CHAPTER TWO, A ROOM WITH BRYDIE. (P1)

Greg Cowan.

Greg Cowan always knew he would one day succeed in business. 

Destiny,  his mother called it   –   and ‘Little Greggie’ knew the meaning of the word destiny by the age of three.  Destiny meant it was gonna happen,  period.

He only wished Ma would have warned him how hard it would be to succeed in anything legal.

But, he mused as he sprawled in his undershorts in a bright orange vinyl motel chair and puffed on a long menthol cigarette   –    as a welfare hooker there was no way she could have known. Paying taxes rather than living off them, was a thing she always claimed to aspire to.

The silly bitch. Who in their right mind would want to pay taxes ? Greg for one sure as hell didn’t.

Thankfully,   Ma also taught him a couple of life lessons that were actually useful. Like how to cheat with a big honest smile, and how to beat Uncle Sam at his own game.

Playing the system. Yep, it was better than Vegas.

Thanks for that one, Ma,  he thought as he pulled on his socks. He lit another cigarette, puffed on it fiercely but did not inhale.

He was, after all, a nonsmoker.

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Danny.

Across the room, Danny found himself dreaming of a soft, clean, dry bed.

Not a bed of his own, of course  –  that would have been too much to hope for, even in a dream.  No,  he thought this must be a fantasy version of one of the five metal framed single beds that slept twelve boys, back in some attic in Edinburgh.  Whichever two boys got home last, bedded down on the floor  –  this was the rule of the makeshift household.  As Danny drifted toward wakefulness, he felt a pang for that time in Scotland.  The funnest time of his life, running the streets in a pack of a dozen wild boys, and just being a kid.

He stirred in his half-sleep, turned over and pulled the soft clean sheets  up around him. The pillow under his head felt like heaven. This bed was huge, he could tell by the way he was stretched out across it, diagonal, corner to corner.

This must be why he’d dreamed of the old attic room with the metal beds.  This was a strange bed, in a strange room….

With no sound of Brydie!

He could smell her skin’s reassuring scent of vanilla extract  and woman.  But he could not hear her.  And there should have been some sound.  Brydie was forever singing or humming,  and waltzing or twirling or doing some kind of a silly dance step.  She was never completely silent, not even sleep. 

But now the only sounds were an air conditioner,  and somewhere beyond that,  traffic.

Now he smelled a menthol cigarette! And Brydie didn’t smoke!

He bolted straight up in the bed, scanning for whatever object might make a good weapon.

CHAPTER ONE, THE COMPOUND. (P5)

Will.

Across the bar, Christian resumed rambling about the Compound and his vision for it.

To Will’s right, Brydie smiled and pretended to listen to Christian.

David gave a half smile with his lips closed, the way he used to do as a lad. And somewhere in that small expression, Will got the distinct message that David was

dead….murdered….oh God, please not by Christian!

Will brought his unlit pipe to his mouth and bit down on the stem so hard he felt a tooth crack.

(So this was what it felt like to lose one’s mind. Who knew.)

“Don’t speak,” David said without speaking. “I know your thoughts, and you know mine. I’ve missed you, brother  –   but right now time is short.”

“Don’t,”  Will silently pled at the word brother.

“Take the woman and boy, and leave here just as soon as you can break away from Christian.  Don’t take time to pack,  leave on foot if you have to.  Or Christian will kill you   –   and Will, he won’t even know what he’s done.”

“But how will we get past those guards ?”

“Come on, Will.  This place is not guarded. There are only four people alive here, you said so yourself.  I’m showing all this to the boy right now….quickly, let me show you too.”

And it was indeed quick, what David let Will see. It was all very quick.

He saw Danny in the candy store with Brydie earlier, falling prey the same madness as Christian. Danny on the sidewalk now with the veil of madness torn away, exposed to the candy store’s true state. Danny assaulted by visions   –   the unmanned guard towers  equipped with  cobweb-covered AK-47s;  the store mannequins in a grotesque circle of classroom chairs, frozen in a permanent town hall meeting.

