Brutal Business: Book Three in the Mad Mick Series

by Franklin Horton

  They put a basketball goal in the back and that provided some distraction until the games got too heated and Thomas shut it down. As usual, it was the loudmouthed Mundo instigating it. He was a good player who couldn’t restrain the trash-talking. If he was playing, the games always ended in a fight.

  “You gonna get your ass killed one day,” Lawdog warned him. “You don’t know when to stop. Somebody is gonna blow your damn head off cause that mouth won’t quit flapping.”

  “They can bring it if they think they’re bad enough,” Mundo said. “I’m invincible.”

  “You ain’t bulletproof, dumbass. You gonna get shot full of holes.” Lawdog knew he couldn’t rein it in, though. Mundo couldn’t stop being an asshole any more than he could stop his heart from beating. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Duly noted.”

  Lawdog understood that Thomas had a hard time keeping the men in check. These were all men who had been used to getting what they wanted on the street. Military life had instilled discipline in them to the point that they learned patience. They learned how to gradually work toward a goal instead of requiring immediate gratification, which was the way of the street. They were all cut from the same mold, basically. Even Thomas. He had vision, though, and that was what kept these men together.

  Later that day, Thomas came searching for Lawdog.

  “I figure we’re going to need to move in the next day or two. The men are getting bored and restless. If life gets too easy they get soft and start fighting among each other. Can’t have that.”

  “Where we headed?” Lawdog asked.

  “South.”

  “Any destination in mind?”

  “I’m thinking Portsmouth, Kentucky. Then Ashland after that,” Thomas replied.

  “What about long-term? Any idea where we’re headed?”

  Thomas shook his head. “I don’t see us settling down, wearing bibbed overalls, and turning into farmers if that’s what you mean. I don’t think people like us could survive like that. We’d eventually pick a town clean. We’ll do best staying on the move. Besides, in one place, we’d get bored. The men would fight all the time and probably kill each other. I see it now when we sit still too long. It’s only those parties once a week that keep the men grounded, allowing them to purge that fire inside them.”

  The thing left unsaid was that those parties always resulted in dead girls. If someone had to die, though, better it be one of them than a soldier they couldn’t replace.

  “So we sticking to Route 23?” Lawdog asked.

  “It’s treated us well. I don’t have any destination in mind beyond that but it’s already cold. We should head south to warmer country. I like a challenge but that don’t mean we have to suffer in this damn cold like a bunch of Eskimos. I’m sure there’s good pickings down there. We could find another old highway like Route 11 or Route 1 and keep moving along it.” Sensing that this might not have been the answer Lawdog was seeking, Thomas continued. “You not cool with the moving around? You don’t like my plan?”

  Lawdog knew better than to give any indication he wasn’t with the program. “Nah, T, I’m good. Just thinking ahead is all. Trying to pull my weight as your lieutenant.”

  He was telling the truth. He didn’t care where they went or even if they went south to take advantage of the warmer climate. He’d grown up hard. He’d seen and done bad stuff, but had surprisingly been able to keep his nose clean enough that his record didn’t keep him out of the military. His service there had been a piece of cake compared to life on the street, even when he’d been deployed to Afghanistan. He was as content now as he’d ever been. The Bond was the best of both worlds. He had the brotherhood of military service and the lawlessness of gang life. What wasn’t to love about that?

  7

  The following morning they began tearing down their camp. It would take all day and they probably wouldn’t pull out until the following morning. They might have been there one week or they might have been there two. No one counted. No one cared. They would leave with only the essentials, abandoning any useless crap they’d accumulated during their stay. The DVD collection, the ridiculously large television, the basketball goal, and even the basketball itself would be left behind. All of it could be replaced, looted or stolen anew, in the next town. Wasn’t that the fun of it anyway? Wasn’t that the adventure of the life they’d chosen, living like pirates sailing across the landscape of a battered America in their vintage trucks, taking what they wanted and killing anyone who dared stand in their way?

