Death Deceivers [English]

2. Death is pathetic

Before he died, Frederick Carmichael swore that death was pathetic. In his eyes, only the weak ended up in early graves, only those who were not brave enough to challenge and cheat death, defying the odds to defeat something as mysterious as an intangible force of nature. This thought arose when Carmichael realized that life never gave him anything easily, and therefore, he would not give himself so easily to death either.

His tragedy began in 1970 with an unpleasant fate called "being born from a very brief love affair with no future." His mother was very young, barely over twenty years of age. She was an unruly girl, or so he was told, and she had a fixation with finding the right man. Of course, Carmichael's father wasn't the right man, given that he left the morning after they spent the night together. No one even knew his name.

His mother gave birth nine months later and cared for him for only three weeks before giving up, getting drunk, and leaving him to his fate in a hotel room so she could elope with another man whose appearance only promised misfortune. He was found by the guests next door after almost two whole days of crying. Luckily, they couldn't find his mother or contact his relatives, so, unsurprisingly, he ended up in an orphanage. That's where it all really started.

Since his mother never named him, one of the orphanage caretakers earned the right to do so and chose sentimentality over anything else. She named him Frederick after the recently deceased owner of the orphanage, and Carmichael was the result of combining his mother's first and last names, Carrie Michaelson. So instead of simply calling him Michaelson, she decided to get creative and merge them to form a completely different last name: Carmichael. It wasn't a name with a spectacular or epic origin like the protagonist of some novel or movie. He was simply Frederick Carmichael.

His childhood was what could be nominated as peculiar. He attended a public school with a low educational level and whose student body only seemed to have the potential to be future convicts. Carmichael, by then, had chosen to call himself only by his last name since he was teased at the orphanage for having the name of the deceased owner. Incoherent logic of children. At school, he was an accomplished and quiet student, deliberately drawing little attention to not become a target for bullies. Until he made the mistake of making eye contact with one.

"Stop acting like a wuss, Carmichael!" A boy with an impish face and a nasty smile from which several teeth were missing yelled at him. "Are you afraid? Do you want your mommy?"

No, he wasn't afraid, and he couldn't want his mother either because he didn't even have one. To tell the truth, back then, he was only worried that the kid would punch him and break his nose since it would just be a huge nuisance to explain to the orphanage caretaker.

Carmichael was not a fan of physical violence. He was well aware of his malnourished and puny physique and never considered himself fit to deal with children who were taller and more robust than him. However, there was something that bothered him, and it was that they made him feel inferior, more than he already believed he was due to his situation. But instead of fighting with closed fists, he decided to be a little smarter and use words, not even aggressions, just something more subtle; lies, flattery, and his favorite, manipulation.