Chapter 10 (part 2)

Evan breathed heavily and fought off a sickening few moments when he was afraid that he might actually start crying in front of this trio. When that moment came and went without the shedding of a single tear, Evan looked Lott squarely in the eye and did his best to explain his situation.

“I’m in the middle of a very screwed up drug deal,” he said. “My life was threatened earlier tonight because the men I work for tried to outwit the men I’m buying from.”

“If you’re buying drugs from around here,” Lott said, “you must be mixed up with the cocaine pushers, yes?”

Evan realized at once that Lott was trying to trip him up, hoping to catch him in another lie. “No,” Evan said. “Peyote. From a tribe somewhere south of here.”

He was delighted to see a flash of recognition in Lott’s face as he heard this. Lott knew that there was not a big cocaine supply out here and, Evan guessed, he was equally aware of the peyote peddling tribe.

“Continue,” Lott said, paying closer attention now.

“They sent someone for me tonight, thinking that I was responsible for trying to pull one over on them. When they realized that I was blind to what was happening to them, they still kept a gun on me and sent me on a little errand.” When he said this, Evan couldn’t help but smile in spite of the situation. “My God, that asshole had no clue what he was talking about.”

There were slight tremors in his voice as a result of the pain in his hand, but as he spoke about Sam, he didn’t care. If he could just have three seconds alone with him…there’d be much more than broken pinkies for Sam to fret about.

The puzzled looks on the faces of his three listeners made him want to stall the story as long as he could. But the insistent pain in his left hand proclaimed that to do so would not be wise. So Evan went on.

“They told me about this bus that had been spotted driving through the desert at night. They said that it was a suspected disguise for running drugs without being picked up by police or competing sellers. These guys thought that the people on the bus were stealing their business.”

“That makes no sense,” Lott said skeptically, although even as he said it, he began to realize where Evan’s story was going.

“Tell me about it,” Evan said. “But drug runners aren’t really known for being clever, now are they?” He paused here and then continued. “So they told me to flag down the bus, to get on and see what sort of things were going on. Tthey dropped me off in the middle of the desert and I did what they asked. And here I am.”

The two men opposite of Lott braced themselves, awaiting any instruction that Lott may give them. But when the last word had left his lips, Evan could tell that Lott didn’t doubt the story.

“So, this tribe knows about our bus?” Lott asked.

“Apparently,” Evan said. “And according to them, I think the local cops know about it, too.”

“The police have known about it for quite some time,” Lott said without much interest. “Tell me, Evan…this tribe and their competitors…they know about the bus and even knew when we would be out, but they have no idea what we do?”

Evan shrugged. “I guess not.”

He was terrified as to what sort of condition he might be in within the hour, but he also knew that in situations like this, it was best to keep your panic at bay and carry on such conversations as if they were as simple as a casual interview. He could feel his heart racing in his chest and still felt as if he could piss his pants as a result of his painfully snapped finger. But the will to live overruled all of that and he did what he thought might help him to get out of there with only a broken finger as a souvenir.

“But you know,” Lott said. “You’ve seen first-hand what we do. Have you not?”

Evan nodded slowly. He didn’t beg ignorance and he didn’t promise that he would never tell anyone. He simply nodded slowly and said, “Yeah, I saw.”

Lott thought this over for a moment and stared at one of the black candles for a good thirty seconds without speaking. As Lott sat there thinking, Evan wondered where the bus and all of the other passengers had gone.

“What else is there?” Lott finally asked. “What else have you seen? You were in the bathroom for quite some time. Did you see anything in there?”

The mere memory of the thing in the toilet made Evan shudder and once again, he told Lott what he wanted to hear as best as he could. “I don’t know what I saw in there, but I saw…I don’t know…I saw something.”

Lott actually chuckled at this. He drummed his fingers on the table again and then stood up slowly. “Well, Evan,” he said. “This is the first time we have been put into a situation like this, so I have no idea what needs to be done. Considering your occupation, I assume that you are good at keeping secrets. So, I suppose we could let you go, so long as you vow to never tell a soul.”

Evan said nothing. He knew that if he did, he would come off as desperate and maybe end up pulling one of Lott’s triggers. But even though Lott showed no signs of having decided his fate, Evan knew that he would not be let off with something as simple as a broken finger. The fact that Lott had claimed that the police knew about their activities made Evan wonder if he’d be safe even if Lott did let him go. If the local PD was in on this somehow, maybe Lott would let him go only to have him arrested or killed.

Evan thought of Max Young from the bar and found it hard to believe that he and his fellow officers could have a hand in all of this.

