The Saved

by Cole McCade

  THE

  SAVED

  Cole McCade

  A CROW CITY PREQUEL NOVELLA

  Copyright © 2016 by Cole McCade

  Smashwords Edition

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher / author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author at the address below.

  Cole McCade / Xen Sanders

  blackmagic@blackmagicblues.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Semisonic, Pontiac Firebird, Dumpster, Vicodin, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Charge of the Light Brigade, Kismet, TCM, The Princess Bride, The Red and the Black, Foucault’s Pendulum, Samsung, Kevlar, Toyota Tercel, Velcro

  For those who give in. For those who surrender.

  You are not weak. You are not broken. You are not lost.

  You have survived, and will carry on.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Trigger Warning: A Word from the Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  The Crow City Series

  Other Books by Cole McCade

  Writing as Xen Sanders

  TRIGGER WARNING: A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR

  THIS STORY DEALS HEAVILY WITH the topic of PTSD, and contains graphic violence, bloodshed, and references to sexual assault.

  If you’ve read The Found, you know already that Priest is a man who expresses his pain through violence. This is his story, and one that shows how he found his way onto the path of a brutal contract killer. It isn’t meant to in any way accurately represent the mindset or behavior of military veterans with PTSD, and should not be construed as a belief that veterans are psychopaths, murderers, etc. Vin’s path is one of sensationalized fiction. Veterans’ pain is real, and in that pain they are victims, not aggressors.

  That pain, however, is discussed in great detail on these pages, and can be difficult to read—even triggering. If you feel triggered, if you deal with any form of PTSD yourself, if Vin’s mental struggles or the violence depicted are hurtful to you, it’s okay to put the book down and walk away. Take a moment. Take a breath. Take care of yourself.

  As I always say…be good to yourselves.

  -C

  For it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul. – Leviticus 17:11

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE DAY VINCENT MANION RETURNED to Crow City was the day he knew he would never find home again.

  Home was for other people. Whole people. People who were more than a shell of skin stretched over a framework of bone like a paper lantern, creating the shape of a man with nothing but an empty space and a single burning light inside. That light illuminated his dark inner spaces, where memories were painted on his cavernous, echoing walls like cave paintings, two-dimensional representations of every love and bond he’d ever had, scratched into his stone-carved heart so they wouldn’t be lost and yet never anything that would be real and whole again.

  It was that shell who accepted the awards, the commendations, the Purple Heart pinned to a uniform that felt like funeral dressings waiting to be laid in the coffin. It was the shell who helped Gabriel Hart from his wheelchair and held him upright so he could stand—stand with a pride that was the only thing they still had in common, stand for this thing that meant nothing to them both—to receive honors and words that would bring nothing and no one back. They’d looked out over an audience of strangers, not one person there to stand for them, and when their eyes had met as they leaned shoulder to shoulder, Vin had seen himself reflected in Gabriel’s eyes. Himself, and a question:

  Who am I, now?

  He and Gabriel both had left their real selves back in Afghanistan. In Sangin. And the memories of pain and the stink of burning flesh etched into his brain, his body, his blood, his soul, his hide, were where he lived now.

  Home was not a place, for Vincent Manion.

  Home was just the thoughts he could never escape, erecting walls and a floor and a roof around him until they enclosed him in a room made of ghastly whispers of flesh.

  “You going to sit and stare, or you going to order?”

  The old man’s voice. Vin lifted his gaze and made himself look at Gary Mitchell across the scratched and pitted bar, and tried to look at him without seeing her. Serafina had had her father’s eyes, his good one bright and green and just as uncannily sharp as hers had been. The other was glass, and looked like a hex given form, a pox on Vin and Gabriel themselves for surviving when Gary Mitchell’s daughter was a uniform draped on top of waxy flesh, slowly going to seed inside a pine box wrapped in the decaying symbol of a justice that no longer existed.

  Strange how that hexed glass eye could still seem filled to the brim with pain. Like a mirror, catching the wet hot gleam of its flesh-and-blood twin, reflecting it back in baleful reverse until Vin couldn’t escape the weight of its penetrating stare.

  Gary’s jaw tightened. “Well? If you’re just gonna hold down that stool, I got customers that’ll actually pay to do that.”

  Vin opened his mouth. But even though he knew what Gary was saying, understood the words, comprehended that a request was being made and he should string together words—words in English, words that could be understood when no one here understood his beloved mother tongue, his precious Italiano—somehow a connection was failing between understanding the request, processing a response, and making his lips move.

  He couldn’t seem to focus on words, when all he saw was Gary bursting open beneath his touch in a riot of pulped and broken flesh, his thoughts filling with terrible visions of what he could do to the old man’s fragile, lean body, how easily he could split him open and crack the egg of him with his bare hands until the scarlet yolk spilled out everywhere.

