Catharsis (Book 1)

by D. Andrew Campbell

  Let's apply more force to the door and spread out the contact points, I think. And let's give up on those locks and instead aim for the hinges on the other side. Those have to be weaker.

  With my plan in place, I turn around and jog back to the edge of the yard so that I can build up some speed for my final entrance. Settling myself into a sprinter's stance, I stare at the door and visualize where I want to hit it: left hand side in the middle and about a foot up from the bottom (where I'm assuming the hinges should be placed). Blowing air out of my nose, I push electric energy down my body and into my feet. As soon as I feel it hit my toes, I push off and tear across the grass towards the house. Keeping my eyes on the door, I wait until I reach the concrete of the front porch before I push off the ground and go into a mid-air flip so as to let the centrifugal force of my motion add to the final impact. Curling my body in as tightly as I can, I hold my legs next to my body until my cannonball shape almost hits the wood, and then I release my feet with the precise aim needed to smash into the barricade in the exact points I had determined earlier.

  The door explodes away from me as I fall onto the hard, gray front porch.

  "And I'll blow your house down," I say quietly to the open doorway as I quickly bound back to my feet and peek in through the now open entranceway. Apparently one of the four I had smelled earlier was standing on the interior side of the door when I hit it, as I can see a pair of legs protruding from underneath the smashed remains of the wooden door (All he needs is a pair of striped socks and some red slippers, and then I'd be three heel clicks away from a trip home.).

  "Hey, the other three of you in the house not dumb enough to stand behind the door," I call out as I step to the side and pick up the red plastic container of gasoline I had brought with me. "This house is about to go up in flames in about five seconds. I highly recommend running." I pause for a moment and consider where I'm about to throw the can and then say, "Especially if you're anywhere near the big pile of drugs I'm about to roast."

  Spinning the cap off the can, I pour a bit of gas around the concrete steps and then onto the door (I hate that door now. It deserves to burn with the poison in this place. A good fire will teach it a lesson about trying to thwart my plans.) before sloshing a bit inside the front hallway. Laying the can on its side so that the gas chugs out, I give it a push and send it spinning down the hall - towards the smell of drugs - splashing everything around it with the combustible liquid.

  I don't want to give the men inside any time to react or remove the can before it can do its beautifully destructive work, so while the can is still charging down the hall I pull out the lighter from my pocket and flip the wheel. With the bright flame dancing in front of me, I quickly squat and hold it over the pool of liquid at my feet and watch as the flame jumps, grows and then spreads to consume every bit of the shimmery liquid it can find. Within seconds the fire has raced away from me and down the hall so that it can chase the gas can like a greyhound trying to get the rabbit at a Florida racetrack.

  Stepping away from the open doorway, I'm followed by a satisfying FWOOMP as the remaining liquid in the can finally ignites and shares its glorious payload with the surrounding drugs. Orange and yellow light reflects off the walls of the hallway as the flames find other combustible materials in their surroundings and begin to consume them.

  I contemplate a number of witty things to say ("You're fired!" or "The roof...the roof...the roof is on fire." or even just "And I blew the house down.") before deciding to forgo the whole thing since there isn't anyone around to hear it anyway (Well there are people still in the house, but I'm thinking they may currently be too distracted to appreciate my wit.) and there's no point wasting a good line.

  Then I remember the guy underneath the door that I just set on fire. He may not make a good audience, but that isn't because he's distracted. It appears I've relieved him of the burden of being conscious, and that normally wouldn't bother me except I can't just leave him to burn to death like that. The other guys in the house can at least fight their way to a door or window. This guy can't do anything aside from lay there and become an overcooked drug thug bratwurst.

  Even after all that's happened, I still can't bring myself to knowingly murder a defenseless man. I am not that person, yet. No. I hope I am not that person, ever.

