Brutal
Uday Satpathy
Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgment
Thank you
Book 1
Prologue
Eight Years later
1. Hotel Ritz Plaza, Allahabad
2. 11:30 AM, Allahabad District and Sessions Court
3. 2:35 Pm, Hotel Ritz Plaza, Allahabad
4. Untitled
5. Laxmi Apartments, Vivekanand Marg, Allahabad
6. Untitled
7. Untitled
8. Untitled
9. 8 Pm, Ambala City
10. Untitled
11. New Delhi
12. 1 Am, Ambala City
13. New Delhi
14. 2:30 Am, Ambala City
15. Untitled
16. 7:30 Am
17. 8 Am
18. 12:30 Pm, Karol Bagh, New Delhi
19. 3:20 Pm, Ambala Executive Inn
20. Century News Headquarters, New Delhi
21. Chelmsford Road New Delhi
22. Untitled
23. Untitled
24. Forest Institute of Science and Technology, Jabalpur
25. 2:30 Pm, AJK Umaria Police Station
26. 7:30 Pm, Grand Trunk Road, Ambala City
Book 2
27. 8 Pm, Dehradun
28. 9:30 Pm, Ambala City
29. Untitled
30. 10 Pm, Ambala City
31. 8 Am, Lutyens’ Delhi
32. Untitled
33. 11 Am, Ambala City
34. Untitled
35. Untitled
36. Ambala Cantt.
37. Untitled
38. Untitled
39. Untitled
40. Untitled
41. Untitled
42. Untitled
43. Untitled
44. Untitled
45. Untitled
46. Untitled
47. Untitled
48. Untitled
49. Untitled
50. Untitled
51. Untitled
52. Untitled
53. Untitled
Book 3
54. Untitled
55. Untitled
56. Untitled
57. Untitled
58. Untitled
59. Untitled
60. Kushwaha Farmhouse, Jharoda Kalan, Delhi
61. Untitled
62. Koramangala, Bangalore
63. Untitled
64. Bangalore International Airport
65. Untitled
66. Hotel Le Regalia, Bangalore
67. Untitled
68. Untitled
69. Kushwaha Farmhouse, Jharoda Kalan, Delhi
70. Untitled
71. Untitled
72. Le Regalia Hotel, Bangalore
73. Untitled
74. Le Regalia Hotel, Bangalore
75. Untitled
76. Untitled
77. Room 705
78. Untitled
79. Untitled
80. Hotel reception, Le Regalia
81. Untitled
82. Untitled
83. Untitled
84. Untitled
85. Room 703
86. Untitled
87. Untitled
88. Room 702
89. Untitled
90. S. S. Marie Cargo Ship, Somewhere in the Indian Ocean
91. Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu
Bloody Good Book
Published by
Bloody Good Book, an imprint of Bushfire Publishers LLP
6th Floor, Core House,
Off C. G. Road, Nr Parimal Garden
Ellisbridge, Ahmedabad - 380006
Copyright © 2014 by Uday Satpathy
ISBN: 978-81-931821-0-9
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents have been used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, event or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
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.
ISBN: 978-81-931821-0-9
To my wife Astha,
for believing in me more than I did,
&
To my little boy Vivaan,
for all the happiness in my life.
Acknowledgment
Some people inspire you, some guide you and some live your dream as if it’s their own. I have been blessed to have the support of all these wonderful people throughout the journey of writing this book.
I am indebted to my wife Astha Agarwal for continuously encouraging me and critiquing my work since its inception. My heartiest thanks to dear friends Subhasis Mohanty and Soumya Prakash Patra for going through umpteen unedited versions of my book, and providing their invaluable input. A word of thanks to my family too – Uttam Satpathy, Usha Rani Satpathy and my parents. I couldn’t have been what I am without you.
I am deeply grateful to Niyati Patel, Rashmi Bansal and the whole Bloody Good Book and Westland team for leaving no stone unturned in making my book better. Selecting a book through crowdsourcing is a novel concept in the Indian publishing industry, and I believe www.bloodygoodbook.com will scale new heights in the future. That Brutal is the first product of such an initiative is a source of immense joy and pride for me. This book has been made possible only by the love, praise and constructive advice from the author-and-reader community at Bloody Good Book. Keep reading and backing new voices!
Thank you
Brutal is India’s first crowd sourced and crowd curated book. Its publication wouldn’t have been possible without the contribution of these and many other amazing Bloody Good Book members. Thank you for reading and reviewing Brutal on www.bloodygoodbook.com. Your vote helped publish Brutal.
