Blood and Guts - Left for Dead: A Romantic Suspense Read online

  “Not very usual is it, to try and knock a man’s door down like that…”

  The words were slow and a bit lost in their delivery.

  “Aden Wallace, we have a warrant for your arrest, as well as an expedited warrant to search the premises. We believe that you may be responsible for for the abduction of a one Lorin Corale.”

  “Not sure I know whatchu mean, why don’t you hold on for a minute, an I’ll invite you on in.”

  He took another pull from the bottle of whisky, and then lifted the chain from the side of the door, welcoming the men into his cabin. My body tensed up, as I wasn’t sure how I would proceed.

  I bit my lip, and started to step toward the door, but Aden shot me a glare with deadly precision, telling me in no uncertain terms that I was to stay where I was. I made myself as small as I possibly could, shrinking down into the corner of the cabin.

  The door opened.

  “Now then, boys, if I was…” he started to say, before smashing the bottle clean over the head of the first man who entered the room.

  Shots were fired immediately into the room.

  From the sound of it, the fire came just behind the man who was now slumped over Aden’s shoulder. Aden’s pistol came up behind the body shield of the man drenched in whisky, and fired off two shots behind the door. I heard the bodies falling into the snow outside. I also heard the booted steps of men running back around the cabin toward the front door once more.

  Aden let out a roar, and flipped the man from his shoulder over his back. The body was flung backward to skid along the blood stained floor of the cabin. The man came to a stop just in front of the fireplace, while Aden quickly shut the door to the cabin once more. The chain was quickly wrapped back into place but the security provided by an absence of conflict was no longer available.

  The door was kicked inward, straining the chain placed between the door and the supporting wall. Wood splintered explosively as the shotgun was picked up once more and fired inward on the cabin. Sparks flew as the chain, split in two. Instinctively, I ducked down to cover my head.

  Another shot was fired from inside of the cabin, and when I looked up, I saw Aden had fired the pistol through the peephole of the door. The body of the man outside of the door collapsed in the doorway. The shotgun fell between the door and the frame.

  Aden reached down to grab the gun by the barrel and quickly pulled it through the crack in the door. The weapon was flipped, summarily, with the one-handed expertise of an ex-ROTC member.

  He positioned himself behind the butt of the shotgun while the weapon completed its spin, and then fired. The explosion of the shotgun was just in time to catch yet another man in the chest as he was coming through the door.

  Aden got up quickly, and shoved the door shut. The door pushed the bodies that had piled up in the entryway out into the snow once more. When the latch was in place, he turned around and stalked straight toward the man who was laying down in front of the fireplace. The man was bleeding terribly from the fire he sustained by his own forces.

  I had never seen an officer bleeding out onto the floor of a room before.

  I was horrified.

  I had gone through most of my life thinking that men of the law were the most equipped warriors this society had to offer. Aden obviously had military skills that were superior to the training of the officers. The idea that they were on two separate sides to a conflict blew my mind. The fear I felt when I saw a police officer was one associated with authority and even contempt. Now, watching the man bleed out onto a floor that was already stained red, I felt disgust and pity.

  I wanted to reprimand Aden, or scream for help, but all of the men who could have been there to help me were now dead, or locked outside of the cabin.

  Aden kneeled over the body of the man in front of the fireplace, and began rifling through his pockets. He pulled out some survival gear, a decent supply of ammunition, and a series of high resolution, digital photographs.

  “You going to tell me who you work for?” Aden asked.

  The man’s breath was labored and it was obvious that he wouldn’t be speaking to anyone anytime soon.

  “All of your friends are dead.”

  Watching him talk to the dying officer like that was too much for me. I ran up to him and tried pulling him off of the man, wishing that in his final moments, he might have some semblance of peace.

  “He’s a cop, have some respect!”

  With a single stroke, he reversed my hold on him and grabbed me by the throat. He caught himself then, and I saw something shift inside of his eyes. He took a breath, and let go. I fell back, confused, and afraid for my life.

  “Rangers are the authority for this forest — not sheriffs,” he said simply.

  “What?”

  “The Arostook County Sheriff doesn’t have jurisdiction here. And what’s more, this man doesn’t have a badge, or any identification.”

  “Then how did th--”

  He scowled, as though dealing with my questions was an unnecessary point of irritation, and one he would have preferred to avoid.

  “Do you recognize this?”

  He handed me one of the photographs that he had pulled from the man’s body. They were a series of pictures of a woman, beaten, and naked to a tree in the middle of a snowstorm. She was freezing to death, and it was clear that she wasn’t conscious. The next sequence of pictures showed a man in heavy snow gear walk up to the woman, and pull out a knife.

  “That photo was taken less than 12 hours ago.”

  “That’s me.”

  He nodded.

  “That’s me, tied to the tree, why do they have a picture of--”

  Flying into a fit of anger, I ran forward to clutch a hold of the collar of the dying man.

