by L. A. Cruz
THE BLOOD KEEPERS
The Salem Penitentiary Book One
L.A. CRUZ
Edit History:
Version 1.0 (10/23/17)
Copyright © 2017 by L.A. Cruz
Cover copyright © 2017 by Russ Munson
All rights reserved.
The following story is fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events, websites, or locales is completely coincidental and unintentional. Except when not.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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CONTENTS
Title
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Afterword
PROLOGUE
The kid sat in the back of the van. There were no windows, only two benches on either side. His black knee pads rattled against each other. They looked like something bionic, like umpire’s knee pads made out of Kevlar. The road was poorly maintained, cracked from the heat, a few fissures in the pavement here and there, an occasional pothole, sometimes a speed bump, but it wasn’t the condition of the road that was making the kid’s legs bounce.
It was fear.
And the five other SWAT cops in the van knew it. They knew it with a single glance at him. They could smell it, he thought. They had so much more experience than him that they had grown a nose for that kind of thing. The kid was scared to death, his knee pads knocking as loudly as a frightened toddler banging on his parents’ door after a nightmare.
The rest of the cops weren’t wearing any knee pads. No elbow pads either. Like football players who wanted to run faster, they knew that pads of any sort limited their mobility. If things were about to get crazy in there—which they were—they wanted to be able to perform. But this was the kid’s first extraction, his first underworld rodeo as they said, and he was following the rules as outlined in the handbook. Knee pads. Shoulder pads. Crotch pads. Helmet.
The handbook was written by a lousy desk jockey.
“We forgot the bubble wrap,” Tanker said.
The other cops all laughed, all but the kid. He was the brunt of all their jokes. The runt and the brunt. Their teasing had been relentless all through the academy. Just hazing, he kept telling himself. It came with the territory. It would stop eventually.
Or so he prayed.
A small dome light in the ceiling was turning the five men across from him into nothing more than silhouettes. After Tanker had said the kid was “sure to wet himself,” the other cops had all moved to the bench on the other side of the van. Now it was five, all squished so their shoulders touched, against one. They didn’t want their boots squishy, the kid guessed, not when they had to charge through the Arizona dust.
They were all wearing helmets, their faces obscured by the yellow glare on their visors. Tanker, who had been the kid’s substitute drill sergeant for a day at the Academy, reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of Big League Chew and stuffed the shredded bubble gum into the side of his mouth, lint and all, as if it were a wad of tobacco. It was enough gum to make a cow choke.
They called him Tanker on account of the sharp widow’s peak that looked like the gun turret on a tank. He chewed the wad of gum, his jaw working it back and forth, his mustache a furry creature doing a jig under his nose. Tanker too, was dressed in full gear, black combat boots, black cargo pants, a bulletproof vest, shiny letters across his chest that read SWAT, everything but the pads.
He blew a bubble and popped it. The inside of his visor was speckled with pink blobs.
“All I know is that you better not slow us down,” Tanker said.
The kid put a hand on his knee and forced it to stop bouncing. “I won’t, Sergeant,” the kid said. He had a slight accent.
“Where are you from, anyway?” one of the other cops said. “Mexico?”
“He’s a Filipino,” Tanker said.
“Actually, I’m from Jersey,” the kid said.
“Remind me again. What’s your name, kid?”
“Manny.”
“Put your helmet on,” Tanker said. “This ain’t gonna be like riding your tricycle down the street. On days like this, it ain’t cool to feel the hot wind in your hair.”
Manny nodded and grabbed the helmet off the bench beside him and pulled it down over his ears.
“Visor too,” Tanker said.
The van hit a speed bump, the kind of bump that shredded your tires if you reversed over it, and there was a large metal clang. The five cops merely jiggled, but Manny was so light, a bantam-weight, as Tanker had called him, that he launched a foot off the bench, landed hard on his tailbone. Upon landing, his vizor dropped, instantly blurring his vision.
He was now trapped inside the helmet. It was hot. His forehead broke out in beads of sweat and the heat pulsed around his ears. The hard plastic of the visor—scratched and smudged with fingerprints—was curved around his face, and he felt as if someone had dunked his head in a bowl of boiling water. Inside the helmet, everything echoed and he could hear his own heart pumping in his ears.
