Page 18 of Scar

“Relevance?” I ask, yawning.

“They both came out a side door to do the dirty in the grass. They’re two down.”

“Move!” I screech into the comms.

Shots ring out in the night, and I know it’s Rafi and Lucky taking out the dudes in the grass. The gunfire attracts the attention of the loaders, who fumble for their firearms.

Brando and I stay under cover of the shadows as we move toward the front of the truck. A hail of bullets pings againstthe trailer, before I hear one of our sharpshooters through the comms unit.

“Clear.”

Doesn’t mean shit when you don’t know what’s waiting inside the warehouse, but at least the area outside is now clear of gunmen. We run to the back of the trailer and wait at the door.

“Gas,” I hiss, before Brando and I hurl smoke bombs throw the door. Simultaneously, Lucky and Rafi do the same from the side door.

A spray of bullets flies haphazardly around the warehouse before it ends with a heavy thump.

“Clear!”

Rafi’s voice comes over the comms and I throw myself in through the double doors and make my way across the floor, my gun aimed at the ready.

I hear the lurch of the roller door as it moves up, groaning in pain. “We’re in,” one of our men says. “Far end.”

There are only three men in the warehouse, who now lay groaning on the ground, rolling over in the haze of dissipating smoke. They’re all in their late twenties or early thirties, with nothing significant about them but the tattoos on the webbing between their fingers. Tiny little intricate spider webs, and then one single tarantula spread across the back of their hands, as though crawling away from the webs.

“Along came a spider…”

Something I can’t quite place niggles at the back of my mind. I know this tattoo. I know its origin. But I say nothing. I wait.

I know all the men outside, dead or alive, are being carried in even as we take stock of the warehouse.

“Tie them up.”

Lucky throws a man to the ground and gets to work, tying up the prisoners. But he doesn’t just tie them up any old way. No.He hog-ties them, so that when their bodies are found, everyone will understand the depths of depravity these men saw.

My men, along with my brothers, flank me like a wall of human armor. We have six dead bodies, which are carried and slumped on top of each other in a pile in the middle of the warehouse, for all to see. I force the gazes of the five living towards the pile as I douse them with liquid.

“This is a twelve-thousand-dollar bottle of scotch,” I say. “No-one can accuse me of not sending them out in style.”

I walk around the bodies, making sure they’re drenched, until the bottle is empty. I lift it to my lips and let the last drops burn down my throat. So their bodies are entwined with mine for all eternity.

“No-one steals from me and gets away with it,” I say. “But I guess you guys didn’t know that, right? Otherwise, you wouldn’t have done it.”

One of the men curses, splutters over himself and tries to tell us he’s just a paid hand.

I light a match and hold it atop the dead bodies. My lips curl into a sneer.

“Which one of you will squeal like the pig you are, and which one of you will join this pile?”

A second man tells us to go to hell.

A third shits his pants.

I drop the match.

It’s slow, because alcohol really isn’t the best accelerant, but it’s what I’m aiming for. I want the torture of the slow burn and the acrid smell of burning flesh to reside in their nostrils, so they never forget the smell. Even in death. I’m a monster like that.

“Ok, ok, ok,” the paid hand says, recanting his story. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”

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