  “Where did you get this!” I demanded, shoving the picture in his face. “Where did you get this picture!”

  “They must have had surveillance equipment set up at the spot where I found you,” Aden replied.

  He stood up to indicate that there was nothing he believed he could gain from this situation any longer.

  “Look around, and if you see anything useful, pick it up. We have to go.”

  “What do you mean we have to go?”

  “Chances are the men who came here were on orders. If they don’t report back soon, we are going to have more problems than strange, heavily armed men, showing up at my door with BDSM, nudie pics. Got me?”

  “BDSM nudie pics? Have you seen these bruises?”

  He grabbed me and pushed me into the nearest wall.

  “You haven’t told me shit about why I found you there in that forest. I don’t have any reason to believe you’re innocent. What’s more is now, thanks to you, I have five dead bodies on my hands, and my little hideout is compromised.”

  His breath smelled like alcohol, but his tone was dead sober.

  “The deed to this land is not a matter of any record — private or public. The people who would prefer that you were dead, are well funded, and dangerous. Whether you like it or not, this is exactly what we’re dealing with, so I suggest that you stay the fuck out of my way, and stop whining. Are we clear?”

  I gulped, and nodded, tears were running down my cheeks.

  “Now go drag those bodies inside.”

  Chapter 7 - Aden

  Evaluating dead things has never been a source of pleasure for me. I’ve been around enough death in my time, and I’ve caused enough death.

  They say there is brain activity for a few minutes after the point of death. If that’s true, it means that there is still some sort of consciousness inside of the bodies as they are lying there on the floor.

  I don’t prefer to keep contempt after the fact. Seems like a bad sport to kill someone and send them psychic hatred after the fact. I may not like having my house broken into by armed men, but I don’t need to bring myself to a point of further pain because I can’t keep my thoughts to myself. As a result, I tried to treat the bodies like a mix
ture of corpses and duffle bags.

  I admit there is a significant amount of depersonalization present in my mind. I’m well aware that bodies keep the qualities of consciousness after the point of death. Hell, some cultures think that the soul hangs out around the body for a matter of days before moving on to whatever grounds they move onto from there.

  I’m not a religiously speculative person — or at least, I don’t bother to ascribe to any particular version of the afterlife. I also don’t have time to wait around a couple of days so I can loot these corpses with peace in my conscience. I needed to know who they were, and what they were capable of, and I needed that information as quickly as possible.

  Once the five bodies were all lined up on the floor, I took a look at their general make-up.

  They were all built like army grunts. The defined muscle, and clothes were flashy. Their looks told me that they cared more about the way that they looked than the efficiency of their fighting style. Of course, if they had caught me out in the wild, they would have taken me no problem. Walking around with that level of firepower meant that they were people that had a significant budget. They didn’t mind flaunting their cash around in order to meet whatever goals were required of them.

  If they had been older and more experienced, I wouldn't have been able to kill all off. The way they had all gone down, it was clear they didn't see me as a threat.

  They should have.

  By all accounts, the firepower that they had brought to the fight was superior to my own. If they wanted to waste the two of us, they could have drawn us out of the house somehow.

  I paused my search of the bodies for a moment and thought about how I would have approached the strike.

  I realized at that point that the main problem in the approach of the men who were dead on my floor was the fact that they were young and impatient. No doubt eager to use their overpowered weapons, they had failed to count for the basic tenants of stalking your prey before engagement. Hell, they could have had a fair shot at me while I walked out to the shed to pick up some more venison for dinner. Or, had I gotten around to kicking out the girl today, they could have intercepted us and picked her up on the way.

  I shook my head from side to side, as though trying to shake their idiocy away from my consciousness. There was no reason for me to stay focused on them any longer than necessary. I actually suspect that the fact that I was spending so much time thinking about them was proof enough that the bodies were still haunted.

  No doubt the spirits were pursuing revenge as we spoke, in their own subtle way. If you can’t take a man’s life all at once, why not make him late for his next appointment, and the one after that, and the one after that.

  Death by a thousand cuts. Except in this case, the cuts were psychic.

  “We’re going to have to burn the cabin down,” I told her.

  The information was intended more as a warning than anything else. I needed her to be ready to leave and I needed her to do that of her own accord. The last task I wanted was to babysit someone who should be old enough to take care of themselves.

  “Get your shit ready.”

  She shrugged. “What do you think I have to get ready?”

  I looked at her with complete disgust. Then, I began consolidating the weapons that the men had brought, with them, as well as any other information I could glean from their bodies.

  While they may have been stupid and young in the way that they approached their mission objective, they were at least professional in their gear.

  The terminal mistake of rookies is to believe that gear is the end all be all of any kind of mission. I can’t even begin to tell you how often I’ve seen that same mistake bring about an early death to fresh, young operatives. Being an academy hot shot, with a signing bonus, doesn’t make you ’Agent Double O Anything’. You simply end up getting proper fucked by an older guy who has been around enough corpses to where he actually treats the dead with respect.

