Brothers (The Last Colony Book 1)

by William R Hunt

  “You’re up,” Walker said, dropping his fork as he sat back. “Ready for your big day?”

  Dante opened his mouth to finish the question he had already implied (What are you doing here?) when he noticed how different Walker looked. It was the same man, wearing the same clothes, and yet his face was different. Like a schizophrenic changing personalities, the haunted look Dante had previously seen in Walker’s face had been transposed by something more relaxed, more at ease with itself. Even as Walker chewed the deer heart, his cheeks tried to lift into a smile, like he was in on some private joke.

  “Where’s Vic?” Dante asked, clinging to any pretense of normalcy he could manage. The sound of his own question chilled him because it spawned a dozen possible answers and none of them was pleasant.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s around,” Walker answered casually, still chewing.

  Dante began to measure the distance between himself and the closet in the hall where the Winchester was hidden. There was also the poker by the fire, but he would have to cross the room to reach it. Besides, what would he do with a poker? Jab Walker’s eyes?

  As if reading Dante’s thoughts, Walker pulled a pistol from his lap and set it casually on the table. It was a Glock, not a Colt. Victor, wherever he was, might still be armed.

  Walker swallowed what was in his mouth and chased it down with a splash of water from the glass resting on the table. He set the glass back down and paused, studying it. “It’s clean,” he said.

  “There’s a brook in the woods,” Dante explained.

  “You carry it all the way from there?”

  Dante nodded.

  “I never understood,” Walker said, “how people can resign themselves to so much work when there are so many alternatives.” He lifted the glass and took another swallow, releasing a satisfied sigh this time when he was finished.

  “Take it all,” Dante answered. “Take what’s in the garden. We won’t come after you, just as long as you get the hell out of here.”

  Walker, still leaning back against the chair with his hands resting easily on the table, listened to Dante in silence. He looked amused.

  Dante’s brow furrowed. “You’re not here for food, are you?”

  Walker lowered his eyes and ran his fingertips lovingly along the barrel of the pistol. “Alas, there are bigger things at stake here. And speaking of steak, have you tried this heart?” He skewered another piece of meat on his fork and pulled it free with his teeth. “Delicious.”

  Dante heard a noise outside. It sounded like the creak of leather.

  “I don’t see this often,” Walker said, gesturing vaguely at their surroundings. “You’re more prepared than most. I’m guessing it has more to do with your brother than with you.” He raised a finger to his mouth and began picking at his teeth with the fingernail.

  “What was the end game?” he added when Dante did not answer. “Two bachelors playing house until their hair turns gray?” He clucked his tongue. “Setting the bar awfully low, if you ask me.”

  “We were going to look for others,” Dante answered, “when the time was right.”

  A lazy smile spread across Walker’s face. “”When the time was right.” Are those your words or Victor’s?”

  “What’s your end game?” Dante said. “You’re sitting in the bear’s den. It’s just a matter of time before he returns.”

  “I guess we should get going, then, shouldn’t we?” His eyes danced with mischief, a sort of prancing glee like that of a child who has locked his parents in the basement and intends to leave them there till they shrivel to brittle bone and tattered cloth, while their demon-child goes about the world in the guise of humanity. It was the deep self-satisfaction of a serial killer who has cornered another victim and knows he will suffer no more for this crime than for all the ones before it. The mask had cracked, and the face Dante saw beneath it was nothing like the tired survivor he and Victor had met in the forest, nor the frightened man who had spoken of being chased by men on horses. Now he was the nightmare, the cabin was his playground, and Dante was merely a figment of his imagination that could be toyed with and finally discarded when the fun was over.

  Sensing the game was up, Dante planted his foot and dashed into the hall. He rushed past the stairs and around to the closet, where he threw the door open and reached into the darkness, fumbling among the coats, cursing the lack of electricity that prevented him from just flicking on a switch.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Walker called from the kitchen. It sounded as if he was still sitting at the table. “But if you run, you’ll get hurt.” He paused. “There. Now you can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Dante’s hands brushed the back of the closet. He shoved the coats aside and spread his arms wider, growing desperate now, knowing Walker could sneak up behind him any minute, but that would be okay because he would turn around with the rifle in his hands. They always kept the rifle loaded, ready for an occasion such as this. But where was the damn thing?

  “Don’t you realize I already checked there?” Walker said.

  Dante flinched at the sound of the voice. Walker was standing just outside the closet, his gun shoved into the front of his pants. He interlaced his hands and stretched them, cracking his fingers the way one might before a martial arts practice session.

  Dante rose to his feet and asked the one question that seemed all-important in that moment. “Who the hell are you?”

  Walker grinned. “I’m the guy who’s about to kick your ass.”

