The Stone
Seb L. Carter
Wolfline Publishing
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2017 Sebastian Carter
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and review. For information address Sebastian Carter and Wolfline Publishing.
If you obtained this book through any other method than purchasing through an online store or given with the express permission of the author and publisher, you should be aware that this book is stolen property.
Contents
Note:
Also by Seb L. Carter
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
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About the Author
Note:
This book deals with previous suicide attempts by the main character. Please be aware that this is discussed in the text, not in any great detail, but in the main character’s backstory.
If you or anyone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide, please reach out to the following:
National Suicide Prevention Hotline in the U.S.: 1-800-273-8255
National Suicide Prevention Online Chat: http://chat.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/GetHelp/LifelineChat.aspx
Suicide.org in the UK: +44 (0) 8457 90 90 90
Also by Seb L. Carter
Just One Night - M/M Romance
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One
Lufkin, TX - March 2010
The first gunshot woke him.
Liam didn’t know it was a gunshot at first. He sat up in bed, his heart pounding, and he took a survey of his bedroom in the darkness. The house was cold. It was Texas in March when temperatures were already licking at the heels of 80 most days, and the nights stayed a temperate 68 degrees.
But that night, it was cold.
Maybe he heard thunder, a storm front moving in. Thunderstorms rolled through during spring like the column of a conquering army, lightning and dark clouds sent by vengeful generals.
He even reached over his headboard to lift the window curtain so he could peer out into the night. It was quiet outside his window. But quiet skies could be misleading, especially in Texas. In Texas, when storms blew in, clear skies opposed black and angry clouds, good and evil separated by a wall reaching high into the heavens.
It was 2:32 a.m.—a time to stick with him forever. The clock cast a digital green light, an eerie glow in his room.
Just when he dismissed the sound to lay back down again, shouting started. Another gunshot shattered the night.
“No, God! No!” Deep, wailing cries. Pleading cries all at once.
A woman. His step-mother, Becky.
Then another scream, “MOMMY, MOMMYmommymommy!” His younger sister, Tamra.
Liam threw the covers aside and froze at the edge of his bed, scared, uncertain.
Another gunshot. There was no question what he heard now—and the abrupt silence of Tamra’s scream followed by the solo, mournful cries of Becky.
Liam raced from his bed and paused with his hand on the doorknob of his bedroom door, but again he froze. An intruder. What else could it be? An intruder with a gun. He needed to get to a phone, call 9-1-1.
He needed to see if his sister and step-mom were all right.
He should go out there. He should fight. He should…
He didn’t know what to do. This indecision would also come to haunt him.
But the fear gripped tight, kept him from going any further, too afraid to actually turn the door knob and take that step out into the hallway.
The cries again. “Why, Walter? Why?! Oh God, why?”
Walter was his father. Liam finally did open the door. A crack. Just enough to peer out down the hallway.
Light fell into the corridor from the kitchen. There, in the middle of the hallway, was Becky on her knees. She held something. Her nightgown was soaked in red.
She cradled what she held. What she held struck dread in Liam’s heart, and tears leapt to his eyes, his mouth open in a silent cry.
A small arm, limp, covered in stark smears of red blood against sun-kissed skin. Holly, Liam’s youngest sister. Just a baby.
Liam threw open the door to his bedroom and ran out into the hallway. Becky saw him. Her face was smeared with the blood. She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Go back. Please, Liam. Go.”
Becky cried.
The barrel of the shotgun moved in from the kitchen. It pressed against the side of Becky’s head, and Becky squeezed her eyes shut. The gun fired, and the side of Becky’s head was a pulp of red mess.
Liam turned and ran back into his room, and he stopped to peer out the door closed to a crack again.
Outside, silence.
And footsteps, heavy footfalls. A man’s leg stepped over the lifeless body of Becky, a man’s arm roped out of a rolled-up red-plaid sleeve, and then the face that chilled Liam to his core.
His father’s all-too serene face. He carried a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun in his hand, held upside down as he methodically, mechanically reloaded the magazine with shotgun shells that he pulled, one-by-one, from the bulging breast pocket of his shirt. He did this as he moved down the hallway toward where Liam crouched down behind the cracked-open doorway.
When his father stood outside his door, Liam scrambled backward to crab walk to a dark corner of his room. Where else could he go? The midnight square of his window covered by half-closed curtains. Could he make it in time?
