Page 15 of Torn

4

Mason

September 12th, 2010

New York City

“Mr. Ashwood?”

I glanced up at Vlada, my secretary. “Yeah?”

“You asked me to remind you about today’s meetings when I got in. The first is at two with Barnett, and the next is a dinner meeting with the Gallaghers starting at six-thirty at the fusion place on West 51st.”

“Cool. Got it.” I took my legs off my desk and sat up straight in my chair. I’d just finished my coffee, so it was probably time for me to at least pretend to get some work done.

Vlada held out a brown paper bag. “Oh, and before I forget, here you go, boss.”

She dumped the bag on my desk, then winked and sashayed out of the room, silky black hair swinging from side to side as she went. I could see two guys out on the floor staring at her ass before casting envious gazes toward my door.

Before coming to work for me, Vlada was a model, so everyone always assumed we were fucking. I couldn’t be bothered to deny the rumors, but they had no basis in reality whatsoever. I wasn’t in the habit of hiring women I wanted to fuck, because I’d seen a fair few friends screw themselves over that way. My secretary was hot, but not my type in the slightest. She was good at her job and we got along well. That was all I asked for.

I tore the bag open to find the sweet doughy treats within. Leaning back in my chair again, I sank my teeth into a warm beignet. Vlada picked these up for me every morning from some little bakery in whatever hipster neighborhood she lived in. They were passable. Nowhere near as good as the proper ones from New Orleans, but they were a nice reminder all the same.

As much as I’d hated visiting Louisiana as a child, I had to admit it kinda grew on me in the end. My mom was born and raised in the state, so I’d practically spent half my childhood there thanks to her dragging me along on vacations at every opportunity. Now my parents had retired down there after building their lucrative New York property financing company from the ground up over the last thirty years.

They wanted to keep it in the family, so I ran it in the city along with my three siblings, James, Ella and Andrew. The golden children. They were all slightly older than me and vastly more mature; I could admit that. While I’d been fucking around as a teenager and getting myself expelled from school after school, they’d been learning to play piano and volunteering for charities.

I got there eventually, though. When I went to college (after getting in by the skin of my teeth) I discovered I actually enjoyed commerce studies. I wound up here after graduation, and surprisingly, I didn’t fuck it all up like my siblings probably expected.

Sure, I had lazy days, but overall it was a pretty decent gig. I enjoyed it for the most part, and it meant I would actually earn the multi-million dollar trust fund my parents set up for me and my siblings many years ago. That was more than I could say for a lot of the other lazy-ass rich kids I went to school with.

As I chewed the last bite of the beignet and licked the powdered sugar off my fingers, I checked my emails. Nothing particularly interesting. Just the regular crap. To make it interesting, I had a little game I played with myself where I would try to see how much ridiculous corporate bullshit I could fit into one email before the recipient got suspicious.

I typed something to a nearby real estate firm about ‘touching base’ and ‘synergizing’, and then I reached into the brown bag and pulled out another beignet. Vlada always bought me three, because one was never enough for breakfast.

A faint smile crossed my face as I remembered the first time I‘d ever truly appreciated the little sweets. It was a sweltering summer day in Vermilion Parish at some old plantation property my parents had dragged me to. They said they wanted to visit an old business associate, but holy shit… things got fucking weird when we arrived.

Apparently the dude they knew had turned into some sort of doomsday preacher in the years since they last saw him. I guess at the time, the millennium was approaching and a lot of people were freaking out about that kind of shit, thanks to the media stirring up concerns over the Y2K bug and the supposed end of the world. The country folk in Vermilion were no different in their worries.

This so-called prophet guy, Jacob Chastain, had spent a few years working them all up into a lather over the idea of an apocalypse, and they’d been enraptured by his words from the second he ‘confirmed’ their worst fear: the end was nigh.

That was what my parents had gathered from the short time they spent there chatting to Chastain’s congregation. I’d barely listened because I was so fucking bored, not to mention the fact I was sweating my ass off and my stomach was growling like mad. Then that cute little girl came up and saved me from my hunger and boredom. Jolie with the green eyes. The prophet’s daughter.

I still thought about that kid from time to time. Not in a weird way, like I was attracted to her or anything. Fuck no. I mean, sure, I promised her I’d go back for her when she was eighteen, but that was just some dumb shit I said to make her feel better because she obviously had a little crush on me. I figured she’d forget all about it within a few days, as kids tended to do.

When I thought about her, I simply hoped she was okay, given what happened not long after my parents and I left the Chastain ranch that day. It was all kinds of fucked up.

With a frown, I typed ‘New Eden Ranch’ into Google. That was the new name of the place. I liked to search for it online occasionally, just to see if there was any new information about what happened down there.

The first thing that came up was a news article from August last year. Ten years on and still no leads in church terrorist attack.

A bunch of armed men had shown up at the spiritual retreat that hot afternoon. They knocked out Jacob Chastain, and then they shot and killed around seventy women and teenagers in the very same white marquee I’d stood in with my parents only moments before. Fucking horrifying shit. The stuff of nightmares.

Aside from Chastain, the men of the church had allegedly been inside the mansion having some sort of prayer meeting, which saved them from the shooting. They said the younger kids were all playing way down the back of the property, so they’d fortunately avoided the attack as well.

Everyone else was killed. By the time the cops finally got out there, the gunmen were all gone, and the front of the property was littered with bodies.

The lengthy response time from the police had been criticized by many over the years, but apparently they’d been busy helping out with some huge fire caused by an arsonist in the nearby town of Amiens while the ranch shooting was occurring, so it took a while for them to realize what was happening out there.

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