The dry well outside the gates where Christian had used an old Bobcat loader to dispose of the Compound’s other occupants, including David .

For the first time in over a quarter century, a tear escaped out the corner of Will’s eye and rolled down his cheek, unnoticed.

He lunged over the bar and tackled Christian to the ground. Strangling him, pounding his head into the floor, vaguely aware of Danny at the door now, vaguely aware of Brydie shoving Danny back out to the sidewalk.

Christian reaching for his pocket. David’s warning, He’s got a gun.
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Brydie.

Brydie heard two quick pops.

And then   –   silence.  Awful, terrible silence.

With her heart pounding in her throat, she forced herself to the doorway and looked inside.

Will lay face down, Christian face up.  Neither of their bodies moving with breath,  blood spreading into a red lake around them.

Now it was Brydie who heard someone screaming, then realizing it was herself. Some cold, efficient part of her made a mental note to tell Danny sooner that Will O’Graidy had actually been his own father.

That cold part of her now observed the boy, Will’s own son, so very much like his father.  He steeled his face and shed not one tear, walked to the bodies and pocketed both men’s  handguns.  Then he went to the bar and retrieved Will’s lighter, cap, and pipe. He regarded the cane for a moment, as if he might leave it there  –  the cane he had taken many a blow from. But then he picked it up and slung it over one elbow, its tip dragging the ground as he stepped back to Brydie and took her hand.

He led her still sobbing  down the empty street and to the Compound’s metal gate.

And as he swung the gate open, he used Will’s lighter to set ablaze the tall dry grass behind them.

CHAPTER ONE, THE COMPOUND. (P4)

Will.

Will didn’t turn around from the bar when he heard Christian’s heavy boot steps coming up the walk.

He’d forced himself to send his brother a letter of gratitude, upon learning that arrangements were underway for a private plane to smuggle them to the States. He’d even gone so far as to allow Christian to give him a quick, stiff hug once they’d landed.

But then Christian, upon first seeing Brydie, had reverted to his true form. He’d taken her hand and kissed it, like he was some kind of movie star.

And damn it, it bothered him. Even more, he was sure Christian knew it.

“This is only the second time I’ve set foot in my own damned tavern!” Christian announced so loudly that he might have been addressing a whole room full of people. He slid in behind the bar, popped the cap off a dark ale and chugged it straight from the bottle. “The first was the day I signed the papers on this beauty and made it my own.  Have you heard the story of the town this used to be ? It’s fascinating….”

Yes, Will had heard the story. From Christian himself. More times than he’d ever cared to hear it. In fact he could probably have recited it word for word by heart, how a hippie commune led by a guru who claimed to hail from Sri Lanka but was really from  California, had taken over an abandoned mining village. The property was rumored to be haunted, and when the commune disbanded and scattered upon the guru’s untimely death, the rumor grew to legend.

By now Will was starting to find the story slightly less than fascinating. More like intolerable.

“Anyway,” Christian happily continued, “the only other time I’ve been in here was to check out the job David and the boys were doing on the place. Turned out they did me right proud. In fact I’d say they performed a near miracle, don’t you think ?”

Will could indeed see the pride on his brother’s face, and hear it in his voice. But he could not for the life of him understand it.

Because he did not see what Christian was seeing. To Will, the place was still hardly more than a shambles. True, the remnant of what had once been a village was now surrounded by a barbed wire fence with makeshift guard towers, and the utilities were back on. There was food and drink and soap, the bare minimum of necessities for decent human existence. But if their younger brother David and ‘the boys’, whoever ‘the boys’ were, had accomplished a single thing more than this, Will could not tell it. In fact he thought that if he had his brother’s money and owned this place, he’d be downright ashamed of it.

Now Christian leaned on his elbows on the bar, and his eyes searched Will’s.

