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Herba: Once in, there's no way out.

Page 6

by Arjun Kramadhati


  The house was a normal English style villa, which bore a villainous look due to the creepy vines sticking onto it and the crumbling pillars. It was a two-storied house with a chimney jutting out from the top. The ground floor consisted of a large hall and a guest room. Attached to this was a spacious kitchen area. The floor above this had three bedrooms. The hall had a fireplace that led to the chimney on the top. The windows were rusted and the glass panes were broken. Plants had covered the fireplace. Creepers had managed to sneak inside the house through the broken windows. Glass pieces lay all over the floor of the house. Spider webs had conquered the wall corners and openings. There was very little natural light inside the house. Pretty much, it was the settings that one would find in a haunted house.

  ‘How did you find this house?’ Rocky asked Herba.

  ‘You come here to smoke-up often?’ he asked, before she could reply anything.

  This place was definitely a winner.

  ‘This was once our summer holiday house,’ Herba replied, looking disappointed.

  Rocky and Natas exchanged glances at each other in silence.

  ‘And then what happened?’ the quiet Natas asked. It was rare for him to show interest in anything other than the business he so deeply cared about.

  ‘Every summer we used to come here. About twenty of us, relatives. The land that we are standing on right now still belongs to us. About two acres of this is ours...’ She stopped. Her voice broke.

  She continued.

  ‘Now, I need a joint before I continue the story. I do not want to cry on this exciting day,’ she said, looking down at the floor and trying to hide her moist eyes.

  The three walked out of the house to roll up a joint. They sat down on the small set of stairs, which led to the main door. The house really was creepy.

  Rocky quickly went about the complete ‘cleaning and rolling’ process. Herba sat silently as she stared away into something in the past that haunted her immensely. Natas smiled to himself at having found the perfect location to start his drug empire. Rocky prepared a king-size joint and lit it. After about ten minutes of silence, Herba continued her story. This time, her voice sounded calm and firm. The Marijuana helped.

  ‘This land was passed on to my dad by his father while my dad’s brother got a patch of land in the heart of the city. But my uncle wanted a piece of this land too. So, he offered to give up a portion of the land in the city in exchange for a portion of this land. My dad refused. He knew that my uncle was in it for the money. He knew that once my uncle had his hand on the land, he would sell it. My dad wanted this to be a family getaway. Small quarrels became big family disputes and led to big splits within our family. While my dad wanted to solve this peacefully and reasonably, my uncle did not intend to go away without a piece of this land. After long and bitter series of fights over many months, my uncle ultimately murdered my parents in this very house. He shot them in the head with a country made revolver,’ she said, pointing to a place on the front porch, supposedly where the gory crime had been committed.

  There was an eerie silence after that. Herba continued.

  ‘Most of my relatives offered to take me into their house. But I ran away. I will never trust any of those goons. I live with my friends now. One night here, one night there...”

  Natas and Rocky were shocked. Suddenly, the house had become scarier. They felt a deep sympathy for the newfound friend. They were quite surprised how easily Herba had opened up to them after just a day’s acquaintance. Maybe she was just too lonely and needed someone to talk to and share her feelings with. Rocky felt his love for her deepening. He had to take care of her now.

  ‘Where is your uncle now?’ Rocky asked, worried about the whereabouts of the merciless killer.

  ‘He is serving a fifteen year sentence in the state prison,’ she replied.

  Herba added one more sentence.

  ‘That is why I have resorted to this,’ she said as she held out the half burnt joint in her hand.

  ‘This makes me forget all the bad things. This shows me Heaven amidst the Hell I live in.’

  She managed a smile on her face.

  Rocky was deeply touched. He mustered all the manly courage in him, held Herba’s hand and brought her close to him.

  ‘From now on, we are a team, Herba. We do this business together. We stay together and watch out for each other’s backs. I am there for you. Got it?’

  Herba did not reply. Instead, she rested her head on Rocky’s shoulders and closed her eyes. Rocky knew that was a ‘yes’.

  Over the following days, Rocky and Herba grew extremely close to each other. It was evident to them that they were meant for each other. Rocky filled the void that had been left behind by her parents. Herba realized that Rocky was someone to trust and rely upon. She loved the way in which Rocky always cared for her.

  Rocky and Herba spent the following days by clearing and cleaning the land in front of the house for cultivation of Cannabis. The three spent an awful lot of time in cleaning the insides of the house. Natas made arrangements to get all the chemicals and the tablets he had purchased earlier. He also bought the apparatus and the clothing required for cooking the daddy drug.

  In about a weeks’ time, the house had a major makeover. The unwanted plants and cobs of web were cleared out and the floors were scrubbed. The front porch was cleared of all the broken glass pieces. The patch of land in front of the house was cleaned and leveled. The estate was ready to be transformed into a drug farm.

  Little did the three know that in the coming days, their business would attract the unwanted attention of the merciless drug cartels of the city.

  Meth Lab

  “Very soon, the world around them started to rotate and revolve. Vision became blurry and imaginary things came in to life. The meth was working and it was very good.”

