Peace Tomorrow: A Verón City Novel

by M. Roberts

  Peace Tomorrow

  by M. Roberts

  Copyright April 2, 2014.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Thank you for reading.

  Prologue.

  Lucius was in the moment, heavy breath and careless thoughts. He was operating on adrenaline and hate, both rushing through his veins as his sweaty fingers clenched the butt of the pistol in his hands tighter and tighter with every passing moment. Time was racing, and yet the moment was rich and still. There were so many moves he had to make after this one, so many considerations and swift actions and all of these were looming in the back of his mind, congealing into a plan. He was going to need a plan. The thing in his hand, the metal instrument that in a moment was going to kill was also the lynch pin. Pulling its trigger was sliding it out of place and the whole system around him was going to collapse into a hazardous mass of metal, mangled. He assumed he wouldn’t make it out alive. He didn’t care. What would come tomorrow was an afterthought, lost in the rage and the warpath. It was a winding trail that came from a darkness behind him, miles for which he was ignorant. He was clear now. He came to know his world in the past seventy-two hours with startling and abrasive clarity the likes of which shattered all he stood for. He wasn’t even sure what it was he once stood for. Peace? Love? Paradise? Whatever it was, he stood for something else completely now. It was blaring its message in the front of his mind. It craved the blast that was coming next.

  Lucius swiped his blonde, sweat soaked bangs away from his eyes for a clearer shot of his prey, reeling on the floor before him, weeping, pleading. Lucius placed his right hand against his left to better wield the pistol, and steadied his stance. Though his body was thin, his forearms were thick and muscular, and as his fists squeezed, his veins surged and rose from his flesh. What laid before him was something he once loved. A friend. But the hate, the adrenaline, it swirled in his mind and, fuelled by a betrayal, consumed all of what love remained for the squirming man at his feet.

  Lucius zeroed in on his face, clenched and tear drenched. The image drew a grin slowly across Lucius’s face. He enjoyed the misery. He had never enjoyed such a sadistic pleasure before. But something fundamental had changed in him minutes before.

  “Lucius,” a quivering voice interrupted his focus, pulling it momentarily to his side. Nathaniel, the sixteen year old boy, cousin to Lucius, loyal and trusting, stood upright, jaw clenched to stop it from chattering. He mustered enough bodily control to ask, “What comes next?” He was both frightened and eager for the answer. Whatever it would be, he was one hundred percent with his cousin.

  There was only one word that came to Lucius’s mind.

  “Bloodshed.”

  Nathaniel drew in a sharp gasp of air, swallowing his fear. In a final attempt to appeal to what perhaps remained of his cousin’s old sensibilities, he asked, “What about peace?”

  Hearing the word aloud, what he had so frequently preached in his old mindset, stung his ears. There were two sentiments that came simultaneous. The first was of longing, that feeling of absence and loss one has when an ideal dies within them. The second was of the dying, a voice of ridicule for the foolish naiveté that once endeavored to change his world. It was this second sentiment that drove him to do finally what he had been building towards in the previous moments.

  “Peace,” he repeated with disgust. “There’ll be peace when we’re dead.”

  An image of his resting corpse brought solace to his pained heart.

  “If we do this, if we go through with this, Lucius—” Nathaniel couldn’t finish with his eyes open, so he shut them tight and finished, “We’ll be dead before dawn.”

  Lucius’s calm, yet broken voice replied softly, “Then there’ll be peace tomorrow.”

  His finger twitched and tightened, pulling and drawing in the small trigger it wrapped itself around. The head swung violently backwards, a splattering of blood and brain matter painting the floor behind it before the entire body jerked and threw itself on its spine. The crying was over, the quiet pleading was finished. The traitor was dead.

  The heat and the rattle echoed in Lucius’s wrist. The tingle sneaked into his bone and swarmed throughout his frame. It was inside him now. It was in his core.

  It defined him.

