Chapter 176 Chapter

"Persistence runs in the family," he mused. "I was a soldier. A Gulf War veteran at the grand old age of twenty-five. Honourably discharged after I took a bullet to the back and was temporarily paralysed. I came home without the use of my legs, screwed up on military inoculations and with the smoke of the Kuwaiti oil fields engrained upon my lungs. I was in rehabilitation for a long time afterwards, learning to walk again, and my wife, Lacey, well, let's just say she grew tired of waiting on a man who raged at her because he couldn't get to the bathroom in time. She got tired of being afraid of the man who went off to war as her husband and who returned as someone she didn't even recognise, all because whenever he looked at her, all he could see was the bodies of the slaughtered men, women and children who resembled the pieces of meat you'd see hung in the window of a butcher's shop, rather than the human beings they were. Anyway, by the time I was walking again and ready to go home, I