Left to Darkness

  LEFT TO DARKNESS

  Craig Saunders

  First Edition

  Left To Darkness © 2015 by Craig Saunders

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Other Books by Author

  Bloodeye

  Deadlift

  Flesh and Coin

  Masters of Blood and Bone

  Check out the author’s official page at DarkFuse for a complete list:

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  For my dear old mum, Mrs. Norma Jean Saunders

  A survivor of every kind of apocalypse but the last, and that’s a way off yet…

  She’s on my team.

  Acknowledgments

  Please allow a moderately old man a moment to say thanks to a few people before you move on to the next thing…this being, by and large, the start of the book, I would hope the next thing is the story itself…

  First, foremost, the team at DarkFuse.

  Thanks to everyone over on my FB author page—the bonus material at the end of this novel exists because of you.

  To my friends Sandy-Andy, the Oates. The Great British Horror team—Matt Shaw, Ian Woodhead, William Meikle, Graeme Reynold, G.R. Yeates, Iain Rob Wright, Michael Bray. For my friends on Facebook—too many to name, but love you all. Especially, though, for my colleagues, many of whom have shared the mean streets with me on this, the long haul toward being an AUTHOR. It doesn’t stop. Ever. Love you all, too.

  My fans? Yeah, you. Lisa Lamb! Jami Hamilton! Malina Roos! John C. Hoddy! It’s about time I said hi to you in a book.

  My boys, Tom, Jack, Harry. It’s been emotional.

  Lastly, mostly, my amazing wife, Sim. Always.

  Craig

  The Shed

  2014

  “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

  —John Milton, Paradise Lost

  “And the Lord replied: ‘The times when you have seen only one set of footprints in the sand, is when I have carried you.’”

  —Footprints in the Sand (Authorship disputed)

  I. The Briefcase

  1

  Kindness can be deceptive, like a steaming mug of coffee on a cold day. You never know how hot it’s going to be until you pick it up.

  So, when the man sporting nothing but a pair of stained pants offered a cigarette to the man in a stinking coat from a charity bin, the man in the coat was understandably suspicious.

  It wouldn’t be the first time someone had held out a kind hand, only to follow it through with a hard boot to the ribs. The man in the coat was a few teeth shy of a mouthful. Scarred lips from a punch, a wheeze from the cold and neglect. He had a heavy limp—three youngsters had given him such a kicking one night about seven years before that they’d managed to break his thighbone. Him, an old man. Homeless, shit out of luck, stinking, yes. But a man, still. Always a man.

  The man in the coat was named Ed Bright. He was the man who would not bend.

  Ed sniffed unsuccessfully and wiped his dripping nose with his right hand. He wore a glove on the left and didn’t want to get snot on it—the glove was nearly new.

  “No trick, boss,” said the man in the stained pants. He still held out the cigarette pack, like he could do it all day. Like it wasn’t snowing up above their little perch in the shelter of the subway.

  Ed sniffed again.

  Bugger must be freezing, Ed thought. Shit, he was wearing a coat and three jumpers (if he remembered rightly) and he was still cold. Cold like the kind that you couldn’t get out in a couple of hours sitting around a shop’s heating vents. The sort of cold that wouldn’t go until the first month of spring, and even then, your bones would remember it.

  Bones don’t forget the cold so easily when you’re an old man.

  He did really want a cigarette. He had a lighter, too. There was a bit of gas left and the flint was still sound.

  “Well…cheers, then.”

  Carefully, wary as always of the kind hand, Ed Bright took the proffered cigarette in his bare hand (snot hardening on his skin in the cold air already). He didn’t look at the brand, because he didn’t care. A cigarette was a cigarette, he figured. It didn’t matter to him who’d made it.

  He fumbled in one of the large pockets of his stinky coat and brought out the disposable lighter of which he was so proud. With a nod to the man in the pants, Ed lit his cigarette and took that grateful first hit all the way down into his tattered lungs. He could feel the warm smoke, the tar, the nicotine…working their magic straight off. The kind of magic any junky feels after a fallow spell breaks.

  “Been a while,” said Ed Bright, warming to the stranger sitting with him, weathering the midwinter cold…in his pants.

  Ed meant to ask about that. It just didn’t seem polite, right now, while he was enjoying the man’s cigarette.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Nope,” said Ed with a largely toothless smile. Ed hadn’t shaved in a while, and when he smiled, the corners of his mustache went into his mouth.

  Shifting around on his perch—a grubby briefcase that Ed had found and been using as a pillow—Ed watched the man tap out his own smoke and rolled it expertly across his knuckles before popping it into his mouth.

  The stranger flicked his own lighter at his own cigarette. Same brand as Ed’s. Basically, an identical cigarette. Like might happen for rich people when their cigarettes came from the same packet. People with money smoked whole packs. They had a brand, rather than homeless people who smoked whatever was left on the ground outside shops and pubs, or in the wall-mounted ashtrays that adorned Britain’s walls since the indoor smoking ban.