  His fist swung toward Dante with the casualness of a veteran of bar fights and street brawls, his elbows pulled inward. But Dante, who had experienced a few scraps of his own, managed to lean away from the path of the fist, causing Walker to overextend himself. Dante followed this with a punch of his own at Walker’s jaw. His intention was to twist Walker’s head to the side in a violent motion, perhaps pinching the spinal nerve and ending the fight as it began. But Dante’s fist, striking at a moving target, failed to connect with the impact he had hoped.

  Walker staggered back a step as blood began to run along his lip. For the first time that morning, he looked like he had seen something unexpected. Everything else had been choreographed to perfection, but this…

  “Just a trick Vic taught me,” Dante said, planting a foot forward. He raised his fists and settled into a fighter’s stance, ready for Walker’s next move. His heart was thundering in his ears and he was breathing like a winded horse, but fear was no longer the engine of this excitement. He was beginning to sense the tables turning. Walker had come to the house expecting Dante to be cowed, but instead he found himself in a street fight.

  “I misread you, Dante,” Walker said with a hint of respect. “I thought this would be easier.” Before Dante could appreciate this offhanded compliment, Walker drew the pistol from his waistband. He studied it the way a fisherman might study his first catch, treating it not just as a thing of value but of beauty.

  “I said you’d get hurt,” Walker said. “You should have believed me.”

  Dante’s fists changed to open palms. “Wait,” he said, seeing the dark eye of the gun now staring at him, bearing down on him, Walker’s finger curling around the trigger. He hadn’t expected it to end this way. Since realizing Walker’s deception, Dante had sensed a careful calculation in all Walker had said and done. Why would he have tried to win Dante’s confidence just to murder him like this?

  “What do you want?” Dante shouted. “What do you want?”

  Walker advanced on him, forcing him to retreat until his back was against the closet. The dark eye of the gun stopped within inches of Dante’s forehead.

  “Don’t move, understand?” Walker said in a gruff whisper. “You move—I shoot you.”

  “Just tell me what you—”

  Before Dante could finish, Walker kneed him in the groin. With an involuntary gasp, Dante fell sideways into the wall as Walker towered over him, his features masked in darkness. The pistol flew again
st the side of Dante’s head, causing him to collapse to the floor as Walker started kicking him, knocking the breath from his lungs, battering his shins and forearms as Dante made a feeble attempt to protect himself. Dante tried to sink back into the darkness of the closet, to hide himself like an old baseball lost beneath the living room couch, all the while wondering where Victor was and why the hell he was not there when Dante needed him most.

  All at once, the blows stopped. Dante heard a muted scuffle.

  “Get off me!” Walker shouted.

  Dante cracked his eyelids to see two figures standing just outside the closet. The newcomer had pushed Walker against the wall.

  Finally, Dante thought, no longer caring why it had taken so long for Victor to come. It was over now. There was no way Walker would get the upper hand, not when Victor already had the drop on him.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Dante’s head was muddled with messages of pain sent from nearly every nerve in his body, but even so, there was something wrong with the voice. The voice was deeper than Walker’s or even Victor’s, with a touch of an accent Dante could not quite place. It sounded Middle-Eastern, perhaps Arabic.

  Walker was breathing heavily. “He tried to get away. I told him—”

  “You listen to me,” the Arab answered, bunching Walker’s shirt in his fists and pinning him to the wall. “You were supposed to deliver a message, that’s all.”

  Walker’s face twisted into a lopsided grin as he glanced at Dante. “Oh, I think he’ll get the message, alright.”

  “You think this is a game? I should snap your neck right now.”

  “Go ahead then. Show how tough you are.”

  The two men stared at one another for a few tense moments. Then, with a deep breath, the big man released Walker’s coat and stepped away. “Go out and wait with the others,” he said to Walker.

  “That’s what I thought,” Walker answered, grinning uneasily. “Next time you need someone to do the dirty work, you know where to find me.”

  The Arab waited for the front door to close before he squatted beside Dante. “How bad is it?” he said.

  “Bad,” Dante whispered.

  Between the darkness of the hall and the pain behind his eyes, Dante could hardly see the man. But he sensed a note of genuine concern in his voice.

  “He’s what you call white trash,” the stranger said.

  “Is that an apology?” Dante did not know whether he should thank this man or curse him. He might be as dangerous as Walker, but right now Dante was just relieved the blows had stopped.

  “I don’t make apologies,” the big man answered. “But I will make you a promise. If you listen to me, do what I say, and don’t cause trouble, you may get through this alive.”

  “Where’s Victor?”

  Dante thought he saw the big man’s cheek twitch. “Let me worry about him. You just worry about staying in one piece. Do you think anything’s broken?”

  “Just my dignity,” he managed to say.

  “That’s good.” The big man nodded. Then, in a mutter that sounded like he was thinking aloud, he added, “You’ll need your strength.”

