Brand New Dark

by Beau Johnson

  I’ve gotten ahead of myself, though. I know. I know. But like the both of you, it would appear I can’t stop being me.

  Batista is the next man to join Rider’s cause. His partner from Bishop’s time as a cop, he acts like a channel, hooking Rider up with, well, people just like the two of you. Not long after comes Alex, a man we won’t spend much time on as he deserves neither our attention nor the recognition. I will state, however, that how Alex leaves this world, it was as intestinal as it needed to be.

  S’okay. Pretty sure you had to be there.

  Brings us to the latter half of things and Jeramiah. The son of the man who ensures Rider’s sister is raped by men in masks before she is killed. Jeramiah though, he isn’t his old man. Meaning he chooses to land on the side of things most of us do and decides to right his father’s wrongs the only way he feels he can. Even better, he not only commits to Rider, but saves the man’s life the very first time they meet. Rider loses what we’ll call his kicking foot in the process, but hey, alive is alive is alive, am I right?

  Yeah, I think I’m right.

  On to the main event then. You two. And Hightower.

  Took us a bit, you both still living in your parents’ basements as you were, but we tracked you down. This each of you knows. What you might not be aware of is this: the man you worked for, he’s been here for months. What, you don’t believe me? Here, let’s give you a tour then.

  For obvious reasons, we call this the White Room, and in case you wondered, yes, behind that plexiglass is where the magic takes place. One corner more and voila, just look at him. Little bit smaller than you’re used to seeing him, I know. Down about ninety pounds or so I’d say. Most of it going in chunks last spring, but his nose, yeah, Bishop took that just yesterday. And that feeding tube? That catheter and colostomy bag on the right? Rigged them bad boys up myself.

  Why am I showing you this? Good question, Lucas. Not that you really asked, but hey, I have an image to uphold! And the man who just joined us, just so you know, he’s been listening the entire time. That machete in his hand? Yeah, same one I grabbed when I went to that boarded-up motel and collected the pieces of our friend. This machete here, though, I went out and purchased it special, and only because, unlike Hightower, we think things through.

  It means you were always going first, Lucas. And Anton, you were always going to watch. The only thing we did change was where the big man and I were going to start.

  Little hint, boys: it ain’t gonna be up top.

  Back to TOC

  THE BOTTOM OF THINGS

  It wasn’t the raised ranch we were interested in. It was the structure set further back on the estate. About a quarter of the size of the house, it jutted from the ground at an awkward angle, like the metal siding had been attached incorrectly. The moon above it and to the right showed that the chains about the double doors were not only new, but heavy.

  “That third strike, Bishop,” Batista says. “Just the threat of it, it gets their attention every single time.” Worked for me. Vermin giving up vermin being the favorite pastime of any cop, retired or otherwise. Still meant we had to verify the story Batista’s CI had given him.

  “And would you look at that: we have ourselves a winner.” But there was something off about Batista. Minute, sure, but there all the same. Back then, however, deep into the middle part of what we’d become, I admit to falling blind to certain things along the way. Like how losing parts of one’s face could impact a man’s psyche, let’s say.

  “Paul Rand,” Batista continued, and the big man’s hand goes up to the right side of his face almost instinctively, rubbing at the thinness there, at the meat that’s missing. He grew back the beard in an attempt to downplay things, but the angles of his face, they never played fair, and at times I caught myself flashing back to him in that chair, a straight razor held up under his chin by a dirtbag named Harrison Garrett.

  You come any closer, I’ma turn his neck into a hose! See if I don’t!

  “Piece of shit looks to be all in too,” Batista goes on, there as our recon continued. We were in the upper part of the house on Buchannan, the files in front of us as deep as the open laptops to our sides. “Solicitation as well as attempted abduction of a minor. We take him alive, might be time for us to show him what ‘all in’ is really about.”

  Of course we would. It’s what we did.

  All told, there was no other way.