“I see only one way of solving this,” Lott said, slowly approaching Evan. “Despite what you saw me do tonight, I am not an unjust man. I believe that you have told me the truth, and that truth means that you had no ill intentions towards our group when you stopped the bus. I do not doubt that you are truly a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Evan said.

“If it were up to me,” Lott said, “I’d let you go and request that you never show your face in this part of the state again. But you see Evan, we serve a higher power here and it would be sinful for me to decide your fate. We will leave such decisions in more divine hands.”

Evan slowly began to register things as Lott spoke. The black candles, the talk of a higher power, the ritualistic style murders…Lott and his minions were part of some cult. And if the ungodly thing he had seen in the back of the bus was any indication, it was a cult that dabbled in some truly bizarre shit. The beheadings and the murders were nothing when compared to that monster. There was crazy and homicidal and then there was just plain evil.

“What divine hands?” Evan said. He didn’t care if he came off as afraid anymore.

“We’ll put you before His children, Evan. Only then can your fate be decided.” After Lott said this, the two men beside him stood up from their seats and chanted, “Amen.”

At that single word, Evan felt incredibly cold.

Evan couldn’t help but resist. He pushed himself away from the table but before he had a chance to move, Lott’s two henchmen were on him. He was once again put into that same sleeper hold and was jerked to his feet. As he was raised, his head began to ache again but he did not care. He struggled against them and even when he realized that his efforts were in vain, he kept fighting. His vision grew hazy and his head pounded like a drum. Through all of that, he could hear the chants from the three men that carried him away from the table and into the hallway that Lott had appeared out of.

They chanted in some foreign language that Evan did not understand and he was actually glad that he couldn’t make out what they were saying. He did his best to keep control of himself, to take in his surroundings and make sure he knew where they were taking him. While he knew his chances of escape were incredibly slim, it wouldn’t hurt to have an escape route planned.

Halfway down the dank and featureless hallway, the two men stopped pushing him along but still held their grip on him. Lott came from behind them and stood in front of Evan with a look on his face that could have very well been sincere sadness. Behind Lott, there was a single wooden door with two bolted locks on it. There was a strange marking in the center of the door that looked like some form of ancient hieroglyphics that had been crudely carved with a knife.

Lott chanted a prayer and then cupped Evan’s face in his hands. “Forever we are and forever we will be,” Lott said, “the seeds of His rule, his legacy.”

And with that, he removed a set of keys from his pocket and set to unlocking the pair of locks on the door. Lott unlocked them as if he was taking some sort of sexual pleasure away from the action of inserting the key into each lock. When both of the locks were undone, Lott slowly opened the door to reveal the other side.

There was only a set of ancient wooden stairs to be seen. Other than that, there was total darkness. Evan tried to push away from it but the two men that held him were far too strong. There was a single moment of relaxation when the bearded man removed his arm from around Evan’s neck, but this was quickly replaced by a sheer horror as he was pushed hard from behind.

Evan went tumbling down the stairs and into the darkness. There was a moment when he felt his shoulder hit a stair very hard and then, after several hard thumps and cartwheels, Evan came to rest on a hard dirt surface, landing on his broken finger as he did so.

He screamed out in pain, not caring how desperate he seemed to Lott now. He slowly raised his head up to look up the stairs, but all he saw was a slowly thinning beam of light as Lott and his partners closed the door on him.

Evan was left alone in the darkness with only the brief clicking sound of the locks being reset to keep him company.

And then, after a few tormenting moments of silence, there came the sound of something slithering around with him in the darkness.

Chapter 10 (part 1)

Evan sensed that he was being moved. He also felt something very cold on his head and something wet touching his mouth. His lips recognized the wetness as water and he opened his mouth to receive it. He gulped at it greedily and when he swallowed, his head began to ache. He heard a door close somewhere behind him and he instantly thought of the bathroom door on the bus. That recollection brought to mind the horrible creature he had seen pulling itself out of the toilet and he began to panic.

Evan opened his eyes but his vision was incredibly hazy. He tried to scream but as soon as he opened his mouth to do so, his head seemed to explode. He could vaguely remember being hit in the head, but that seemed like a dream right now. As his vision swam in and out, he could imagine several of those horrible toilet-monsters scurrying around him and that made his panic intensify.

He felt himself being lifted and then felt solid ground beneath his feet. “Walk,” said a smooth yet demanding voice from beside him.

He then felt a hand grab each one of his arms. He was carried forward by what he thought was two men. They assisted him with the first few steps but then Evan’s disoriented mind seemed to remember what walking was and how to do it.

