Vengence

Chapter 1

The nurse led Jack to a small room at the back of the clinic. He was concerned about the visit. The nurse had been vague on the phone as she booked the appointment. ‘Dr. Travis needs to speak with you,’ she had said. ‘He will explain when you get here.’ The appointment meant another day off work, and although Jack was way past retirement age, he could not afford too many days off. His hip ached as he followed the nurse, and he exhaled sharply as he sat.

“The doctor will be here in just a moment,” she said with too much sympathy. And then she left as if relieved that her role was finished.

It was but a moment later that Dr. Travis entered the room, folder in hand. He sat at the desk next to Jack. “Did you come alone?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Jack. Everyone that Jack had loved had already passed or moved on. Tammy, Jack’s partner of thirty years, had passed away twenty years earlier from a heart attack brought on by liver failure. That had been a bad few years for Jack. He lost his job, his house, and most of his fortune. He preferred to live alone on the little piece of land that he had purchased with his retirement fund. It wasn’t much, and it was a bit isolated, but he liked it. He didn’t mind living alone.

“Jack,” began the doctor. “I am going to get straight to the point. I have your test results here. I have checked them twice. You have cancer.”

“How long?” asked Jack.

“It is advanced. If you had come in sooner, if we had caught it sooner . . .”

“How long?” Jack was insistent.

Dr. Travis placed his hand on Jack’s forearm. “Six months, maybe a year. There are treatments, though, which could greatly prolong . . .”

“No,” said Jack. “No treatments. How long before I become disabled?”

Dr. Travis removed his hand from Jack’s forearm. He examined the folder before answering. He inhaled deeply and exhaled through his mouth.

“It is a miracle that you are still walking now. Jack, we can ease the pain. Let me admit you . . .”

“No,” said Jack. I have some unfinished business. He rose to leave.

“Wait,” said Dr. Travis. Here – a prescription for the pain. We can set up a home care . . .”

Jack took the prescription and left the doctor talking to the air. He had work to do—preparations to make.

#

Brad Shnithed.

Big bad Brad.

He had come a long way.

He had started out working in the warehouse shuffling freight to and fro, and now he was about to receive recognition as the man who made the tough decisions. The CEO of the year. He adjusted his cuffs as he walked on stage. He gave his usual speech on efficiency in the workplace. ‘We must do more with less,’ he always said. He loved to quote Spock from Star Trek: ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.’ He cared about all of his workers, he said, but they must earn respect by succeeding. We all want to be liked, but leadership means accepting that sacrifices must be made and being able to live with that is what makes a good leader great.

Afterwards, Brad sat in the green room, waiting for his limo. Someone handed him a whiskey on the rocks, which he sipped on as was his habit. It felt good to be the king.

An underling popped in. “Limo’s here, sir. Parked out back as per your request.”

Brad was starting to sweat. He gulped the last of his whiskey. He needed some air. He made his way to his waiting limo. Without hesitation, the driver opened the door and ushered, almost pushed him in. He felt dizzy, woozy. His last conscious thought was a message on his cell phone informing him that his limousine had just pulled up front. How long would he be?

Then everything went black.

#

Brad awoke still in the back of the limousine. His head hurt, and his mouth was dry. He found a note pinned to his lapel.

“Make yourself at home. Feel free to look around. I will be with you shortly.”

Brad eased his six-foot-three-inch frame out of the limo. He was in what appeared to be the entry port to a large complex. There was a large cargo entrance behind him and a man door in front of him. He looked for the mechanism that would open the back cargo bay door. He found a keypad with numbers on it. He punched in 1234. Nothing happened. He tried the man door. It opened to a long corridor ending at a cargo elevator with only a down button. He pushed it. The elevator doors opened with a loud clang. The ride down was a good few minutes.

The door opened to an old man in an older company uniform.

“Do I know you?” said Brad.

“You don’t remember me? A pity, but typical. She died, you know. Three years after you fired me. She drank herself to death, and I got to watch that, unable to intervene, to help. You see, I had issues of my own. Depression, anxiety and a brand new panic disorder. And all that without resources. The bankruptcy – we lived in my van for a while, and the thought of being homeless – again – drove her off the deep end.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Tammy, my – partner.”

“Look, people lose their jobs all the time. They move on. That’s life.”

“I suppose it is. I was hoping that you would remember me. Apologize, – feel something. I would have made your death quicker. But you didn’t. Choices have been made all around.”

Jack succumbed to a severe coughing fit that lasted for several minutes. He waved off Brad’s offer to help.

“There is nothing you can do,” he said when it finally passed. “Anyway, feel free to look around. You will find plenty of food and water. I wish I could stay and see the moment when you realize your situation. When hope leaves your body. When despair is all that is left. Poetic justice. But I don’t have a lot of time, so I will leave you to your fate.”

Jack walked down a long hallway and disappeared through a door. Brad, having little other choice, followed. They found themselves in a large cafeteria. The walls were lined with confection machines loaded with snacks of all kinds. Jack chose a ginger ale from one machine.

