Intrepid: A Vigilantes Novel

by Lake, Keri

  The guy lay beneath me, tied to the springs of a rusted metal bedframe I’d scrounged from inside the abandoned house that I’d turned into my own makeshift surgical room. The gurgling of fluids he hacked up interrupted his deep, throaty cries that failed to elicit a single ounce of empathy in me.

  The sight of him, though, was another story, and I swallowed hard as the acids climbed my throat.

  Kicking my head to the side, I heaved the last meal I’d eaten onto the concrete, the sour scent mingling with that of the blood and sweat and mold. I spent the next two minutes spitting away the last stringy vines clinging to my face, to avoid having to drag my mouth across my bloody arm. That was the thing about taking life, for those of us who didn’t do it for amusement. Physically, it was as easy as one well-placed slice, but mentally, it was a fucking wonder I hadn’t blacked out yet. I may have been cold to his cries, but I certainly wasn’t cold to the act itself.

  At first, I’d mistaken it for the fear of getting caught, but it was more than that. There was a small part of our humanity that begged us to forgive someone, just before making that one fatal jerk of the hand, severing a vital organ. For me, the screaming voices, and not just the ones from my own past, trampled those pleas to dust and sealed the guy’s fate.

  Back at the airport, I’d spent a bit of time with the old boy. After a few more shots and another pack of cigarettes, I’d worked up the balls to pretend like I was one of his kind, lamenting about how the world didn’t understand our desires and the need to corrupt innocence. He’d told me of a website, somewhere in the bowels of the dark net, where my every fantasy could come true. Where I could find those innocent young souls in my own city and take my ‘craving’ to the next step.

  I didn’t bother to tell him the only thing I craved in that moment was the thrill of watching his eyes widen as I slid a serrated blade across his flesh.

  Even still, there was a fine line between wanting and doing, and I didn’t think I’d ultimately have the grit and guts in me to go through with it.

  Part of me wondered if I’d made the right choice to stick around, instead of hopping that plane to Dubai.

  I’d stored his only remaining eyeball in a small foam cooler filled with ice, which I’d set beside me, leaving a hollow socket that’d tripped my gag reflex a couple times already. Not sure what I’d do with it yet. Maybe I’d feed it to one of the many stray dogs roaming the streets.

  Patch covering his other eye, the guy didn’t even look human anymore.

  When I’d started with him, I really hadn’t a clue how I’d go about my revenge. So many options. Fast. Slow. Painful. Painless. When it’d come down to it, I’d let my memories guide me, and opted to take an eye for an eye, since that was what they took from my dad before burning him in the house where I grew up.

  Seemed fitting.

  At the stranger’s head, the picana I’d hooked to a portable generator, as an improvised electrical prod, rested precariously against a wooden block, separating it from the bedsprings. Not as savvy as the closets they’d constructed, but I’d rigged the contraption within a couple of hours, and I was impressed with it.

  Each passing second marked my indecision, as I contemplated whether, or not, to keep on. On one hand, I felt like I was doing some poor young kid a favor by killing the piece of shit. Ensuring he’d never hurt another, like Eli, again. On the other, I felt as if I was slipping away from the person my father had intended me to be.

  A screeching sound echoed inside my head, distant memories from my past, and I screwed my eyes shut as the noise sharpened into screams. Horrible, pain-filled screams I’d locked away for too long.

  The visuals set in next, and I wanted to slice them right out of my skull, but I couldn’t. They played like a movie reel inside a locked projector room.

  My father standing inside a circle of flames, the desperation and despair prodding him to his knees.

  His cries for mercy vibrating across my bones.

  I opened my eyes again, staring down at the man whose lips trembled with his stuttered prayer. Begging me for the mercy he’d refused my father.

  Beneath the blood on my forearm, I could just make out the iron cross tattoo and the date of my father’s death.