  And sometime earlier, Titus Dicaro was rubbing his head, not with his fingers, but with his closed fists, scrubbing his scalp with his knuckles, whining to himself and cycling through the thousand different voices in his head that yelled at him, listening for the one to tell him what to do. It was a mismatched chorus of unsynchronized vocals, each originating from its own dark corner of his mind. Mostly, they were negligible, but in times of great stress they descended on him in what felt like a biblical swarm that consumed his clarity. He couldn’t think straight. It was a mess of noise and garbled words running into each other clouding any decision he considered making for himself. He was haunted. But he had brought the ghosts upon himself.

  He tapped the end of the pistol against his temple. None of his demons stopped, so he tapped harder, then began banging. He swung the metal against his temple with such force that his vision twisted upside down. He didn’t care about killing himself, or rather, hadn’t the free mental space to consider that end. He just wanted his brain to work, to give him the answer to this situation he found himself trapped within.

  And then it happened. Above the cacophony of voices rose a single whisper. It was distinct, familiar. It was the voice that had propelled him into kidnapping his victim in the first place. Though Titus knew not to trust it, but this knowledge he locked away in favor of an answer. What it told him to do, it said in two short words. Simple instruction.

  “Kill her.”

  Titus decided he would appeal to the voice. He would appease it in an effort to ally himself with the strongest of the multitude. Titus stopped scrubbing his scalp and wiped the snot from beneath his nostrils and off his upper lip with his sleeve. He stood and charged out of the bedroom, wrapping around the corner to enter what would be called the living space of his garden apartment, though it appeared unfit for such an activity. All his things, clothes, drugs, and otherwise, lay scattered across the floor stained with food and rain water that poured in from corners. Roaches scattered to his footsteps, leaving the only living thing, a girl, bound to a chair in the center of all the chaos, to the will of Titus. His shaky hand rose the pistol slowly, like a heavy weight, and stepped in towards the girl until the end of the barrel was hard against the side of her head.

  “Titus, please.”

  Titus ignored her as he did what the voice had commanded. The matter within her skull was released into the chaos of his room, and the force of the bullet tearing through pulled the rest of her down with the chair, falling to its side.

  He watched the blood empty out and felt the same happening within him. Cold.

  “Life is a trip, free flowing, time irreverent, uncertain, chaotic, swirling. Uncontrolled. Consciousness always tries to negate that fact, tries to ensnare reality with laws, with rules, rigidity. We try to make it make sense, when it won’t. Are we forever blind to our own cycles? Rearrange our moments to see a jumbled timeline. Would we see it then, that we repeat ourselves? Would we make sense of it before the end?”

  1.

  Lucius leaned over his bathroom sink, keeling from the pain in his abdomen, dripping blood from the end of his nose, grimacing when he coughed.

  “Get me a shot, damnit.”

  Malcolm rested on a stool placed just outside the bathroom, hanging his head in embarrassment, wanting to address the issue but knowing how Lucius would react. He raised his head, opened his mouth, but kept the words at the edge of his throat. He gro
aned as he stood, walking into the kitchen, a two step distance in their small, but elaborately dressed apartment. It was four rooms, a kitchen, a living room, and two bedrooms, on the north side of Verón City. It wasn’t ritzy, but any space in that area of the west coast town didn’t come cheap. It was paid for in part by Malcolm’s inherited wealth and the rest by Lucius’s modest drug dealing, with a sizable campus of customers. There was a university in the city limits, a prominent art school where students came from all over the country to attend. He also controlled some streets on the sketchier side of town, established by his now absent brother. But that territory was becoming harder and harder for the reluctant twenty-three year old dealer to retain.

  Malcolm slammed an overflowing shot glass on the toilet seat beside Lucius. Rather than turning his head to accept the kind act, Lucius raised his head to come face to face with it in the mirror. His brown sun soaked skin glistened with sweat smeared with blood, having been wiped from his nose. He was Japanese in blood, but American in all other things. His father, first generation, married a Dutch woman in New York. Even Lucius’s father was Americanized, estranged from his family by his parents. Lucius’s father left them in his teenage years, feeling strangled by their rigid observance of tradition. But as he settled down with his new wife, picked up a nine to five, and celebrated Memorial and Labor days with neighborhood grillouts, he unwittingly lost himself to another set of traditions, that, had he thought of it, did nothing to define him. Their calendar milestones were enough to distract.

