You are the Vulture
An introduction to The Owner's Manual
It’s been a very long 28 years. Life was hard in the beginning and it only got worse from there. Your mom bailed on you before you even met and left you with a father that was far more interested in his racecar than he ever would be in you. From as far back as you can remember, you’ve always known two things: how to fight and how to drive. There was no other way. There wasn’t much for honest work in your town of Jessup, but there was always money to be made—if you knew where to look.
By age 18, your life had become a whirlwind of fast women and faster cars. You’d made a lot of good friends on the wrong side and agreed to do things that had you in deeper shit than you ever thought possible. In Jessup, the Church was the law and the Reverend might as well have also been the Sheriff. However, by some stroke of luck, he had taken a liking to you and given you the means to carry on your lifestyle, just as long as it was mutually beneficial.
Of course, that’s where all the trouble began. The Reverend always liked to keep a close eye on things, but in a moment of spontaneous charity, you began secretly sharing your earnings with your friend and mentor, a Vietnam Veteran named Lance. Before the Reverend, Lance had stepped into your life at right about the same time that your dad had stepped out. While Lance didn’t approve of your reckless lifestyle, he also never condemned you for it. He was just always there, with his daughter Jenny. Together with her, you had grown into adults and found the hardest parts of life waiting for you when you got there. When Lance lost his job and was going to lose his house, you stepped in and made sure that never happened.
For a few years, you kept it all together. The job was always the same: make the delivery, don’t look in the trunk and don’t get caught. Easy enough. You’d done this so many times that you believed you could have done it driving a payloader straight through the police department and still gotten away with it.
Then one night, there was a twist. The Reverend's grand-daughter Gail, had snuck herself into the car with you. It was an undeniable fact that Gail was the most beautiful girl in the entire state of Georgia and also the most trouble. Her and Jenny had a real hatred between them, but with you working for her Grandpa, you knew you needed to stay out of it so you had always kept your distance. As far as you could tell, Gail had never actually had a boyfriend, but she was also never lonely on a Friday night. And when she popped up, all alone in your backseat, with her devilish smile shining in your rearview mirror, it didn’t take long before you were in the back there with her.
When it was all over, when you dropped into bed completely exhausted, with blurry vision and your mind spinning, everything seemed right. The next thing you felt however, was a hard slap across the side of your face. When your eyes popped open, you found yourself staring at the seething, angry scowl of the Reverend.
Gail had told him she was raped. And before you had a chance to speak for yourself, your mouth was gagged, your hands bound and you were delivered to a regional work camp for rehabilitating young adult criminals. It’s name: God, the Georgia Outreach and Detention Services of Wayne County, a project initiated by the Reverend himself. Your sentence would be 5 years of community labor clearing sludge from the area around the Old Colt Dam just over the border in Tennessee. That, as the Reverend had convinced the Judge, would be enough to purge you of your sins.
You were 22 and life was all but over. You had lost everything and from where you stood, covered to your waist in thick, brown, stinking muck, you began to wonder if anyone would even care if you ever returned at all. With each passing year, you became more and more reclusive, oftentimes never associating with the other prisoners that would come and go from your crew. At times, under only the thinnest sliver of moonlight, you would escape and venture off into the surrounding woods all alone. In these moments, you tried to remember your freedom, remember what that felt like. As the breeze rushed across your skin, you would close your eyes and picture the Reverend standing out there with you. His face waiting there to be destroyed by your hands, an act of revenge that would save you from this world and make everything right again. It was fantasy, but it kept you going. Every time you opened your eyes again, you would again find yourself all alone.
Except once.
The last time you ever slipped away from camp, someone—or something, as you truly believe—had followed you. You had felt its presence near you all day long. You could have sworn that it had been standing in the river beside you. It was there when you rode in the truck back to camp and you felt it looking down at you when you crawled onto your cot and waited for the guards to fall asleep.
And when you left, you couldn't see it, but you heard it follow. You began to run and it ran too. You wove in and out of the trees and still it followed. It was chasing you and you could hear it getting closer. It was breathing and you began to feel something press down against your back. Your body shook and you fell into the soft mud of the riverbank. And when you turned your head, you saw it. It was a woman. Her round, black eyes stared at you through the night. Her skin was wrinkled like wet paper and wrapped in torn clothing. Her mouth opened slowly and revealed a hideous, jagged edge of yellow teeth. Your body shook in terror. Her face was only inches from yours, close enough for you to smell the reek of decay rolling from her face, when the sounds of shouting guards and barking dogs scared her away.
Recaptured, you served the final years of your sentence shackled at all times. You worked with a fully loaded shotgun aimed at your head and you were beaten at night when your screams would wake the others. When it was all done, you were returned to Jessup and into the care of the Reverend, who already had the rest of your life planned out for you.
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