But before he could even process the thought into action, the door to his room kicked open. Liam froze.
His father walked into the room, the shotgun aimed and ready. He moved to Liam’s bed and stopped when he saw it empty.
It was only a matter of time. The door, could he make it? But his legs wouldn’t act.
He should scream. He should fight.
His father was much larger than he was, a man who worked with heavy farm equipment that he had to lift and use in order to demonstrate it to potential buyers. He was a man who could swat a teenager the size of Liam down with one big, meaty hand.
But Liam’s father wasn’t like that. He was a gentle man, a kind man. The type of man who gathered up a puppy found broken and near death beside the road to carry it to a veterinar
ian to be saved.
This was not his father. It was the shell of his father carrying a loaded gun.
“Daddy?” Liam said in a voice that came out from him too small.
A whisper of breeze turned his skin to goose flesh. And a cold hand gripped inside him. The house shook. Liam thought it was him, that he was trembling, but it was the whole house that trembled.
Liam’s father paused. He turned in the room and watched as pictures fell from the wall. Elsewhere in the house, something shattered, the sound of glass sprinkling on the hardwood floor. The barrel of the gun moved just feet from where Liam crouched in the corner, level with his head.
And it passed over him.
Liam was sure his father looked right at him. He even waited for that second of recognition as he stared into his father’s eyes. He needed to see the moment of his father’s decision to take Liam from this world. If he was to die like this, his father owed him that.
The shaking in the house grew more intense. Wood splintered behind the walls. The whole house could fall on top of them at any moment.
And Liam waited for his death to come.
But death never came.
Instead, his father turned and walked with heavy footfalls from the room to stop in the hallway right outside Liam’s door.
Fear mixed with confusion. The shaking of the house stopped.
Was this part of the torture leading up to his death? Was his father toying with him? Liam remained where he was.
A final gunshot broke the night, this time close enough to cause a ringing in Liam’s ears. He heard someone fall. Then he heard nothing at all.
The house was too quiet after so much noise. Except the sound of his lone beating heart thudding in his ears.
For a long while, he stayed where he was. Minutes or hours. They seemed the same, blurred. He couldn’t move except to tremble and wipe away errant tears. He hugged his legs. He didn’t want to move, to face what was beyond his door. So he stayed put.
The smell of blood was cloying, thick in the air. And a sour smell of shit after a time. He didn’t even move when he heard the pounding at the front door and the red and blue lights pulsating off his bedroom walls through his curtains.
Police officers flooded into Liam’s room, guns aimed. They watched the wide cracks in the walls like they were afraid that, at any moment, the whole house might betray them and fall.
When one officer found Liam, he yelled. Liam could barely comprehend what he was saying, a far-off language, and he was lifted from the floor, the officer stepping over the dead body of his father to carry him out of the house. The man he called daddy now dead with his face only vaguely recognizable by the familiar cleft of his chin. The rest was in ruin.
The image of his dead father: Another image that remained burned into his brain.
Two
Chicago, IL – Present Day
The man Patrick Rowe was supposed to meet was already seated at the diner table, sipping a cup of coffee and eating a cheeseburger and French fries at 3 a.m. The restaurant was an all-night place with a long counter and vinyl-topped stools, dingy booths, and gaudy red neon in the windows. A haze of grilled onion stink hung in the air. Elsewhere in the diner were club kids, college aged and stuffing their faces with their own fatty foods to bring down the buzz of liquor enough so they could go home and crawl into their beds.
“You’re late,” the man said when Patrick stopped at the table. He looked like a professor in a maroon argyle sweater vest and a glistening dome of a head with thin strands of hair combed over his bald spot. He wore glasses and peered over the rims to stare up at Patrick.
Patrick tossed a picture onto the table that spun and came to a stop against the man’s plate of food. It was a picture of the same man sitting there with his fingers glistening from hamburger grease and dredging a French fry through ketchup. “I passed your little test,” Patrick said.
The test he’d been given: Find the man in this picture. No address. Not even a country or city. And he’d succeeded. Too much was at stake for him not to succeed.
The man glanced down at the picture then back to Patrick. “You’re still late,” the man said.
“My flight was delayed from Dubai.” Patrick said.