  Underfoot and slick, the path was muddy and deep from the rain. “Keep moving,” Batista instructs, pushing Rand from behind as he does. With a stump for a neck and a full head of greying hair, Rand tries his best to hold himself together but continues to lose the battle with each passing step. “Might want to hold that hand up too. I’ll sure as hell drag you before I carry you.”

  Rand does as he’s told, his right hand going up on an angle against his open shirt. Batista removed the thumb earlier, after Rand decided he’d play both sleepy and dumb to the reason we stood on either side of his bed. The reduction came fast too, punctuated by a type of screaming that led to different kind of dentistry, one that involved Batista’s left knee twice.

  We reach the bunker.

  “I’m sick. I know that now,” Rand says, and the way he says it, there in the dark, it’s all I could do not to gut him where he stood. As if reading my mind, Batista slams the butt end of his shotgun into the bottom part of the man’s spine. Rand goes to his knees, both his hands forward into the muck.

  I hunker down, hold him by the hair, and tell him to tell us something we didn’t already know. I add that if he did, we’d make it quick, and if he’s lucky, we’d leave enough of him to bury.

  This gets his attention. But it was too late. Batista had already removed the chains and lock. Had already pulled open the doors.

  He pumps the shotgun. We descend.

  And find one more place god failed to exist.

  The smell hits us first, full-on and like a bus. The fluorescents come next, flickering to life on their own. We go forward, cement walls crowding us, Batista in front and Rand in the middle. The lights continue to flicker, and as Batista comes to a corner, I watch him tense. He stands there, one second, two, and in those moments, I know what’s about to transpire even before it occurs. His face a sheet of hate, he turns back toward us, the butt end of the shotgun up and moving again, forcing more of Rand’s teeth from their home once it connects. The sound is both solid and wet, and Rand howls in response, going to his knees as he does. His screams are joined by others, however, and this is when everything becomes clear.

  I look around the small room and then I look back to Batista. He nods. Bends down and binds Rand at the wrists and ankles and then leaves to contact Jeramiah. The kids, one still crying, the other two just watching, begin to realize things were not as they appeared—that this was far from what had become their norm.

  I approach them. Tell them I’m different from the man laying on the floor behind me. I want to say they understood. I want to say they were no longer scared. I can’t. Not without lying to myself.

  Malnourished and naked, they hold their wrists to me. Each one is slender. Each one is bruised. I unshackle the boys first, then the girl. The mattresses beneath them as marred by piss and shit as they were by fear. In the corner on a tripod stood a camera, but it was old, ancient, and led me to believe that Rand could in fact be holding out.

  Jeramiah and the kids already in the van and on their way to Ray, Batista asks, “We good?” He already knew the answer, though: we weren’t, and never would be.

  And I want to say it got us to the bottom of things—that Rand knew more than he’d been letting on. It didn’t, though, things ending right there in that bunker at the far end of the property he’d inherited from his parents. But what I can say is this: I pictured the past as we took him apart. Using it not as inspiration, but as fuel. I go to the place that started it all, Abrum’s, to where upon a stage Batista and I reduce that man to pieces
and place what remained into a wheelbarrow. Forward now, and I find myself over Mapone, where I use a spoon to remove his last good eye. It’s followed by Kincaid, my greatest mistake, and how parts of his frontal lobe end up clinging to my boots like chum.

  Did it make Rand the same? You’re goddamn right it did.

  It always would.

  It’s the reason we start with his knees.

  Back to TOC

  OLD MAN RIDER

  It happens in a variety of ways. Research is one. Deep diving the internet another. There was Batista too, and for years this was how I’d get word on an impending release of a particular inmate or two. More often than not, however, shitbirds beget shitbirds, and occasionally things could go our way for months at a time. Evil connecting to evil and us attempting to chop it down. Stacking it too, of course, but only when the message I wanted to provide needed a little something extra. A little something more. Piles of intestine, perhaps. Or a pyramid of eyes.

