The blood formed a dark, hot puddle beneath his back.
Liam lay on the cold asphalt of an East End alley.
He no longer felt pain, only a drowsiness that told him everything was ending.
Breathing was hard.
He closed his eyes, and the memories came.
The boy grew up in a small, dirty flat.
His first memory was not of games, but of the sound of his father Frank coming home drunk.
The smell of cheap beer and cigarettes soaked every corner.
His mom was a thin woman who always seemed to be apologizing for existing.
Liam learned quickly to hide when he heard Frank's heavy steps on the stairs.
Under the bed, in the wardrobe, any place where he couldn't find him.
Frank worked unloading boxes in a warehouse.
He came home with dirty hands and a black mood.
"Useless!" he shouted at his wife while throwing things.
Liam covered his ears, but he couldn't avoid hearing the blows.
That was the routine of his life throughout his childhood and adolescence.
When he turned fifteen, his mom started coughing.
A dry sound that didn't go away.
The neighborhood doctor said she needed medicine and clean air.
Frank laughed when they told him.
"Treatment? With what money?"
The woman got worse every day.
Liam saw her lose weight, her eyes sank.
But Frank kept coming home drunk, kept shouting.
One night, he grabbed her arm with such force that Liam heard the crack.
His mother's scream.....
broke something inside him.
A weeks later on the night of his sixteenth birthday, Frank was snoring drunk on the sofa.
His mom coughed in the bedroom, Liam was in the kitchen, looking at the bread knife.
Old, with the splintered handle.
When he turned his head he could see how Frank murmured something in dreams, "damn bitch do your job right"
It was a curse on his mother
One more of thousands.
However this would be the last.
The boy didn't think.
He walked toward his father and stabbed the knife.
Frank's eyes opened with an expression of surprise.
He tried to speak, but only blood came out of his mouth.
Liam pressed with more force managing to pierce the man's heart.
Which less than a minute later lied dead on the ground.
The silence was absolute.
Liam let go of the knife.
His hands trembled.
He waited to feel remorse, but he only found emptiness.
He hid the body in the river that same night.
After all he knew that to no one it matters even if someone would find the body.
It would only be one more dead man in that infernal neighborhood...
He told his mom that Frank had gone.
She looked at him with those sad eyes that seemed to know everything, but said nothing.
A month later, his mom died in her bed.
She went in silence, as she had lived.
He ended up burying her in an abandoned lot a few blocks away.
He didn't cry.
He had no tears left.
Liam had no money, that's why the landlord ended up kicking him out in a week.
Liam a 16-year-old teenager was alone in the streets of one of the poorest neighborhoods of London.
Only with the clothes he wore and the stained knife.
It was hard.
The first days he slept in parks, until the police ran him off.
Then he found refuge under the bridges of the Thames, where others like him tried to survive.
Hunger was the worst.
A constant pain that clouded the mind.
He learned to look for food in the containers behind the supermarkets, to steal fruits from the stalls when the vendor wasn't looking.
He met others like him.
Old Jack, who had been a soldier, and Mary, who spoke with voices that no one else heard.
The knife became his only valuable possession.
He used it to open cans, to defend himself, to feel safe in the darkness.
Two years passed.
He was eighteen and thinner than ever.
The hunger never went away.
One winter night, cold and hungry, he saw an older lady leaving a market.
She carried a shopping bag.
"The bag," he said, showing the knife.
She got scared. "Please, it's my pension."
He tried to take it from her.
They struggled.
Liam, weak and nervous, pushed her.
The woman stumbled and fell.
Her head hit the curb with a dry noise.
The boy stood staring at her motionless body.
He had killed again.
But this time it felt different...
As much as he tried to ignore it, the remorse and the guilt settled in his heart.
Because of this he didn't see the man who watched from the corner.
Who ran off without making a sound.
The lady was Danny's aunt, a thug known in the area.
The man went to tell him everything hoping that he would be granted a favor for the information.
Danny didn't wait.
Two days later, he found Liam sleeping under Waterloo Bridge.
"You, trash," he said.
His eyes burned with hate.
He took out a gun.
He didn't say anything else.
One shot.
Then another.
Liam fell against the brick wall.
The hot blood ran across his chest.
The cold of the ground was the last thing he felt.
The cold went away.
Suddenly, a horrible heat wrapped him.
It smelled burnt and rotten, like rotten eggs and meat gone bad.
He opened his eyes.
He wasn't in London.
there is no starry sky
Only black rock, with rivers of lava that shone with red light.
The air burned when breathing.
You could hear screams in the distance.
They were more than simple screams
they were howls of suffering
He stood up.
He had no wounds.
He looked at his chest.
There were no bullet holes.
He looked around.
He was in a landscape of ash and bones. Mountains of white bones against a dark sky.
Figures moved in the distance, dragging themselves, screaming.
The heat was unbearable.
He walked a few steps.
His feet sank into the ash.
He saw faces in the distance, faces twisted in perpetual agony.
Some looked at him, but their eyes were empty.
He didn't need anyone to explain anything.
He knew it on the spot.
He knew it when.
he looked at that red sky
he had died.
But he was not sent to heaven.
After a life in the hell of the streets of London, he had awakened in Hell for real.
And worst of all was that he knew he deserved it.