  Since their first stop beyond the military base they originated from, Thomas had established a tradition that one man would be chosen to leave the signature of The Bond when the occasion warranted. They weren’t like the Freemasons or other entities who had established signs that would be recognized by anyone who saw it. Their mark was the result of improvisation, something new each time, with the only requirement being that it made clear the name of their organization. Somewhere within what they left behind, the name “The Bond” had to be specifically spelled out. The purpose was to acquaint people with the name. To give them someone to fear. They did it everywhere they took a notion. Every place they felt fear needed to be reinforced. Sometimes it marked a particularly grisly deed, the site of something nasty that The Bond wanted credit for.

  Thomas delegated the assignment of leaving a signature at the farm supply to Mundo. Thomas appreciated that Mundo never took a half-assed approach to the task no matter how many times it was presented to him. He could always be counted on for something dramatic, for disturbed visual statements that grabbed your attention almost immediately. He was a little twisted, a little crazy, and he took the job seriously. Despite his shortcomings, Mundo’s enthusiasm endeared him to Thomas.

  “I’ll try to make a good impression, T,” he assured Thomas. Mundo had once heard that it was important to make a good impression, though he couldn’t recall where. It certainly hadn’t been from his dad, his family, or his own circle of friends. None of them ever gave a shit about making a good impression. Maybe it was something he’d heard on television.

  Acting with that single-minded determination, Mundo rooted around in one of the trucks and soon appeared before Thomas, Lawdog, and the rest of the gang in a hazmat suit. To an outsider the suit may have seemed something frivolous to retain on the trucks. It wasn’t, though. Sometimes they’d chosen to enter buildings rank with the smell of the dead when they were searching for a particular item. The suits made that a little easier to tolerate.

  “What the fuck, dude?” Lawdog asked. “What kinda shit are you planning?”

  Mundo stood there intentionally breathing like Darth Vader, playing it up for his audience. "I need a volunteer," came a muffled voice from the suit. It was only then that the men noticed he had another suit in his hands.

  Lawdog chuckled. “Good luck with that.”

  "Who's going to help me? I got something good in mind and I can’t do it alone. Somebody gotta man up around here."

  The men who had been standing around waiting to see what Mundo had in mind suddenly found other things to do, wandering off and appearing busy. No one wanted a part of this. They’d seen what came out of his head before and it wasn’t pretty.

  “Hey, wait,” Mundo called. “Don’t y’all be going nowhere.”

  The men didn’t slow, suddenly busying themselves with truck maintenance or loading boxes.

  Thomas was enjoying the men’s discomfort. “Wait a minute now,” he said. “This is kind of like Cinderella. We gotta figure out whose foot fits the glass slipper. In this case, the glass slipper is a hazmat suit. What size suit is that?"

  Mundo searched for a label and read it. "Large.”

  "Ain’t gonna fit my big ass then," Droopy said with undisguised relief. “I’m a 2XL. Another one of y’all gonna have to help this freak with his little project.”

  “He-Man!” Thomas yelled. “Get your ass over here and help this soldier out.”

 
; He-Man groaned, but this wasn’t the kind of assignment he could gracefully turn down. He’d been called out by name. It was supposed to be an honor to play a role in leaving the mark, no matter how it was done. Besides, Thomas didn’t make suggestions. Calling He-Man on deck was basically as good as an order. Rejecting the order meant rejecting The Bond, and it was seen as a personal insult by Thomas. It meant someone was going to die. That in mind, He-Man dejectedly pulled on the suit and gestured at Mundo that it was his show.

  “Okay, you got me, man. Let’s get on with this and get it over with,” He-Man said from behind the shield.

  Mundo wandered off, He-Man dragging along behind him. The men could hear Mundo laughing behind his mask and it made them laugh too. It was a nervous laughter, all of them glad that they were not in He-Man’s shoes. If Mundo was that excited, there was some weirdness about to go down.