His vision finally settled down and he was able to see a small house in front of him. It was actually more like a shack than a house, its construction no more inspired than a ten year-old’s clubhouse. There were two windows on the side that he faced, both of which were boarded up. It’s roof sloped down in a sharp triangle, the shingles peeling and falling off.

Behind this shack, there were three other similar structures. The four buildings seemed to be connected by crudely built walkways that were barely boarded over. The construction was flimsy at best, but the almost symmetrical sloppiness of the buildings and the walkways as a whole seemed abstract in the open spaces of the desert.

The two men to his side remained quiet. They stopped for a brief moment as they approached the shack so that the man to his right could open the front door. Evan looked at both men and recognized the one to his left as the bearded man that had spoke to him on the bus.

“Stop looking at me,” the man said. He gave Evan a slight shove towards the open door. “Go inside.”

Evan did so without struggling. He was a fighter at heart and would normally have refused to follow the bearded man’s orders. But it seemed useless to fight in that moment. His head hurt too badly and the pictures from the night that were zooming through his head seemed like a nightmare. He saw the beheadings again, saw the little monster-type thing in the toilet, saw the fat meaty leg sticking out in the aisle of the bus.

Inside, Evan looked around and saw that the shack consisted of a single large room that was lit by several candles and two kerosene lanterns. All of these light sources sat on an enormous table located in the center of the room; the light was so abundant that it was almost as bright as natural overhead light. Scattered around the table there were a few empty chairs and stools. In the farthest corner of the room there was a thin entryway that most likely led out to one of the connecting walkways.

“Take a seat,” the man to Evan’s right said, pointing to the large table. As he pointed with his right hand, his left hand drew a large knife from the waist of his pants. “If you go along with what we say, I won’t have to do anything nasty with this,” he told Evan.

Giving this man an awkward glance, Evan did as he was instructed. He took a seat at the head of the table, noticing for the first time that all of the candles that sat upon it were black. Uneasy with this, Evan looked back to the two men that had carried him in. They were also taking their own seats at the table, sitting at the sides a good distance away from him.

The sight of the black candles made Evan incredibly uneasy. Just what in the hell had he stumbled onto here? Certainly, it was something more than Sam’s crazy drug-trafficking theory.

Before he could give this any thought, he heard footfalls coming from the entry-way across the room. The sound of the footsteps carried as if coming from the depths of some amplified cavern, a sound that added to the ache in Evan’s head. He looked to the entryway, awaiting the source of the footfalls with dread.

The man that finally came through the doorway was frail and looked slightly underfed. His white hair was all over the place and unmistakable. Evan stared at the man and his heart sank. It was the man that had sat in the back of the bus…the man with the electric white hair and the axes…the man that had beheaded those people. The only difference in his appearance as he approached the table was that he was now wearing a shirt and he was not holding his axes. That, at least, put Evan a bit more at ease.

“Good evening, Evan,” the white-haired man said.

He reached into his back pants pocket and withdrew a wallet. He hefted it in his hand and gingerly tossed it onto the table in front of Evan. He then followed the wallet’s progress and took the seat to Evan’s right. He hunkered down calmly, as if he were about to discuss something trivial. He seemed incredibly relaxed and this somehow bothered Evan more than anything else. There were no signs at all that he had just killed four people in the desert.

Evan eyed the wallet on the table and recognized it at once as his own. He then looked stupidly at the thin white-haired man as if to ask a question that he did not yet have the words for.

“I apologize,” the man said. “We never have guests on our bus, so I felt it necessary to find out who you were.”

“Did you come to that decision before or after you had me brained with a crowbar?” Evan asked, not caring if he angered the man or not. The black candles and the memories of the beheadings from earlier led Evan to believe that he was doomed no matter what he did or said.

“Before,” the man answered without a trace of sarcasm. “We wanted to make sure you were an innocent and that you were not sent to snoop around in our activities.”

Evan didn’t respond right away. He looked from this man to the other two that had led him into this room. His original two captors stared in the direction of the thin man with much admiration. The flames from the black candles pasted an eerie wavering light onto their faces.

The thin man habitually ran a hand through his wild white hair and then offered the same hand to Evan. “Well, it’s not fair of me to know your name and not introduce myself, now is it?” he asked. “The name is Lott.”

Evan blinked in surprise at the gesture. “I’m sure you’ll understand if I don’t want to shake your hand,” Evan said, looking at the man with as much hatred as his fear would allow.

“I suppose so,” Lott said, withdrawing the offered hand and smirking. Evan was surprised to see that he actually looked a bit hurt at Evan’s response. “I hope you know that we had to bring you here. I know that you saw what we do. I’m not really worried about that, though.”

