Catharsis (Book 3): Catastrophe Page 22

  “Why would they think that?”

  “Three reasons come to mind off the top of my head. For one, quite a few of their guys died in that attack. I wouldn’t guess that the majority of dead were connected to them, but I would say that the majority of their men in there are now deceased. From what I’ve been able to pull up, I would guess all combined the cartels had close to forty guys linked to them in one way or another inside DCI that day. Of the forty I’ve been able to get information on, only six are still alive. And that’s only because they were either too far away from wherever you were or they may have been surrounded by other men that drew you to them more strongly.

  “That doesn’t look good from their viewpoint. Their presence inside the Correctional Facility is now almost non-existent. Plus the one guard that did die was on their payroll. That only makes it look more suspicious.”

  That first guard was on the cartel payroll, I wonder. And then I realize it makes sense. That’s why he handed Chadwick the phone while they were in there. He probably had the connection to the lawyer. Now, I definitely don’t regret what I did to him. That makes it even better.

  “Plus,” Ren continues. “These men tend to be a generally suspicious group already. They see conspiracies around them regardless of the facts. It’s probably what’s kept them alive and in power for as long as it has. This prison event has only fed those suspicions.

  “And finally, the thing that probably convinced them the most,” Ren says. “One of their lawyers, who it appears worked directly with the head of the cartel, died in a mysterious house explosion moments before the riot began. And he died right as he was passing along critical information to the top boss himself. Information that directly connected to events at the prison.

  “So, yeah, I’d say the cartels have a reason to be worked up right now. I can’t really blame them.”

  “Ok, that all makes sense, but how does it affect us? Does it make our jobs easier, maybe? With all those guys out of the way that had to weaken them, right? Now they’re just going to fall apart.”

  “Not quite. It’s a bit more of the opposite. It’s given them a reason to rally and strengthen themselves. I believe they are more dangerous now than they were before.”

  “How so?”

  “The people, the men, who run these cartels are not locals. They aren’t from around here. Our area, our city, is just one small part of a much larger drug-distributing machine. We had been doing a nice job of causing some disruptions and we were just annoying enough to get some of them to pull out and leave. Fighting us wasn’t worth the hassle. We weren’t an established presence that was easy for them to battle, so we forced them to do a modified ‘cost versus benefits’ analyses on dealing drugs in this area.”

  “What?” I ask him. “What does that mean?”

  “We were cutting into their profits and they had to decide if what we were costing them in lost employees and narcotics was worth the benefits of the profits that could be made. Some of the cartels pulled out and that was why we saw the different groups moving in in an attempt to establish themselves and take over the area. But now that’s changed. The scene at the prison means there’s a new factor that has to be included in their decision.”

  “And that is?”

  “Honor. Saving face. They’ve now been insulted by having their men executed like that. If they pull out of this area now, then it makes them look weak. It no longer looks like a valid business decision to pull up stakes, and instead they appear weak if they leave. It looks like they are running because they can’t handle their opposition. And if they’re weak, then every family and cartel that wants to move in on them will do so. It’ll become blood in the water with a pond full of sharks.”

  “Uhh, sharks don’t live in ponds,” I tell him. But I know what he means.

  “You know what I mean, Cat. The cartels that were operating here and had men serving time at Duncan now can’t afford to leave the area. They have to not only remain, but they have to create the impression that they are strong and not to be intimidated. Instead of getting weaker, they are now heavily recruiting local people and sending home requests for more experienced and veteran members of the cartel to be sent in from other cities or states to help out.

  “It’s about to become a warzone here. No cartel knows who was responsible for what happened, so they all assume it was one of the others. Because of that they are all preparing to kill anybody that has a crime affiliation, but isn’t part of their own team. It’s going to be a bloodbath.”

  “That’s good, then,” I say excitedly. “If they’re all killing each other then that saves me work. They’ll just be dead, and we can sit back and watch it happen. They’ll go after each other, and I’ll keep taking out the drug dens.”

  “Drugs are going to be the least of our problems real fast,” he tells me. “When these organizations go to battle like this, they aren’t good at keeping the action to themselves. Innocents are going to get hurt. A lot of them. Maybe even more so than the bad guys themselves. That’s where the problem comes in.”

  “How do you know all this?” I ask him. “It’s not like it’s happened around here before. I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

  “Not here, no. But in Mexico? Columbia? Or any number of the little countries in Russia? It’s a way of life. It’s ongoing every day, and it’s destroying them. Check this out,” he tells me and starts typing at the keyboard again.

  Within moments, he’s brought up a number of new international articles about the countries he named and their internal battles with the drug trade. It’s awful. As I read the articles, Ren then brings up several videos of news footage with reporters speaking Spanish and dialects of what I can only assume must be Russian. The reporters are always standing in front of scenes of destruction from what at first appear to be war-torn third world countries. And then as I watch them, I realize that isn’t what I’m seeing at all. These aren’t third world, underpopulated locations at all. They are major metropolises in countries I’ve heard of, but they are ruined landscapes because of the local turf war battles between the occupying gangs and cartels.

