I came home from a Delta deployment to find my wife in the ICU. Her face… I couldn’t recognize her. The doctor whispered, “Thirty-one fractures. Blunt force trauma. Repeated strikes.” Then I saw them outside her room—her father and his seven sons—smiling like they’d just won something. The detective said, “It’s a family matter. The police can’t touch them.” I looked at the hammer print on her skull and replied, “Good. Because I’m not the police.” “What happened to them… no court could ever judge.”

“Hello, boys,” I said. “Who wants to be number three?”

Felix swung a pistol blindly. I smashed his wrist with the hammer. He howled. Kyle tried to run; I knocked him cold with the handle.

Victor sat in his chair, leveling a gun at me with shaking hands. He fired. Missed. The generator outside died, plunging the cabin into darkness.

“You think you can erase me?” Victor snarled. “I built this town!”

“Walls fall faster when the fire starts inside,” I said.

I knocked the gun from his hand and shattered his wrist. He fell to the floor, sobbing.

“Thirty-one strikes,” I said. “You remember that number?”

“She betrayed me!”

“Count,” I commanded.

I brought the hammer down on the floorboards next to his head. CRACK.
“One.”
I hit the chair leg. CRACK.
“Two.”

I didn’t hit him. I destroyed the world around him, inch by inch, just to let him feel the powerlessness.