  Ed didn’t notice where the stranger kept his cigarettes or lighter. He did wonder, for a moment. Not long enough to bother himself, though. And he was enjoying his smoke. A bit giddy from it, too, like a virgin smoker, even though he’d managed to scrounge up three butts the day before.

  Hasn’t been that long, he thought. But he didn’t let that strangely powerful hit he was getting from each puff of his cigarette bother him either. If anything, he felt pretty fucking grateful, all told.

  “Please excuse my lack of attire,” said the stranger. A well-put-together older man. One to whom the years had been a little kinder, maybe, than they had to Ed Bright, with his sandpaper skin and sawdust lungs.

  Ed shrugged in answer to the stranger’s comment. He might have been curious as to the lack of attire a moment before, but oddly, he didn’t seem to care anymore.

  He could do little more than shrug.

  And smile. He felt happy. Getting a hell of a buzz off a mere cigarette.

  Ed kind of swayed a little when he took the next hit. Reminded him of the rare times he’d picked up a roach, thinking it a butt, and smoked it. Similar hit, this, to those leftover drugs he found on occasion.

  Oh, thought Ed. Oh. Fuck.

  He threw the cigarette down as the fir
st wave of sickness hit him.

  “What…what the fuck?” he managed. His head wasn’t buzzing anymore with a harmless smokers’ high, but thumping like a fucking great big drum.

  “Flunitrazepam, my friend,” said the stranger, merrily smoking his own cigarette without any sign of ill effect. “Roofies? Rohypnol? Ringing a bell?”

  “You…cunt.”

  Each word Ed managed was slurred. Confused. The next time he tried to speak, he couldn’t.

  “Tip was soaked in it. Warmth of the smoke released the vapors. Not a big dose, but you’re undernourished, freezing, run-down and worn-the-fuck-out, aren’t you, buddy?” The man in the pants didn’t sound happy, or sad. Just matter-of-fact.

  “Shsl…flu…”

  “I’d give up if I were you, Mr. Bright,” said the strange man with kindness.

  Ed didn’t register the oddness of this man, this pusher, knowing his name. He coughed and followed through with a small spurt of foul vomit on his coat. Then, unceremoniously, slid to one side and cracked his head against the cold concrete of the subway’s floor.

  Out, cold. Not dead, though. No, thought the stranger. Dead wouldn’t do at all, would it?

  Gently, the man closed Ed’s glazed and staring eyes. The stranger’s fingers and hands were soft and clean.

  He finished his own cigarette, crouched over Ed Bright, watching the worn old man dream. He dragged Ed to one side and rested the man’s head on his briefcase-pillow. He wasn’t especially gentle, or rough. It was just a gesture, and like most gestures, probably empty. Then, flicking his cigarette butt end over glowing end into the murk, the strange man walked away from Ed Bright. He left the old man curled against a piss-stained wall with a children’s mural on it.

  Ed Bright lay unconscious, in the darkness of the subway. It was the middle of the day in the middle of a cold winter in the middle of a cityscape like so many others.

  The stranger walked out of the subway as the first of the meteors hit.

  The prelude to the big one, small fragments, outriders, striking all across Europe, before the big one and the reign of fire.

  Before the setting skies.

  He’d saved the old homeless man’s life with a cigarette and a little liquid loving. The strange man smiled at that thought as a rock the size of a hatchback car hit the entrance to the subway, sending hot shards of rock through the air, concrete and meteorite alike.

  The stranger didn’t flinch, nor did he duck. He wasn’t thinking about the meteors and the destruction raining down from the sky, but of the old, broken man he left beneath him, safe from the coming storm.

  He hadn’t saved him for nothing, though, but Mr. Bright and the briefcase were more like a deposit in a bank, he figured.

  “Work to do yet, Mr. Bright,” he said as rock after rock tore into the city all around him. Not like I can do everything on my own, thought the man as he lit another cigarette from a smoldering piece of wreckage he passed. Ed Bright might not be the sharpest tack, but he’d do just fine.

  “Just fine,” he said.

  He began to feel the heat already. Snow fell, but flames were licking at his heels as he walked and he was breaking a sweat. The tarmac melted from the heat of the fires throughout the city. Ball sweat was dampening the man’s pants. He stopped, shook his head and laughed.

  He dropped his pants on the hot ground and they caught fire in the heat.

  He walked on naked while the city burned and the people screamed. He looked up at the skies with their rain of fire, beyond the sky to something above, beyond.

  “You had your turn, buddy,” he said. Nodded up at the sky, then walked on with a big grin and not a lick of clothing.

  2

  Three months earlier…

  Frank Liebowicz weighed in at about 250 pounds. Plenty of it was fat, but not all. He had muscle, too, and thick, hard bones, and a forehead that had broken countless cheeks, noses, and teeth over the years.