Deepak Kaul
Neha Lokhande Rajput
Vidhya Devaraj
Niyati Shinde
Antony Varghese
Mark Fong
Gunjan Sen
Sombir
Hywelpinto
Siya
Rasika
Jenny
Remesh
Yamini Algaonkar
Sanket Panda
Pooja Sood
Tarun Agrawal
Narendra Singh
Uttam Satapathy
Sauvagya Ranjan Bhanja
Sandeep Jadhao
Pearl Enginer
Priya Agrawal
Swarup Mohanty
Sabrish Nair
Shreyansh Jain
Vibhor Jain
Arnab Sarkar
Parag Randar
Subhasis Mohanty
Sarthak
Sakshi Goel
Soumya Prakash Patra
Usha Mohanty
Manish Kumar Tiwari
Joyita Bandopadhyay
Pritesh Bhosale
Yaagneshwaran Ganesh
Sapna Bhattacharya
Nalin Verma
Zahir Ansari
Nithi Subramaniam
Astha Agarwal
Damini Majumdar
Swarup Kumar Kar
Jahnavi Chintakunta
Darshan Mhatre
N. Murali
Mahrukh Chikliwala
Qais Palekar
Siddhartha Deshpande
Hetika Sanghani
Sanjana Parikh
Gaurav Thapar
Ravi Ojha
Sushma Rao
Kirti
K Sankar
Nirmala Kelkar
Praveen Vohra
Shanti Bhosale
Vishal Seth
&n
bsp; Marc Wellington
Rajesh Shankaran
Vivek Mundhra
Badrinath Nuggehalli
Annie Joseph
Surendra Mohanty
Raunak
Soumyadeep Koley
Shanthan
Sheshagiri K M
Antony Varghese
Book 1
Prologue
2 AM, Bandhavgarh National Park
In pitch darkness, Kunal Chaubey dashed through the thick foliage, ignoring the branches and twigs clawing into his flesh. Webs of overhanging roots kept getting in his way, lacerating his face like barbed wires. Yet, he ran like a mad man. He didn’t know where he was going. He just wanted to get out of this damned forest.
For the last half an hour, his legs had been charging through the dense shrubbery, unmindful of the rodents crawling beneath. His skin was itching and stinging at odd places, with insects swarming all over. Some of them could be poisonous, he knew. But right now, what terrified him more was the realization that his body was tiring.
Even though he was a young man, all his vitals were running on overdrive. He was wheezing, with lungs on fire and legs quivering with muscular cramps. If things continued this way, he knew he would fatigue himself to death. Still a better way to die than falling into the hands of the monsters, he thought, his hands tightening around the handle of the axe he was holding. His palm was sweating and fingers trembling, but his grip on the weapon didn’t budge one bit. It was his saviour. The only thing that stood between him and the predators.
For now, he had stolen a lead on his pursuers. They were in shock. They hadn’t expected him to resist, much less fight back. But fight he did, surprising even his own instincts, for he had been a spineless wimp throughout his life. His aggression, however, was only momentary. It had come and gone like a flash of light. He was no longer a warrior, but a man running terrified.
Since his childhood, he had been afraid of the dark. And it was not some bullshit phobia psychiatrists called by weird names. It was real. Far too scary to be explained to people. He had seen things in his life people would prefer not seeing even in nightmares. Things lurking in the black shadows, slithering through the branches of trees. Like a cloud of soot that has life.
His parents had taught him to deal with these sinister entities. ‘Just ignore them’, they said. ‘It’s all in your mind, these creatures from hell. They can’t touch you. They can’t harm you.’
How wrong were Mom and Dad? They could not fathom how close they were to their own harrowing deaths. Two years ago, the demons took them away, leaving behind a contorted mass of blood and burnt flesh. Looking no different from the twisted metal they were entangled with.
People called it a gruesome car accident. Sheer ignorance, again.
They had not gone away because of the mistake of a drunken truck driver. The man was driving beyond the speed limits, no doubt, but in his own lane. It was his parents’ car which, coming from the opposite direction, had swerved inexplicably, and leaped over the divider and run into the giant vehicle. Nobody could explain why, except him. The reason was evident on the victims’ disfigured faces, which resembled those of roller-coaster riders in an uncontrolled free fall. Their gaping mouths, bulging eyes and raised eyebrows had preserved the horror of their final moment like a negative film does. A moment in which they realized that their son’s wild imaginations were no longer just ‘imaginations’.
The incident left him shattered, filling his heart with dread. His guardian angels had departed. There was now no one left to save him. Thus far, the demons had kept a distance from him, prowling only in the shadows. But now that they had tasted blood, there would be no stopping them.
And they came, as expected, not allowing him even a night of mourning.
They came out of the darkest of corners of his house, their tentacles crawling out from the shadows. Alone and cornered, he knew only one way of escaping. Run. Just run. He left his home, beginning a life where he was always on the move. But, the creatures never gave up on him. They stalked him everywhere – in desolate stretches of road, in movie theatres, in supermarkets, in his engineering hostel and now today even in this wilderness.
Whump! Lost in his thoughts, Kunal tripped and fell forward on the ground. His cheeks and nose brushed against the soil. It felt moist. He picked himself up and looked around. It was a river bank. A stream of water lay ahead, gleaming under the stars. Thank God! With elated spirits, he marched towards the stream.