Truth was, he’d been in Chicago for six hours now. He made a couple of stops before coming here. This operation—if it could be called that—was unconventional, and it didn’t sit well with him in the least. Patrick worked for the CIA’s Special Operations Group, and sometimes unconventional was the norm. But this time, four lives were on the line. And this time, he was on his own. If he was forced to rely only on himself, he needed to back himself up with some firepower. A luggage locker in Chicago’s Union Station had everything he thought he might need. But even that was an educated guess.
The waitress came to their table, and Patrick ordered a cup of coffee. He stared at the professorial figure sitting across from him.
“Well, here we are,” the man said. He had a voice like he smoked, and his clothes carried the scent of nicotine and cigarettes.
“How about you start by telling me exactly what it is I’m doing here and what this has to do with finding my team?” His team, missing two weeks now.
The man stuck a fry in his mouth and chewed. “When you need to know, you will.”
Patrick hit the table. He leaned forward and stared hard at the man. “That’s not going to work.” Some of the other patrons of the restaurant peered over at them.
The man betrayed a small smile on his face. “Calm down, Mr. Rowe,” he said.
“Believe me, I am calm. If I have to get angry, there won’t be much talking going on,” Patrick said.
The balding man leaned back and wiped his hands with his paper napkin. “I do like your spirit,” he said.
“Four SEAL team members were kidnapped by Taliban forces,” Patrick said, his voice an angry whisper, “and I was told by your boss to come here and find you in order to get them out. You want to tell me why I’m here and not over there looking for them?”
“You are here and not there because my employer has the ability to free your team,” he said. “But that is not something he is willing to offer freely. You understand that, don’t you?”
Patrick glared at the man.
This all started for him two weeks ago. His team was the stakes. Four guys he’d come to call friends, even family, over his two years embedded with them in a forward operations group working out of Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.
The night they were taken, it was to be a simple mission, the type they, as a black-ops group, had done countless times. A search and eliminate for a man named Aarif Sattari, a key official in the Taliban resistance and a man thought to be connected to Iranian Quds Forces. Patrick was the team’s compass, the one who told them where to go. Usually he and his team only got close enough to paint a target for drones, and hellfire rained down from the sky. But this time, they were ordered to do a direct takedown. The enemy lay in wait, and they were ambushed and taken hostage. Patrick was the only one to escape in a twist of fate he still struggled to comprehend.
Patrick unclenched his fist and laid his hand, palm down on the table. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Yes, you are.”
The waitress brought Patrick his coffee and asked if he wanted anything else. Patrick told her no.
“You should eat something,” the man said.
“I’m not hungry.”
The man shrugged and took another bite of his hamburger. “Suit yourself,” he said through a full mouth.
After a moment of watching the man eat, Patrick finally asked him, “What do I call you, anyway?”
“A follower of Thaddeus,” the man said.
“And who is Thaddeus? Is that the man I met in Dubai?” The clandestine meeting in a Dubai hotel was with a rich guy, not bad looking, and that guy had introduced himself as Cyril. But in his line of work, somebody with a few names wasn’t all that uncommon. The name Thaddeus was a ne
w one.
“Thaddeus is the reason we are all here,” the man said.
Patrick stared at him, then he shook his head. He was through with riddles. “This is all a waste of my time,” Patrick said, and he slid from the booth and stood.
“Where are you going?” the man asked, this follower of Thaddeus.
“I’m going to board the next plane back to Dubai so I can continue the search for my team.” He started to leave.
But the man reached out and grabbed Patrick’s wrist. When Patrick turned on him, ready to knock the guy out, he couldn’t move. He tried to, but, even as he tried to command it, his body simply would not respond.
“Sit down,” the man said with a motion of his head back toward the seat.
And Patrick finally did move—not of his own volition. He walked the two clipped steps back to sit down in the booth again and to stare across the table at the man. Everything else was frozen, paralyzed, his chest constricted, almost unable to breath. He could only take in shallow breaths to keep from blacking out.
With a wave of the man’s hand, it all released, and Patrick fell forward, gasping for air. He knocked over the cup of coffee, and the dark liquid spread out across the table and soaked the photograph. The man didn’t seem to take notice. “What the fuck was that?” Patrick barely managed as he gulped in deep breaths.
The Stone (Lockstone Book 1) Page 1