“What is it that’s troubling you here ? You and the woman and boy,  you don’t have to keep a low profile any more.  You don’t have to be ready to disappear at a moment’s notice.  You won’t go hungry here, you won’t do without. So tell me, what is it ? What’s the trouble ?”

Will drank down the last of his ale, in order to stall before answering.

“There’s nothin’ I’m troubled about here,” he lied. “I’m in debt to you for all this. I just wonder about a couple o’….things….an’ I’m sure you know what.”

Christian blinked at him.  “Actually, I don’t.  Please. Enlighten me.”

Will made a snap decision not to mention for now the compound’s state of disrepair.  He’d heard there were drugs here not seen in Europe,  and  he suspected his brother might be on them.

What he finally said was,  “I wonder about the other people here. We never see ’em,  never hear ’em.   Even late at night when the town hall’s closed.  Now I know what you’ve told me,  an’ I don’t mean to question your word.  But if I didn’t know better,  I’d swear there was nobody here but the four of us.”

Thankfully Brydie came waltzing in now, singing to herself as usual, smiling.

“Christian,” she nodded politely to him, then gave Will a kiss on the cheek and took a seat beside him at the bar. “Have you seen Danny ?”

Will shrugged. “He went for a walk. I thought he was with you.”

“Most likely he found some kids his own age,” Christian assured her.

“Well, one thing’s for sure,” Brydie said to either herself or the air. “He’ll be back when he’s hungry.”

This was when Will saw, or thought he saw, his brother David step out of the corner shadows behind the ancient jukebox. Before Will could say anything or even think anything, David raised a finger to his lips in a gesture of ‘silence’.

“There are no other children in this place,” David said without moving his lips at all. “I need you to keep quiet and listen to me now, Will. If you would get the woman and boy out alive, keep quiet and listen like you’ve never listened before.”

Chapter One, The Compound. (P3)

Danny.

Danny heard Brydie singing in the distance, the instant he stepped out into the dry summer heat.

Christian had bragged to Will on the phone about how lovely and green this place was. Ha. It might have been green not so long ago, might soon green back up again. But right now, with the unusually long lack of rainfall and every one of these old buildings made of wood, it was all one big tinderbox just waiting for lightning to strike the dry grass and burn the whole thing straight to hell.

Which was where Danny thought it belonged in the first place.

He followed the lone sound of Brydie’s voice down the cracked sidewalk, past the few abandoned shops with their windows boarded up and their screen doors banging open and shut in the hot, dry wind.

Ghost town, some part of his brain that was not his friend whispered. Cowboy town.

His mind flashed on a memory of an old movie he’d seen once on a small black and white telly, many years ago back in Dublin or Edinburgh or wherever they’d been hiding at the time.  A movie about an abandoned Old West town, where all of the people had died.

He was just about to turn around and go back to the (tavern, it’s called here) pub, when he spotted Brydie through the window of a candy store.

(…wasn’t really scared), he lied to himself as he pulled the screen door open with a loud creak, and stepped inside.

“Oh! Danny!” Brydie interrupted her song. “Come here, I’ve got somethin’ for ya! You’ll love this, I promise!”

And Danny already had no doubt he would love it. Because if it was possible to fall in love with a room, he’d just fallen instantly in love with this one. Painted bright yellow and white, with plastic red checkered curtains and table cloths, it was everything he’d ever dreamed the inside of a candy store would be. The big sparkling window  invited in every last drop of sunshine. The air, blessedly cooled with the quiet hum of an air conditioner (the first he’d encountered in this weird old town), smelled like the bottle of vanilla extract Brydie kept in her purse and used as deodorant.

And the chocolates! All shapes and sizes of chocolates, dark ones and light ones, lined up in little fluted pastel paper cups and sprinkled and piped with every color of decoration.

The only way he knew he wasn’t dreaming all this, was that smell of vanilla. He’d never been able to smell anything in his dreams.

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Brydie.

She handed the lad a dark chocolate covered in matching chocolate sprinkles, and half the size of her fist. ‘Bordeaux Cherry’, it said on the back of the box, but she didn’t want to give him the whole box of them.
The lad had a strange tendency to choke up over every little unexpected kindness.