  Underneath the bar, Gabriel’s knee bumped his, and Vin’s vision cleared—until Gary was only Gary, not a bloodied corpse that spoke in spitting, resentful words. Hart lifted his head from folded forearms, hooded eyes fixing on Gary, just a flash of silver in the dark below his hair.

  “Vodka. He’ll have the vodka,” Gabriel growled. “And it’s on me.”

  The old man made a soft, disgusted sound. Thudded a shot glass down on the bar hard enough to make it spin, closing in on itself in concentric circles until it stopped. Splashed two fingers of vodka in. The cheap stuff. Good vodka was odorless, but this—this stung Vin’s nose and prickled Vin’s eyes, and he told himself the burn and scour behind his lids were just the alcohol fumes rising to mingle with the strange, worn-in smells of The Track, smells that didn’t belong, like lavender and rosin and warm weathered wood and the gathered sweat of a thousand bodies that had spent the salt of their skin in work and the ways of men. Good smells. Clean smells. Human smells, things Vin had never paid attention to
before, back when he’d still felt human enough for them to be just another part of normalcy’s tapestry.

  Gary stalked away. Vin lifted his head, looking at Gabriel. Again he saw that reflection of himself, lost and drifting with no purpose left but to breathe until the last of bitter days. Yet in Gabriel there was such a wealth of emotion, a storm, his eyes a silver crackle of lightning crashing and striking and rioting with something waiting to break out, filled with too much to hold.

  While Vin just felt empty. Detached. Distant. As if he’d forgotten how to feel anything at all.

  Perhaps Gabriel was trying to feel enough for the both of them, to light this strange, disconnected gray nothingness that had become Vin’s world.

  “I…” He found his tongue, even if it was leaden and slow, the English words thick, fighting him. “I could not.”

  “I know,” Gabriel answered simply.

  “He hates us.”

  Gabriel parted his lips, then looked down into his own untouched glass, sitting on the bar and catching the dusty overhead light to refract it into fragments of liquid crystal. “Do you blame him?”

  “No,” Vin said. “No, I do not blame him at all.”

  They sat with the drinks they had paid for and yet didn’t touch, while the bar moved around them in an ebb and flow of laughter and banter and noise. If the bar was a live motion video, they were a still photograph, trapped in a moment in time while everything else somehow found a way to move forward.

  I am a snapshot of the man I became when the knife cut my flesh.

  I am an image of me, and nothing more.

  Vin curled his fingers against the shot glass, just to feel its weight; just to feel something physical, if nothing else. “Is this all that is left of us, now?”

  “What makes you think there’s anything left?” Gabriel stared down into his vodka. His fingers shook against the glass—subtle, but Vin knew withdrawal symptoms for what they were, a silent and prideful battle fought in white knuckles and a shaking grip. “Where are you answers now? Where are your prayers?”

  “I do not know.” The rosary against his chest had no weight, no substance. He curled his fingers against the weathered wood of the beads and tried to feel its heart, its soul, but it was as lifeless as a corpse whose spirit had fled. He bowed his head and mouthed Ave, o Maria, piena di grazia, but Mother Mary wasn’t listening and didn’t have a single answer. “I do not know how to pray anymore. I cannot find the words.”

  “Words are useless.”

  “Are they?”

  “Words are useless to me. Words can’t change anything.” Gabriel lifted his vodka, pressed its rim to his lips. “I don’t think it’s possible for anything to change.”

  Because words were useless, because words could change nothing, Vin said nothing—and only downed his vodka shot, and wondered why he couldn’t feel the burn as more than a faint echo like smoke in the back of his throat and a prickle on the edges of his nostrils.

  * * *

  BY LAST CALL, VIN WAS two drinks deep—and Gabriel was six. The bar was almost eerily silent, the lights dimmed so the flicker of the wall-mounted television flashed like lightning through dark clouds. People had come and gone in cycles, the tired workaday Joes slogging off home, following the patterns of their lives as if they were set on rails…only to be replaced by the twenty-somethings who had nothing better to do and nowhere better to go, people who knew each others’ faces by heart and yet still came here every night as if they’d find someone and something new. They mixed and matched like that game Richard had snuck out on one of their deployments—what had it been called? Concentration. Trying to find two cards that matched. They’d played for hours, some nights, far from home with its night life and cell phones and television. Just them and the quiet sandstone walls and the flicker of fire and camp lights, and quiet laughter.

  Strange how the simple things had been all they’d needed, then.

  Strange, too, that in that memory Vin couldn’t see their faces. They were just smudged blurs of color, except for Gabriel’s—but in Vin’s mind’s eye, Gabriel’s mouth didn’t move. His laughter bounced and echoed off the walls of memory, but his mouth was a grim, cold line, his eyes flat as tarnished steel.