He began walking along the bank, hoping to run into a human settlement soon, where he would get shelter, and more importantly, protection. A cool breeze comforted his burning skin, luring him towards the waves caressing the coastline. Shifting the axe into his left hand, he bent down and splashed water onto his face. It felt rejuvenating. He stood there briefly, taking a few deep breaths.
His nostrils picked up a slightly pungent yet familiar smell. He instantly recognized it. What surprised him was that it was coming from his axe. No way! He frowned and brought its sharp edge close to his nose. A dark, viscous liquid was dripping from the blade. Its smell was now unmistakable. It can’t be. Warily, he dabbed a finger in the thick liquid and put it into his mouth. Every shred of doubt in his mind evaporated right away. It was human blood – salty and slightly metallic in taste. He brooded for a few seconds, and then shook his head dismissively. There was no way it could be human blood.
It was the blood of the monsters he had killed.
Eight Years later
1
Hotel Ritz Plaza, Allahabad
Something woke Prakash Sinha up. He felt dizzy, his eyes burning as he tried to part his eyelids. He looked at the wall clock and groaned. 8:25 AM. Damn. Yet another sleepless night. He had slept only for 15 minutes. That was the best he had slept in two weeks.
He lifted his five-foot-ten body from the bed and stood up, immediately greeted by a pinching sensation in his right knee. Yeah, good morning to you too, he sneered, stretching his leg. The pain had been bothering him since the last few days, stinging often when he got up or sat down. It was one of the ‘gifts’ from his last assignment. He stroked his fingers over his knee and noticed a tiny metal splinter protruding from his kneecap. Another Goddamn piece of shrapnel. Not today!
Today was a big day. He couldn’t allow it to go wrong. He was a Special Correspondent at Globe News, getting back into the field after three weeks of leave, a period he had spent in severe depression and trauma. His face looked wan, eyes bloodshot with dark circles under them. The salt-and-pepper hair he prided himself on appeared more salty than peppery. Yesterday, while looking at the mirror, he had remarked that he looked sixty. He was only thirty-five.
His ordeal began one month ago, when at the peak of a glorious career, he took up an assignment to cover a story in Banka. It was a Naxalite hotbed and a place notorious for the bloody battle between the government and the rebels. He had taken a team of cameraman Ojas Patel and a local freelancer with him. Both of them had died in the very first week. He woke up in an ICU, his body full of shrapnel, enough to give him a lifetime of suffering.
The doctors were able to remove a few major chunks of metal from his neck, thighs and back. But they had to leave untouched the minor fragments embedded deep inside his body. He was discharged in a week – body fragile, mind tormented.
Night after night, he would wake up with a splitting headache and spasms coursing through his body. Some days, he would hear explosions and then squeeze his ears with hands. Nightmares made him spend nights under his bed in terror. He tried sleeping pills; even drinking, praying for an inebriated slumber which never came. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was lying in a cemetery surrounded by graves. One belonged to his career. One to his happiness. And one to his life. All buried for good.
If someone had told him that he would soon leave the gloomy walls of his New Delhi apartment and fly to Allahabad to cover a story known as the ‘Nitin Tomar case’, he wouldn’t have believed him. But
he was well on his way to do it. And it was made possible by Seema Sharma, a close friend who was also an ace journalist with the Century News channel. She kept visiting him, often against his wishes, even on days he closed himself up in his room sulking in darkness. She was the only one who could persuade him to come out of his shell and get back into the field. Begin with an easy case, she said.
He had begun to hate journalism, maybe even fear it. But he also badly wanted things to get back to where they were a month ago. So, he agreed to her suggestion, just to give himself one desperate shot at redemption. He knew nothing about Nitin Tomar or the crime he committed. He was going as a blank slate, unprepared, like a rookie. Beginning his career again, like he did twelve years ago.
He picked up the mobile phone from the bedside coffee table. There was a message from Seema. This must have woken me up. He read it. ‘You are coming to the court, right? Will kill you if I don’t see you at 11:30 AM. He smiled and nodded in agreement. There was one more message. It was from Ritesh Pandey, his boss, the editor for crime beat at Globe News. It said: ‘Best of luck. Be the stubborn bastard again that we all knew.’
He had a quick bath, dressed formally and then went over to the restaurant area of his hotel for a breakfast. It was a long time since he had eaten in public.
He was halfway through his breakfast when he saw a short, stout man with a balding head enter the restaurant. Dilip More. This man was his old companion and cameraman. Like him, Dilip also lived in New Delhi, but they hardly got to see each other nowadays.
Prakash smiled and called out his name.
Dilip looked back, smiling. “So, the lion is back into the game!” he said, before hugging him. It was a long hug. From a colleague who was now almost a brother.
“How is the great Dilip More assigned to such a low profile case?”
“Ritesh Sirji called me up. He said you are going to cover the Nitin Tomar case at Allahabad. That was enough for me to…”
“So you have come to babysit me?” Prakash muttered.
“Now c’mon bhai, everybody can do with some help,” Dilip said, settling into a chair across from him. “Look at yourself. You look fucking tired.”
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