by J. C. Allen
Chuck was like a monster, rising from hell to take me to the land of fire and brimstone to torture me.
Chuck was… just Chuck, my sociopathic brother who got as much pleasure from seeing my life in a miserable hell as he was eating a good meal.
It was sickening to think that all three cases carried the same level of disturbance and weight to me.
I threw everything I had into pressing the spot on a screen that light and faith told me was a button—a bridge to Derek’s voice. A bridge to my protection. A bridge to the defenses I needed against whatever scenario played out.
The contacts list came to replace the screen I’d come to loathe so much, and I heard myself cry out and was instantly embarrassed by it.
Chuck…
My son-of-a-bitch brother had me so terrified I was working my brain into a lather over…
Over a fucking phone call?
If you’re trying to show you’re strong, Eve, you’re doing a terrible job of it.
Yeah but who wouldn’t freak out over something like this?
Derek, for one.
A clap of thunder crashed down, earning another scream—this one stifled to some degree—and all I managed was whimpering and curling up on the couch, my eyes flashing all over the room, praying that I suddenly didn’t see the silhouette of Chuck Kellerman before my eyes.
Miraculously, I found Derek’s number—which was actually quite un-miraculous since it rested atop all the others in the “Recently Dialed” list—and, with another hopeful press to an imaginary button, I was soon rewarded with the beautiful chime of ringing…
B-B-B-B-Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rinngggggg…
Breathe in… breathe out…
“C’mon, Derek…”
B-B-B-B-Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rinngggggg…
Breathe in… breathe out…
“C’mon, Derek…”
B-B-B-B-Br-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-rinngggggg…
Breathe in… breathe out…
“C’mon, Derek…”
B-B-B-B-Br-r-r-r—
“Hey there,” Derek’s voice sang out, and I loosed a noise that perched between a sobbing cry and a barking laugh.
“Derek, oh thank go—”
“I can’t get to the phone right now. You know what to do.”
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
In my mind—a mind haunted by a vast, dark forest occupied by depression and, somewhere beyond its seemingly infinite depths, a well-read and even college-educated catalog of knowledge and deductive prowess—I thought of a myriad of things to say to Derek’s voicemail.
In my mind, I was clever and witty. In my mind, I hadn’t even let it get this far. In my mind, I would give the exact phrase needed to bring Derek to my location, saving me from all the evils of the world.
My mind was somewhere far from me now.
“Hi, hi, Derek, I don’t know what’s going on, but, but… OK, I’m getting these weird, fucking weird texts, and I don’t feel safe—”
Then a floorboard creaked in the other room, and I was screaming.
Lightning caught the scene like a snapshot—I imagined something from a horror movie staring at me in the corner—and the clap of thunder roared down at the very same instant.
And the lights, all the lights—the lights that I’d come to see as a sense of security; the lights that kept that safe, secluded condo from near total blackness—went out.
The storm’s right on top of me, I thought. And I don’t just mean the weather outside.
The next creak was much closer this time, and I made a mousy sound.
Numb fingers piloted by blind eyes worked to get my phone back on. Suddenly that too-bright screen seemed like a miraculous thing to me.
Creak.
I felt hot wetness running down my cheeks, but I refused to believe I was crying.
“Goddamnit, Chuck, go away!”
Get it together, Eve. This is in your head. It’s only in your head. It’s always in your head. Just in your head! Your stupid, worthless, broken head! Just get it together, get your damn phone working, and you’ll see— that it’s all… in… your…
My phone’s screen bit threw the darkness like something a divine being willed. Nothing had ever been so bright and so beautiful.
A short man with a thick beard, one who looked vaguely familiar—and nothing at all like Chuck—stared at me.
“Hello, Eve, it’s the eve of your final days.”
“What… who…”
“Oh, yes, many questions. Here, I’ll give you a few answers before you pass out.”
“Wha—”
Before I could finish, though, he jabbed a needle into my neck. Immediately, I began to feel sleepy.
“I’m Tyler. I was a Savage Savior before I realized the ineptitude of your boy toy, so now I’m a Black Falcon. Your brother? We sent him to distract Derek, and knowing him, he succeeded. Of course, Chuck’s probably dead by now. But his sacrifice means that we got you back.”
“Chuck?” I said, rapidly losing consciousness, unable to process all of this right now.
“Don’t worry, we’ll go over more, Eve,” Tyler said, a wicked grin on his face. “Sweet…”
I never heard the rest of what he had to say.
11
Derek
Did I just get played again?
As I roared on my bike down the roads, ignorant of any previous promises to be safe, I had a mortal fear that even in death, Chuck had gotten the better of me.
He knew I’d come to him. It was too predictable. Say something that threatened Eve or could lead to a threat to Eve, and I’d respond. I suppose it was better than being ignorant to dangers to Eve, but that just meant that Chuck—and the Falcons by extension—could use that against me for their own good.
Why couldn’t I just have a better grip on things? What would have been better, for me to respond as quickly as I did, or to get someone like Roost or Eagle to dispatch that scrawny motherfucker? Where was my mind in those moments?
It was easy to answer at least the last question. It was lost.