  I flicked the block out from under the charged rod, and the first tap against the metal emitted a spark, which sent the Joker seizing against the springs. With blood-soaked hands, I tapped the last Marlboro from my pack and lit it up, watching him bounce on the bed like a cat across an open-range stove, until at last, I flipped off the generator, shooting one last burst of current, and he stilled.

  Though, the rise and fall of his chest told me he was still alive.

  Hearty bastard.

  He broke into a sob, but not even his pathetic wail could touch me. Somewhere in the last hour, I’d hung my humanity on a hook and made a mental vow to finish the job. Strangest feeling—all that tension and desire to kill him, built up into such explosive magnitudes, and suddenly, staring down at him, all of it dissipated right out of me. The atonement overwhelmed me in such a gentle, calming way.

  The kindling piled below him, underneath the bedframe, begged for one single spark. I turned toward the boy beside me, who remained silent—beautifully, blissfully silent. The familiar scar along his cheek roped me into visuals of him lying on a shag carpet floor with a knife trailing down his otherwise flawless skin, the scent of piss and garbage tugging at my throat.

  “Is this what you want? Is this what you need me to do?” I flipped the Zippo, lighting up my cigarette, then lifted a small piece of newspaper from the pile sticking out from the bed. The flame caught the end of it, creating a torch that climbed toward my fingers. “There’s no going back after this.”

  I thought about that for a moment, as if the first remnants of my soul had begun to slink their way back into my hollow body. There was no going back, because once a person killed a man, they carried the burden of his soul forever.

  I withdrew the torch, moving it away from the kindling beneath.

  I didn’t want to carry the man’s soul.

  The boy’s hand covered mine, his deep, obsidian eyes drilling into me, as though he could see things I didn’t.

  He guided my hand forward, and I dropped the flame onto the kindling.

  For the next hour, the two of us watched the stranger burn in the flames, and when his body finally began to curl into itself, I pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper and a pen tucked inside my coat. On the blank side of it, I wrote four names: The Joker, The Pawn, The Fox and The John.

  I crossed the first name off the list and turned to the boy. Without a word, he pushed to his bare feet and walked off, disappearing into the shadows of the building.

  14

  Ty

  Present day …

  I sat up in bed, eyes tacked shut, clutching my head. The pain felt like nails being driven into my temples. I concentrated on every stab, counting back from ten, as I’d been instructed to do by a former doc.

  Ten, nine, eight, seven …

  I breathed.

  Six, five, four, three, two, one.

  Breathed again.

  My mind drifted back to the final minutes of my nightmare—the same one that’d plagued me on a weekly basis since I was a kid. Of lying in a cramped space with the scent of pine and roses filling my nose, and heat radiating across my body, warm at first, until it got hot, the pain intense. Like every time, I’d endured the ice-cold numbness, until I’d finally snapped awake, trembling in a cold sweat.

  I lifted my head from my cupped palms and searched the room—the small, cramped space I’d called home for the last few months. Only a stack of weights sat beside a black acoustic guitar and a chair, beneath which, sat my shoes. My bed was nothing more than a mattress on the floor, with a sheet and a couple pillows. I’d been left a decent amount of money, more than I’d ever need, but I couldn’t bring myself to spend it so frivolously as to make a fancy home.

  Especially when I had no
intentions of staying.

  I trailed my gaze toward the window to the right of me, where a thin translucent curtain fluttered on the cold breath of night. When my eyes scanned left again, I found what I’d been looking for. In the chair across from me sat a boy, a teenager, with ruffled black hair, his eyes nothing more than inky pools, devoid of life. His body carried the bruises of a beating in the big purple plums he wore on his cheekbones and legs. Welts and cuts marred his skin, so pale, he glowed in the darkness. His swollen, cracked lips bore the dryness of thirst, while his sharp, protruding bones professed starvation.

  There’d once been a time that he’d scream and claw at me, like a monster out to consume me. As of late, he merely sat quietly in the corner, staring at me, with the same condemning expression as always.