  It meant killing, if we were lucky, brought more killing and further killing from there.

  Take Jerry Adler for example.

  Textbook predator who liked his meals below the age of ten and a man we took care of years ago. Latched on, we show him the error of his ways, and in doing so it produces what we hoped: another name. All this before Jeramiah cuts old Jerry in half in the man’s very own construction yard, the excavator’s rusted bucket going through the man’s middle like teeth. The name Jerry lets slip? Phil Davies. Head mentor to an all-boys home for children who should never have to deal with the things they are forced to.

  Removing appendages by way of an axe, my goal was to retrieve another name from Phil, to keep this particular chain of reductions alive, but no, it wasn’t to be, and as much as I would have preferred a different outcome, we reach the end of the line.

  Or so I’d thought.

  “You ready for some good news?” He’s animated, almost bouncing, and chomping at the bit as we pull away from the place on Buchannan. Jeramiah waits, however, and to savor the moment, I assume, but I don’t really know, not for sure. But he continues, as does the east side of Culver, slipping past us like an eyesore: broken houses, broken businesses. Broken lives. Everything most predators require when looking for lives to devour. No. Correction. Not everything. You could never count out money. How it gets inside and spreads like rot.

  “Stupidity or conceit, it was one or the other with this guy.. Either way, he deserves a second death.” And then Jeramiah produces a flash drive, red on black, and holds it between the index and middle fingers of his right hand.

  “It was hidden well, I’ll give Davies that, but a share file is a share file, Bishop, camouflaged as receipts or not.”

  I take the flash drive from him and turn it over in my hand. “Part of Kincaid’s original list?”

  He stops at the lights, turns, and smiles at me in such a way that for a moment I flashback to the man who started this all, Jeramiah’s father, and how that man smiled as he brought down his size nines and broke parts of my face.

  “Part of Kincaid’s original list,” Jeramiah confirms.

  I make a fist. The flash drive within it.

  Christ. God did exist.

  Unfortunately, it was only one name, one piece of shit, but his removal from the world would ensure I left it better than I’d found it. Yeah, I hear it too. But forthright or not, I’d yet to be put down.

  “Ansel Proctor, one-time English teacher. Spends his time in Boyle Heights now, past Harktown. Upscale retirement home that, get this, refers to its residents as ‘seasoned.’”

  I don’t answer, my mind already elsewhere—to a time I’d been given a chance to ensure human garbage like Ansel Proctor never existed, or at least got off on the type of network Kincaid sets in motion, a network that grew because I wanted to make an example of Anthony Kincaid instead of just ending him when I should have.

  Hubris? Perhaps. But I couldn’t change things. I could only learn from them.

  Eventually, I do get the chance to correct things, the upper parts of Kincaid’s bridgework stuck between the laces of my boots by the time it’s all said and done. But the damage he’d created, the malignancy I allow to fester, it remained. Ansel Proctor and the men upon Kincaid’s subscriber list, living, breathing proof.

  And it wasn’t hard, not with the type of security you find at old-age homes, especially ones with open-door policies. There’s a sign-in procedure, sure, there always is, but my John Smith is the same as anyone’s John Smith. Perhaps a tad neater.

  “Ansel Proctor?” He looks sixty, not eighty, greeting me with a full head of grey hair and a yellow sweater despite the heat pouring out of his room.

  “I am he. You are the new book man?”

  “Not exactly,” I say, and to the man’s credit, he senses something is off. My ball cap, maybe? The days-old scruff I’d worked up as Jeramiah and I planned how things would go down? Who knows? It happens though, him perceiving me as the danger I represented. He wasn’t able to react fast enough is all. The syringe up and into his neck almost as fast as he folds. I catch him as I enter, closing the door behind us as I do.

  Our alone time had come.

