The Pounding Rain (Prologue)

             The Pounding Rain (Prologue)

(This is my own novel I've been working on for more than a year, and I decided to start posting it to my blog, or I might create a new blog just for this book. Enjoy!)

   There were about 8 or 9 of them. They came on the Third of March, at One in the morning. Two held him down, while his wife was raped, and had every major bone in her body broken, before her face was slashed, and her throat cut. His two children were taken outside, where they were beaten with whips, and sticks, then drowned in a barrel of water, one after the other. Their screams and cries were clearly audible inside the house, and he tried to break himself free, screaming his family's names over and over again, before he was slashed, and stabbed by large bowie knives and switchblades.

   He felt the knives entering his writhing body, cleaving through flesh and sinew, till he could feel the blade of each knife striking his bone. 

   After a few minutes, which felt like the eternity of Heaven and Hell, they stopped, drew their knives out of him, wiping his blood from their arms and faces, laughed, and set about ransacking the entire house.

   They took the ring he'd given his wife for their wedding, her jewelry, his entirely precious gold watch, his horses, anything that was worth something, and went outside, while one of them splashed oil over part of the floors and the walls, and set a match to the thin trail of oil leading outside.

   The flames erupted, and licked the wallpaper, with a growl reminiscent of a lion being starved.

   The man heard them riding away, and swore to himself that he would survive, if only to revenge himself on those who had killed, tortured, robbed, raped, and drowned his family.
   He had to decide quickly on whether he should desert his dead family or not, but he knew in his heart that he had no other choice. He started crawling, and he could feel the edges of his open wounds dragging across the hard, wooden floor, and he screamed, screamed in agony, in pain, and in a rage which temporarily lent him inhuman strength, and for a few moments, he couldn't even feel the burning pain, only a rage; a rage so great that he imagined that he would die with the intensity of it. He could feel the fire stalking him across the floor.
   Grab a breath. If you breathe you're alive.
   With each precious breath, he could feel his chest, wet with crimson, sticky blood, rising and falling. He crawled slowly out the open front door, and to the edge of the small clearing where his house stood, and watched the house cremating his loved ones.
   Sean McCall's stars faded to black, and he fell into merciful oblivion.