  Lucius watched as his parents lost sight of who they were during their assimilation, and was determined himself not to follow in their footsteps. He and his brother ran away when he was seventeen, and he assumed they had been long since forgotten by their preoccupied parents. He never looked back. But that also left him with a hole, for in the six years since he left to begin anew on the other side of the country, he was no closer to discovering his identity than when he was a teenager. Now his brother was gone. Run off to hide from a greater enemy than the larger drug racket in town.

  “Fuck the Dicaros.”

  Lucius spit into the sink.

  “Whoa,” spoke Malcolm, his voice tinged with sarcasm, “harsh words for such a romantic.” He downed the shot intended for his roommate.

  “We’ve had Sixth Street corner for a year and a half.”

  “We? I don’t see anybody else here. Looks to me like you’re the only drug dealer around.” Malcolm disappeared again to the kitchen, this time for the whole bottle. Lucius knew Malcolm’s words concerned his brother, a jab at his character for abandoning his younger brother. But Lucius thought of another, of the drug kingpin whose hand he felt around his throat.

  “Apparently not.”

  Malcolm returned with another shot glass and set it beside the first to fill both to the brim. He took his in hand and forced the other into Lucius’s.

  “Malcolm,” his voice dropped its aggression, sank to an exhausted sigh.

  “Drink, my friend.”

  They threw back their shots.

  “Lane, that asshole. He knows not to fuck with the truce.”

  “He was there to save his shit stain cousin. You know that’s different.”

  “I don’t hate the Dicaros. I really don’t. But they push, Malcolm. They won’t stop pushing us until we’re gone.”

  Malcolm draped an arm around Lucius.

  “I know, buddy, I know. You are physically incapable of hating. You’re a lover boy.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Malcolm stepped back, laughing.

  “I mean it, Malcolm. I just want things to run smoothly. There’s plenty of city for the both of us.”

  “And there are plenty of other cities out there for you.”

  “Goddamnit, Malcolm. Stop with that. I won’t run.”

  “For some misplaced notion of loyalty. Your brother left you. He left, Lucius. He knew the right thing to do.”

  Lucius knew it wasn’t only loyalty that kept him, but it was among the reasons.

  “He ran to keep the heat off me.”

  “He ran because he got in too deep. Fucking around with drugs and gangs—and the mob? He made poor decisions, Lucius. Victor knew he made bad decisions. He’d never want anything bad to happen to you, that’s true. But his fleeing the mob on a gambling beef was not noble.”

  These were words that landed with Lucius, though he chose not to respond to them.

  “Can’t you speak with them? Lane, Ezekiel, the whole family.”

  Malcolm turned, rubbing his hand across the back of his neck. Lucius understood.

  “We ran away to take our piece of paradise,” Lucius recalled. “Vincent’s connection seemed like the life. Selling drugs, drinking all day by the ocean, a sea of beautiful women to give your heart. It was perfection in my mind, I wanted it. Nothing made sense, my parents were just fading. Vince and I were skipping class to plan it out. ‘Let’s go live with our aunt, I know this guy who will set us up.’ Seemed so brilliant. If all life was fading, we could at least do it in the sun, and share some love. Look at us now. Aunt’s on meds, her kid’s under my wing. Vince on the run, me fighting for territory. Shit, I knew that gambling job was stupid, I should’ve never let him walk into that club. But I did, and here we are. No paradise, no love, no perfection. And still fading. Goddamnit, Malcolm, I put all of myself into this pursuit. All that I am is in a dream, a distant vision of the good life. I can’t give up on that. I can’t just run away again. How can I run away from here to save myself, when I ran here in the first place to find myself?”

