Run (A Suspense Horror Thriller & Mystery Short Story Novella) Read online

  RUN

  JEREMY BATES

  Copyright © 2015 by Jeremy Bates

  First Edition

  The right of Jeremy Bates to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-0-9940960-0-5

  For a limited time, visit www.jeremybatesbooks.com to receive a free copy of The Taste of Fear.

  PROLOGUE

  They had set up camp in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains earlier in the day. Located in the southeastern part of New York State, the area was a wilderness of mixed hardwood forests carved up by narrow valleys, rushing rivers, and a plethora of hiking trails. Now it was a little past midnight. The nippy autumn air was redolent with the smell of dead leaves. Overhead, the black expanse of night sky glowed with stars.

  Sitting with her knees pulled into her chest, close enough to the fire to warm her hands, Charlotte recalled the time she’d come to a park somewhere in these parts as a kid. She’d spent much of the morning at a swimming hole, catching tadpoles and fishing with an eggbeater rod. Her grandfather showed her how to decapitate and gut a trout. He loved fishing, and he must have told her the story how he caught the twenty-one-inch largemouth bass mounted above the fireplace in his study a dozen times.

  Her grandparents had raised Charlotte since she was eight. That’s how old she was when her parents were murdered in a home robbery. They’d been shot with a sawed-off shotgun. Charlotte had been the one to find them. She’d heard the shots but remained at her bedroom door, too scared to do anything except call out for them. When they didn’t reply, she eventually crept down the stairs to the ground floor. She saw the bloody footprints first. They zigzagged all over the marble foyer floor. She followed the bloodiest set to the kitchen, where her father had been on his back, his brains spilling from his skull, her mother on her stomach, her blouse frayed, the skin beneath shredded and wet with blood.

  Charlotte didn’t remember any details after that. The memories of rest of the night had faded to some dark corner of her mind. All she knew was that the neighbors had called the police. She was taken to the hospital. She talked to a lot of people, detectives and doctors probably. Then her grandparents arrived and told her she would be living with them.

  The thieves, she’d learned a couple years later when she was deemed mature enough to be told how and why her parents were slaughtered, had stolen most of her mother’s jewelry, which had been valued at roughly two hundred thousand dollars. They were never caught.

  Charlotte always found it strange how she had only known her parents for eight years of her life—really, only known known them on a cognitive level for half that time—but they remained more real and important to her than anybody else she’d met to date, her grandparents included. She could still recall their faces, their expressions, their voices, their laughter. How her mother would let her cook and bake with her at the stove. How her father would give her scratchy chin kisses when he didn’t shave.

  Charlotte had organized the present camping trip because she had hoped the solitude and fresh air and raw nature would do her boyfriend Luke some good. And for a while it had worked. He’d seemed to be somewhat at peace with himself—until fifteen minutes ago anyway.

  Emma said, “What do you think they’re doing?” She was sitting across the fire from Charlotte, dressed in an over-sized Icelandic sweater, black tights, and Timberland boots. Her glossy black hair fell around her heart-shaped face, her porcelain skin timeless in the firelight. Her father was the CEO of an aviation-aerospace company, her mother a successful real estate agent, and she’d grown up likely believing credit cards only came in platinum. That being said, she was smart, a good listener, and one of Charlotte’s best friends.

  Charlotte shrugged. “I guess they’re talking.” She was twisting the engagement ring on her finger unconsciously.

  “I feel bad,” Emma said. “It was my fault.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I can’t believe he got so mad at me.”

  Ten minutes earlier Emma had been telling a ghost story about a girl who was burned to death at an orphanage and kept coming back to haunt the kids who had teased her. When she began explaining in detail what the burned girl looked like, blistering skin and all, Luke snapped. He went from being so quiet you almost forgot he was there to raging at Emma so viciously she shrank back in fear. Charlotte tried to placate him. He waved her away and stormed off. She explained to Emma and Emma’s boyfriend Tom what Luke had been through in Afghanistan, how small things could set him off. He wasn’t really mad at Emma, she’d insisted, he just needed some time to cool off. Eventually Tom went to check up on him while Charlotte remained with Emma.

  “Like, he was normal one minute,” Emma went on, “and the next…”

  “He’s still adjusting,” Charlotte said. “It takes time.”

  “You said he was just quiet. You didn’t say anything about a temper.”

  “He never had a temper before. This is all new for me too.”

  “This happened before?”

  “He hasn’t snapped like that. But like I said…he’s different.” Charlotte hesitated, wondering where to begin. Emma had never met Luke. Charlotte and Emma were friends from their time at NYU where they’d been neighbors in Third North, a residency on the Washington Square Campus. Luke had been in the army all that time.

  “Different?” Emma said.

  “Different—like, different. He doesn’t like talking. Not much anyway. We don’t sleep together. We did the first couple nights he was back. But now I usually find him on the sofa in the basement, with all the lights on.”

  “Usually?”

  “Sometimes he’s in the kitchen when I wake up.”