  I’m deep into his abdomen when he wakes, past his stomach cavity and into a kidney that had seen better days. To his right, bathing in the sunlight, lay his large intestine. Further still, but free of the sunlight coming in through the bedroom window, sits his small. All of it wet. All of it slick. Parts of it roped like pregnant string.

  “You’ve gotten away with some things in your life, Ansel. Things that must be accounted for. Me, I’m here to ensure you do.” Was he aware I’d been a medic once? In a war he never participated in? I give him this knowledge freely, of course, but with each new instrument I pull from my little black case and the repeated shocks to his system, a toll is taken, and the information I’m sure he could have absorbed and processed at any other time becomes, shall we say, problematic.

  You don’t say.

  Had it even come close to getting me what I wanted, though? Unfortunately, the answer was no. And only after another episode of Judge Judy begins and I introduce him to chunks of his liver does he succumb. If anything, I’m thankful for his pain. For the agony I watched him endure behind his gag.

  But all this...it is the past, to a time when I was a younger man. A stronger man.

  It brings me back to the beginning of what I started here. To research, I mean. And deep dives into the cesspool that is social media. We have just buried Batista, and Jeramiah, after the detective’s funeral, he presents me with a loose end I never thought I’d see again.

  A blast from the past as it were.

  “The one who got away.”

  We take care of this man together, a one-time sergeant by the name of Sid O’Bannon, and by the end of our time together, he’s less than he once was, literally and otherwise. Jeramiah stays for dinner afterward, and it’s pleasant, like old times, and only after he leaves does it begin. Something dormant steps forward, advancing, and I feel sixty instead of seventy, fifty instead of sixty, alive instead of dying. It gets me working. It gets me doing. And in no time at all, I catch wind of a support group. One that shouldn’t and mustn’t exist. One that every second Thursday allows monsters to sit around and reminisce about the things they dream of doing again. Think I’ll pay them a visit. Think I’ll ask them a question or two.

  It means the wicked, they deserve no rest. The dying, either.

  My work, it was not yet done.

  Back to TOC

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Oh, hello there. Looks like it’s just us again. May I say I like what you’ve done with your hair. I kid. I kid. I don’t even know if you have hair. Of the six of you who read this, though, I’m going to assume that four or five of you do.

  Anyway.

  Writing a book is a pretty solitary experience. This I think many of you know. Releasing one, however, is the exact opposite of th
is. It means I couldn’t have done this alone and that I have people I wish to thank. First there is Down & Out Books, who I am still amazed after all these years they even took a chance on me. I would also like to give a shoutout to the kind souls who gave me their time to take an early look at Brand New Dark and, in my opinion, blurbed the shit out of a manuscript that wasn’t as polished as I hoped at the time. Honestly you guys, I’m humbled. In no particular order they include: Laurel Hightower, Ed Aymar, Laird Barron, Nick Kolakowski, Jennifer Hillier, James D.F Hannah, S.A. Cosby, Paul Heatley and Hector Acosta.

  I would also be remiss if I left out my brother, Shane, who puts up with me asking for his set of eyes to look at and edit some very dark shit. My wife’s continued support is something I cherish as well, and even though she doesn’t read what I write, she is in my corner everyday. I love her for that. My kids too, all three of them, who, same as Dana, I’d be lost without. And last but not least, there’s the six of you, Dear Reader. Have you been here from the start? If you haven’t, all good, as there’s no time like the present to see how it all began. If you have been here, however, know it feels like we’re going steady now. On my end, anyway. And I don’t want to jinx things, but if you choose to come a little further, I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s almost over. One more set of adventures and I think Rider’s story will be complete. Now, I wanted his life to get to an even one hundred stories, but alas, I think things will end up closer to ninety-five. Nothing’s set in stone, of course, just a feeling. Anyway, that’s a secret to be kept between just you and I, so tell no one, not if you can help it. In all seriousness, though, it’s been a blast. All of it. The ups, the downs, the entire awesome experience of sharing my stories with the world. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride too.