  “Why’s that? What the hell is going on?”

  The big man sighed again. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” he said in the tone of a man confessing a life of crime. “It should have been simpler, but things are set in motion now—things even I can’t stop.”

  He stretched a hand into the darkness. “We should get moving. I don’t want to be here when your brother gets back.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” Dante answered.

  “Oh, you are.” He grabbed Dante’s arm and began hauling him to his feet. The man was over six feet tall, with what one of Dante’s old basketball friends might have described as “Kawhi Leonard” hands.

  “Where are you taking me?” Dante said as the room swirled around him. He no longer liked his chances of getting away. Even if he pulled free, he could not trust how steady he would be on his feet.

  “Who are you?” he added.

  The Arab stopped and met Dante’s eyes. There was not even an ounce of humor in his face. “I’m the only person in the world who can help you now,” he said.

  Part 2: Kings and Pawns

  Chapter 7: Wonderland

  No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.

  Or you don't - Stephen King, The Stand

  We are either kings or pawns of men - Napoleon Bonaparte

  Victor almost missed the blood. He would have missed it had he not gone to the closet to grab the box of .40 caliber ammunition for the Winchester, which Dante had forgotten to return to the closet after cleaning it in the back room. But when he saw the blood, he stopped in his tracks as if the curtain had been drawn back on his life to show him it was all a lie, a grand fiction, a joke made at his expense.

  A long con.

  He had found the cabin empty, just as he had feared. As for the tracks outside, it was clear the horsemen had not tried to hide their coming. They had simply come to raid the cabin, take what supplies the brothers had left, and then leave. And Dante…

  Ever since hearing the empty echo of his own voice return to him as he shouted Dante’s name, Victor had been telling himself Dante must have heard the horses and hidden himself. He was probably in the woods, just waiting until he was certain the strangers were gone. Or maybe he had hidden in the basement. It was dark enough down there that even if the strangers had searched it, they might not have found him without flashlights.

  He clung to this theory until he saw the stain on the closet floor.

  It was nearly gone. Someone had cleaned the spot with a rag or a cloth, and the polyurethane had kept the blood from seeping into the wood. If the person cleaning had been careful, Victor never would have seen the faded crimson circles that indicated where the drops of blood had begun to dry.

  But they were only drops. If Dante had been shot, Victor would have found a large pool of blood. This was more like what a person might leave from a bad nosebleed.

  He wanted to believe the blood might have belonged to someone other than Dante, but if that were the case, why wasn’t Dante here now? Maybe Dante had cleaned the blood. Maybe he was hiding behind a door somewhere, just waiting for Victor to get close so he could jump out and scare him.

  These thoughts, as well as ones even more absurd, chased one another through Victor’s mind, filling his head with noise so he wouldn’t have to hear that quiet voice (Dead, he’s dead, you know he’s dead) trying to convince him he had known what he would find long before he saw the blood, long before he even visited the cow farm. He had known…

  The way Walker looked at us. Like he…

  The pieces were there, but he could not yet put them together. Still, he knew he would not have been tricked so easily a decade ago. A younger Victor wouldn’t have let Walker within ten miles of the cabin. A younger Victor would have made certain Walker never wandered close to the cabin again.

  Time, you old bastard, he thought, still studying the traces of blood by the closet to give his mind a chance to register any details he had not yet noticed. But it was not time alone that had changed him—he knew this as certainly as he knew Dante was not hiding behind a door or waiting at the edge of the woods. Time had begun collecting interest on his body, that was undeniable, but it was his mind that had been affected most by their comfortable life in the cabin. Once it had been a powerful tool seemingly capable of solving any equation, escaping any dilemma. Now it was more like a dull knife, still capable of cutting but neither as precise nor as dangerous as it had once been.

  And you know why, he told himself. You no longer trust yourself.

  He fetched the box of ammunition from the closet, then went outside and circled around to the bulkhead. The door gave a sharp whine from hinges he had b
een meaning to oil, but what did it matter now if someone heard? What did it matter if something came to the cabin, if Dante was not there?

  He stole down into the darkness, finding his way to the cabinets by memory. He felt for the handle, grasped it, then carried the briefcase back upstairs and into the morning light. He set it on the ground and paused to let his eyes travel across his surroundings, wondering if another pair of eyes was studying him now the way Walker must have studied the brothers.

  As he moved to turn the combinations, he noticed someone had tampered with them. He always set them all to six when he was done with them, not because he put any stock in the supernatural value of 666, but because the number (a single 6, not a triple) held special significance to him. (Just like the six plates in that house, he thought.) But now they were all at 0. His first assumption was that whoever had come to the cabin must have tried to unlock the briefcase, but he just as quickly discarded this idea. If they had been interested in the briefcase, they would have broken it open or simply taken it.