  “What? Sleeping on the table?” Emma started to laugh, but seemed to think better of it.

  “Awake,” Charlotte said. “Drinking whatever booze is around.”

  “In the morning?”

  “I think all night.”

  “You never told me this.”

  “It’s tough to talk about. You don’t know him.”

  “So does he drink, like, all the time? I mean, every day?”

  Charlotte nodded. “He’s…I don’t know what you call it. Self-medicating? Sometimes I wonder if he still thinks he’s in Afghanistan. He never leaves the house. And when he does, he’s all agitated. He hates crowds. They make him nervous. That’s why I thought this camping trip would be good.”

  “A lot of army guys go through this when they come back, don’t they? Like that guy in Forest Gump. Not Tom Hanks. You know, the guy without the legs?”

  “Yeah, but Luke’s injury is in his head. Think about it, Em. The army spends months training you to kill people, right? You go to war and see some horrible stuff, right? You probably do some horrible stuff too. Then you come back on a Thursday and everyone expects you to get a job on Monday. There’s no decompressing.”

  “Can’t he go to VA, Veteran Affairs, whatever it’s called?”

  “Don’t get me started on them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After what happened—you know, with Luke’s unit, the ambush—he began having a lot of problems
with the guys above him. I don’t know the details, Luke won’t talk about it. But he did something and they wanted him gone. They ended up making him sign this thing called a Chapter 10. Pretty much it means you don’t get thrown in the brig, but you get a less than honorable discharge, which means you’re not eligible for medical benefits.”

  “What did he do that got him in so much trouble?”

  “Not following orders? Getting into fights? I don’t know. But what really gets me mad is that whatever got him kicked out was a direct result of the ambush. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that seeing your whole unit get wiped out is going to give you more than a few nightmares. Who’s not going to flip out a bit? The army should have tried some counseling with him or something, or gave him some time off. Instead, they just gave him a bunch of meds and kept sending him back out to shoot people, which made him worse and worse until he did whatever he did. What the fuck is that?”

  “I don’t get it,” Emma said, her long-lashed, green eyes flashing with anger. She tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Why wouldn’t they just help him?”

  “It’s too expensive. It would cost them billions to give ongoing treatment to soldiers with psychological conditions. It’s true. It’s all over the internet. It’s been going on for years. At first the army was misdiagnosing soldiers with something called a personality disorder, which they said was a preexisting condition to service, which again means no benefits. This is garbage because every soldier is screened before boot camp for stuff like personality disorders. They all have to pass psych tests and be deemed fit for duty to get into the military. So five or six years ago, when the media started getting wise to all this, there was this big backlash. So now instead of the army wrongfully diagnosing soldiers and screwing them out of their benefits, they’re just not diagnosing them at all. They’re pretending there’s nothing wrong with them. And when these guys, guys like Luke, start breaking down and getting in trouble while still enlisted, the army makes it look like it’s their fault, and they kick them out when it’s the army that made them that way.”

  “There has to be someone you can talk to about this, Char.”

  “Maybe if it was only Luke. Maybe someone would cut him a break. But it’s the system right now. You can’t fight it. At least one person can’t fight it.”

  They sat in silence for several long seconds. The flames of the fire licked and spit. Crickets chirruped. The breeze changed direction and blew smoke in Charlotte’s direction. She covered her nose with her hand but didn’t move from the heat.

  “So, what’s wrong with Luke then?” Emma asked. “Is he, like, depressed or something?”

  “That, plus anxiety, nightmares. He’s even been having hallucinations and flashbacks.” She shrugged. “Post-traumatic stress kind of stuff—which, I should mention, the army does acknowledge can be a result of combat trauma, and which his disability benefits would have covered.”

  “Can’t you take him to a normal doctor or something?”

  “A civilian doctor?” Charlotte said. “I’ve mentioned it to Luke. I’m hoping I can convince him to go when we get back to the city.” She put on a brave face. “But who knows? Luke, he’s tough. He’s only been back for a few weeks. This all might pass. He might get better on his own.”

  “Or he might get worse.” Emma fiddled with one of her nails. “Have you ever thought of...well…like, leaving him? Just listen,” she added quickly. “I don’t want to sound indifferent to what he’s going through, but to be honest, I was a bit freaked out when I met him this morning. He was so aloof, shifty. And now, knowing this…”

  “It’s not his fault, Em.”

  “No, maybe not. But it’s not your fault either, or your responsibility, I guess I should say. You guys really only dated way back in high school. Okay, so you saw him a few times over the years when he was on leave. But that’s a long time not to be with someone on a regular basis. Like you said, he’s changed.”

  “What do you expect me to do, Em? Dump him when he needs me the most? He just spent the last six months in a warzone trying to kill people and having them trying to kill him. He needs time to readjust to normal life. Imagine if you were dropped in Afghanistan tomorrow—”

  “I’m just saying—”

  “I know what you’re saying. And would you be telling me to dump him if he had cancer or something like that?”

