“Who are you?” he asked with scared, wide eyes as I pulled on a pair of nitrile gloves. He should be frightened.
Not saying a word to him, I crouched and proceeded to draw a series of symbols on his naked skin using the tip of a razor-sharp silver knife. The first cut was such a shock that he didn’t make a peep. By the second, he shrieked like a little girl. It fed the beast that was stirring within me. Ripples of darkness ran through me as it fought to come to the surface. Shoving it back, I maintained my focus. This wasn’t the time to let it free.
Once I had control, I mirrored the symbols in pig’s blood.
He became increasingly agitated, screaming and struggling against the chains that held him in place. By that time he was shrieking at me. I ignored his pleas that turned to threats until he mentioned something I wasn’t expecting.
“What did you just say?” I asked as I paused. The brothers in the room with me stepped closer, telling me they’d heard what I heard.
“I said you’re going to regret this, because the Scorpions are going to be coming for you,” he said, obviously feeling like that had given him power.
My eyes flashed to Facet. It was his job to find out every detail of the person’s life before we brought them here. He shook his head with a frown. He hadn’t found a connection between this piece of shit and the Scorpions.
“I don’t believe you,” I said as I continued with my job. He screamed again. As if anyone would hear him.
“Mule is my cousin,” the man rapidly threw out. I again looked to Facet, who appeared disbelieving and still shook his head. Mule was the vice president of the Scorpions down in south Des Moines. He was also a real piece of shit, so it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a relation between them.
“Funny, we never found that information anywhere,” Phoenix said from his position over by Facet.
“That’s because he was adopted. It was a closed adoption, we only found each other recently. You kill me, and he’ll be gunning for you.” The man thought he actually had bargaining power, and I found that humorous.
“And you think that scares us?” Ghost asked with a deadly calm.
“Come on, I have a wife and kids,” he pleaded. That was knowledge we did have, and it curdled my stomach to think about. Especially because we knew his own children had suffered at his hands.
“Maybe you should have thought about how much they supposedly meant to you before you destroyed any chance they had at a normal life,” Blade said from the chair he sat in as he organized his tools on the rolling cart.
Blade was a fucked-up individual. Then again, with the life he’d had, it probably shouldn’t be a surprise.
“Oh. You won’t be needing this anymore,” I said as I used the scalpel-like knife to slice off his flaccid penis. That was one of the specific requirements of this particular job.
That got his attention. He began screaming at the top of his lungs—eyes wild.
“You’re all dead! You hear me? You’re all fucking dead!” he screamed at us with spittle flying. At least until I shoved his spongy cock down his sick, twisted throat. Like a cold, calculating machine, I stared him in the eye as he gagged. Then, I slid the blade up his abdomen to his neck. With surgical precision, I sliced along his carotid. First, one side, then the other. Then across his throat in a garish smile.
Bright crimson pooled around him as he tried to speak but couldn’t. While the savage beast gnashed its teeth in the depths of my darkened soul, I continued to watch the life leave his eyes.
Once I was finished, I stood, peeled off the nitrile gloves, and told Blade, “I’m done. Finish up.”
Ghost, Phoenix, Facet, and I stepped out to leave Blade to work his sick twisted magic on the guy.
Once Blade was done with him, he’d be fed to the hogs on the farm, and no one would ever find his body. It was one of the perks of owning a hog farm and came in handy with the disposal side of our business.
Hawk had inherited the farm from an uncle he’d barely known. The uncle didn’t have any kids, so as his only living relative, he’d left it to Hawk. That had been years ago. At first he was going to sell it, because he said he didn’t know the first thing about running a hog farm.
Then they had found out that hogs will eat any fucking thing. Especially the gigantic wild boars we bred there for hunting ranches. They were some ruthlessly savage creatures.
“You heading straight to the clubhouse?” Squirrel asked as he pulled his helmet on.
“Yeah,” I said as I did the same, uncaring if I smeared the paint. It was cooler that day, thank fuck, because anytime we had business like that at the farm, we wore helmets. Less of a chance that someone would be able to point one of us out specifically. Then again, the local law enforcement didn’t fuck with us too much. We paid them enough.
I flipped down the tinted visor and started up my bike. We all pulled out of the farm without a backward glance.
Coy and the boys down in our Louisville Chapter had a similar operation, but theirs was disguised as a Pet Crematorium and Funeral Services business. Crazy thing was, they actually did that shit too. People paid a lot of money to keep old Rover’s ashes with them for all eternity.
The other thing we were in agreement with was their stance on the drug trade. Well, mostly. We made a lot of fucking money by transporting weed from Colorado to Iowa and down to Florida. False bottoms and a false wall in the front in the livestock trailers of the semis made for the perfect storage system. We made money from the hogs and the weed. It’s the perfect cover.
But the harder shit? Fuck that. That shit was toxic to people, families, and society in general.