First edition published 2019.
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‘Brimstone’ is a work of fiction and similarities to any persons alive or dead are purely coincidental.
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If it is not to be,
Let it still be remembered fondly.
For the boys.
The Story so Far
In “Under Fire” – Paul Draker returned home after a career as a decorated, closeted Combat Rescue Officer. He wanted to live and teach in the woods that peacefully, in the pristine rolling mountains and forests of Fairbridge, a small city in Western North Carolina.
Jimmy McKay’s tortured soul drove him on a perverse mission. He killed several people on a nationwide spree, then upped his violence in Fairbridge itself. There he killed many, including young Alex Keegan.
Draker, now a civilian, found Jimmy and neutralized the threat, but not before large scale and tragic carnage.
The story of “Brimstone” takes place a few months after.
“Sure, military combat is scary… but in some ways combat seems a little easier than personal relationships. At least in combat, the enemy is honest enough to claim themselves as such.”
–Steve Maraboli
“It’s not the load that breaks you, it’s the way you carry it.”
–Lena Horne
“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”
–Bertrand Russell
Prologue
Kagubatan
You want in?
You do, don’t you?
You want to know everything there is to know. You want to touch the raw places. You want to be able to say, you’ve been there.
But you see, you don’t really know what you are asking for. Because the ride you expect is never quite the ride you get. You could want excitement.
But end up terrified.
Cry. Like a little baby. Piss yourself.
This after going through Basic. Through Active Duty. Through Deployment. Through several layers of special forces training.
And you could still find yourself half drowning in mud, in torrential rain, dying in some monsoon jungle hellhole. And you could literally – badass soldier that you are, tough guy, Mr. Hero – piss yourself because horror itself was having its way with you.
Yeah. That’s what you want. You want to know the story. And you demand full honesty. Hell, you demand to know the truth.
Truth?
Truth is the whole event was supposed to have washed away in the humid stench of dense jungle undergrowth. Left behind when it was over.
Except what went down that day won’t wash out.
It keeps coming back at you. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes hardcore.
You live with it as well as you can.
Except when it hits, it hits hard.
Oh, you can cry. You can bargain. You can beg. You can pray.
But mercy never comes.
You relive the thing. Not like a movie. Not like you’re being transported into some scene. It’s not like you change sets… you stay present in your moment. You know where you are right here and right now.
But the images, and the sounds, and the sensations of those other moments, on that day, in that place shows up too.
They play back. You can’t stop them.
Asleep or awake. Every now and then…
Boom. It would hit you. Waves of feelings, on your skin, underneath your skin.
For Paul Draker, it only came when there was some tension or anxiety going on. But he couldn’t pinpoint cause and effect directly. Mostly, it would just show up.
That was the worst of the symptoms. What someone misnamed “flashbacks”.
But there are other symptoms. Maybe less immediately painful but sure to give you a good long-term ass-kicking.
The way Paul preferred to isolate himself, walking as much as he did.
Because only people who really wanted to, would walk with.
The way he sometimes felt like an observer, rather than a participant in what was going on. Slightly detached from everything.
Persistent general nervousness that kept him on his toes – essentially living life as if there were some really bad drill sergeants chasing you to Exceptional as if your life depended on it.
Little things about yourself that only you know. No one else.
Your most intimate secrets.
But you want in, right? You want to be there for the ride.
Do you really want to know what it feels like to fear for your life?
To be inside a moment, to be present – if you want to get hippy or emo about it – where you stare reality in the face. It was not only possible that you could die. It was fucking likely. And soon, too.
Because you find yourself defeated.
As good as you are, as skilled as you are. You find yourself at the mercy of someone without mercy.
They will do what they want to you. Everything and anything they want.
And you are powerless.
Fine then. Let’s go there:
Paul stopped clutching his leg. The pain felt like barbed steel rods, twisting inside his veins. His entire body was on fire: breathing burned in and out. His skin stung too. His tongue.
And his heartbeat pounded his head like a hammer would an anvil.
He was bleeding out, and whatever blood he had left was full of toxins. Probably neurotoxins, something that would ravage him to the level of his DNA.
He was lying in a mud pool, writhing in agony. His assailant was gone. And took the snake with him.
Paul Draker was dying.
He pissed himself.
He tried to scream, but found he couldn’t.
That was it. Only that moment.
Nothing long and drawn out. Just a little flash of existence as perpetual, universal suffering.