  “It’s not the same.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s scary, Char. I mean, I might not know him well, and he might be getting better, I don’t know. But right now I’m worried about you.”

  Charlotte shook her head. She didn’t want to talk about Luke anymore. She shouldn’t have bothered in the first place. Emma didn’t understand. She couldn’t understand. Charlotte stood. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s see if Tom found him.”

  #

  As they started down the path toward the lake Charlotte played the flashlight beam among the hemlock, sugar maple, and birch trees crowding the beaten path. It didn’t reveal much except the shadowy outlines of tree trunks and the canopy of spindly branches overhead.

  Abruptly Tom’s voice cut through the night. He sounded panicked.

  Charlotte glanced at Emma, who shook her head. Then they broke into a run. The trees thinned, tapering off to smaller shrubs and scrub. Slabs of rock angled down into the three-mile-wide lake that spread away from them like a vast oil spill. The waxing moon cast a silvery reflection over the mirror-smooth surface.

  Tom and Luke stood twenty feet away, facing one another. Tom was holding up his hands, palms outward, as if trying to calm Luke. His family was filthy rich, and everyone knew him as a spoiled brat womanizer who’d gotten accepted to Columbia’s MBA program because his father was a Wall Street big shot. Physically, he was a muscular jock type, with a brown mop of hair and an unkempt beard. His shirtless upper body was lean and tanned in the moonlight. Right then, however, backing away from Luke, who stood six four, he looked small and unimpressive.

  Luke’s hair was still cut military high and tight. His features, always straight and handsome, now seemed sharper, carved out by black shadows, his eyes lost in the dark recess below his brow. He wore board shorts and a white T-shirt. Sleeve tattoos covered his biceps and forearms, running the gamut from machine guns enshrined in roses to demon drill sergeants to skulls and snakes, a fury of green ink. “You wanna know?” Luke was saying. “You really wanna fucking know?”

  “Dude,” Tom said, “I was just chatting.”

  Charlotte stopped a few feet from them. “Luke, what’s going on?” she demanded.

  “This motherfucker asked me if I’d shot anyone.”

  Tom shrugged. “I didn’t know it was such a big deal.”

  “Shooting someone’s no big deal? You ever shoot someone, dickhead?”

  “It’s all right, Luke,” Charlotte said.

  “He’s fucking crazy—” Tom said.

  Luke head butted Tom in the face. The sound was like someone snapping their finger and thumb together, and that might have been Tom’s nose breaking.

  Tom collapsed to his knees, then to his side, where he rocked back and forth moaning and cupping his face in his hands.

  “Luke!” Charlotte cried, seizing his arm and yanking him away from Tom. He shoved her hard, sending her flying through the air. She landed on her tailbone. The flashlight clattered away from her.

  Yelling, Emma attacked Luke, batting him with her hands, but she might have been a butterfly attacking a bear for all the good she was doing. He swung a sideways closed fist at her, striking her temple. She collapsed to the rocky ground, unmoving.

  Luke kicked her in the head with his bare foot. The impact made little noise but snapped her head sideways.

  Leaping to her feet, Charlotte felt ill, and all she could think was: This can’t be happening! This isn’t happening! He’s going to kill them!

  Luke raised his foot over Emma’s head, as if to stomp it like an egg.
>
  Charlotte crashed into him, pleading with him to stop.

  One of his hands clamped her around her throat. His eyes shone like an animal’s, intense, emotionless, unrecognizable.

  She raked her nails down his cheek, drawing blood.

  Cursing, he let her go.

  She ran.

  #

  Dead leaves and moss and lichen scattered beneath her feet. The scent of rot and evergreen seared her nostrils. Her heart was pounding. Her breathing came in gasping sobs. Everything whipped past her in a blur of darkness.

  She risked a glance over her shoulder to gauge Luke’s pursuit.

  He was a dozen feet back, gaining on her.

  She reached the campsite moments later and blew past the two dome-shaped tents, knowing there was no time to search them for the car keys. She ducked the clothesline they’d strung up and leapt over the orange ice box. She landed awkwardly, touched a knee to the ground, then barreled through waist-high grass and cattails. Trees closed around her once more.

  She didn’t need to risk another glance over her shoulder to know Luke had followed her into the thicket. She heard the racket of his pursuit.

  She thought she was running parallel to the road they’d driven in on, which meant if she continued in a straight line she would end up at the main camping area, where there would be others.

  Yet would this matter? Would Luke get hold of himself and calm down? Or would he continue his insane rampage and attack everyone? Was she putting others in danger by leading him to them?

  But what else could she do?

  The trees became denser. Branches tore her dress and skin, scraping and cutting her bare arms and legs.

  She had never been this terrified in her life. She wanted to scream, to tell Luke to leave her the fuck alone. But she was too scared, too winded, to do so.

  Luke barked something at her, something vicious, and just as she was thinking he was going to catch her, and beat her to a pulp, and maybe kill her in his madness, she burst into a clearing—a clearing filled with a handful of cabins. She veered toward one which had light seeping from a window.