He remains composed, but I sense raw emotion bubbling just under the surface. Is he going to crack? I want to see this bastard’s pain, want to see him hurt. He stops speaking, closes his eyes, takes a breath, and then continues.

“It was pretty early on, I suppose. You remember what it was like in the early days when we thought there wasn’t really a problem and that the streets were full of copycat vigilantes fighting just because everyone else was? Before we knew that people like you were actually changing? Back in the days before we all got too scared to even look at each other? Remember?”

He automatically looks at me for a response, but he doesn’t get one.

“Anyway, like I said, it was a Friday night. We’d just finished eating, and I was watching the news on TV, hearing about how bad everything was starting to get. My wife was in the kitchen, arguing with Keisha, our seventeen-year-old, about going out. She was going through the whole protective mother routine, you know? Telling her how she didn’t like her going into town on weekends anyway, but especially not then with all the trouble going on… you get the picture. Now I’m sitting there with my feet up, trying to block out the noise and concentrate on the TV, but it’s getting louder and louder in there. Keisha’s shouting at Jess, Jess is shouting at Keisha, then Keisha’s shouting back again, and I’m just staring at the screen, wishing they’d both shut up…”

His voice trails off again, and in the sudden silence I remember all the TV and kid-oriented arguments that used to grind me down in my dead-end former life. I check myself quickly. Am I identifying with this fucker? Maybe that’s what he wants? This is probably just more calculated bullshit to try to get me on his side.

“The shouting gets louder and louder,” he says, “and I hear the back door swing open, then slam shut. I think that’s it, that Keisha’s stormed out, but then I realize I can still hear both their voices. Then I hear a crash and one of them starts screaming, then a thump and another crash. And then all the screaming stops.”

He looks straight at me. There are tears rolling down his cheeks. He wipes them away with his sleeve.

“I get up and start walking toward the kitchen, and there’s this guy just standing there in the middle of the room with his back to me, both my girls lying at his feet. I know they’re dead as soon as I see them. He’s got a baseball bat in his hand, and there’s blood dripping off the end of it. I can only see Keisha’s legs, but Jess is lying on her back, her head just a yard or so from where I’m standing, and her face… Christ, there’s nothing left of it, like her whole skull’s been caved in. Just a dark, bloody hole where that beautiful face used to be…

“Now our house was just a small, modest place-narrow, middle of the block, you know the type? I start backing away from the kitchen, praying the killer’s not gonna see me. I’m halfway across the living room when he starts to move. We had a closet under the stairs with one of those slatted louver doors. I drop down to my hands and knees, crawl behind the sofa to the closet, then shut myself inside. And the worst thing is, when I get in there I’ve still got a clear view of everything. I see the man step over my wife’s body and walk into the living room. Bastard was crying like a baby. I can’t even remember what he looked like now. I just remember him wailing and sobbing like it was him that had just found his family dead. I reckon the Change had just hit him, you know? It was like he was regretting what he’d done, like he was trying to work out what he was and come to terms with it. Tell me, Danny, was it like that for you?”

I think about the nervous panic and confusion I felt immediately after killing Harry, but I don’t tell him. Mallon wipes his eyes again and continues.

“Anyway, after a while he started to calm down. He sat down in my seat like he owned the place and watched my TV. Even helped himself to a couple cans of my beer from the fridge. He stayed there for hours, and I stayed shut in the closet, just like you’re stuck in here now. Except you don’t have to look at the battered bodies of the people you loved most in the world, do you?”

A trace of bitterness has crept into his voice, but I still don’t react. I’m just wondering how long this pathetic sob story’s going to go on.

“Eventually he just got up and left. Didn’t even look around the rest of the house. He just upped and went, and I didn’t have the balls to stop him or try and fight back. I wanted to stay there with my family, but I couldn’t, not when I saw what he’d done to them both.”

If they were Unchanged, they had to die. Simple as that. I’m on the verge of telling him as much when he starts speaking again.

“Like I said,” he continues, a little more composed now, “it’s nothing you haven’t heard before. But after it happened I decided your kind wasn’t going to get away with it, and I went out looking for revenge. Hard to believe when you look at me, but I went out onto the streets, looking for trouble. Wasn’t long before I realized it wasn’t working. Got myself mixed up in all kinds of nasty business. I never killed anyone, but I came close to dying a few times… You can imagine what it was like. I latched on to a group of vigilantes. A couple of times things got really bad, and you know why? Because people thought we were like you! They saw us trying to take a stand and fight back, and they thought we were the Haters! And then after a couple of weeks I stopped and took a step back from it all and I realized they were right. There was hardly any difference between us and people like you. And I thought about the man who killed my girls and how he cried, and I understood. He didn’t want to kill them, he thought he had to do it.”

Joseph gets up from his seat and crosses over to the window, making sure he stays well out of my limited reach. He stands on tiptoes and looks down.

“And that leads me to the main part of my sermon this morning.” He grins. “Pay attention, Danny, you need to listen carefully to this! You see, when I stopped trying to fight, life started to get better again. That might sound like bullshit to you, but it’s true. I was already resigned to the fact that things were never going to be easy again and that nothing I could do would bring Jess and Keisha back, but I realized that revenge wasn’t the answer. You can’t fight fire with fire, you know what I’m saying?”

He moves away from the window and paces the length of the short room.

“Then I found the people here, people who’d all reached the same conclusion as me. And I realized that it doesn’t matter what made any of this happen, all that’s important now is putting a stop to it before it’s too late. So that’s what we’re doing. We’re trying to end the cycle. I think of us like a firebreak, you know what I mean? When they’re trying to stop a forest fire spreading, they sometimes burn a strip of land farther ahead. Then, when the fire finally reaches it, there’s nothing left to burn and it dies out. We’re like that. We’ve all done our share of fighting. Our battles have been fought. So when people like you reach us with your hate, there’s nothing left to burn. We’re putting the fire out. Stopping things from getting any worse.”

He sits down again and stares straight at me. What’s he thinking? Does he actually believe any of the crap he’s just been spouting? I look back into his dark brown eyes, and all I can think is that I want him dead like I’ve wanted all the rest of them dead. But there is a slight difference here. All the others I’ve killed looked back at me with hate in their eyes, but not Mallon. There is something different about him. Is there any truth in any of what he’s just said, or is it total bullshit? Is he just preying on me? Wearing me down and fucking with my mind before he goes in for the kill? He’s probably trying to catch me off guard. As soon as I lower my defenses, he’ll attack.