  That weirdness took them a little over two hours, during which time the rest of the men carried on with their tasks. It was nearly sundown when Mundo announced to the group that they were done. He waited near the front gate while the men assembled there. He was like a tour guide or a proud child ready to show his mother what he’d been up to.

  He-Man stood off to the side, a little green around the gills. While he was normally pretty boisterous and loud, at the moment he looked like he wanted to wander off and purge his stomach into the bushes. His appearance stirred no sympathy among the men. They took jabs at him for his weakness, which was an intolerable state among these hard men.

  The sun was setting over the flat landscape of Ohio, laying an orange pallor over the dying fall grass. The air was cold and crisp. It would have been a beautiful evening for men prone to noticing such things. This group would enjoy a last fire in the farm supply that night, eating a simple dinner that would require no elaborate cooking and no cleanup. They had to be up early.

  When everyone was present, Mundo marched them to the site of his handiwork, the public roadway just north of the farm supply. The men stared in silence at Mundo and He-Man’s handiwork.

  “It says, ‘The Bond’,” Mundo said. “You see it, don’t you?” He was concerned for a moment that all his work might be for nothing, that his message was indecipherable.

  “I see it,” Thomas said. “You a sick bastard, man. One sick puppy.”

  “Got dropped on his head when he was a baby,” Jawbone suggested.

  Mundo cackled. “You think it will make a good impression?”

  “It’ll give them people nightmares,” Droopy stated. “That shit might even give me nightmares.”

  The men continued to study the scene before them in silence, trying to figure it all out.

  “How did you get them bodies to bend that way?” Thomas asked. “It ain’t natural.”

  “It wasn’t easy,” Mundo said. “Some of them were all stiff and shit. We had to snap them loose and bend them different ways. That’s when He-Man lost his shit. The sound of breaking bones didn’t sit well with him.”

  “Going to have to change that name if you don’t toughen up,” Jawbone called to He-Man. “He-Man supposed to be tough.”

  Normally a comment like that would have had He-Man charging Jawbone, ready to fight, but in a testament to his state He-Man simply turned away from the scene in disgust. He’d seen all of it he wanted to see.

  “What’s the matter, He-Man?” Thomas chided. “You don’t approve of this message?”

  “Ain’t that,” He-Man said. “That sound, man. Them bones snapping. Joints coming out of place like you was tearing a leg off a turkey. Shit was nasty. Too much for my stomach.”

  In the scene before them, Mundo and his reluctant partner He-Man had used the bodies of the dead to spell out “The Bond” in the roadway in front of the farm supply. They used the people they’d shot when they took the farm supply as well as the bodies of women who died at their hands after they moved in. The straight letters had been no issue but the letters containing curves had required the significant manipulations that He-Man had described. That was perhaps the most disturbing aspect of it – spines bent counter to their natural range of movement, arms disjointed and twisted, legs splayed at disturbing angles.

  Thomas started clapping and out of a sense of obligation the other men jumped in to join him. “Bravo!” As his clapping faded away like the hooves of a departing horse, he headed back toward the camp. They’d had a long day and these men had earned their dinner.

  8

  When Conor Maguire approached the roadblock he kept both hands in plain sight, resting them on the saddle horn and not making any sudden movements. The two sentries did not raise their guns at him, perhaps afraid he’d take offense and kill them for the insult. They knew this Irishman. Conor noted the way their grips tightened on their weapons and the manner in which they subtly shifted their bodies to better fighting stances. He imagined their thumbs stretching toward the safety levers of their respective rifles, ready to flip them off and open fire if he behaved in a less than civil manner.