“Oh wow,” he said, obviously unaware that he’d said it.

“Well ?” she coaxed. “Go on and try it then!”

He took a bite of the chocolate, closed his eyes, and looked as if he might faint.

(Yes. This place was going to be everything Will had promised her, everything Christian had promised Will.)

Behind the counter, she tucked the box of eleven more chocolates into her purse, hoping they wouldn’t melt in this heat.

Because for Brydie, there was no air conditioner in this place. No candy lined up in neat rows behind glass, no enticing vanilla bean scent. She did not experience this place the same way Danny did, not at all. And she had no way of knowing this, for she had no way of knowing what Danny was experiencing.

For her the air was dusty, and the furnishings even more so. The big front window was caked with rain spatter and dirt, with a deep crack the shape of a lightning bolt running right down the middle. The glass candy counter was empty, for she’d found the candies crawling with ants and had thrown them away. Only a few of the unopened boxed ones remained.

“Where was all the people today ?” Danny asked through a mouth full of chocolate.

“Were,” she corrected him. “They were at some sort of town meetin’. Christian says there’s a meetin’ most every day.”

“Mm. You think he’ll want us to start goin’ too ?”

She shrugged. “I don’t rightly know yet. I’ve wondered the same thing myself.”

“I hope he doesn’t,” Danny went on between bites. “Please don’t tell Will this, but I don’t much like it here. I kinda wish we could just go home.”

Chapter One, The Compound. (P2)

Danny.

Unbeknownst to Will, the boy  –  whose name was Danny Dawson  –  was at that very moment recalling the same fateful punch.  Because this was one of those times when the searing ache left in his jaw had decided to act up a bit.  He shut his eyes and held his breath,  forced himself to give no indication that it hurt.

Drinking beer beside his hero still gave him a thrill.  Even as he recalled coming to on his hands and knees on that pub’s tile floor, frantically scrubbing at a pool of fresh blood with a napkin far too flimsy for the job.  A second later he’d realized,  as the pain began to register,  that the blood which kept spattering down in big fresh drops was in fact his own.

And now in his mind he was back there again,  watching the blood smeared floor advance towards him as he lost control of his limbs and collapsed.  He heard someone shrieking and wished they would stop because it was all he could do to tolerate the pain he was in.  That infernal screaming was simply too much,  why didn’t someone for God’s sake shut that braying fool up.

Then he realized that,  just like the blood on the floor,  the screams were coming from him.  And there was not a thing in the world he could do about it.

He shook his head,  brought himself back to the present.  He recalled how Will’s girl friend Brydie had picked him up under the arm pits and dragged him backwards up the stairs,  to the room the three of them were sharing.  There she had re-set the bones in his face herself,  with Will holding him down as he sobbed from the pain.

He’d been sure that Will would next take his belt off and beat him for crying.  Crying was a sin in Will O’Graidy’s household.  Neither Danny nor Brydie had been allowed to shed tears,  for as far back as Danny could remember.

But on that day,  the dreaded belt had not come off.  For once in his life,  it seemed Danny Dawson had received forgiveness.

That had been months ago,  when he was only eleven.  Now he was almost thirteen,  and much more grown up.  Today he was sure that if he ended up needing the bones in his face re-set,  he could suck it up and take it like a man.

“Tough life sometimes, eh Danny ?”  Will asked out of nowhere,  and Danny realized Will had been watching him in the mirror.

“Not near as tough as it used to be,”  Danny replied without thinking. Instantly he felt himself wince,  anticipating a blow. Trying to sound nonchalant he added,  “Nossir, not at all,”  hoping that crucial word sir had (oh please) not come across as an afterthought.

To his relief,  Will only chuckled.

“Well now.  I suppose it ain’t.  So you like it here then, do ya ?”

