"Judged by Lead" Season One

Chapter 2: Development of the "Code"

Chapter 2

My eyes slowly fluttered open as the insistent buzzing of the alarm sliced through the blissful silence. Groggily, I reached over to slap the snooze button with the familiar habitual motion. Just five more minutes of peaceful respite before the daily grind consumed me once again.

As the fuzzy mental cobwebs cleared, my thoughts drifted back to the vivid nightmare that plagued my slumber. Trapped in a recurring cycle, forced to relive those gut-wrenching final moments from the night my life was shattered into jagged pieces at the tender age of four.

Watching in paralyzed horror as the masked intruders brutalized my mother and sister before my innocent eyes. The silver arc of the blade...the sickening crunch as it cleaved through flesh and bone...Emily's terrified screams abruptly choking into eerie stillness...

I shuddered against the phantom nausea roiling within my stomach. No matter how often I endured that waking night terror, the trauma of witnessing the slaughter remained profoundly raw. A festering psychic wound that would never fully heal despite the passing decades.

It was the trauma that irrevocably fractured my grasp on reality. That spawned the vigilante ideology festering within me during adolescence while the Lewis family valiantly fostered my recovery. The warped "moral code" that deluded me into believing I alone possessed the strength and focus to scour the world of its great evils.

To identify society's sickest degenerates and malignancies. To stalk them to their lairs, outwit them through sheer meticulous brilliance, and deliver the harshest judgment imaginable. Death, pure and simple.

Just like those robbers fifteen years ago, I had become judge, jury and executioner in service to my self-righteous crusade. The excising of virulent cancers, one scalpel stroke at a time.

How many lives had been cleanly severed from this mortal coil via my own bloodstained path of twisted vindication? Sixty-three recent cases flickered through my consciousness, minus the ten more whose bodies hopefully remained undiscovered in remote locations.

No guilt weighed upon my soul. Only the dull, wearying sense that I alone upheld this sacred duty to balance the scales of justice through extreme prejudice. To purge the evil that the system proved incapable of exterminating through legitimate means.

I may be reviled as a monster in the vein of those whom I executed...but perspective was a fickle thing.

It was all in how one chose to contextualize the killing. If the colloquial adage about one man's terrorist being another's freedom fighter held true, could it not be applied to my nocturnal persona as well?

The "Redeemer"...the urban legend that haunted this city's underbelly like a relentless specter dispensing divine retribution upon those who deserved far worse. Was I not just an avenging angel culling the wicked from this plane of existence?

While the rest of society idly wringed their hands and debated politics, I took decisive action. Swift, brutal, and with no mercy spared for those lower than human animals who deserved the most extreme sanction

These ruminations consumed my psyche as I rolled out of bed with a dull groan, bones stiff and protesting the transition to wakefulness. I glanced at the digital clock on my nightstand, grimacing at the numbers blinking back at me.

6:34 AM...time to bury the Redeemer's night skin and enfold myself within Sergeant Lewis' professional persona once more. The brilliant police forensics expert recruited for my uncanny aptitude in deconstructing crime scenes and blood spatter patterns.

Affecting a dry humorless chuckle, I steadied myself with the day's first shot of black coffee from the kitchen. If only the Commissioner and my colleagues at Central knew the truth about their esteemed Sergeant's "extracurricular" activities...