Alabama Abattoir

The handcuffs bite into my wrists as I count my heartbeat in the dark.

Fourteen seconds. The metal scrapes bone as I twist my right hand at an angle that should be impossible. The cuff slips over my thumb joint—Jesus, that hurts—and my hand pulls free. Both hands loose now, fourteen seconds from locked to free.

Down from thirty-eight when I started seven weeks ago.

I strip the blackout fabric from my eyes. The storage unit materializes around me: concrete floor, rust-stained walls, the permanent smell of motor oil and decay. My knees ache from kneeling. February in Birmingham isn't bitter cold, but the concrete pulls heat from my body through denim that's already worn thin.

I check my watch. Five-eighteen AM. Time to go.

The handcuffs go back in the duffel bag. Practice cuffs, three different models. Zip ties next time. Then rope. I'm methodical about this. Every restraint method I can think of, practiced until muscle memory takes over and panic has nowhere to live.

My mother's voice drifts through the darkness, faint as cigarette smoke: You're getting good at suffering, baby.

I'm not suffering. I'm preparing.

There's a difference.

I lock the storage unit behind me and walk to my car through the industrial pre-dawn. The steel mills glow orange in the distance, perpetual fires that turn Birmingham's sky gray even when the sun tries. This city is all rust and exhaustion, built for function rather than beauty. Foundries and fabrication plants, everything coated in particulate matter that never quite washes off.

It feels like home.

I've been here just over a year. Long enough to become invisible. Long enough to watch.

The Desert Sun Shuttle Services uniform hangs in my car's back seat, waiting for today's shift. Dowdy blue polyester, name tag that says MARLEY in faded letters, the kind of outfit that makes middle-aged men's eyes slide right past you. Desert Sun covered the whole South—they paid by the hour to move trucks between yards, dealerships, repair shops. No cargo, no freight, just empty rigs that needed to be somewhere else. Bottom of the pay scale, but work was never hard to find when you'd take what other drivers wouldn't. Perfect camouflage.

Two kills have taught me the value of invisibility.

Dale Hutchins died almost two years ago, strangled with his own CB antenna wire at a weigh station outside Phoenix. Eugene Thibodaux dissolved in his own acid thirteen months ago at a K&B Chemical facility in Louisiana. Both dead. Both deserved it. Both killed with their own methods because that felt right, felt just, felt like poetry written in diesel and blood.

And I felt electric after each one. God-like. Alive in ways I'd never been alive before.

Not grief. Not justice.

Power.

The training isn't about grief anymore. I know that now. It's about capability. About becoming something more dangerous than the things I hunt.

I drive to Iron City Fuel Plaza as the sun fails to rise behind Birmingham's permanent overcast. The plaza sprawls across five acres of cracked asphalt: diesel pumps, truck wash, diner, convenience store, showers that smell like mildew and despair. The aluminum siding is stained with decades of exhaust. Everything here is functional, transactional, temporary.

The lot lizards work the perimeter after dark. During the day they sleep in cheap motels or don't sleep at all. I've learned to listen to them the way you'd listen to canaries in a coal mine—they know which tunnels are poisoned long before the air turns black.