Danny’s entire nervous system reminded him  he didn’t dare answer with the truth.  That he thought Christian was full blown crazy,  and this abandoned mining village surrounded with barbed wire and guard towers  was just plain weird.

However,  no one answered Will O’Graidy with words that were not carefully measured and weighed. And even though in truth Will had not laid so much as a finger on him since the punch that had changed both his life and his face,  not for one second did Danny believe those days were really over.  That would be like believing in God or in Santa Claus  –  better left to kids who could afford it.

“Yessir,”  he lied,  “I like it very much.”  And, he reasoned, it wasn’t entirely a lie   –   after all he really did like having enough to eat,  hot water and soap,  clean clothes and a soft dry bed.

“Lad,”  Will asked in a tone Danny had never heard him use before,  “why don’t you tell me what you’re really thinkin’ ?”

The tone caught Danny off guard,  and a hot lump suddenly rose in his throat.

Will never cared one way or another what anyone thought,  not ever. Not even Brydie.

Nor did anyone ever care one way or another what Danny Dawson thought, nossir. Not ever.  The hugs and smiles and warm looks he saw other kids get, he knew he could never have. He’d sworn many an oath to himself that never would he accept such treatment even if it was offered,  because coddling was for babies and after all he was no baby. But telling himself how grown up and tough he was gave him not much consolation.

He cleared his throat and gave a cough,  kept his eyes averted from the mirror.

“I’m thinkin’ I want some fresh air,  sir,”  he lied again.  “May I go for a walk ?”

Chapter One, The Compound. (page 1)

Will.

Will O’Graidy had not always been the kind of thug that even other hardened thugs avoided and feared.
Slouched at the bar of the abandoned pub (tavern, he chided himself,this is America and here they’re called taverns), he stared morosely into his mug of ale (beer you dolt, here it’s called beer), and allowed his weary mind a moment to drift.
He had once been a merchant sailor off the coast of Madagascar, and thought he would happily remain so the rest of his life. His childhood with his two brothers and their drunken father, he remembered almost nothing of – and judging from the little that came back to him at night in his dreams, he thought this was for the best. The one thing he did know for sure about his childhood, was that his greatest achievement in life had been to survive it.

Now here he was in his forties, and often mistaken for sixty. A permanently injured leg had ended his career at sea, condemned him to a life of limping with the cane that now rested by his side, the cane he had also beaten two people to death with.  Though constant pain now bent his posture, he still stood six foot six, his hulking weight solid with muscle. This he attributed to a diet of red meat, black coffee, strong ale, whiskey, and water ‘generously sprinkled’ with still more whiskey.

He raised his head and moved his dark stare to the mirror behind the bar. His heavy black brows and mutton-chop sideburns gave him the appearance of a werewolf, and this pleased him greatly as he liked to be feared. Being feared in this life, was a good thing. It was the only safe thing.

His one redeeming feature, at least according to the women he had known, was his eyes. One woman had told him they spoke pale blue mysteries to her. He knew for a fact that when they narrowed and went cold they spoke death or worse to men.

Yes, it was good to be feared. And he was confident that the scrawny lad now sitting on the bar stool to the right of him would one day fill out and learn to inspire fear as well.

The mop-haired twelve year old, sipping his own mug of ale like a fully grown man, had more than once been the unlucky recipient of a Will O’Graidy beating. This last time, even Will himself knew he had gone too far.  He no longer recalled the boy’s transgression, back in that run down pub in Dublin. All he remembered was punching the lad square in the face with a blow that knocked him unconscious and broke both his jaw and his nose, and for one terrible moment brought back all too clearly Will’s own childhood.

That was when Will had quietly done two things he had never done before. The first was to promise a God he didn’t believe in, that never again would he lay and angry hand on anyone less than a fully grown man.

The second  was to ring up his wealthy and arrogant brother Christian. Christian who now owned property in the United States.  Christian who had introduced him early on to the painkillers that now allowed him to function at all.

The second thing Will did was to ring up Christian, and for the first time ever, ask for his help.

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