The Tenacity of Darkness: Book # 2 of A Thorn for Miss R.

by Sakiv Koch

  Peter laughed. An outburst of genuine mirth this time. The man on my left was black; the man on my right, white. Both were taller than me. I felt as though two pawns, one from each side of a diabolical chess board, had come alive with the express purpose of hurting me. I couldn’t see the man standing behind me, of course, but my stricken imagination projected him as a terrifying giant in my mind.

  “So we meet again, Sonny Boy Neel,” Peter said in soft tones, jolting me afresh with the utterance of my name. He was a man of medium height, with a more than average girth pegging him somewhere between plumpness and obesity. He was half English, half Indian, but his mother’s genes had obviously played a bigger role than his father’s in shaping his looks and complexion. He wore a black trench coat, and a trilby hat sat atop his brown-haired head.

  “What do you want?” I croaked lamely. The hour was hovering around midnight. The side street I was in was well lit, but completely deserted.

  “I want to shake your hand and take you somewhere for a little treat,” Peter said, offering me his right hand, which I shook as promptly and as enthusiastically as though he were my favorite movie star.

  “Good. Let’s go,” he said after our linked arms had pumped three or four times. They herded me to a Lincoln Continental idling at the curb. I had been too absorbed in my Rachna-inspired thoughts to notice the motorcar enter the street and glide to a halt right beside me. The muscular chessmen flanking me sandwiched me between them in the rear seat of the car.

  Peter and the fourth man, the one with the gun, occupied the driver’s and the passenger’s seat, respectively, in the front. The fourth man, a Hispanic, corresponded with the image of the big and scary giant that my terror had first conjured in my mind.

  He turned around in his seat and pointed a Colt Peacemaker at my face. His own stern face broke into a grin, revealing several golden teeth scattered here and there in the two rows of his crooked, yellowing gnashers.

  “You budge, I shoot,” he said gruffly while still maintaining his grin.

  “He loves shooting people,” Peter told me conversationally. “He ends up shooting most men even if they sit as still as statues after his customary warning that he’d shoot them if they budged. He said it to his mother-in-law, too, before shooting her in the head in front of her daughter.”

  Everyone laughed, except for me and the trigger-happy man, who continued to grin in exactly the same manner, neither confirming nor denying anything Peter had said about him. Another eerie thing about the man was the rate at which he blinked—almost never, as though he couldn’t afford to miss seeing his target even for a microsecond, lest he budge.

  An unspeakably intense itch took birth on the tip of my nose. My scalp mass-produced beads and sheets of sweat, which proceeded to get into my eyes and cascade down my neck. Other itches sprang up in other places. I didn’t dare twitch my fingers, let alone scratch any part of my body.

  What if a sneeze comes along now? an obviously fatalistic part of my subconscious asked the rest of me. Lo-and-behold, a sneeze gathered force somewhere deep within me as soon as the fear of its possibility arose in my thoughts. I fought it as though it were a man-eater going for my throat.

  I was still grappling with this terror when I became aware of the game that the chessmen on my left and right were playing silently from around my edges. Their palms and fingers formed Rock Paper Scissors, indifferently, inhumanly, while my young life hurtled toward an abrupt and violent end.

  This observation ignited an extremely volatile fuse in my head, a fuse that, in its own right, made me as trigger-happy as the Grinning Gun, with the critical difference that my head-bombs went off on their own.

  I transformed into an unthinking, rage-driven, adrenaline-fueled body, trained from its birth to be extremely flexible and unbelievably quick. My head, conditioned by shell-cracking meetings with countless coconuts over a period of two decades, became a cannon-ball, ramming into the left chessman’s face with a bone-cracking momentum, achieved in that tight space by an economical-but-powerful thrust from my shoulders.

  Grinning Gun’s gun didn’t bark, didn’t establish any kind of peace. His reputation after his encounter with me must have ceased to be what it used to be until that night. His reflexes were probably not as quick as mine. Or perhaps Peter and his goons had never intended to fire a bullet in a car moving in downtown Toronto.