Bad luck that’s the ‘back’ that keeps on flashing you.
After you’re down? They kick you, for good measure.
Lying in traction in a military hospital bed in Rammstein for four weeks. The venom still ravaging Paul’s system. He could see the pain in his head. It felt like the sharp point of a dentist’s drill, drilling upstream throughout the network of his veins. Pain that made him lose his mind.
They couldn’t sedate Paul.
He was fighting for his life.
Two weeks of pretty much that.
Paul’s brain didn’t do re-runs of that time like he did the moment of snake venom hellfire in the mud hole.
But whenever he did think of that time, his posture sagged and sweat poured from his forehead. A little shortness
of breath. That sort of panic attack thing.
After that, cramps that felt as if they were eating you, from the stomach out.
Headaches that made your neck spasm.
Then two weeks of less pain, but an uncomfortable numbness.
In all of that time, looking forward to being held by Reuben, and kissed, and told everything would be okay.
Then one day.
The docs and the nurses weren’t around. It was just Paul. Waking up almost without pain for the first time since that pool of mud.
Only then, when he came to, did he remember that Reuben was dead.
In that moment, he knew then that he was done with the military.
He forgot that Reuben was dead. The mud pit, the traction, the gnawing pain day in day out. And in all that time he’d been yearning for his love. Forgetting that he’d been dead – already, for a while. Reuben’s death had been two long years ago.
And the time came for Paul Draker to go civilian. Maybe see if there was still a chance he could heal from that mud pit, and other places like that, and Reuben’s death.
Now when the flashbacks come?
Well they bring a whole package of goodies right with them. Nothing flashy, but it always told Paul that the mud pit, that gaping hole of hell and mud, knew exactly what a piece of shit he was.
The Military made it clear: Do Not Ask, Do Not Tell. We won’t ask you about any of that faggot shit – and you’d be smart not to volunteer any information either. We find out anyway – and you – decorated soldier, medal winner, life saver, hostage finder, fighter pilot lifeline – will be dishonorably discharged.
Faggot.
Reuben died in a traffic accident.
He worked in finance and offices and airport lobbies was his natural habitat – while Paul risked his life daily, in uniform or camouflage, anywhere and everywhere that the United States Armed Forces asked him to go and do “his thing”.
Yet Reuben was the one who died.
And what do you do if you hear about it, while serving your country and picking up all kinds of assorted physical and emotional scars along the way?
Do you weep for the biggest loss you have ever suffered? Do you cry?
You do. You can’t help it. But not uncontrollably. If Paul cried too loudly, it would have been discovered that his tears were for another man. Discovery meant discharge. His career would have been over.
So, Paul Draker – son of a bitch that he was – went stealth.
The loss was suffered, alone and in silence.
And he kept doing his thing, because it was the only thing other than Reuben that mattered. And Reuben was gone and not coming back.
He had Tina, but no family. His life had been just the military for a long time. Then Reuben showed up and showed him that the world could be full of love as well as war. People and places that were wonderful, and not just bad.
Reuben died. Paul attended the funeral – taking leave – lying about why he did.
Because the only ‘unnatural’ answer he could have provided was that he wanted to mourn the death of the love of his life.
And while Paul accumulated all the little skirmishes… that firefight from hell in some dried out but icy mountain top in Afghanistan; that urban shitstorm in Iraq; that platform in Nigeria; Colombia; and even the big one, the mud pit of snake fire, the one in the Philippines… he was still fine.
But from the moment he made the decision to retire from the military, that morning, the shelf he’d been stuffing all those experiences on broke. And they all came back at once.
He came a long way for just another orphaned hillbilly and he knew a lot of people.
But there he was, alone in the world.
But he was alive. If he was going to survive much more and any longer – then he damn well at the very least owed it to himself to make it worth the effort of surviving.
A hardened and cynical old bastard of a military doctor called it ‘a fucking miracle’:
His unit had been trying to locate a Swedish businessman, kidnapped in a small regional city of the Philippines. The gang responsible for taking him was a band of hoodlums that alternated how they operated. Sometimes they were holy warriors in a struggle against the Great Satan. Other times they were thugs and pirates on a crime spree.
Paul managed to track the captors and their hostage.
He was on his way back to report the exact position to the others, he had a run in with the short, wiry little guy with the t-shirt covered face and the dirty fingernails.