Lott drummed his fingers on the table and then eyed Evan with suspicion. “What interests me,” Lott said, “is how you knew about us.”

“I told your driver what happened to me when I got on the bus,” Evan said.

“Yes you did,” Lott said. “However, my driver is not stupid, nor am I. So I’m going to give you five seconds to tell me what I want to know. So, I ask again, how do you know about us?”

Evan didn’t know what to do or what to say. But he knew that if he were to change his story, the punishment for his lie might be rather painful. He didn’t have to look back to the man with the knife to be reminded of the blade that was waiting to do him harm.

“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Evan replied. “I got jumped and I needed a ride.” As the words came out of his mouth, he was achingly aware of how paper thin they sounded.

Lott leaned back in his chair a bit, considering Evan’s explanation. A good ten seconds passed before he made any sort of reply. When he did, it was to his partners. He gave them a simple nod and before Evan was completely aware of what was happening, all three of the men were in motion towards him.

Lott got to him first and did nothing more than grab his left arm. While Evan began to struggle against this, the other two came to assist Lott. The man with the beard wrapped an arm around Evan’s neck and held him in a sleeper-hold position while the other one helped Lott with his left arm. Evan squirmed against the seemingly mammoth arm that was firmly planted around his neck, but there was no resistance. In fact, the harder he fought, the tighter the hold seemed to grow.

Evan knew within moments that he was helpless. So, hoping that it might pay off in the end, he simply stopped fighting. He relaxed against the man’s grip and allowed Lott and the other man to have his arm.

The man that had pulled the knife out moments ago placed Evan’s left arm on the table, securing it by the wrist. It was a peculiar thing to do and Evan found himself tensing up in anticipation of whatever might come next. As he tensed, the vice-like grip at his neck flexed and Evan found that if it grew much tighter, it would be very difficult to breathe.

With his arm on the table, secured even tighter now by Lott’s henchman, Lott took a firm grip on the top half of Evan’s pinky.

“I tried to give you a chance,” Lott said almost sympathetically.

He then pulled Evan’s pinky hard and to the right. Before he was aware of what Lott was doing, Evan heard and felt his finger snap in two. He screamed in the chair even though his throat was mostly closed off by the bearded man’s grip. He tried to fight away from his three tormentors but to no avail. He shuddered in pain and finally relaxed his back against the chair in defeat, breathing hard and grimacing from the pain. The scorching ache in his hand was excruciating, but he knew that he would have to look past it if he hoped to get out of here alive. And besides that, he did not want to sob or whimper in front of these men.

Gasping for breath and in horrendous pain, Evan looked down to his left hand once Lott released his pinky. The finger was hanging onto his hand at a sick slanted angle and it made Evan sick to his stomach to see it. He whimpered against the pain as the other man released his wrist but Evan did not bother attempting to get out of the chair. What would be the point? One of them had a knife and Evan knew that there were axes around here somewhere. He also knew what these assholes were capable of when armed with those axes.

“I hate doing things like that,” Lott said. “But you forced my hand.”

Evan bit the remark before it left his mouth, but he thought, Yeah, breaking fingers is a huge step down from cutting off people’s heads, you crazy fuck!

“Now, Evan,” Lott went on. “I’m going to give you another chance. And here’s how we’re going to do it. I’ll keep asking you and you can keep telling lies if you want. But the next time you lie, I won’t break any more fingers. I’ll simply cut that broken pinky off. And I’ll do that to all ten fingers until you tell us the truth. So save us the time and trouble and save yourself the use of your hands by being truthful.”

The maniac was still speaking calmly and in a soothing tone, as if he were explaining the alphabet to a preschool class. Evan cut his eyes at him, trying to use his anger as a means to control the fear and the warm flashes of pain that were slamming through his left hand and head.

Somehow, Evan got a few words out beyond his trembling lips. What he said was true, but he didn’t think it meant much to Lott and his two helpers. “The truth,” Evan said, “sounds even dumber than what I just told you.”

“It often does,” Lott replied with a smile. “I can tell when I’m being lied to, so as long as you tell me the truth, you’re in good shape.”

Evan found himself feeling more exposed and vulnerable when he noticed the bearded man looking at his broken finger with interest. Evan withdrew his hand from the table slowly and cradled it carefully in his lap, trying not to wince at the pain that flared through his hand as he moved it. He found himself wanting to hide his pain from these three; it wasn’t because it seemed the macho thing to do, but because he knew that they would take him more seriously if he made it through this interrogation without crying like a baby.

“The truth, Evan,” Lott said. “Quickly, or we’ll cut that finger off.”

Chapter 9 (part 2)

Five minutes into his ride, Max almost wrecked.