  Whatever the reason, Grinning Gun was still sitting in the same posture, like the cutout of a stupidly grinning man, a split-second after I had stunned the man on my left. My left hand slapped the Peacemaker’s barrel with enough force to knock it from Grinning Gun’s hand. The handgun vanished, but the grin lingered in place for an additional moment.

  The man on my right was packed in too tight to elbow or punch me effectively. He imitated me by ramming his head into my face. I dodged the blow by whipping my head to my right once again, in perfect synchronization with the motion of my attacker’s head, thereby striking the left chessman’s face with my skull once more, rendering that gentleman practically ineffective for the next few minutes.

  And then my already-throbbing head swiveled back on my high-endurance neck to collide with the chessman on my right. His skull wasn’t fun to play hardball with. I saw stars materialize in front of my momentarily unfocused eyes. But the man I had just hit folded up, falling away from me, just like his counterpart on my other side.

  The no-longer-grinning Grinning Gun was scrambling for his fallen gun, practically hanging upside down from the back of his seat and fishing around in the area around my feet. Ramming a knee into his face — with all that legroom and the fortunate positioning of said face — was half as easy and twice as effective as all the head-banging I had indulged in.

  Now that I had a momentary advantage and some room to move—because of the beaten chessmen lying slumped against the respective doors on their sides—I subjected the temple of the man on my right side to a couple of hard blows with my elbow.

  I had changed the game in just about forty seconds. I had subdued three hardcore ruffians despite my having been as afraid and as meek as a chicken being dragged out of its cage just forty-one seconds ago!

  I just had Peter to take care of now. He was a matchstick if Grinning Gun and the chessmen were massive tree trunks. He had the additional limitation of being at the motorcar’s wheel. To his credit, he had maintained the same speed, without swerving even slightly, that he had been driving at before I went berserk and turned the tables on him, so to speak.

  I picked up the fallen Colt, checked its chamber to see if it was loaded, and cocked its hammer.

  “Stop the car!” I commanded Peter, waving the gun in a wide arc to indicate that I could shoot any of my fellow passengers with equal ease. Grinning Gun had drawn back, but he still sat facing me. His nose was ruined. He was making gurgling noises in his throat. His golden teeth had dislodged from his gums and hanging among bloodied threads of his saliva. A couple of his real teeth had also abandoned his mouth, creating new vacancies for more golden implants in the future.

  The chessmen were still out of commission. Peter had not obeyed my command, and Grinning Gun was clearly fixing to do something desperate to get his beloved gun back from me.

  “You budge, I shoot,” I told the bleeding man. “And you, Peter —,” I tapped the back of his head with the barrel of my gun, “—you stop the car RIGHT NOW!”

  Fear was rising quickly back to the fore of my mind. My situation was only slightly less dangerous than before. Whatever was happening here and now was just a sideshow, an insignificant thing.

  “You think this is about you, Sonny Boy?” Peter asked. He didn’t stop the vehicle. He didn’t even slow down. “You fight well, though. You know, I am not even licensed to drive because of my susceptibility to sudden seizures. I was sure these jokers could take care of you, you with your famous impulses and abilities. Fucking sissies. I’ll cut off their —”

  I cut him off at this point by hitting him in the bac
k of his head. I did it with the heavy weapon in my hand, but I did it gently, relatively speaking, so that the man wouldn’t crash the car. The blow was to underscore the gravity of my order. “Stop right now!” I advised him, “or your daughters will never get to see you alive again.”

  Peter applied the brakes and brought the car to a complete halt in some street I didn’t recognize.

  “You three,” I addressed the chessmen and Grinning Gun, “get out of the car! And you, Peter, stay where you are.”

  Whereas the groaning men in the backseat evinced remarkable avidness to get away from me, opening their doors and literally falling out of the car, G.G. stayed put in his seat, gaping at me with his bleeding mouth hanging wide open.

  I had no choice but to enhance the goodness of his looks further. He got a tremendous punch on his already mashed nose. He rose on his knees with a cry and crashed against the car’s dashboard with an impact that shook the vehicle.