  I knew what he wanted, why he came to me every night, haunting me with his sad, sunken eyes and cries of pain. It’d become clear what he needed from me nearly two years ago, when I’d killed the Joker.

  My mind pulled me into flashbacks of that night.

  The coppery scent of blood in the air, the tearing of flesh beneath my blade, the taste of charred meat with every breath I inhaled.

  The blur of the room sharpened back into focus as the memory dissolved, and I looked up to find the chair empty of the boy who’d sat there moments before.

  A therapist once told me the boy was a hallucination—a manifestation of guilt. She’d suggested that the boy was a younger version of me, but I knew better. According to her, in order to make the hallucination disappear, I needed to address whatever it was that brought it on in the first place. To purge the suffering I hadn’t allowed for myself, and confront the issues that’d festered in my head for so many years.

  Therefore, I credited her with my unflinching drive for revenge. Because although that first kill was sloppy and terrifying, there was also something deeply satisfying about silencing the screams.

  The ones inside my head, anyway.

  For months after, I’d become paranoid, certain someone would find some spec of evidence. After all, it’d been a rushed and careless kill—I’d literally had to scrape the bastard’s charred flesh off the metal prongs of the bed where I’d burned him.

  I’d hidden myself away in a shitty apartment on the East side and avoided anywhere I might’ve run into a cop, or someone who could’ve seen me that night at the airport.

  No one had come forward to report him missing, though. Not a boss, a friend, not even the bartender who’d poured his drinks once a week at the airport bar. As if the asshole hadn’t even existed in the time he was alive, no one gave a shit about his death.

  I guess in the end, the joke was on The Joker.

  When it seemed I’d gotten away with it, I vowed never again. I’d never take a life again, and would do everything in my power to stay on the straight and narrow.

  But the boy had returned.

  The screams returned.

  The nightmares had become so intense that I dreaded closing my eyes, and my job quickly turned into a dangerous playground as I traversed beams hundreds of feet in the air with the ache of insomnia setting me off-balance.

  I got on sleeping pills. Then got hooked on them. Yet, still the voices and hallucinations wouldn’t relent their torment.

  So I’d made the decision to silence the voices for good. To make good on another promise I’d made years before. But in order to do that, I’d have to get better at hiding the evidence.

  I’d begun to study crime scene investigation. Every book. Every TV show. For hours, I’d surfed the web, venturing into the darkest places where most feared to look. The website Joker had mentioned just before I’d killed him.

  That was where I’d found my practice subject—a man looking to meet up with a thirteen-year-old, preferably.

  I’d spent the next few months studying him, the way he groomed girls on popular teen sites, posing as a fifteen-year-old kid. All the while trading graphic images of prepubescent girls getting raped and beaten on the same dark websites that’d advertised hitmen and arms dealing.

  After months of observation, I’d decided to approach him online, pretending to be the teenage daughter of parents who just didn’t get me, while he’d posed as a teenage boy who did. I’d found it both amusing and sickening, the way he’d feigned care and concern, weaving fantasies of running away together, completely oblivious to how deeply into shit he’d fallen.

  We’d agreed to meet at an old hotel on the East side. Outdated, without cameras, that rented rooms by the hour. It was there he’d made the terrifying discovery that the girl he’d been chatting with happened to be a healthy adult male with an appetite for justice, so I’d drugged him and brought him to an abandoned house, where I’d spent the next few hours field dressing him, the same way my uncle had taught me while hunting deer. Shoulder-length gloves over a plastic tarp made it so much cleaner, before I’d eventually burned all of it, including his body.

  Not leaving so much as a single intact tooth behind.

  When it was clear I’d gotten away with his murder, as well, I’d pulled my list once more and set to work.

  Starting with The Pawn.

  15

  Jameson

  Nine years ago …

  I was certain morning had arrived, though it was hard to tell in the darkness.