  Malcolm smiled for a moment, there’s another one of Lucius’s famous diatribes, he thought. But the smile quickly faded, as the tone sank in. These rants used to be optimistic in the face of such trying circumstances. Now it felt winded.

  “Listen, there’s a party tonight. You need to come.”

  Lucius groaned and returned to his hunched position, leaning forward with both hands on the sides of the sink and hanging his head.

  “Who’s going to be there?”

  Malcolm understood Lucius was really asking if Dicaros would be there.

  “They’ll do nothing. Lane may grin from across the room at your bruises, but he’s there for pussy same as you’ll be. Not for war.”

  Lucius scoffed. “What’s the difference? I come away with bruises from both.”

  “Look at you, poet, entwining two disparate actions with personal experience.”

  “You sound like my hipster customers talking about homework.”

  “Maybe you should listen before you judge.”

  Lucius was done with the back and forth. He turned to face Malcolm.

  “I can’t.”

  Malcolm shook his head.

  “Don’t you give me that Vivian shit again. She left you months ago when she found out what was good for her. College and a rich white man, not drugs and turf squabbles. Your heart isn’t broken, lover boy, your ego is.”

  “Quit calling me that.”

  “I call it like it is, lover boy. Just look in the mirror at that pretty pouty face with the beautiful blonde bangs and tell me that’s not what you see.”

  Lucius looked back at himself. He couldn’t help himself from laughing this time.

  “You really think I’m pretty?”

  “No, I think your fuck ugly, but all those drunk girlies at the party tonight are going to eat that shit up.”

  Malcolm turned to exit the bathroom and step into his bedroom to assemble his outfit.

  “Come on, get ready, we don’t have all night!”

  Lucius ran cold tap water into his cupped hands and washed his face.

  He spoke to himself, “I suppose I could use a little escape.”

  2.

  The door swung open and it was noise and bodies, swirling together in an inebriated pool before them, as Lucius and Malcolm crossed the threshold. In Malcolm’s mind, there was a wash of all stress. This was his element. People and socializing, circles a
nd outcasts, and him across all their stages. They all loved Malcolm, and he loved that. He was immediately swept away from his first step, leaving Lucius alone at the door. Lucius stuffed his hands deep into his coat pockets, feeling cold despite all the warmth. Lucius wasn’t sure what his element was, but he knew this wasn’t it. Knowing he couldn’t clench his fists in his pockets by the door the entire night, he made an effort to move about the room. He managed to make small talk with acquaintances here and there, but nothing lasted, and too frequently he fell silent, feeling awkward in the background. There were constant stares, eyes thrown his way by girls from all around him. Some ventured near to enter in conversation, but none broke his icy exterior. On another night, on a day he wasn’t beaten, some time before his unfaithful relationship, sometime before his crippling self conscious realization that he was lost in his life, he would be warm to their advances. Likely moving to a more intimate setting, speaking of some paradise he wished he could take her away to, a place he envisioned in daydreams. But his head occupied a different space entirely now. The same revolving door of women would not suffice the hole that he felt growing now faster than ever in his pit. He caught sight of Lane, drunk and entertaining a circle of men, likely with the story of how he beat the no-good one man competition on Sixth Street earlier that day. Lane caught Lucius’s eye. He smiled, raised a glass, then continued speaking with his buddies. Lucius forced his way through the crowd to the back door to exit into the backyard.

  Malcolm was in the kitchen, having just finished one of his collections of repeated jokes. It landed well, but watching his close friend exit through the back wearing such distress stole the sweetness in his social victory. He grew quiet and the conversation continued around him. He turned to face the counter, pouring a shot for himself when a delicate hand placed a second glass beside his.

  “Can’t let you drink alone.”

  The seductive tone refilled Malcolm’s spirit and concerns for his friend were resolved by the greater stimulus of a confident woman. Malcolm turned to greet her with a smile, then proceeded to fill her glass. He raised his glass and she met it with hers in the small space between them.