He had kept a check on the terrain pretty frequently but had somehow missed a small washed out spot on the desert floor. The hole was no more than six inches deep and maybe a foot across, but when he hit it, he had no idea it was coming. The slight jolt of the bike took him by surprise and he nearly took a nasty spill. Not only that, but in fighting to regain control of the bike, his thumb had somehow hit the switch to cut on the headlight.

He snapped the light off immediately and then corrected the balance of the bike. With his heart hammering in his chest, he checked the terrain with the binoculars again and saw that he had smooth sailing for quite a way. And even though he could not see the bus, he could see the faint trail of dust that it was kicking up. The dirt of the desert was so hard packed that the dust cloud was nearly nonexistent, but it was there. He had to use this faint cloud as his tracking measure because, as on previous nights, the driver of the bus had killed the headlights.

He wondered if he had been seen in the brief moment when his headlight had come on. He was pretty sure no one on the bus had seen him, but Max knew that there were others out here that would get suspicious if they found him.

He knew that there were a few men cruising along the highway, looking for the bus. They were members of a drug cartel that Max knew only as The Tribe. It was the same group that he had discussed briefly with the young man at the bar earlier in the evening.

Thinking of that young man made him think of the two fighting elderly men, particularly the one that had killed himself several hours ago. And then, of course, there had been the unheard of shooting of a police officer by another officer. It had all been so unreal, like something out of a really bad movie. Max had barely known the old man, but he had known both of the officers very well. The shooting had made absolutely so sense at all.

It had certainly been a fucked up day.

But Max had almost been expecting it. The unexplainable violence in Shinoe, the bus and the beheadings…he’d been piecing it all together for a while now. They were both very odd pieces to a puzzle that he had been obsessed with for a few years now.

His thoughts returned to The Tribe and when he thought of them and the behind-the-back deals they had with the Shinoe police department, it both shamed and angered Max. He was in on it just like the rest of them and he was getting the same benefits as everyone else. He was just as guilty as all of the others. But on a day when an officer was shot for no apparent reason by another cop, one was forced to put things into perspective. Illegal dealings with drug runners seemed twice as bad and twice as unnecessary on a day like this.

Max forced himself to stop thinking about it. All he knew was that if one of those assholes from The Tribe found him out tonight, there would be a very intricate mess. How would he explain himself?

The Tribe thought that the bus was a clever tool being used by a competing cartel, but Max knew otherwise. Max knew what was really going on with that bus, but he could never tell anyone. He had his own demons to keep at bay and he could not do away with them until he knew everything about the bus, its occupants, and the reasons behind their actions.

But to Max’s knowledge, The Tribe and a few outside people were the only ones who knew about the bus and its peculiar and seemingly randomly timed routes. The idea that they were a competing drug circuit was a simple stupid assumption that had misled the Tribe. For all Max cared, they could go on thinking that one of their competitors was running drugs on the bus. It was an excellent cover story for what was really happening.

That false assumption had given him plenty of time to hunt them down and study them. It had given him this chance, this very night, to get to the bottom of it once and for all.

But what if The Tribe found out that he knew about the bus? Then he’d have to either go along with their fabricated drug-running story or tell them what was really going on. If this were to happen, he’d basically be putting the entire police department on the chopping block. And if he did that, he would be admitting that he had knowledge of kidnappings and murders over the last two and half years and had told no one. He’d also be getting the Shinoe police is one huge heap of trouble because they knew what really occurred on that bus, too. They knew what Max knew.

But they didn’t know that Max was tied to that bus and its passengers in a way that they would never understand.

Max checked the lay of the land once more with his binoculars and swerved slightly to the left to avoid a boulder the size of a medicine ball. Through the binoculars, he could see that he was getting a little too close to the bus, so he let off of the gas a bit and slowed the bike considerably.

He wondered what the deal was with the man that they had pulled off of the bus after the beheadings. He also wondered what they did with the bodies after every one of their barbaric beheading sessions. He was pretty sure that he knew; he had heard rumors, but he wasn’t gullible enough to believe them.

Perhaps more importantly, he wondered what it was inside of him that justified keeping his knowledge of the bus and the people on it a secret. True, the entire police department was in on it, too. But surely Max could take the matter in secret to the FBI. Still, the reasons he had for hiding what he knew would be justifiable to almost anyone. But being able to watch this demented group do what they did was unnerving. At times, it made Max wonder if there was truly something wrong with him.

But he had his reasons.

And that was more than enough for him to be out here tonight, chasing after a bus that no one knew about, following it to an unknown destination. His hope was that when he arrived there, he would find some answers and a way to close the door on a very dark chapter of his life.