard him talking to Dad. I guess I shouldn’t say overheard. He wanted me to hear him, looked right at me with those lizard-green eyes, then licked his lips, slow and deliberate.

That’s what I see at night when I can’t sleep. His eyes on me, his slow tongue. A combination of evil and ecstasy flickering on his face like a pornographic movie.

At first he spoke too fast for me to understand, but when he saw me in the doorway he slowed down, enunciated every syllable like he was the teacher and I was the student.

“We gots a problem, Domingue,” he said, using Dad’s surname, like he had a right to talk to him with disrespect. “Resurrection, it ain’t working. Nine times ain’t enough.” His voice sounded like tires rolling over gravel.

“Nine times is all there is,” Dad answered, smooth and calm, as if a soft answer could turn away this demon’s wrath.

“No, there’s always a way to gets more. No matter what ya wants.” Lizard Man shook his head. He leaned forward into the light. Shadows played war games on the crevices in his face. “Tell me, One-Timer, what does ya wants?”

Dad stood silent. Finally he answered, “I’ve got everything I want.”

“Maybe ya does,” the other man said. “But can ya keeps it?”

“Are you threatening me?”

The stranger shrugged.

Dad didn’t say anything. But I had a feeling that he knew what the scumbag was going to say next.

“Nine times, it just ain’t enough for the rest of us—” He paused to smile, to run his tongue over his lips one last time. “But maybe for you, one time ain’t gonna be enough.”

He slid back into the shadows then, a quiet liquid movement, like a poisonous snake slithering off through grassy rocks. He became as invisible as the black night, but the stench of his presence remained. Thick, oily, rancid, the smell of unwashed hair and decaying flesh.

It was the smell of death, and from that day it never left me.

He became my nemesis, this dark creature of the night. I learned later that his name was Neville Saturno and he was addicted to genetic engineering. It was his Achilles heel, the bit in his donkey mouth that some other unknown monster used to move him across the chessboard of my life.

It was too dark, so I couldn’t see him the night my father was killed. But I could smell him. That sugar-sweet smell of rotting flesh filled my senses and blinded me with fear. I know Chaz thought I was brave because I cursed our attackers and cried for help.

But I was only trying to save myself. I didn’t care about Dad or Chaz. I was trying to run away when my father collapsed, when one of his arms got tangled around my feet.

I couldn’t break free.

I panicked in the suffocating black night. I screamed and kicked and cursed until my voice faded to a whisper, until I was the only person left in my collapsing universe.

And sometimes I feel like I’m still trying to break free.