The Relic Runner Origin Story Box Set Ernest Dempsey (top 10 books of all time txt) 📖

"Are you sure?"

Jamie had never been more uncertain of anything in his life. And for the first time he could remember, he lied to his little brother. "I'm sure."

Four

Brown’s Ferry

Nathaniel Collier stood erect in front of the stove, watching the sirloin steak sizzle in the frying pan. The morning sun hung over the horizon through the kitchen window to his right. Rays of light poured through and glistened over dust motes floating in the air.

Nate worked his hands deliberately back and forth in a methodical rhythm, running a kitchen knife across the honing steel. The shallow grinding sound of the blade against the rod echoed through the kitchen with only the intermittent songs of birds interrupting from the giant oak tree outside.

He took pleasure in the act, the knife soliciting a grim smile as he continued to hone it to a razor's edge.

Systems, Nate believed, were the only thing that separated civilization from chaos. He reveled in systems, fed off them. He'd approached everything he did in the military with the same precision he used with the knife in his hands.

The men on his team had called him reckless on occasion. They'd seen him cut down countless enemies with his machine gun as if he merely utilized it like a scythe. To him, it was a precision instrument more like a scalpel. He'd never argued the point with the others. They preferred their rifles, eliminating targets with a single shot or a short burst.

When it came to clearing out a room, though, they didn't complain when he took out potential threats by the dozens.

His mind wandered to the group of young terrorist recruits he'd wiped out while deployed in the Middle East. The others thought Nate didn't hear their comments or notice their disgust at the act.

The fact was, those boys were a threat. They were extremists in training. To let them live would have been a danger.

But something else awakened in him that day, a slow burning fire that had been smoldering in the depths of his soul since he was a boy.

Nate looked over at the steak. He set down the knife on a bamboo cutting board, picked up a pair of tongs next to it, and flipped the steak over onto the uncooked side. The meat sizzled louder as the flesh touched the hot skillet. Juices bubbled all around it in the olive oil he'd sprinkled in earlier.

The smell drifted through the air and trickled through his nostrils, filling them with the intoxicating aroma.

He glanced out the window at the field beyond the gravel driveway. Rows of corn filled ten acres. Beyond, forests surrounded the entire property—a natural barrier from the outside world. He owned more than one hundred acres, much of which he'd used as his private hunting grounds.

His mind returned to the grand scheme he'd laid out, the one rooted in something he'd always been denied—except by the military.

Even as a young man, Nate was consumed by the act of taking a life. It started when he was only thirteen, when a neighbor's dogs continued to wander into their yard—barking incessantly.

His father—a drunk and a gambler—was too inept to handle the problem. And Nate's mother had left the two of them when he was only seven.

Nate found one of his father's guns, a 9mm Ruger P89, and took care of the issue on a dark night when thunderstorms rolled through town. The thunder, he rationalized, would mute the sound of the gun's discharge.

He'd been right. The neighbors never suspected a thing, though they came by once and asked if Nate had seen the animal. He lied, of course, having disposed of the evidence in a dumpster behind a local watering hole up the street.

After killing the animal, Nate felt something, something that had never graced him before. It was a strange sense of joy, but more than that, he felt powerful. He could determine the fate of a living thing. And he wanted more of that feeling.

At first, he turned to hunting as the outlet for his newfound passion. His father's old hunting rifle had been collecting dust for years while the old man sat on the couch in a drunken haze, earning money with a government paycheck for as long as Nate could remember.

With his dad plastered to the sofa, Nate started taking the pickup truck out into the hills where he could hunt small game. He was a large boy for his age and knew the local cops wouldn't pull him over if he didn't break any laws—other than driving without a license.

He'd take out squirrels and rabbits in the early days, but later he moved up to larger game. Wild turkey, deer, and hogs were among those animals he sought most, though the turkeys didn't do much for him. They were dumb animals, easy to kill. Too easy, in his mind.

Nate leaned more toward the hogs and deer for his killing preference. Most people who enjoyed deer hunting loved it for the serenity of a chilly fall morning in a tree stand, the thrill of spotting their quarry and getting off the perfect shot. Some, Nate heard, looked at it in an almost spiritual way, the way the Indigenous Tribes did long ago.

Not Nate.

His enjoyment of hunting deer derived from taking the life of something innocent and pure. But with every kill, he wanted more. On one occasion, he'd managed to kill several in a single outing, far more than was permitted by the authorities. He recalled seeing the bodies strewn out on the leaves in a forest, and how that sight had given him so much satisfaction—but hardly slaked his lust for bloodshed.

He flipped the steak again and once more the sizzle sparkled through the room.

Hogs were a joy to slaughter for other reasons. They were wild, untamed, much like the deer, but they were also capable of aggression. Dirty, vile beasts, Nate enjoyed the thrill of killing them at closer range with his father's .45