  Bending down, I grab his feet and pull him out from under the door and drag him for several paces until he is safely away from the heat that is beginning to emanate from the house. Without bothering to look at him (My ears had picked up his steady heartbeat as I dragged him across the grass, so I knew he wasn't a conscious threat.), I turn towards the other house to make sure its door is still open and my entrance unimpeded. It is.

  "Let's have some fun in Scrooge McDuck's mansion," I say and breathe deeply to clear my lungs and prime my body for what is sure to be a physically taxing several minutes.

  As the clean outdoor air flows through me and inflates the little capillaries in my lungs, it brings with it the identifying scent of the man on the ground behind me: bad guy number three, the one who was already familiar with the house's poisons. Dismissing the information as mildly interesting but mostly irrelevant, I run several paces towards the new house before my body doubles over in pain. The gut-wrenching stabs of misery I had felt the other night return with a vengeance and are even stronger than last time.

  Curling into my own fetal position in the dirty grass, I dig my fingers into my ribs and abdomen in an attempt to loosen the cramps that are gripping me. My massaging fingers slow the pain slightly, but they don't fully ease it. My body's trying to tell me something with this pain, and I need to figure it out quickly.

  Focusing on my breathing in an attempt to control the pain, I take a moment to re-examine all the scents I'm taking in from the world around me. Most are easily ignored (grass and dirt, faint smell of drugs hinting the background, burning wood, the overlapping scents of different people from the two houses), but one stands out and won't be pushed away: the smell of the guy I saved from the fire. More specifically, it’s the hot, salty smell of the red liquid pumping through his veins.

  "I don't have time for this," I growl into the dirt while writhing in pain. "I'm not even hungry. Why now?"

  The more I push the thought of the man from my mind and focus on breathing in other scents, I realize it isn't just his blood (I can smell the blood of some of the other men if I concentrate, and theirs has little effect on me right now.). It's something in his blood.

  Gagging with the discovery, I realize what separates his blood from everyone else's: the poison he ingested at the house. He's on drugs. He's a drug addict.

  It's not his blood I'm being pulled towards right now; it's the drugs in his blood I can't ignore.

  "I'm a drug addict, too," I whisper as the heat of angry tears begins to burn the edges of my eyes.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

  "The trash man," I say through blurry eyes as I realize where this all started. "It had to have been him. That's what got me hooked."

  Now that I know what it is, I have a chance of fighting it. For a moment I consider giving in to the pull and just feeding right now to alleviate the pain (I'll just give in to it this one time so I can feel better, and then I can quit tomorrow.), but then I realize that's the same rationalization that killed my uncle. Resisting this starts right here, right now. I will not give in to this.

  Forcing myself to get to my knees, I ignore the pull of the aromatic scent behind me and visualize what I need to do next: get inside that other house and get the money that's been funding all this. Once I do that, then I can work on detoxing myself and working on getting healthy (I mean as healthy as a person can be who no longer consumes actual food and lives by draining the blood of others, that is.). From my knees, I propel myself towards the house and away from the evil beckoning me from the grassy lawn. Each step I take towards the house invigorates me and drains some of the ache from my gut, but I can tell the battle to not give in to the drugs wi
ll be both distracting and debilitating. The bad guys just found themselves a solid ally, and they don't even know it.

  Building up to a jog, the open front door quickly fills my view. I still have quite a bit of darkness left in me, so I decide it's time to put it to good use. Let's see how much damage I can do when I want to.

  As I prepare to leap through the open door of the house (Is there any other way to enter a building when your goal is to completely startle and surprise its occupants?), I will time to slow down around me so that I can strategize for my entrance. My ears pick out the thumps of five different heartbeats around me (two very close, and two deeper into the house), and my nose informs me that all of these men are armed with weapons (The unpleasant tang of multiple guns lets me know there is at least a one-to-one ratio going on in here.) and drenched with fear. Fear can be useful, but it can also backfire if I make them feel trapped. It's a fine line between fight or flight, and I have to be careful I keep them on the right side of it.