  I shook my head.

  “Nothing.”

  The girl had actually begun looking through the house, and had picked up a number of things that she found to be interesting. One of them was a handgun from the men on the floor. She had a few other things that she was stuffing into one of my backpacks.

  “Good to see you have some sense in you after all.”

  She shook her head and I smiled.

  If a person was strong enough, they stopped putting up with your shit when you treated them shortly. If this girl was nothing more than a pushover, there wasn’t much use in me treating her like anything but a pawn. If she failed to even get a basic level of operation, I’d have to treat her as a liability instead. At this point, she was more of a liability than not, but it was nice to see a spirit inside of her, even if I had to coax it out through being a dick.

  “There’s a few feet of rope over there, would you hand it to me?”

  The question was more of a test of her pliability than anything else. The rope wasn’t going to be useful for anything at this point, but I wanted to see how immediately she dropped what she was doing in order to pick up my orders.

  She stopped what she was doing immediately, and grabbed the rope from the wall. Without pause, she turned around, and tossed me the bundle of rope. Without pausing a moment longer, she evaluated my personal belongings. Her eyes were set to find the items that would be necessary for our impending escape.

  The cabin was small, and I was an ardent minimalist, which meant there wasn’t a whole lot for her to look through.

  I propped up the bodies around one another and bound them up with the rope. Whenever somebody came by to see this place, I wanted them to be scared as hell. Nothing says ’don’t fuck with me’ like five tied up corpses in the middle of a burned down building.

  I learned a long time ago that the psychological component of war is grossly under utilized by all accounts. It was the same problem that these kids had in how they approached their mission here. Any tactic at all, besides the one they chose would have been more effective. Whoever paid them to come here was likely smart enough not to send the same caliber of men up against me the next time.

  Probably some new recruits, eager to impress. Pawns, nothing more.

  I finished tying them up, and then got my basic hunting gear together. I had no idea where I was going, but my plan was simple enough. I would get to the road, and let her hitch a ride with some good samaritan. She could go into town and turn herself into the police, and then I could head the other way and cross the boarder.

  In my younger years, I would have been more vengeful about the whole thing. That whole ’you took away my house’ attitude wasn’t my style any longer.

  I wanted to be left alone, and I wanted to have a clean conscience. I didn’t think that was too much for a man to ask.

  I informed her of my plan.

  “We’re going to get you to the police and I’m going to get lost. You’re lucky I found you, but you and I have got nothing tying us to one another, and I’d rather burn down a cabin than start a war.”

  She watched me disassemble my gear with practiced ease, and set it up into a mobile format; only the essentials, and not an ounce more.

  “Who are you?”

  Now it was my turn to shake my head.

  “Fucking women.”

  “Excuse me?”

  I picked up the nearest weapon.

  “Do you see this?”

  She nodded.

  “This equipment is military grade, and these people aren’t soldiers. That means mercenaries have my information, and yours. They will try to track the two of us down, and if they can afford this kind of shit, chances are they can afford much worse.”

  She was silent.

  “What you’re not telling me is why you are so valuable to these people that they would spend those kind of resources, just to wipe you out. I don’t know if you’re involved in some kind of intelligence community, or if you’ve got dirt on some kind of politician. — I don’
t care.”

  She started to get nervous.

  I shook my head again.

  “You’re transparent as hell, and my life was fine before you showed up. I’ve been around these games for a long time, and I’ve got to say I have no interest in continuing. I retired for a reason.”

  “So you used to be one of them.”

  I wanted to attack her. This very instant.

  This is why I stopped spending time within conventional society. People are too nosey for their own good, and nobody understands the value of being left the fuck alone. You can gain a lot in life if you’re not dealing with other people’s bullshit. I did that for twenty years, in the most intensive format available to US Citizens. When they asked me to move, I flew for them. I did everything possible to exceed expectations, and I never accepted failure as an option.

  What I learned from all of that was that none of it fucking matters.

  Not one bit.

  Each new politician struggled for personal power. Each damsel in distress, each rebel with a cause, every drama of the human condition was nothing more than a script. The whole play was a theatre of cruelty, played out by parties who were too stupid to figure out the whole game was a shuck.

  I said nothing more, only continued to finalize my pack. When I was done, I grabbed the fuel storage and doused a strategic line around the main walls of the cabin.

  The flu to the fireplace was open and the door would be left open behind us. The air would pass through and the whole thing would go up in smoke.

  Chapter 8 - Aden

  Burning a house to the ground is never a fun thing to do.

  You might get a thrill out of it the first couple of times, especially if you aren’t attached to the place. If you’ve got enemies, it is important to get a symbolic victory under your belt. The natural thing to do is to want to watch everything they have worked so hard to build turn into nothing more than smoke and ash. When you set a fire, you need to be careful that you are doing so with the right intention, because once you start, it’s difficult to stop.