  The men’s wariness came from recognizing this rider. He wasn’t intimidating in his size. He wasn’t musclebound or particularly tall. He wasn’t scarred and snarling like some bad guy from the movies. He wasn’t even wearing black, just some dirty European camouflage. The sentries were wary of him because they’d seen him in action. He was skilled in all manner of weapons, both common and unfamiliar. He was devious and possessed of an evil cunning. His tactics were brutal and delivered with no compunction for how many of the enemy he might kill. After all, they were the enemy and their lives were of no consequence to him.

  The men were glad he was alone. For all the fear and unease he instilled in them, they found him to be significantly less intimidating than his daughter. She was dangerous and half-crazy, depending on who you believed. She was ready to kill enemy and friend alike if she took offense at something you did. No one wanted to be around her. No one knew what to do with that.

  Conor brought his horse to a stop a safe speaking distance from the men. "Wayne sent for me," he announced, the remnants of his Irish childhood present in the lilt of his voice. Despite the years it lingered there like the taste of liquor in a glass of melted ice.

  Both men gave slow nods of acknowledgement, not taking their eyes from Conor. One of them gestured that he should ride on by. So much for friendly conversation between strangers. Conor tipped his cap, nudged his horse, and got moving. About twenty feet beyond the sentries, he craned his neck back around to peer at the two men. He needed to satisfy his curiosity. Just as expected, he found them watching him, afraid to take their eyes off him. Afraid to turn their backs to him.

  Conor smiled. "Why is everyone so scared of the little ole Mad Mick?" he wondered aloud.

  He understood why they were afraid, though. It was for the same damn reason that everyone he’d ever fought with carried a sliver of fear at being in his presence. It was because they knew he had no limits. If all was fair in love and war, he took it to a new level. The things he did to those who crossed him were the stuff of legend.

  Around the next bend in the road the land opened up. For the past eight miles he’d followed a narrow river valley. Mountains rose on both sides, their slopes so steep that some trees jutted straight out of the mountain, growing horizontally rather than upward. The road was set into the base of one slope while the broad churning river spanned the bottomland between the mountains. There was room for nothing else in the tight space, other than the occasional roadside turnout where men stopped to fish, relieve themselves, or toss out their empties.

  Conor didn’t mind the terrain but some found it to be claustrophobic. Being in these Appalachian valleys, having to stare up to see the sun, was like standing in the bottom of a hole. Strangers sometimes found it difficult to breathe here. Others couldn’t tolerate that valley-dwellers might only get two or three hours of direct sunlight a day.

  Conor’s destination was a wide spot where the mountains temporarily splayed apart like the legs of a stag
gering and bandy-legged drunk. To the right of the road was the fire hall where Wayne and the rest of his Michigan band were living. Originally just passing through on their way to a more hospitable climate, Wayne had decided to winter over with his people after they hit hard times. They were tired and the weather was turning on them. Stopping early allowed them to lay in supplies and prepare the firehouse to be a winter home. It wasn’t comfortable and there was no privacy but they were better off than some.

  Since Conor last visited the firehouse they’d moved more vehicles around the perimeter of the parking lot. The cars served both as fencing and as cover for shooting positions. A couple of charred and blackened sections of asphalt reminded Conor that he and Wayne had gotten off to a difficult start. There had been some explosions, the odd bomb or two. That happened around Conor sometimes. Besides, what relationship didn’t benefit from a few fireworks at the beginning?

  Since that time, Conor and Wayne had come to an understanding. They’d become allies. Both wanted the same thing—to protect their people and maintain peace within their larger community. Wayne and some of his men had helped in the battle against Bryan, the man responsible for Barb’s kidnapping. They’d proven themselves to be capable and reliable.

  There were additional sentries posted around the barricade of vehicles and Conor spotted Wayne among them. The men were using the radios they found among the gear at the fire hall so the first sentries had probably alerted him that the crazy Irishman was on his way. There were openings in the car barrier for taking the horses into the inner sanctum, little mazes too small for a vehicle to enter, but Conor chose to dismount. He tied his horse off to the shattered side mirror of a black Jeep Cherokee with rusty wheels and flat tires.