Page 13 of In The Darkness

“Video games don’t do a whole lot for me most days,” he said, avoiding the truth that the guys inside were so doped up that they couldn’t help but sleep in the middle of the day.

Nodding his head, Drist made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Pussies.”

He was a man of few words, and at the moment, he seemed to like that singular word. The idea that he probably had never seen a pussy in his entire life, or if he had, it had been online on some cheap porn site made Nick want to chuckle, but he stifled his desire to laugh at Drist and got down to business.

Taking a seat next to him on the step, he leaned back on his elbows and stretched out his legs. The whole movement was meant to make him look relaxed, but he knew better than to let down his guard as he pretended to stare out at the backyard.

“I hear we get to leave this shithole tonight. Thank God for that, right?”

Drist closed one eye and aimed the gun at some unsuspecting squirrel about fifty yards away. “Hell, yeah. I’ll be happy to get the hell out of this farm shit. This man needs the city, for fuck’s sake.”

“Where are we going?”

The question sounded no more different than the last he asked, but Nick had the sense immediately that Drist heard something in it that bothered him. Turning toward him, he pointed his gun directly at his head and narrowed his eyes in suspicion.

“What’s it matter to you? You writing a book?” he asked, his words laced with barely restrained anger.

It took everything in his power to keep calm as he looked down the barrel of Drist’s gun aimed squarely between his eyes. His heart beating wildly, Nick shrugged and said casually, “No, man. I just don’t have a thing for farm animals, and that’s all this place seems to have. Did you see those heifers near the end of the backyard, for Christ’s sake? The fucking things just walk around this place like they own it.”

His longwinded explanation that diverted into the discussion of his dislike of cows nearby seemed to throw Drist off, and he turned to look around for the cow Nick had mentioned. He likely wanted to shoot the damn thing.

Pointing his gun back toward the yard, he laughed. “I could go for a steak. A big, fat, juicy steak, right?”

Nick forced himself to laugh, sure this guy wasn’t playing with a full deck. He had no doubt, though, that if he got the chance, he’d take a shot at the brown and white cow nearly a hundred yards away that now slowly walked away from the backyard.

Crazy fucker. Even animals knew to stay the fuck away from him.

“It’ll be nice to be somewhere we can get a steak and we don’t have to kill it ourselves, won’t it?” he asked, hoping to get Drist back onto the subject of where they were all moving to that night.

“Yeah. Clayton won’t be sending us anywhere good, though. We need to keep moving. A few more nights until he can join us.”

“So more houses like this?”

A rabbit about twenty yards away distracted Drist, so he didn’t answer for a long moment while he eyed up his shot. When he did, he said, “Yeah. One of Clayton’s friends is going to let us use his mother’s old house in Winchester. I guess the old broad died a few months ago, and he can’t find anyone to buy the place. See, that’s what this thing we’re doing is all about.”

Unsure what the hell he meant, Nick put on his most serious expression and nodded. “I get it, man.”

“A guy gets left a perfectly good house and the motherfucker won’t sell because fucking McMansions all over the place make the world think that every house has to have twenty bedrooms and fifteen fucking bathrooms. It’s ridiculous! That’s what this is all about. It’s time to take back this world and let guys like Clayton’s friend be able to sell his mother’s house for a decent profit. I mean, it’s got like three bedrooms. What’s the fucking problem with that?”

Drist began to unravel there in front of Nick, and he wondered if he should push him for any more details. The guy clearly had a very tenuous grasp on reality to begin with, and whatever the hell he was rambling on about concerning real estate already had upset him.

“I get it, man. Three bedrooms. Hell, I grew up in a two bedroom apartment, and we thought we had it pretty damn nice. We didn’t starve, and my father always made sure we had clothes to wear and a roof over our heads. Nowadays, he’d be seen as a loser, but that’s bullshit. Total bullshit. He was a good guy, my father.”

Nick watched as Drist nodded his head, eagerly agreeing with every word he’d said. In truth, his father had been a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army, and by the time he and his mother had him, they had more than enough money to afford one of those McMansions Drist railed against. He’d grown up in a house five times the size of the house behind them.

The world this crazy fucker hated was pretty much the world Nick had lived in since the day he was born. He wasn’t Marshall Gilmore level, but he certainly had never been Drist level.

But he knew how to talk a good game with people like him. They all pretty much had the same story in mind when they thought of themselves. Modest upbringing with decent folks who tried their best to give them a life better than theirs. It was overly romanticized usually, but it helped the Drists of the world think that despite all the good that had been around in the past, now none of it existed anymore because of people like Marshall Gilmore.

The truth was that good they looked back to still existed. They just wanted more. They wanted what the media moguls of the world had but they didn’t want to do what it took to get it.

Well, other than kidnap young women and threaten to upend the world order if they didn’t get their way.

He didn’t give a damn about Drist’s distorted belief system or any of their messed up ideas, in truth. He’d seen them all before. All he cared about was finding a way to get Persephone out from under their control before they killed her.

“That’s the way of the world these days,” Drist said angrily. “People like your old man are losers, while that bitch’s father gets to be king of the world. It’s wrong, man. All wrong. That’s why we have to change it before it gets too out of control and all the good this country has to offer is gone forever.”

Good like Drist. Yeah. Right.

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