  ‘Come inside! Both of you!’ shouted Natas from inside the house. Rocky and Herba were joyfully sowing the seeds into the ground.

  They rushed inside fearing that something had happened. The wooden floor creaked at every step on the way. The house was very dark inside. If not for the shafts of sunlight entering from the broken windows and cracked roof, the house would be pitch dark.

  They found Natas inside the big hall on the ground floor. A wide range of chemical apparatuses were scattered all over the room. The perimeter of the room was lined with large barrels of chemicals. Three sets of full-body protective coat with industrial grade oxygen masks were hung on one of the walls. Natas was standing in the centre with an empty plastic bottle. The type of bottle in which you would see aerated drinks at the store.

  ‘Sit down, it is going to take a while,’ he said.

  He opened a strip of common cold pills, and emptied it onto a plate.

  ‘This is your average cold tablet that you easily get at the medical store. This has the main magic ingredient to cook meth,’ he said as he grinned at how the special ingredient for the legendary drug was found in the most common of tablets.

  ‘We need to crush it first,’ Natas said as he signaled Herba to come forward and crush the tablets. Herba crushed them easily with a stone that Natas had kept beforehand, on the table.

  He then emptied the powder into the plastic bottle.

  ‘Now, I will add detergent and some clog cleaner solution’

  Natas signaled Rocky to pour the chemicals into the bottle for him. The scene looked more like an interactive science lab at school where the teacher made the students do all the work.

  If only these lads had paid as much attention at school!

  ‘This is lye solution. Again, easily available in any of the local stores,’ Natas said as he poured a transparent liquid into the bottle.

  ‘Rocky, there is a battery pack right next to you. Pass it to me’

  Rocky threw a pack of four lithium-ion batteries at Natas.

  Natas took out one battery and started cutting out the outer shell. After about two minutes of cutting, Natas reached the core. It
was a cylinder of smaller and shorter dimensions as compared to the outer shell. The cylindrical core was made of rolls of lithium strips and strips of other materials. Natas unrolled the core and separated out the rectangular strip of lithium. He cut the strip into tiny pieces and added it to the solution in the plastic bottle. The pieces of lithium floated on the solution inside the bottle.

  ‘Now’s the tricky part,’ he said.

  Natas continued as he raised one of his eyebrows charismatically as if it were a cue to the climax of the operation.

  ‘We need to add the exact amount of water. A little too much and the mixture will explode,’ he said, with an evil smile.

  †††††††

  This was specifically true. Lithium is highly reactive to water and explodes on contact with it. But, the mixture in the bottle needs a kick-start for the reaction to begin. So, water has to be added. A mini explosion is enough to burn most of the skin on one’s body. Cases of these are quite common in the streets across the drug-gripped cities of the world.

  ‡‡‡‡‡‡‡

  Natas carefully measured a tiny quantity of water and added it into the bottle. He quickly closed the lid and began shaking it violently.

  ‘This is called the shake and bake method,’ he said as the bottle began to vibrate violently because of the aggressive reaction that had been kicked off by water. Very soon, the bottle was filled with a white gas. Natas removed the lid to let the gas escape and then closed it back again to continue the shaking. An hour of shaking and exhausting Natas was done with stage one. The bottle now had liquid meth amongst other chemicals, dancing away inside the thin plastic bottle.

  ‘Cover your mouth with a cloth,’ Natas instructed the two as he did the same.

  ‘We now have to separate the meth from the solution you see here,’ he said as he pointed to the cloudy solution in the bottle.

  ‘We do this by bubbling it through hydrochloric acid,’ he continued.

  While the solution from the bottle slowly mixed with the acid, fumes started to fill the room. These fumes were highly toxic and corrosive. Without proper ventilation, one can easily die. The fumes, in the right amount can burn through skin and flesh. This is the most dangerous stage. After the bubbling process, the glass was now filled thick sediments at the bottom. The sediment was Crystal Meth.

  ‘This is it,’ Natas said triumphantly, as he raised the glass.

  The look on Natas’s face closely resembled that of a marathon runner’s satisfied face after the long but fruitful race.

  ‘We now dry this,’ he said.

  †††††††

  The real reason why Crystal Meth is so widely popular is the fact that it can be prepared with the most basic of household items. Around twenty percent of all the tablets, which are used to fight common cold, that are bought around the world are bought for the sole purpose of cooking meth. You can cook a batch in less than four hours with utensils and items already available in your house. This is one of the reasons why the police crackdown on the meth industry has been so consistently ineffective. Any user can turn into a cook if he wants to. When the police bust a meth cook, ten others spring up to fill his place. The tumor just keeps growing. One can cook it literally anywhere and start selling it. Natas showed this fact to Rocky and Herba: How easy it is to cook meth.

  ‡‡‡‡‡‡‡

  After about thirty minutes of drying and processing, he was left with about a gram of a strange-looking white powder. The white powder was pure, useable Crystal Meth.

  ‘You see how easy it is?’ said Natas with a huge satisfactory smile on his face.

  Rocky and Herba came closer to observe the finished product. All this process to produce just a gram of the stuff. They were nonplussed by Natas’s vast knowledge on these, otherwise very intricate, processes.