  As Ren watches my face fall further and further with each new video, he says, “I think this is what you’ve just brought upon our city. This is the ‘fallout’ from the prison you asked about.”

  I know this would be even worse if I didn’t have the Darkness inside of me helping to dampen the impact. What I’m watching hurts me, but I’m also continually reminded that those men deserved to die. That it needed to happen. What I did that day was a positive thing. The impact of knowing that I’ve possibly just turned the city I love into a future wasteland disappears as the Darkness gets excited about what this might mean for our future.

  “So how do we stop it?” I ask and try my best to hide the smile that the Darkness is pushing up into me. We both hope what his answer might be, and it excites us.

  “I don’t know, kid,” he tells me. “I really don’t.”

  “It’s ok, Renny,” I tell him and give in to the smile a bit. “I have some ideas that might help.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  “We’re going to hit them first,” I say. “I want to go in and destroy them before they have a chance to get organized and do this. The sooner I can go out and put an end to this the better.”

  “Cat, that’s what we’ve been doing,” he tells me and I can hear the patience straining his voice. “It hasn’t made a difference. Hitting those drug houses just slowed them down, and now these low level affairs aren’t even worth them worrying about now. It’s pointless.”

  “I’m not talking about the drug houses. I don’t plan on hitting them where the street dealers are or even where they’ve been warehousing the drugs before they’re distributed. We’re beyond that now. I want to go higher. I want them to take me, and what we’re doing, as seriously as possible.”

  “When you say ‘higher’, what height are you aiming for?” he asks me.

  “How hig
h can you get me?” I answer as I feel the Darkness beginning to make something deep inside of me tingle with anticipation. “I’m ready to end them, Renny.”

  “I don’t know, but I can start digging and find out. It’s going to be dangerous, though. If we move forward with this, then you won’t be facing the same level of street thug that you’ve been going up against all this time. If you’re serious about taking out the top men, then they are going to be surrounded with professional muscle. Men who have been hitters and working their way up the ranks for longer than you or I have been alive. This may not end the way you want it to.”

  As I consider this, I realize that Ren is wrong. This is going to end in only one of two ways, and I am prepared and ready to accept either one. Either we are victorious in all of this and we bring the cartels to their knees and they abandon our city, or at some point they get the better of me and I die. If I die defending this city and making it a safer place, then it will have been worth it.

  I can feel the Darkness in me pulling for the first solution to work out. It wants to use my hatred of the cartels in this city to strengthen its hold on me. The more destruction I can wreak on these men, then the more the Darkness, and the virus powering it, will be able to feed itself. If we win here and taste victory, then what’s next? How will I continue to feed what is in me when I no longer have the cartels giving me a constant food supply? What will I turn to next?

  And that question powers my own personal desire for the second option to come true. It’s a thought I am trying to not let my conscious mind voice for fear that the Darkness may suspect my motivations and attempt to thwart me. For if I perish during this war, then I can finally be at peace. My guilt and worry and pain won’t be an issue any longer.

  “Just work on finding out where I’m supposed to go, and I’ll work on bringing all of this to an end,” I say a bit dismissively as I try to push my thoughts away. “Whether that ending will be something to be savored or despised is a worry I’ll just have to save for later.

  “Besides,” I continue. “I’ve been working on a little surprise that may help tip the odds in my favor.”

  Quietly shaking his head, Ren turns away from me and refocuses his attention on the computer. I’m assuming he’s about to use his skills to locate my first target. At the speed he’s working at now, it might not take him long to pull up what we need.

  If that’s true, then I need to make sure I’m ready. Smiling and pulling on the Darkness to fuel me, I walk over to our gun safe on the wall and pull open the doors.

  “Hello my new, little friends,” I whisper and begin pulling out the guns we have stored.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Over the next few days, Ren and I don’t end up speaking to each other much. Part of it is the fact that we are both so busy now. As the virus takes a hold of his system and he has gotten more accustomed to what he can do, he takes fewer and fewer breaks from his work. The virus seems to be affecting him a bit differently than it did me. I don’t know if that is because of our genetics, his cancer or maybe it just varies from person to person naturally.

  My Darkness instills a compulsion within me to be active and hunt. Sitting in one spot for long hours is torturous as my mind won’t stop moving and my body is continually twitching with a yearning to move.

  But Ren is just fine using his abilities to stay focused on the monitors in front of him and not move for hours at a time. Only his eyes and hands show movement as they adjust the mouse or tap the keyboard keys in a blur.

  He still doesn’t leave the warehouse to track down fresh blood for himself. My bringing him full lampreys each evening after I return from my own hunts seems to serve him well. He doesn’t ask questions about where they came from, or who I used. He just empties whatever I bring him in a matter of seconds, and mutters a short “thanks” before continuing with his work.

