Chris stared at the unopened bottle of whiskey on the table. He quickly counted five different reasons why he shouldn’t open it. Unfortunately, his sobriety was not one of them. This was the second bottle of whiskey that he had stared down in 48 hours. The first one, now-empty, was buried deep in the kitchen trash can as if he were hiding it from someone. His conscience maybe? He certainly wasn’t going to have visitors, he had successfully driven away everyone he loved within a couple years of coming back home.

Home. It was still a foreign concept to Chris. Sure, he was back in the city that he lived in before he joined the Army, and his old friends and family members were nearby, but a lot had happened in the eight years that he had been gone. The soldiers he had fought beside had become his family. Thinking of them often brought a sad smile to his face. They were the ones who understood him best now, but he had left too many of them behind.

As tears blurred his vision, Chris opened the bottle of whiskey. He looked around briefly for a glass before bringing the bottle to his lips. As the liquid burned his throat, he thought about the numbing effect it used to have on him. Now, he was certain that he was going to finish this bottle tonight and still feel the aching need to get back in the field. Chris continued to drink, and thought about how crazy it was that they spent so much time training him to kill and then spent a few hours telling him how to transition back to civilian life. He stood up abruptly and headed to the hall closet. He could spend the next couple of hours playing the blame game, or he could go ahead and get this over with. The night was going to end the same either way.

Standing in the hall, Chris armed himself with various weapons that he pulled out of the closet. He was supposed to have gotten rid of most of this stuff last month. Which was the last time that he had told himself that it was going to be the last time. He paused to take another swig of the whiskey, and looked down with surprise to see that he had reached the end of the bottle. After tossing it aside, he reached up to the top shelf of the closet and brought out his notebook. Scrawled inside were the names of people in the city that he considered dangerous. People that he considered “the enemy.”

As Chris looked through the list of names that he had crossed out over the last couple of years, he felt conflicted. He knew that the killing was an addiction, and that each time he went out there looking for his new enemy that it was wrong. It was a relapse. He was not a soldier anymore, and he was not on a battlefield. But there was another side of him now. A side of him that had been born on the battlefield, and could not be easily quieted just because he no longer wore the uniform.

Chris took one last look around his modest home before heading out into the night. He was aware that he might be walking out of the door for the last time. While he did have the advantage of surprise, there was always a chance that someone on his list would take him out. These were dangerous people after all, and they were always armed and rarely ever alone. That’s what makes a relapse so dangerous, Chris thought as he locked the door, it might be the last thing you ever do.

Written By: SM Grady

© 2018 SM Grady