  Jumping through the door, I twist my body so that my feet go through first and I land against the far wall of the hallway and absorb the impact into my legs. Momentarily crouching on the wall as my momentum holds me there, I look out and see two guys in the hallway mere feet away from me. They both have large, oily machine guns (My past movie watching history tells me these are most likely AK-47s. I didn't even know those were still used on the streets. I kinda figured they were just a movie thing.) pointed towards the open doorway, and they are just starting to swivel towards me (I don't think they expected my entrance to be quite so sudden and acrobatic.) when I launch myself off the wall towards the one closest to the front door. Aiming for his blond, shaggy head, I grab it with both hands and slam it against the wall as my body plows into him. He goes limp and crumples to the ground as I land next to him.

  Without stopping my motion, I step towards his friend and grab the wood-covered barrel of his gun with my left hand and lift it up towards the ceiling while with my right hand I reach into his armpit and grab the stock and yank downwards. The speed of my attack combined with the sudden unexpected pressure on the gun allows me to rip the gun from his hands before he can even pull the trigger. As the gun continues its somersault, I thumb the magazine release button and allow the clip to fly out of the gun and disappear down the hallway.

  Standing well within his personal space (in order to free the gun from his grip, I had to get within "touching" distance), I have a good view of his reaction to what just happened, and it is quite entertaining.

  With his heartbeat accelerating and his eyes widening, he stutters at me, "Who are you?" in a wonderfully squeaky voice.

  Without missing a beat, I respond in my new raspy voice, "I'm Batman!" (Thanks dad for making me watch that movie when I was a kid. This was the perfect use of that classic line, but I think it may have been wasted on this guy.) I let him blink at me twice as I watch his brain try to register what I just told him, and then I wink at him and blow him an imaginary kiss (It may not have been the most appropriate response, but I couldn't help it.).

  I'm sure with my gore-spackled neck and shirt and wild, unkempt hair, the last thing he wanted was for me to confuse him more with some flirty banter (Who wants to be hit on by the Bride of Frankenstein?), so I decide to help him also retire for the evening.

  Bringing my right hand up next to my left to grab the barrel of the gun, I spin in place and swing the gun around like a heavy, lead-infused baseball bat and crack the poor guy on the side of his head with as much strength as I can manage without killing him. The wooden stock of the AK-47 makes a sickening crunch as it smashes into his skull, but I don't see any blood or Russian gun-shaped dents under his short-cropped hair as he slides to the ground.

  Running my hands along the top of the gun, I find the slide release, thumb it down and pull off the top half of the gun and dismantle it (no point having this evil, little death-dealer come back to haunt me) in a single motion. Tossing the pieces onto the ground, I step back to the first guy and do the same to his gun leaving a pile of (what I hope are) useless parts scattered about the house's entryway.

  Before heading down the hallway towards two more of the house's residents (I can smell them all the way out here, and their thundering heartbeats are becoming deafening to me.) and the stash of drug laundered money (still stinks of dirty cloth and greed), I sort through the pile of gun parts for something that I can use as a weapon (I remember what happened the last time I tried to approach a guy with a gun, and I had no easy way to get to him. I have no desire to get shot again. The next time that happens, it might kill me.).

  Most of the pieces around my feet look awkward and unusable (springs and odd lumpy bits), but then I notice what I assume is the firing rod (I always thought it was a pin, but this thing is much longer than that.) lying next to the wall. It's not ideal as a means of defending myself, but it's better than a bucket of wishes and unicorn farts (That was a favorite saying of my little sister. Strange girl.) which is what I had before. I can't find the firing rod from the first gun, so I scoop up one of the black banana-shaped clips as backup. Shrugging my shoulders in resignation, I ease down the hallway with my new makeshift weapons.