  I, on the other hand, have become deadly effective with nearly any firearm I’ve picked up. All I’ve done for the past several days is teach myself how to use every gun we had in the weapons locker. I went through firing, aiming and reloading first, and then I worked on being able to disassemble and clean them. I know the difference between pistols and revolvers or rifles and assault rifles and even double-barreled shotguns versus pump action.

  Before all of this started, I didn’t even know these types of weapons existed let alone how to tell them apart. Now I can identify what type of gun it is just from the sounds of the metallic pieces moving about inside of it. I’ve made sure to make the most of my time while Ren has been working.

  A drawback to the intensity of my work was that I used up all of our ammo within the first twenty four hours. When I told Ren about this during one of our moments of conversation, he chuckled and said that wasn’t an issue. He explained that one of the joys of living in America with our fervent defenders of the second amendment is that we are never far from a gun shop or their wares. And our capitalistic society has even solved the problem of not having enough ammunition when you really need it: delivery services. It turns out that even though there might be an age limit and waiting restriction on the purchase of guns, the ammunition that goes into those weapons is exceptionally unregulated. Nearly anybody can buy the bullets and several companies have managed to monetize the service by delivering them for a charge. It’s like the world’s most deadly pizza service.

  After only a few minutes of searching on the internet, Ren manages to get a large crate of ammunition of various types and sizes delivered to one of the empty houses near our warehouse. Pre-paying with one of our black market credit cards makes it that much easier as he just leaves instructions for the crate to be left on the front porch for me to pick up later after I go out for my evening meal.

  It’s frighteningly simple, and it helps explain why we have such a gun epidemic here in America. Normally this idea would bother me, but for now it’s actually more useful that it exists than it is disturbing. Without it, I’m not sure either Ren or I would have wanted to just walk into a store and attempt to purchase this quantity of munitions.

  Aside from us both being busy trying to prepare ourselves for the impending confrontation with the cartels, there is something else that limits our conversations with each other: our friendship isn’t the same. Something has changed between us, and I can’t place exactly what it is. Part of me worries that it has to do with Ren’s curing his cancer with the virus. I know getting infected and suffering the virus’s changing process affected my mental state, and I’m sure it has to have done the same with him. Even though Ren’s infection was voluntary as opposed to mine, the virus’s presence still changes things.

  Or it might be that Ren is coming to terms with the idea that he isn’t dying any more. That he’s going to live longer than he’d been anticipating. He went from being given a life sentence of only a few more weeks to something close to immortality for all we know. For now neither one of us knows how long this virus will keep us alive. It might burn us up internally or it could keep our organs moving and alive indefinitely. Regardless, that realization has to have an impact on his mental state and how he sees the world.

  But I fear what is keeping us apart and quiet has nothing to do with any of that. It’s what I asked him to do. He hasn’t brought it up or talked about it again, but I know what happened with the lawyer is haunting him. To make matters worse, it only exists to haunt him because of the pressure I put on him. Without me, his soul would still be clean. Now there is a dark spot on it, and that dark spot is going to tear him apart. I fear the Darkness in Ren is going to use that guilt to destroy him even more. If he doesn’t control how his Darkness manifests, then it could have some spectacularly bad results.

  I should talk to him about it, but I don’t even know how to bring up the subject. How do you apologize to someone for ruining their soul and condemning them to a life of suffering?

  You don’t, that’s how.

  You ignore it and just hope time passes, and it gets better.

>   CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Four days after I’ve returned, on the one-week anniversary of the Prison Incident, Ren calls me in from the backyard where I’ve been practicing. He yells that he thinks he finally has it figured out, and I need to check out what he has.

  Carefully unloading the guns I have in the backyard with me, I gather them together and bring them inside so that I can store them in the locker. Even if I have decided that the guns are the solution I’ve been needing to solve the problem of how to even out the impending fights, that doesn’t mean Ren approves of their use. He still holds to the views I once had and sees them as nothing but a means of destruction. Devices that can only cause pain. He doesn’t yet understand that that pain can also be used constructively. The pain these guns provide will be used to shape the future of this city. They are but a tool.

  Until he understands this, though, Ren has requested that the guns always be safely locked away whenever they are inside. He wants them as far away from himself as possible. On some level I wonder if it is the guns that bother him or just the harsh sounds and smells they bring with them. He is, after all, still adjusting to his newly heightened senses.

  I can’t complain too much as he’s been more than helpful when it comes to my use of the guns in the warehouse’s back lot. Apparently, my use of the guns and the ensuing noises have caused multiple phone calls to the police to report the gunfire. We may not have many neighbors, but the ones we do have have picked up on the fact that something has been going on. On occasion when I’ve gotten a bit too vigorous in my exercises, someone within earshot has heard the noise and called it in to 911. Ren has gotten quite adept at intercepting those calls and helping them disappear. Only once have we had a patrol car come anywhere near our place, and it luckily didn’t end up resulting in a disaster thanks to some quick thinking and problem solving on Ren’s part.