  ‘This is the common method. We can profit about four thousand pesos by spending just three hundred pesos to make it. But this is not what we will be doing. We will be doing that,’ Natas said, as he pointed at the army of apparatus and barrels of chemicals in the room.

  ‘I will now teach you the real deal.’

  Natas got into the full body protection clothing he had acquired. It was very much required for the reactions he was about to set loose.

  ‘But, won’t we taste this?’ Rocky asked, pointing at the gram of Crystal Meth they had freshly cooked. Rocky and Herba were aching to snort the powder. It was too tempting.

  A cook always longs to taste his dishes no matter how much of a junk it is.

  ‘Yes, we shall Rocky. Later,’ replied Natas.

  Natas smiled at Rocky, silently acknowledging Rocky’s thirst to try out the sample.

  ‘Okay. But, where did you learn all this?’ Herba asked Natas.

  ‘Rocky thought me all this,’ Natas burst into laughter as he tactfully deflected the question.

  Natas handed out two protective clothing and masks to Rocky and Herba. The two then went on to arrange the apparatus as per Natas’s commands. In just twenty minutes, the ruined room was transformed into a serious-looking laboratory. A meth lab to be precise. Natas then started the long and boring tutorial on how to cook meth using the actual science.

  †††††††

  In short, the process is straightforward but laborious. The pseudoephedrine is first extracted from the cold medicine. This inert compound is then mixed with red phosphorous and hydriodic acid and neutralised with lye solution. After bubbling with hydrochloric acid, the sediment is then processed to get pure crystals. The yield obtained is far superior than that from the cheap shake and bake method. The amount produced too was far higher than the one gram yield in the bottle method.

  ‡‡‡‡‡‡‡

  After a tiring five-hour demonstration, the three came out of the house exhausted. A burst of cool air greeted them on the front. They sat down on the porch, and spread out a piece of cloth on the floor. Natas took the gram of meth they had cooked and poured it into three straight lines on the cloth. One line for each person.

  ‘I hope, this time I do not get a bad trip,’ he said in a worried tone.

  ‘No, you will not, boy’ Herba joked and laughed at the innocent look on Rocky’s face. Rocky had told her everything about the bad trip in the past.

  Turn by turn, the three snorted the powder. The effects could be felt almost immediately as the powder made its way through the nasal passage. Very soon, the world around them started to rotate and revolve. Vision became blurry and imaginary things came in to life. The meth was working and it was very good.

  Now that the operational processes were in place, they were all set to launch the business. Herba was tasked to grow the weed on the front clearing and Rocky was to cook meth in the harsh conditions on the inside.

  Natas left the two after giving out some more instructions. Natas now had everything except one, important thing. He only needed one more thing to dominate the drug world. He needed an army loyal only to him.

  While the two worked hard at the farm, Natas was heading towards downtown. The place where, long ago, Rocky and he used to sell weed on the streets. He gathered some of the street dealers around and gave them a sample of the freshly cooked meth. They instantly fell for it. They already knew about the superior Marijuana that the trio used to sell. That combined with this strong meth would definitely bring in some heavy cash. With his crafty speaking skills, Natas managed to recruit twelve street dealers. The guys who sold weed on the streets were street dealers. They are generally loyal to their drug lords. But they are highly lacking in morals and will do anything for money. Loyalty usually buckles when money comes into play. Natas knew this fact all too well. He paid the twelve generously and they switched loyalties.

  Natas now had twelve men under him. Twelve men who would obey his commands.

  With this, he was now ready to start his step-one for the drug business supremacy. Natas instructed the twelve foot- soldiers to quietly go and plant low-quality Cannabis seeds across the
city.

  The twelve did just that. Come nightfall, the loyal boys spread out across the city and started planting the Marijuana seeds. They planted it around schools, hospitals, playgrounds and even police buildings. Since, Marijuana is a weed, it quickly grows without much attention. It grows and spread rapidly just like any other annoying weed.

  Nobody, except Natas, knew about the reason behind this strange act. In about a month’s time people would take note of the sudden outgrowth of weeds in the city. They would soon realize that it was not just a common weed but was Cannabis. This would create chaos. Chaos that Natas was waiting to cash in on.

  Back in the farm, Herba and Rocky were efficiently and tirelessly churning out their flagship products. Rocky cooked batches and batches of meth while Herba carefully tended to the saplings of Marijuana. She had built a makeshift green house for the saplings as per Natas’s orders. Together with lamps and humidifiers, the perfect conditions for the young saplings could be achieved easily.

  After a tiring day, Rocky and Herba lay on the soft grass in front of the house overlooking the forest. They were huddled closely together and were high on Crystal Meth that Rocky had just cooked. The feelings had become mutual over the days, and the two started loving each other immensely. Sparks began to fly and they made love in that isolated place surrounded by the thick forest. The play of lust was severely augmented by the effect of meth and the experience was like no other. They fell into each other’s souls and became one.

  While the two passionately made love in the farm, little did they know that Natas was getting the three of them into a dangerous game of power play. A game in which murder was as normal as drinking water.

 

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