  This time the kitchen is not the main base of operations for the money bundling. Instead they've set up in an open downstairs room. I discover this as I get ready to step around the hallway's corner into what I thought was going to be another closed section of the house, but it turns out to be a very open view of two scared men huddled behind a large overturned kitchen table (The stacks of bills that had been on it are now in disheveled piles on the floor between us.). As soon as they see me (Just their heads and arms are peeping out from the sides of their wooden blockade. It'd be borderline adorable - like little boys in a couch cushion fort - if it wasn't such a lethal setup for me.), they both start pulling the triggers on their guns as fast as they can.

  Luckily for me these two are firing small, black handguns at me instead of big, nasty assault rifles, and to make matters even better for me they are firing one-handed (for real accuracy they need to brace the gun with their off-hand) with a partially obstructed view (they don't seem to want to expose their heads too much beyond a single eye), so most of the shots go wide. They did still manage to catch me off-guard, so to defend myself I dive to the right and aim for the first open doorway I see: a small half bath. Not the most strategic place to be, but it's certainly better than standing out in the open. Plus the walls are enough to stop the pistols' small caliber rounds from reaching me. I hope.

  Once they notice I am no longer out where they can hit me, they stop firing (Or their guns just ran out of bullets; I was a bit distracted.). In the resulting silence, I can hear them whispering to each other trying to figure out if they killed me or not. I'm tempted to wait them out to see if I can draw them closer, but getting shot at has made me a bit impatient. I want to take their guns away sooner rather than later. Plus, if I give them time to think they may actually come up with a viable plan, and I certainly don't want that.

  Taking the initiative, I lean closer to the bathroom's open door and holler out, "Hey boys. That wasn't very nice trying to shoot a girl. That won't get you any Brownie points."

  It might not be the most intimidating response, but I figure it'll be enough to startle them and keep them off-balance.

  Sure enough after a moment's pause they both yell back at me.

  "Who the heck are you?" shouts one of the men with a relatively deep and almost melodic voice with just a tinge of an island accent. He has to be a black guy. There's no way a white guy could have a voice that cool.

  "What the truck do you want?" yells the other one (Neither one has any manners when it comes to cursing around a lady apparently. Shame on them.) in a much younger and higher pitched voice. His voice just screams "I'm a skinny, white boy, wannabe rapper thug!" What a cliché.

  Ignoring their questions, I yell one of my own, "Any chance you two will consider just running away so I don't have to was
te my time beating you unconscious?" I pause and let my words sink in. "It sure would make my life - and most definitely yours - a whole lot easier!"

  A few whispers go back and forth, before baritone says, "We can't. You're between us and the only exit. All the doors and windows are boarded up back here." He pauses and I swear I can hear the skinny white boy vigorously shaking his head back and forth to deter the man from saying his next words. "Plus we think we can take you. We outnumber you. And we have guns."

  His boldness makes me smile. I like his bravery. It's misplaced, but I have to respect him for it. "You can't," I tell him in an almost cheery voice. "Remember the two guys at the front door both had much bigger guns, and that didn't help them at all."

  "Your bullets can't hurt me," I lie in as plain a voice as I can manage. "They'll just make me angry and cause me to hurt you. Nobody wants that. Just toss the guns to the side and run out the front door. I won't stop you if you don't try to attack me." That's about as nice as I can make it for them.

  Instead of answering me, I can hear them whispering back and forth (Well the first guy is whispering, the younger kid is answering quite loudly and negatively) trying to formulate a plan for flushing me out of the bathroom (Pun intended on that one!).

  "I'll lay down cover fire and you run over to the couch there for a better angle on the bathroom," the first guy hisses.

  "No trucking way!" the gangster wannabe replies in a non-whispery completely audible voice. "You run out there, and I'll stay here."

  "You're younger and faster. You'll be fine. I'm too old to run."

  "Well I'm too old to fall for a stupid plan like that. I ain't goin'."

  "She doesn't even have a gun. You'll be fine. Don't be a truckin' wussy!"

  "I'm not a wussy. I'm just not stupid. Let's see you do it."

  "I can hear you," I say to interrupt their arguing. "It is a bad plan. I'll drop you before you even reach the couch. Let's go back to the plan where you throw away your guns."