“Help yourself to whatever. Through that door, there is a full professional kitchen and a supply of canned and dried foods that will last a lifetime. The government was very thorough when they stocked this place. It is an old fallout shelter from the fifties. No one has been down here except me for twenty years, and yet everything works fine. You will find all the amenities that you need here.”

Jack fell into another long coughing fit.

“You need help. Let me call a doctor for you.” He tried his cell phone.

“You will find that all forms of communication are blocked here, said Jack.”

“But you will have to leave, sooner or later,” said Brad.

“That is true. And I intend to leave. But not in the usual way. Here, in this capsule, I have the code for the door –” Jack quickly swallowed it.

“So what. You still have it memorized. I can wait and you will never be out of my sight.”

“Perhaps, but the code updates every twenty-four hours and this, is a suicide pill.” Jack quickly swallows the pill. “I have cancer, and it is terminal and very painful. So I choose to leave the easy way. I will leave you to your fate. The place is yours, plenty of food in the pantry, you should be fine.”

“You think I won’t cut that out of you?”

“We will see.”

Jack and Brad stared at each other for a minute. And then the suicide pill kicked in. A few spasms later, Brad found himself alone.

Brad noticed the lump in Jack’s throat where the capsule had gone down. He pressed on the chest, once, twice, again, trying to force it back up. No movement. He wrapped his hands around Jack’s middle and heaved, like the Heimlich might work on a corpse. The body only sagged heavier in his arms, the mouth falling open in mockery.

A thin trickle of saliva dripped from Jack’s lips. No capsule.

Brad stepped back, panting, his pulse hammering in his ears. He looked around the room—no tools, no knife, nothing sharp. His mind buzzed with rage and disbelief. He whispered, “You think I won’t?”

He would.

He did.

Brad removed his suit jacket and his shirt. He dragged the body onto a metal food prep table. He found a paring knife in a drawer and cut the clothing off of the body. He made a crude incision into the soft belly of Jack. He cut deep then jammed his hands up to his elbows into the gaping hole that he made.

He was prepared for a lot of things. The blood, the gore, his eventual success. He always succeeded. But what he was not prepared for was the blood-curdling scream from Jack and the attack.

Jack’s body, which should have been still, exploded to life with a shriek that froze Brad’s veins. The old man swung an arm, catching him across the face with surprising strength. Instinct took over.

Brad slammed him back against the table, his hand closing around the thin neck. Jack’s eyes found his, defiant even as they dimmed. Brad squeezed harder. The scream broke into a quiet gurgle, then silence.

They stayed locked there staring at each other, until the life went out of Jack’s eyes.

For a long time, Brad didn’t move. His pulse thundered in his ears, drowning out everything else.

Jack’s eyes were still open, dull but fixed on him.

He released his grip and staggered back. His hands trembled, slick with blood and spit. He wiped them on his chest to no avail. The smell of copper clung to him.

“Goddamn fool,” he muttered, not sure if he meant Jack or himself.

The body didn’t answer.

“Brad Shnithead, you are a man of action. You make the hard decisions that others can’t,” he said to himself. “This is no different.”

He slowed his breathing, inhaling sharply. Then he went back to work.

He worked with a grim focus, the way he’d dissected every weak employee. It was the same thing, really – just cut the problem out. Get rid of it and move on.

When he reached the stomach, the air filled with a sour, chemical reek. He nearly gagged. The contents were a wet slurry of bile and half-digested food, steaming faintly in the cool air of the shelter.

And there it was.

A small, metallic capsule, slick and gray, nestled among the mess. He plucked it out with shaking fingers and rinsed it under the kitchen sink. The water ran pink, then clear. The capsule gleamed under the fluorescent light, unmarked, sealed tight.

He turned it over in his palm. It was a simple matter to open it. Twist and turn, and out popped the code. A simple four-digit number. 09/25 – today’s date. And another note: Happy Birthday, Tammy, it read. That was unimportant, he thought.

Time was of the essence here. He rinsed himself off as best he could in the sink. It didn’t do a lot of good, merely smearing the blood around on his upper body and face. He raced to the exit and punched in the code.

The door opened obediently. He walked, it seemed forever, up a long curving ramp before finally reaching a man door beside the large vehicle entrance door. The code worked there as well.

What was the point of all this, he thought to himself as he opened the last barrier to his freedom.

Daylight blinded him. Rough hands put him in handcuffs.

“Brad Shnithead,” a voice asked.

“Yes,” he replied.

“You are under arrest for murder.”

Brad’s eyes slowly adjusted to the light. He saw reporters and people – a crowd was gathering – and the police.

“What is going on?” he asked as he was led to a police car. A reporter pushed a camera close to his face.

“That whole thing – everything – was transmitted live.

“But I was trapped. I had to . . .”

“All you had to do was wait,” said the officer.

He put his hand on Brad’s head, pushing him into the back of a police cruiser. He saw the look of horror on his wife and daughters’ faces as he was driven off.