  “Get out, you fucking fool!” Peter yelled at him, taking his hands off the steering wheel to push G.G. away. One of Peter’s hands dived deftly beneath the steering, but before it could come back up with the object it had grasped (surprise: another gun!) I clobbered him on the head again, this time with enough force to break skin and draw blood.

  G.G. undraped himself from the dashboard, opened his door, and scrambled out, looking like a character from a horror movie. But instead of disappearing in the night like the chessman had done, he circled around to the back of the car. I believe he found the idea of life without his beloved Colt unacceptable. I promptly locked both the back doors.

  “Get going! Now!” I directed the still-dazed Peter, jamming the cold barrel of my revolver (yes, it was mine now) into the back of his hurt head to ensure immediate compliance. He complied immediately. The car veered into the wrong lane as it moved, but he corrected course quickly.

  I had a thousand questions for him, primarily concerning where they had intended to take me and what they were going to do with me had I not foiled their plans, but I didn’t have a single moment to lose.

  “Take me to King Sanjay!” I barked at him without easing up or increasing the pressure on his skull, praying simultaneously for his health to remain seizure-free for the foreseeable future.

  “Listen closely, Peter, whoever you are. We have incalculable wealth and unlimited power. We have just ignored vermin like you so far. But that’s changed tonight. We’ll hunt all the dwellers of the gutter you belong to. I’ll begin with you. I’ll make your life such a hell that even your soul would want to commit suicide. I know where you live. If you don’t do exactly as I ask, I’ll shoot you through your stupid head and then butcher your entire family. I’ll not do it happily, but I’ll not shrink away from it even for a second. You deserve to die knowing that you as good as killed your wife and your daughters with your own hands. Take me to King Sanjay wherever he is. Right now!”

  He must have taken me seriously because he slowed the car and executed a tight u-turn. He was a very smooth driver, that man without a driving license. He dashed through the downtown for a few minutes before taking the Queen Elizabeth Way out of town, where he decreased the distance between the accelerator and the floor by another couple of inches.

  Dread ate up the insides of my stomach like a stream of acid poured into it. I might already be too late to save Sanjay. What power was I up against? If Sanjay had already been killed, wasn’t I speeding toward my death futilely? What if Peter was taking me somewhere else altogether, into another trap?

  I had briefly considered going straight to the police, but dismissed the idea out of hand. Peter was crafty enough to disguise truth to look like a mistake, if not an outright falsehood. There was nothing linking him directly to Sanjay at that point. My near-certain feeling that Sanjay must also have been abducted around the same time as me was, after all, an assumption. I couldn’t afford the procedural delays that would arise. I wished I had a way to contact Cameron…

  Peter drove silently for a nerve-wracking half an hour. He abated his speed near a particularly dense stand of trees and then threw the car into a sharp, skidding turn which brought us onto a dirt-road hidden almost completely behind a curtain of foliage.

  The road was liberally washboarded and narrow, with numerous encroachments by leafy branches and brambles.

  “How far?” I croaked, my voice box feeling as though it had remained unused for months.

  “A mile,” Peter croaked back, his throat evidently as super-dry as mine.

  “Straight road?”

  “Almost straight.”

  “Cut the lights and drive slowly.”

  He did as I said. Night, the immortal mother-night from my boyhood, took me in a smothering embrace, deepening my terror, my panic, my disorientation.

  “Stop the car,” I commanded after we had crawled along for about half a mile. He stopped the car. I sat still for a few moments, breathing deep to slow down the galloping pace of my heart.

  Both Peter and I knew that Peter had reached the end of his road. I couldn’t take him with me; I couldn’t leave him in the car.

  “P-please don’t do anything to my family,” he said bravely. “Please don’t—,”

  “Slide over to the passenger-side door as slow as a snail moves,” I told him. “Don’t try to reach for any weapons. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness pretty well. If you can avoid any stupidity and if you can give me a reasonably long rope, I can think about letting you live. This time.”