  Those eyes seemed to judge him, now. As he watched the flurries of life move through the bar; as he wondered at their complacency, and wondered at the secret lives they hid when they put on their social faces and showed the world who they wanted people to believe they were. People lied, Vin had learned early on, in the old days when he’d sat in the darkness of the confessional booth, the people on the other side just hints of color through the screen. Color and furtive motion, secretive whispers and the scent of the oil the acolytes used to polish the hard wooden benches to a gleaming, sweet shine.

  Even in confessional, they’d never told him the truth. They lied even to priests. But in that dark chamber they were as honest as they were capable of being, even in their self-delusion and rationalization. Even in their complacency, that safe sheltered existence where everything was all right so long as their sins could be forgiven so that they might do them all over again and again and again.

  As if Vin had the right to judge others’ sins, when he was a sinner himself.

  But he was an honest one, at least. He’d learned, too, that blood made people honest. Pain made people honest. And he wondered, as he watched these everyday people, these people with their normal facades that covered every abnormal pain, every deviant desire, every secret and sin and crime and folly…

  He wondered how much blood they would have to spill, to become honest. How much they would have to scream. If the slice of the blade could cut the truth from them, make them see who they really were, expose them for their common, base weakness and banality and meaninglessness, filling their days with the small idiocies of life just to give it weight and import when none of it mattered at all. None of it mattered, when it could be cut out of them so easily with just a twist and flash of a keening edge—

  Stop.

  He closed his eyes, breathing in deep. He couldn’t think such things. Those weren’t his thoughts.

  They were false memories that had been cut into him, realigning his neural pathways and forging new channels made wholly of pain, telling him such thoughts were normal. Natural.

  Desirable.

  He wanted to blame the vodka, but he could not judge others for lying to themselves and each other if he couldn’t admit to his own broken truth to himself.

  He opened his eyes. Gabriel watched him, silent. He didn’t need to say anything; everything in that hazed, haunted silver gaze said he knew. With every shot the quiet between them had grown thicker, anything and everything they could say drowned in the pointlessness of liquor. Gabriel had been right; words were useless, when they were just lines recited from a book they both knew by heart. Vin didn’t think civilians could understand the connection that grew between members of a military unit, over the course of long deployments. It wasn’t just about familiarity, or routine. It was a sameness, one born of shared experiences, moments imprinted on the brain and reshaping it until one thought flowed to another to another to another as if they were a hive, one mind seen through six pair of eyes.

  And with so many of those eyes closed forever, the last remaining pieces would never be whole again.

  Never be whole, and yet they understood each other without words, because the same memories were burned into the channels of their minds, engraved in matching brands that marked them property of a harsh and unforgiving past that would never let them go.

  Maybe a third drink wasn’t such a terrible idea.

  Vin lifted a hand to summon Gary, but the old man shook his head. “Time to kick everyone out. You know the line. Ain’t got to go home, but you can’t stay here.”

  Vin tilted his head. “I do not know that saying.”

  “Semisonic,” Gabriel slurred. “Best shitty song ever. Fuck, I’m old.”

  “Not nearly old enough,�
�� Gary said. “That line’s been a long tradition of bartenders since before you were a tadpole.” He rested his hands on the bar and leaned in toward Gabriel. “Go home, son. Sleep it off.”

  “Hn.”

  “Don’t you grunt at me, you—”

  “Grazi,” Vin cut in, and fished out his wallet to leave a few more bills on the bar before sliding to his feet.

  Gabriel slid bonelessly off the barstool, found his feet, then leaned hard against the bar, closing his eyes and tilting his head back. His weight was canted entirely to one side, resting on his good leg, and his jaw was a tight lump, pulse ticking in a little spot against the bone, jumping against his skin. Vin’s vision swam, the only clear point that ticking pulse—that familiar ticking pulse that had once counted the seconds, minutes, hours, days of an agony of hell, blinding fluorescent lights against grimy walls. Lights that never shut off, until the bulbs seared on Vin’s retinas, a dozen hot suns over a desolate and barren planet of timeless misery grounded only by that ticking in Gabriel’s jaw, that quiet pulse of a mutual and shared pain mirrored in the raw chafing bite of restraints on bleeding skin and blades slipping keen under layers of flesh, parting them like a tongue kissing a loving mouth.

  Gary cleared his throat. Vin squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head until dizziness spun him left to right. When he opened his eyes again they wavered, blurred, but beyond his double vision the bar was the bar again, not a hot and stinking cell, not a torture chamber reeking like an abattoir. Just a bar, just the last few lonely souls who had nowhere to go but here, clinging to the last dregs and drops in the bottoms of their glasses. And here Vin and Gabriel were, clinging with them, when Gabriel had nothing but that run-down shop and Vin had not even that. Nothing waiting for him but a hotel room, a thing that wasn’t his but belonged to all the memories steeped into it of lives come and gone and come again.