  A maddening thing: darkness. The way the skin felt more raw and vulnerable, as if the body naturally went on alert in the absence of light.

  Burns scattered over my body converged into a phantom numbness, the edges of which were just painful enough to keep me from focusing too hard. If I did, I’d feel those unforgiving shocks zapping my bones, and hear the crackle as they seared my arms and legs. My knees, palms, and the tops of my feet tingled with the jolts of electricity that’d danced across them, and the vibrations under my skin proved my body wouldn’t soon forget the sharp needling waves of agony. Every dry swallow scraped down my throat, until I could no longer produce enough saliva. The hollow ache of hunger sat low in my stomach, tamped down by the fear of the unknown—the uncertainty that we’d walk out of the place alive.

  I imagined my father coming to pick me up at Jo’s after a long and stressful shift, only to find her pacing in a panicked mess. There’d be police, neighbors peering out of their windows at the commotion, Jo and my dad would wrack their brains trying to remember what we were wearing earlier that day—the small details that seemed so insignificant, but meant everything. They’d unquestionably assume we’d gotten hurt while exploring, or fell asleep somewhere. I doubt either one of them could conceive that something much more sinister had been in play.

  My father likely wouldn’t sleep through the night. He’d be tired and rundown from working third shift, but he’d stay up, tormented over the possibilities. Beating himself up for leaving me there and being a shitty father.

  That bothered me most, because my dad didn’t deserve those thoughts. He didn’t deserve to blame himself for what he’d had no control over.

  What I’d essentially had no control over.

  I tried not to think about the many times I’d warned Eli, practically begged him to leave and walk away. It’d only piss me off, and I couldn’t afford to be pissed off at my friend. We had to stick together. I had no idea what the day would bring, what sadistic play the three had planned.

  From somewhere in the darkness, Eli’s quiet whimper carried across the room. For whatever reason, they’d focused on him more than me. A few times, his mouth brought on the punishment, but even after he’d gone compliant, they continued to mess with him. At one point, they’d moved him from his closet to somewhere else in the house, and all I could hear were the muffled screams through the thin walls.

  Eli had refused to talk to me, when they’d finally brought him back, but I could hear his whispers between sobs. A plea in the dark.

  I twisted awkwardly toward the sound of his sobbing, peering into complete blackness. “Eli,” I whispered, pushing past the dry choke in my throat.
“Just … hold on, okay? We’re going home, I promise.”

  He sniffled and sobbed some more.

  “Whatever they did to you … they’ll pay. All of them.”

  “My father’s coming for me.”

  His response sank like a brick to the pit of my gut. Panic could be a frightening disease, the way it infected the body, paralyzing it, until it finally reached the brain and delusion set in. Though I knew he’d reached that point, a part of me wanted to surrender to the hope that he was right. That my father would find the assholes and make them pay in horrific ways.

  I knew better. Escaping would be up to us, and the men who captured us had, no doubt, learned by trial and error, to ensure there was no escape. We’d have to keep our wits about us, and I could sense Eli’s was slipping by the minute.

  “I wrote a letter. My dad is going to send someone for us. I told him where I hid my secret. I know why we’re here. It’s my secret.”

  Jesus. He’d finally lost it.

  “What secret, Eli?” I half-heartedly entertained his ramblings, only because, even if it was crazy, it kept me connected to him.

  “A secret. A secret I have. It’s in that rusted car at the Packard. Glove compartment.” His burst of laughter was unfitting, painfully so, as he gagged and sniveled. “Those fuckers won’t know what hit them!” Laughter turned to choking, and with each second that passed, I listened to the snapping of threads that held the two of us together. “My dad is the greatest criminal that ever lived. He has connections. He’ll come for us.”

  The breaking of his voice and the desperation in his words brought tears to my eyes, and told me whatever they’d done to him in the other room had finally broken him. To come up with some grandiose story about his father rescuing him was as unstable as telling me that dragons would fall from the sky and sweep us away to safety.