  “I DO HAVE A ROPE!” he bellowed enthusiastically.

  We stepped out of the car together, my gun trained on his barely visible form all the time. He opened the trunk of the car by feel, groped around in it for a minute, and gave me something by extending a hand behind his back, without turning around.

  I jumped aside as soon as I perceived his arm beginning to move, in case he had gotten hold of yet another firearm hidden in the innards of his car. But the object he was holding out didn’t shoot any projectiles. It felt like a limp thing, not hard or sharp (like a knife).

  “Drop it!” I ordered. What fell to the ground from his fingers made a soft plop — it was definitely not anything metallic, wooden, or plasticky.

  “Okay. Turn around. Pick the rope up and hold it out to me again,” I said.

  Peter completed both the steps efficiently. I took the means of binding him from his hand — it was a coil of rope, alright — and bound him hand and foot within a minute. I gagged him with his own handkerchief, put him in the backseat of his car, and drove the car into the underbrush, but not far away from the road.

  I hadn’t killed him outright, but if he wasn’t discovered and rescued within a few hours, or if he were to suffer a seizure while he was still tied up, his daughters would still never get to see their father again. Same difference. The thought created a little lump in my throat, but I couldn’t bestow any more time or care to that crook’s comfort and welfare.

  I emptied my bladder. My hands shook, shaking the stream of my water. The path ahead felt like the gaping maw of a malevolent demon.

  Chapter 14: Malaises Without Cure

  T he ox-wagon had an oil lantern fixed to its front like a mono headlamp. A brass bell hung from a bar at its rear. It moved on a dirt path hemmed in on one side by a canal and on the other by a woodland.

  The little circle of light quivered and the sound of tinkling intensified each time the wagon’s wheels dipped into a rut or climbed over a rock.

  A little girl lay in her mother’s lap, staring dreamily at the star-studded sky through the uncovered roof of the wagon. An older boy sitting nearby was telling her a story, but she paid scant attention to his words.

  Nadya reclined against the wagon’s side, also gazing up at the stars. When Shyam stopped speaking, Nadya began singing a Russian song. She kept her volume low, so that only Runa would hear her.

  Sunder, Shyam’s father, was driving the wagon. Illya sat behind Sunder, working on a colorful face mask. The clown was now as s
trong as he had been before intercepting the circus lion made famous by killing its tamer, but Illya’s face had been disfigured hideously and permanently. Without his masks, he would be more suited to the sideshows exhibiting freaks than comedy acts involving clowns and jesters.

  Akilina sat hunched beside Nadya, knitting a ghostly garment, plying a pair of needles with no skein of yarn in evidence anywhere.

  “I don’t feel good,” she muttered.

  “What’s wrong, old mom?” Illya asked her. “I have so many medicines I could—”

  “No, no, it’s not that,” Akilina cut him off. “I have no physical ailment. I feel as though someone has torn my heart out of my chest and is searing and crushing it inch by inch in front of my eyes. There is no medicine —.”

  She fell silent as a sound of galloping horses’ hooves rose at some distance and grew thunderous in a matter of moments.

  Sunder stopped the wagon under an immense tree. “It could be bandits,” he said fearfully. “We must get away from here.” He leaped down and doused the lantern. His passengers had barely jumped down and gotten into the trees lining the dirt-road when a horse-drawn coach came arrowing out of the darkness.

  It had two lamps illuminating its path. Sunder ran back out into the road and began shouting at the top of his voice. “Watch out!” he yelled. “Stop! Stop! There’s a vehicle parked ahead! Stop!”

  The road was not wide enough for the coach to pass the wagon without colliding with it. The fact that the stationary vehicle was practically undetectable in its cocoon of dense shade heightened the probability of an accident to a certainty.

  Sunder ran back to his oxen and began to lead his vehicle off the road, into the woods, but the trees at the point of ingress stood too close together to admit the large wagon readily. The oncoming coach’s driver must have become aware of the perilous obstruction looming ahead of him. The horses’ speed abated. But they were too close now to avoid a collision.