Page 54 of Running Feral

As pathetic as it is, the intrusive thought makes something inside me snap, and I start crying. Not dignified crying, either. Crying like a little kid who dropped his ice cream. Crying likeI can push all the stress and sweat and fear and misery out of my body through my eyeballs, so I don’t have to deal with it anymore.

It sweeps me up like a wave, buckling me at the knees until I’m sitting on the disgusting floor, leaning against the bar with my arms bent on my knees and my face buried in them.

I get myself under control after a minute, thank god. I can’t remember the last time I cried like that. Not that I think adults shouldn’t express their emotions, but that was too much. I don’t like feeling like my body is carrying me away with it and I don’t have a choice.

I swallow hard, my throat feeling thick and choked even though the whole situation was over so quickly.

Get it together, Gunnar.

If by ‘get it together’, I meant control myself enough to swallow so I can start drinking on the floor, then that’s what I do.

There’s a bottle of Tanqueray, with a thick layer of dust covering all that green glass from how little it gets used. It’s on its side on the ground, rolling around but with the lid still closed and the contents intact.

I reach over—grateful for my long torso and arms because fuck getting back up—and snag it. It’s warm and god knows how old it is. Definitely not stock that I’ve replaced since I first opened this place. But right now, I don’t care. I’ll drink the sickly sweet, herbaceous liquid as long as it makes my chest burn and the rest of the world dim at the edges for a while.

Every time I look at the destroyed bar, it’s overlaid by the image of my father’s body in his destroyed store, and every time it makes my heart clench. It feels like my brain and the alcohol are in a race to see who can take control of my consciousness first. I’m desperate for those awful memories to roll back, because stirring up old trauma isn’t going to help me face this new one. That’s why I’m drinking at a pace I haven’t in years.

Eventually, I feel better. Well, not better, but more numb. The invasive memories of my childhood are rolling back and I feel like I can breathe. I still miss Tobias every second. The worry about where he is and what’s happening to him isn’t going anywhere. I know that. But there’s nothing I can do for him right now.

It’s not the first time I thought it, but the realization that the bar being destroyed is most likely connected to Eamon hating me suddenly hits me with total clarity. I’ve drunk enough to feel like the world is something I can exist in, but not so much I feel like a zombie. And as soon as I put the pieces together, the rest of me begins to wake back up and my focus sharpens.

Eamon did this. It’s the only explanation. Why else would I be targeted? Normal criminals might have robbed me, sure. But no one else would have gone to the trouble of causing this level of destruction. I feel like an idiot for not putting the whole thing together the second I stepped in the door, but I guess I was distracted.

Then I feel like even more of an idiot, because I completely forgot about the camera. The new camera that I recently installed because of Tobias. The one that is still sitting above the bar, blinking green, when I crane my neck to look up and over the wooden barrier.

I pull out my phone. The battery is at 12%, but hopefully it’s enough to see what happened before I have to get up to find a charger. The app is already downloaded and logged into, even though I’ve never needed to use the damn thing, so it takes me a few minutes to tap around and see how it works.

I should have paid for the alert system. But I thought it was unnecessary, because I have separate perimeter alarms to let me know if someone breaks in after hours. Of course, that only works if I remember to turn them on when I leave, which Iobviously didn’t. Because Tobias was with me, I didn’t care what happened to anything else.

Once I pull up the grainy footage, it buffers for a while. They also trashed my Wi-Fi, so I’m working on the tenuous 5G coverage that kind of exists out here. Every moment that the buffering drags on, I get more anxious.

Load, motherfucker. Show me his fucking face.

I know he did this. Or his friends. Someone was trying to send a message. The only upside is that maybe this footage could be used to put him away, or at least get him more shit from the cops. Or even a clue about where he took Tobias. Or a sign that Tobias is still alive.

Equal parts of horror and relief hit me when the video finally buffers, because Tobias is alive. Or at least, he was a few hours ago. Here he is, grainy and black and white, but still so beautiful I want to reach through the screen and pull him back to me so I can clutch him tightly and keep him safe.

He’s the one who trashed the bar. Well, he did it looking like a dead-eyed automaton under the supervision of a man with a covered face, but who I would still recognize anywhere. So, it’s safe to say it wasn’t his idea.

I can’t look away. I set the playback speed as fast as it’ll go, but it’s still heartbreaking to watch. Tobias looks utterly numb. He works through it all methodically, destroying everything piece by piece, occasionally turning to Eamon for instruction, or maybe a question.

My poor boy. I can only imagine how much this must have hurt him. Knowing how deep the rabbit hole in his head goes, I bet he spent the entire time wondering if I would be furious with him as well.

I’m not angry with him, obviously. But my anger is very real, and very present. It’s also accompanied by a kind of hopeless despair that I haven’t felt in a long time. Maybe I’ve spent toomuch of my life trying to dig people out of these situations, only to be shut down. Maybe it’s because I’m being forced to confront how unrealistic it is that I could ever really help Tobias get free, no matter how much I care about him.

I loved my brother more than anything and trying to help him got me nowhere. Worse than nowhere. He still got trapped in his own self-destructive web, tearing apart our family in the process and putting a black mark on our lives that we’ll never get rid of. Maybe Tobias is the same.

He probably thinks I’m caught up in his wave of chaos and ruin, but I think he’s caught up in mine. Because everyone I let myself truly care about turns out this way, and the harder I fight to save them, the worse it gets.

I’m distantly trying to buck against these ideas—because I didn’t spend all that money on therapy for nothing—before they completely shift my thinking, when the footage changes. They’re done smashing everything I own. I’m expecting them to leave, but instead, Eamon pulls Tobias over to him. Once I realize what’s happening, it’s so, so, so much worse than anything that’s come before.

Nothing I’ve experienced in my life has prepared me for the kind of impotent rage that I feel as the footage continues. Watching Eamon hurt and violate anyone, but especially someone I would tear apart the world for…

Eamon holds eye contact with the camera the entire time. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and his message is received. The sight of his hands on the skin that I’ve worshiped makes my stomach churn, but I hold it back.

Tears are useless here. So is cursing or anger or anything else.

I want him fucking dead. I want to find him and destroy his life worse than he’s ever destroyed anyone else’s. I want him to think of all the pain and suffering he inflicted on Tobias as a gentle dream compared to what he’s about to suffer.

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