Tanker blew another bubble, filling his own visor with more pink. He let the bubble sit there on his lips, deflating, but not popping, and he talked out the side of his mouth.
“Do me a favor kid,” he said, the limp bubble bouncing. “Hang back. That's the best thing you can do today. Watch us. Try to learn as much as you can. Don’t get yourself shot in the butt. You understand? Hang back. Don’t make me fill out any extra paperwork today.”
Manny nodded. A bead of sweat escaped his matted black hair, ran down his nose, and around the baby fat of his lips. He lifted a gloved hand to wipe it off, but forgot the visor was down, and could only touch the plastic. He felt claustrophobic, cut off from the rest of them.
The van went over another bump and their assault rifles jumped off their laps. Manny pressed his M4A1 carbine to his thighs to keep from bobbling it like a bad catch. He checked the safety. It was on. Tanker had told him to keep it switched on at all times today. He wasn’t allowed to discharge his weapon, no matter what. He was carrying the rifle to get used to the feel of it, the weight of it, nothi
ng more, Tanker had said. Certainly not to shoot bad guys. If he discharged it, there would be a lot of “paperwork to pay.”
The SWAT cop directly across from the kid shook his head in amusement. He might’ve been grinning, but Manny’s visor was too blurry to tell.
“Don’t let old man Tanker here get inside your head,” he said. “The poor rhesus monkey has been divorced four times already. And you know what he told each of his wives when they said they were leaving him?”
The other SWAT cops spoke in unison: “Don’t make me fill out any extra paperwork!”
They all laughed.
“Hah, hah,” Tanker said. “Yuck it up.” He blew another bubble and turned to each cop on the bench and gave him the finger individually. When he got to Manny, he gave him both fingers at once.
The rest of the cops whistled.
Before Manny could think of a clever response, something self-deprecating that would disarm them, the forward motion in the van stopped and all six cops pitched forward and then righted as the momentum came to a final rest. Manny couldn't hear what was going on outside the van but he remembered the briefing in the station’s briefing room before they had left, complete with a Powerpoint presentation.
They were to travel down Route 80 and pull into the Arroyo Blanco Estates, a posh suburban neighborhood ten miles from the border with Mexico. Each McMansion—they weren’t necessarily huge, but certainly huge by the standards of Manny’s youth—sat on its own one-acre plot of rocks and sand and pebbles and cacti. Each house had Spanish tiles on the roof, all pink. The houses were only one floor and a basement—basements a rare thing for that geography, but this was a community for old, rich folks and they could take the risk on uneven bedrock for the sake of extra square footage if they wanted. Single-level dwellings sold much better with the senior crowd. Manny knew this since this past year when he and his sister had gone price-hunting online for housing for his sick mother.
In the middle of the briefing, Tanker had raised his hand. “Is this an ‘active adult community’ or something?”
The cop next to Manny had nudged him in the ribs. “Don’t steal any Depends.”
Despite the lower prices, a move to Arizona was not in the cards for Manny’s mother. One day, Manny had thought, when he secured his pension, he would buy her a little house just like the ones in this community. Tiled floors that looked like hardwood. A bedroom on the first floor. And a swimming pool the shape of a question mark in the backyard. He had counted fourteen of them in the Powerpoint slide of the community; the aerial view had been shot with a drone.
Yes, for the duration of the entire briefing, he had been thinking about real estate. It was a coping mechanism. A distraction to help him with the fear.
The van went over another speed bump and then made a right turn and drove for another five minutes. Based on the vibrations under his boots they weren’t going any faster than fifteen, he guessed.
From one of the slides in the briefing, Manny knew that fifteen miles per hour was the posted speed limit in the gated community. Right this minute, they were probably passing one of those neon plastic children on the side of the road holding up a flag that said Grandchildren at Play.
The forward motion came to a stop. They must have arrived at the house he had seen on the Powerpoint. Tanker pulled the gum out of his mouth and stuck it on the butt of his rifle. Chewing to be resumed later.
"Go time,” he said.
The SWAT cop on the end of the bench opened the back doors and the van was flooded with the bright Arizona sunlight.
“Deploy,” Tanker whispered and pointed at each of them to disembark.
The cops filed out of the van and dropped onto the pavement and ran around the side of the vehicle. Following Tanker’s orders, Manny was the last to hop out. Even through his boots, he could feel the heat coming off the driveway. He fell into line at the tail end, and they ran up the short driveway and passed a congregation of cacti and a tricycle on the front walk.