  Not strictly an enforcer, Frank wasn’t really anything more than a big, strong guy who didn’t care what or who he broke. A grunt, maybe, for whoever needed a little work done. It didn’t matter to Liebowicz what that work was, or who it was for, or if there was blood. He was a realist. People had blood in them. Sometimes it came out.

  He was a simple man at heart, though he seemed slightly more complex on the surface. He listened to classical music in his home, read books with long words without the aid of a dictionary. He was simple, not stupid.

  Not stupid enough to miss a trick. Like this current job of work he had on. It stank. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but Johnny Muller had sent him to the docks, so he’d gone and not kicked up a fuss.

  Johnny had never steered Liebowicz wrong.

  So far?

  He wondered.

  Liebowicz remembered why he was out this late at night; the small annoying man whose tie Frank held in his thick fist. That was why he was here.

  Hard enough to smart, not hard enough to break anything, Frank pushed the little man against the metal siding. The resulting noise was loud in the empty market, but it didn’t matter, because only the two of them could hear it.

  The little man was wheezing and crying. Liebowicz thought maybe he’d just broken a rib or two, despite not putting much effort into the shove.

  “Mr. Lowe. Please don’t drag this out. For your sake. I don’t care, either way, I get paid. It’ll cover the cost of a new suit. Believe me. But come on…let’s stop fucking around. You’re wheezing, you’re scared. I’m a big fucking bastard who beats the fuck out of people for a living. Eh?”

  Frank wasn’t particularly keen on cursing to make his point, but sometimes a little rage, a few swear words, could do the trick before he had to cause any kind of lasting damage and get a new suit mucky.

  The little man—Mr. Lowe—wheezed some more. A trickle of blood came from his ear, probably ruptured when Liebowicz had first slapped him on the side of the head (getting some of the slimy man’s hair product on his palm).

  Maybe Lowe couldn’t hear him out of that ear. Maybe. But no reason to be stubborn. He had two ears, didn’t he?

  “Going to count to three, Mr. Lowe. Then I’m going to hurt you. Something you won’t shake off.”

  Mr. Lowe wheezed some more.

  Liebowicz wondered if he could pull off a finger. Not dislocate, or snap. Actually pull it free.

  That’d probably work.

  “One. Two…”

  He paused slightly longer before getting to three.

  Getting soft, he thought.

  “Three,” he said, and pulled.

  Turned out he could, after all, pull a finger off.

  He held up the finger, skin ragged, pristine fingernail at one end and gristly knuckle at the other, for Mr. Lowe’s benefit.

  He probably knows without show-and-tell, Liebowicz told himself.

  Lowe was pale and he was screaming. It was a breathless kind of scream, but a good effort, nonetheless.

  Liebowicz stuffed the finger down the little man’s throat to keep him quiet, and, well, to drive home the point.

  Unfortunately, Frank stuffed Lowe’s dying index finger in a bit too hard, because as Lowe inhaled for a second round of wailing, the finger went right into the bastard’s windpipe. Choking, Lowe began to turn a funny hue.

  “Fuck,” said Liebowicz. You didn’t kill people until you had what you wanted. Fucking schoolboy error.

  “Fuck,” he said again, flipping Lowe around so it looked like he was going to try and take the little man from behind.

  “Fuck!’

  Frank squeezed hard a couple of times with his fists bunched up into Lowe’s diaphragm. The finger popped out, covered in spittle.

  Liebowicz let Lowe loose to breathe. But the man wasn’t breathing. He was dead, which explained why the daft bastard fell straight forward, face into concrete, without so much as moving a hand to stop himself.

  “Ah,” said the big man. “Oops.”

  Frank often
spoke to himself. His was, largely, a solitary existence. He didn’t even know he did it most of the time.

  He didn’t often have full-fledged conversations with himself, though, so when someone else behind him replied, he was back in the world, ready to roll.

  “Oops? Fucking oops?” Muller. Muller was here, behind Liebowicz.

  Frank’s fists clenched. He’d known something stank. Fucking known it.

  “You stupid fucking ape,” said Muller.

  Liebowicz spun, ready to lash out. He didn’t though, because Muller had a revolver. A big fat thing of dull metal, with a medium-sized barrel.

  Frank Liebowicz didn’t know much about guns—didn’t have much call for them. But he figured if Muller decided he was going to shoot, it would probably be quite painful and most likely fatal.

  Muller held the gun like he knew what he was doing, too. Not like some piss-pot gangster, but like a policeman in a TV show—two-handed, one elbow bent, one nearly straight. A shooter’s stance.

  “What the fuck, Johnny?” said Frank. He wasn’t angry. Frank didn’t really get angry. He never had.

  “What the fuck, what the fuck? You killed Lowe.”

  Liebowicz shrugged. “So?”

  “So? Fuck your so.”

  “You Chinese now?”

  “Seriously? Fuck you.”

  “Johnny, that’s not polite.”

  “You think I’m here to stroke your balls? I’m holding a gun. Don’t be slow.”