The islands of the Pacific Rim had more than enough snakes, and yet the assassin chose to bring his own.
He won his little melee with Paul. Beat him until several of his bones and ribs were broken. And then he injected the fangs of his pet snake into Paul. Several times. He recognized the snake as an Asian pit viper. Each time it bit into him; it injected its venomous fangs into his flesh like biological hypodermic needles.
The facts were, according to the Incident Report, that his unit found him after he failed to respond. A firefight ensued, the Swedish businessman and four trafficked girls were recovered, as well as a stash of smuggled small arms, although the posse of holy bandits managed to escape.
He was evacuated by helicopter. He was taken to Manila, where a specialist looked after him – apparently well – in a hospital there. He was flown to Rammstein once he was stable enough. The doctor who treated him in Manila was the only person who believed that Paul would live. None of the other doctors or specialists. Not the nurses. Not four of the guys in his unit six-man team. Not the aircrew that moved him. Just that old doc back in Manila.
And then – to everyone else’s surprise – Paul Draker did heal.
And he would stand up, and walk.
And the first walk he took was away from the military.
No Reuben, no job either.
Something new. Something fresh. Something different.
He would figure out how to mourn, how to heal, how to forget, how to remember.
He would reconnect with Tina and her circles and Reuben’s family, and the friends they had together.
And Reuben left him very well taken care of. Lucky him, right?
It would be the end of missions for him.
He would now have to find his own.
It was all good. It was going.
Just every now and then.
Hey there.
Hello.
Me again, your little flashback.
You thought you moved on?
You thought you were over me?
Oh, no… Bless your little heart.
I’m not going anywhere.
I’m the most stable point of your existence.
I get to go everywhere you go.
I am always there.
Just beneath your happiness.
Surrounding you on all sides.
And every now and then I will reach out and remind you of that, no matter where you go, or what you achieve. And remind you I’m still inside your head, your heart and your flesh.
Yeah, you want to go there… Don’t you?
You want to go all the way.
You want to go there with me.
Well. Okay then.
Let’s go.
Chapter 1
Last Rounds
Paul lived and ran his business from a few dozen acres of wooded mountainside just outside of Fairbridge called the Cro’s Post.
If you drove out on Kellman heading southwest from Fairbridge, you’d see the sign. Turn in at the gate. Drive slowly round the bend. Park in the clearing. There was a modern little cabin there, an office from where the Cro’s Post ran outdoor adventures for civilians, search and rescue for law enforcement, and occasionally, when Paul didn’t teach on base, tracking and SERE training for pe
rsonnel from various branches.
But around the back from that cabin was another cabin. This is where Paul lived. His private cabin. Its little footpath led you around two bends and to the cabin itself, where it looked as if you were surrounded by nothing but trees.
It was small, but perfect for Paul. It had an open-plan kitchen and living room, a nice little bathroom, and his bedroom.
It was all connected to the grid. It was a practical and beautiful place to live, if a little isolated. It was only a short drive to town, but you couldn’t walk next door.
If you took Kellman back to town, there was only about a five-mile drive to Castleton. But in peak traffic, it tended to clog pretty badly. You could sit half an hour.
Castleton itself was like a traffic hub around which Fairbridge operated. From there you could move through town or into town. To the airport, to Varsity Town, to Loveday, to North Fairbridge or Downtown. You could catch busses and trains in Castleton.
But Paul seldom commuted. On most days Paul either walked, taught, researched or built some new facility or amenity for the property.
The campers got a new little wooden place where they could have showers and wash dishes. The teens and jocks got an obstacle course. He was working on putting up three or four little chalets for weekend getaways, romantic or otherwise. One of them was already up. Way up in the north of his land, built against the slope in the side of the mountain, with beautiful views of the valley below.
That kept him busy for a while, but it was done now.
It was cozy, really far away from any main roads or traffic. It would be so wonderful to go up there with some company. Perhaps a little raunchy company.
The day to day operation of the Cro’s Post meant Paul needed to hire a few students to keep phones, mails and walk-ins at bay while Paul was out in the field.
Turns out some of them were pretty good kids, and now he had Beth helping with admin.
Paul realized he’d be taking the road into Castleton and South to Loveday more often now, and maybe that was a good thing. He had a tendency to completely retreat – to be alone with his thoughts. But he had to get into civilization and connect with someone. A friend, anyone. But Paul hated the thought of a regular commute.
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