As briefed, the team split in half. The first three ran up to the front door, while the last three with Manny in the rear broke off and circled around the side of the house. Manny followed the man in front of him, his breathing heavy in his ears, his visor fogging. He couldn’t see much more than the boots in front of him.
They passed the side of the house. The air conditioning units were silent, no blades moving. That was strange, he thought. It must have been a hundred and ten degrees outside. These seniors must have liked it really hot in this neighborhood.
Tanker was in front of him. Manny tapped his shoulder. “Look. No air conditioning.”
“Shush,” Tanker said.
Something was wrong. Very wrong, he thought. Even drug dealers used air conditioning.
The first man in the team of three put a hard shoulder into the iron gate and it popped open. They ran around the back of the house, over the stone patio, around the pool, this one shaped more like an ashtray than a question mark. But the pool was nothing more than a concrete hole in the ground, a few scattered pennies near the drain on the bottom and a pile of dried leaves. It obviously hadn’t been used in a long time.
The three cops ran up to the patio door. It was glass, and closed.
With the butt of his rifle, the first man in line jabbed the glass door and the glass shattered and fell at their boots. He then motioned for the team to move inside.
The other three cops who had entered from the front door were already inside. Manny's team entered and met up with them in the kitchen.
“First floor all clear,” Tanker said.
Through the scratches in his visor, Manny quickly surveyed the house. It was an open layout, tiled floor, no linoleum. Little ceramic gnomes sat on the shelves. A nice house, Manny thought. The kitchen was empty, and the refrigerator was not whirring. A bowl of canned dog food, uneaten, sat on the floor next to the dishwasher. A swarm of flies was circling the bowl and the food had hardened into logs, like fat twigs.
Two other cops came from the hallway on the other side of the kitchen.
“All clear.”
One of them pointed to the door opposite the island counter and they fell in line. It was the basement door.
Tanker motioned for Manny to get behind him. “Cover us. Me and the kid got it,” Tanker said. He turned to Manny. “Remember what I said. Keep the safety on. No matter what, do not fire.”
“Yes, Sergeant,” Manny said and took position behind him. “Too much paperwork. I understand.”
“Okay, here we go,” Tanker said. “Trial by fire.”
Tanker opened the door and with his carbine pointed, descended the carpeted steps as cautiously as if he were descending a mountain of loose rocks. Manny stayed close on his heels.
They rounded the stairwell, but stopped. In contrast to the rest of the house, the basement was cool. The only light was coming from a full-size refrigerator on the other side of the bar.
Both the refrigerator door and the freezer door were open, and the refrigerator was straining and whirring. Manny took a breath. He was out of wind, not from the effort, but from anxiety. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, the shapes emerged. They were hanging from the ceiling. Tanker pulled a flashlight off his belt and clicked it on and shined it across the room.
Swinging bodies. It was like a meat locker. A dozen of them hung from the ceiling. They were upside down, their ankles tied and the rope was strung up through holes in the drywall ceiling and tied around the exposed beams.
Beneath each of the bodies was a plastic five gallon bucket with liter markings on the side. The bodies were swollen and bloated and the wrists were tied behind their backs, the zip ties cutting into the skin the same way that a tree will grow around a noose tied into a branch.
The refrigerator was obviously was not enough to keep the basement cool and the whole room buzzed thickly with flies. There was a steady drip, drip, drip from each of the bodies, an echoing that Manny would never forget.
Their throats h
ad been cut. And blood was dripping into the buckets beneath them. Each one of the twelve buckets was half filled with nearly two gallons of blood. The blood had firmed and there was a dark skin on the top.
Drip, drip, drip.
Manny’s lunch came up to his chin. Behind him, two more SWAT cops came down the stairs.
"Oh Geezus.”
Tanker held up a hand for the men behind him to stop where they were. From Manny’s viewpoint, they were obscured by the gently twisting bodies. The bodies were seniors, dressed nicely, polo shirts and shorts and sandals.
“An HOA meeting,” Tanker said.
Something moved. A quick skitter on the far side of the basement. Tanker whipped up his rifle, full auto, and fired. There was a burst of light and the rat a tat tat that Manny had become familiar with at the Academy.