At least this had dispatched Chuck, but was that such a win anyways? Sure, he could have influence over Eve, but even that seemed to diminish in recent days. It wasn’t like he was a dangerous planner of attacks and a mastermind of the Falcons.
That, and it had almost seemed like he’d wanted…
Well, it wasn’t quite true to say that he wanted to die. I’d seen that shocked expression on his face when he saw I was actually driving the knife to his throat—you didn’t have that face if you wanted to live.
But there was no denying that in his final moments, Chuck had won over me.
It was sick. It was sicker that I could never avenge this, that Chuck would go to the grave having defeated me.
That did not matter now, though, because I had to get back to my apartment and see what the fuck had happened.
I didn’t bother to park my bike at my normal spot, leaving it right outside the entrance to the elevator, daring Clarence or the building admins to tow it. I slammed on the elevator button, readying myself for a fight or anything that may have awaited me.
The doors opened.
“Eve!”
But I got no answer. No cry. No muffled voice.
There was nothing.
I stood, frozen, only a few steps into my condo. I didn’t need to go much farther to know the truth.
Eve was gone.
It was dark. It was, I realized after some time of confusion, darker than it should have been.
“Fuckers cut the power…”
Even with all my lights off—even totally blacked-out—though, there was still the constant, albeit incredibly limited, sources of light one always took for granted. The digital clock on the coffee maker. The standby lights on the entertainment system. The inviting glow of a power-strips “on” light illuminating a wall from behind a carefully placed desk.
I glanced dumbly back at the elevator—stared like an idiot at the bright, telling fluorescen
ts that cut through the darkness of the open sliding doors—and embarrassed myself by not connecting the dots fast enough.
“There’s electricity there,” I said to myself. “And… there’s none in here.”
Rage caught on before the rest of me, and I was back in the elevator and riding it down before I fully comprehended what was going on. Wherever I needed to go and however I was going to get there, I was. And there was going to be hell to pay.
As the elevator door’s closed on my nearly pitch-black condo, I caught sight of two things partially illuminated by the elevator’s lights that I had somehow missed on the way up, perhaps too consumed by my own rage.
Eve’s cell phone.
And a spent syringe.
I’d been feeling a sickening strong pull on my mind since the street corner. Standing there under a torrential downpour, anger and hate all but evaporating the water as it assaulted my burning skin, and thinking of all the things I wanted to do to Chuck, I had let my emotions control me once more. I’d wondered what I’d do if I saw sight of the creep.
And then I had. And I had killed him.
And where did that leave me? I mean, out in the rain on a street corner I’d never be able to pass without feeling my teeth clench in my skull, sure, but in the grand scheme of things… in a much worse spot.
In putting himself in the crosshairs of death, Chuck had gone and done the dumbest thing of his life.
He’d tossed Eve to the wolves to save his own ass—at least, I’m sure that was the sales pitch the Black Falcons had given him.
Funny how the Black Falcons always seemed to come up just a hair short on their end of the bargain. We might have permitted some shitty things in the Saviors, but we were always men of our word, no matter what.
Someone is going to die and it’s going to be worse than Chuck, I thought as I bent down, curious to see if Eve’s cell phone offered any clues.
It didn’t, but it did give me the idea to check my phone—perhaps she had called me just before all of this shit had gone down.
Sure enough, I had one missed call from right around the time that I had started to kill her brother. Fuck. Really should’ve paid attention to that a little more…
It was short, muffled, and, most of all, unsettlingly maddening.
It opened to Eve’s voice, shaky and broken. She was breathing, practically panting, sounding as though she’d just spent the entire morning running. “Hi, hi, Derek, I don’t know what’s going on, but, but… OK, I’m getting these weird, fucking weird texts, and I don’t feel safe—”
—followed by a sharp gasp and a long, terrible silence. I’d had to check my phone’s screen then just to be sure the recording hadn’t ended, and just as I pulled it away from my ear I was thankful for it; Eve screamed into the receiver at that moment. It sounded loud enough to have blasted my eardrum out of my asshole if I’d been holding it to my ear still. Then…
“Hello, Eve, it’s the eve of your final days.”
“What… who…”
“Oh, yes, many questions. Here, I’ll give you a few answers before you pass out.”
“Wha—”
“I’m Tyler. I was a Savage Savior before I realized the ineptitude of your boy toy, so now I’m a Black Falcon. Your brother? We sent him to distract Derek, and knowing him, he succeeded. Of course, Chuck’s probably dead by now. But his sacrifice means that we got you back.”
“Chuck?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll go over more, Eve. Sweet dreams, bitch.”
Tyler.
You motherfucker.
You leave my club without warning… after leaving a note at the hospital… and then you take my girl…
I’ve never wanted to kill someone so bad as you right now.
As I stood at the ground level of the parking lot, staring at my bike. I had to alert Roost. We had to mobilize.
“Ya need cleanup on aisle five?” Roost said.
“Remember that traitor Tyler? The asshole who abandoned us for the Black Falcons? Guess who took Eve.”
The loud groan on the other and of the line told me Roost put things together far faster than I ever had.
“Meet at the shop soon as you can,” I said. “We gotta take care of this now. No waiting a few hours to figure things out.”
“Loud n’ clear boss,” Roost said as hung up.
Just for good measure, because I seemingly liked torturing myself, I listened to that fucking voicemail again—all the way through, up until it cut off because voicemails weren’t allowed to last any longer.
Hearing Tyler’s voice was enough to take me over the edge. I was vaulting off my bike and sprinting through the garage in an instant. As I passed the security booth, Clarence gave me a look—something that I registered in that instant as either guilt or fear—and it occurred to me I’d be having a very unkind conversation with him in a short moment.
If nothing else I needed to vent some of this madness now before I took to the roads again.
It wasn’t safe to let a madman roam the streets on a motorcycle in this weather, after all.
“Clarence!” I yelled. “You open this goddamn door right now! You got some explaining to do!”
For a few seconds, Clarence looked at me as if I was a demon possessed who was going to kill him—which wasn’t the most inaccurate description ever. If I found out that he had just weaseled out and let Tyler up the elevator on the basis of a lie, then yeah, there’d be hell to pay for Clarence. He was probably acting in proper self-interest by remaining on the other end of the security booth.
But then I swung the door open myself—a rather weak door for a supposed security entrance—and stood over him.
“Clarence,” I said, trying to steel my nerves as best as I could. “Explain to me exactly what happened. In every detail.”
Clarence nodded, swallowing, and took a few moments to gather himself.
“Now, Clarence, every second is a wasted moment.”
“Some thick, short guy came by and at first tried to be chummy. Said he was a Savior and needed to see you. So I buzzed you but you didn’t answer.”
I checked my phone. Sure enough, Clarence had called me—I had just not even registered it in the process of checking Eve’s last call to me.
“You had mentioned that Roost could sometimes give the OK, so I called him, but he didn’t answer either. I would have called your girlfriend, but I didn’t have her number. So I told this guy as much—”
“What was his name?” I said, testing to see how much work Clarence had done.
“Brett.”
Fake name, then. Can’t hold it against Clarence. Much as I would like to.
“Continue.”
“I told Brett this that no one was available. Tried to say some stuff about how it was an emergency and he couldn’t wait to go up. So I kept telling him sorry, he gave me a very specific set of people to call if something came up. And that’s when… that’s when he brandished the gun.”
“And… That’s all it took, then?” I demanded. “That was all it took for you to let him into my home?”
Clarence was starting to lose his nerve, as evident by the stuttering that came.
“H-h-he sa-said he’d k-k-ki-kill me!”
“Motherfucker, I will…”
Hold it, Derek!
You think this man could do anything against a Black Falcon? Seriously.
Hold him accountable. Make sure he can actually do his job.
For once, I was thankful for the harsh voices in my head. Without them, I doubt I would have had the willpower or the control not to threaten to kill Clarence, a man whom I actually liked and enjoyed when he hadn’t committed such an egregious mistake.
“I’ll tell you what’s going to happen now,” I said. “Because of you, I’ve got some business to handle right now. Very ugly business that you will want no part of. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Let me make one thing abundantly clear. There are only three
people who are allowed up to my apartment, no questions asked. One is me. One is Roost. One is Eve, my girlfriend. No one else goes up without explicit verbal confirmation from me. Don’t text me. Call me. This is in effect indefinitely until I say otherwise. Clear?”
“Y-yes.”
“Good,” I said.
I looked around the station, realizing how it was better suited to collect parking tickets than to actually enforce security. If a Black Falcon had launched an attack on this place, it wouldn’t be an attack, it would be a massacre. It would be without mercy and without fairness.
“Were you armed when Tyler came?”
“Tyler?”
“The short guy.”
“Brett?”
“He gave you a fake name. He’s with the Falcons. But his name doesn’t matter. Were you armed?”
Clarence shook his head no.
“Company police says, says if we’re in that much trouble, we call the police. I—”
“Yeah bad news, bucko, the cops can’t stop this war,” I said. “They know full well if they arrest certain individuals, shit is gonna get ugly and real. So they just try and keep it out of the public eye. Unfortunately for you, this parking lot and this apartment isn’t exactly the public eye.”
I snorted in disbelief. How could you even call Clarence security if he wasn’t actually fulfilling the role of providing security for the residents of this place? If a threat came, and he couldn’t stand up to it because of the ineptitude of his bosses, what did that say?
“Good news for you today, Clarence,” I said. “You’re getting a promotion from bitch guard to actual guard. I’m going to my shop right now, and when I come back, you’re getting armed. Don’t you dare tell your bosses. You know how to shoot?”
“Do I?” Clarence said with a chuckle. “You know I served in the Army for an entire stint out of high school, right?”
And you still let Eve get kidnapped?
Then again, he had no weapons. That wasn’t cowardly. That was just…
It’s what 99 percent of the population would have done.
“Then I don’t need to tell you anything else,” I said, turning around. “Clarence. I’m sorry you weren’t prepared. But after I come back with a weapon for you, I don’t want any excuses. If anyone other than us three get up to the apartment without explicit verbal confirmation from me, you’re gonna have that same gun so far up your ass you’ll be shitting bullets. Clear?”