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Insanity Road
Insanity Road
Insanity Road
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Insanity Road

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The prequel to Death Impressions and Blood of Belladonna, Insanity Road takes the reader back to the childhood of three violent and troubled men.

"I love my mother," writes Roy Vega, "at least I love one version of her. I'm terrified of the other. This isn't how I envisioned my life to go, but I don't know any different. I'm probably doomed, but I have hope my little brother Eddie is still young enough to escape and have a normal life. I have money saved up and a bag packed. The only thing holding me back is getting little Eddie out with me. If she catches me, I'll probably disappear like the others."

LanguageEnglish
PublisherJL Rehman
Release dateMay 24, 2013
ISBN9781607710103
Insanity Road
Author

JL Rehman

Jl Rehman has a background in law enforcement, a childhood fascination of the macabre and lives in the vanishing rurals of central Florida. JL Rehman is the publisher at Partners In Crime Publishers and the author of four Florida crime fiction novels.Read her interview on the Partners In Crime Publisher page. If there is any problem uploading these books please email me at: infopicp@picp.us

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    Insanity Road - JL Rehman

    Insanity Road

    By

    JL Rehman

    SMASHWORDS EDITION

    ****

    PUBLISHED BY:

    JL Rehman on SMASHWORDS

    Insanity Road

    Copyright 2013 by J L Rehman

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

    This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

    Smashwords Edition License Notes

    This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    Published 2013 by Partners In Crime Publishers

    http://www.partnersincrimepublishers.com

    Smashwords Edition 2013

    ISBN: 978-1-60771-010-3

    Religion in the hands of the insane is the devil’s entertainment

    JL Rehman

    Alachua County, Florida—the late 1970s.

    Bella Vega believes in the devil.

    Not only the winged horny one depicted in William Blake’s painting The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun, a devil with a tail that in her mind is more lizard than snake, but the devil in a man’s soul with strong hands and dark eyes that seduces you to sin on yourself. She’s sinned on herself three times that she’ll admit.

    Denies the rest.

    She glances in bitter disappointment into the rearview mirror at her three boys in the backseat—Roy, seventeen, trying to scrub blood off his hand onto his pant leg, Ricky, an insolent fifteen, and little Eddie, ten. Eddie’s not the brightest of the three, but he tries the hardest to please her. That revelation isn’t wasted on a night like this. She’s using him more often while on the troll—his face sweet, eyes large and vulnerable. Any young girl would melt under Eddie’s gaze. He grins in the backseat like he knows a secret no one else does, muttering under his breath to no one in particular.

    Ricky, her middle boy, does little more than grunt and shrug. It takes repeated commands to get him focused. A little too wrapped up in the material world is what that is. She claims the TV’s to blame and threatens to sling it out the door when they get back to the house. Just as well they don’t catch the evening news when she’s in the room to avoid being quizzed about reports of missing girls in their area that will invite awkward dinner conversation and questions like …ain’t that the girl we picked up?

    Usually, emotional explosions on her part dampen down inquiries like that, but lately Roy gives her knowing looks she tries to ignore. So far he stays loyal and keeps his judgments to himself, but one day it’ll end. One day it’ll come down to him or her. As for Ricky, TV’s gone. First thing.

    Bella turns east and presses the accelerator, headed for town in a 1962 rusted-out Ford Falcon Squire station wagon defecating oily smoke from worn piston rings, driven by a psychotic woman who can’t keep a man in the house long enough to fix it.

    The radio blasts a Christ’s Crusade preacher instigating action against Satan and his followers—hysteria shrieking across the airwaves of the scrub palm, sand flats of central Florida; Bella yelling Jeeeesus! at each pause break while glancing in the rearview to see which one of her boys is participating in tonight’s sermon. Eddie enjoys yelling Jeeeesus! out loud with hyperactive vigor.

    Roy gazes out the window, he’s not with the program, hasn’t been for a couple of months now. Bella caught him with prohibited magazines rolled stiff into tubes rammed between the mattress and the box spring, sex catalogs of the devil—pick your position—and now the mattress sits out at the road for the junk man to pick up. Anything left at the road the junk man gets free. He slips up and down the road once a week, his derelict pickup piled to the top of the cab with the rusted carcasses of battered washers, dryers, bedsprings, anything sellable to the scrap metal dealer. She’d yelled at him one day asking if he’d pick up wicked boys too. Junkman waved and smiled at the woman everyone in the neighborhood says lives in Cuckoo Town—but never to her face.

    "Kill the devil!" she screams at the radio, but not like those Holy Rollers, entranced folks dancing and swaying in church aisles; arms and shoulders draped with slick, lethargic, poisonous snakes, or sprawled between the pews struck with seizure-like fits. She tells her boys they’re doing it for the attention, but Bella says she’s fighting the real war.

    She makes a right onto a desolate ribbon of highway dimly lit by the one functioning faded headlight, cranks down the window and thrusts out her arm to punch at an invisible saurian spirit she’s convinced is conspiring to gain access to the car and her soul—kids are on their own—the car massaging the centerline one second then veering for the shoulder the next.

    A litany of profanities sweep in with the rush of humid Florida night air, words the boys are forbidden to use, but necessary for her in the on-going battle of the spirit world. Sometimes you have to get down to their level, spirit level that is, if you’re gonna win the fight—so she said one day after blowing the head off neighbor Tate’s pony with the twelve gauge. She’d been watching it for the better part of three weeks noting the way it hung by the fence line between properties to spy on the house. She didn’t like the way it eyed her while standing under the shade tree when she’d get the mail or pick through the garden, or the way it constantly shook its head as if mocking and taunting her circumstance—possessed evil bastard—at least in her mind.

    Lucky for her the neighbors were out of town for a few days, something about a glitch in a quit claim deed, she can’t remember, but her three boys were inducted to dig the hole right where it fell. Too big to drag off. Took the better part of the day to dig a hole that deep, annoying Bella because it took so long and chores were backing up—damn weakling kids bitching about It’s hot and we’re thirsty—Bella muttering, Why can’t they buck up like real men and do what they’re told?

    When the neighbors came back and queried the Vegas, Bella said they had no idea what became of the pony. Bella did inform them, because she heard it on the TV, how thieves were rustling horses and cattle right out of the pastures in the dead of night to sell straight to the meat factories to ship to Japan—a delicacy there—thievin’ happening all over, she’d said.

    No one talks and that makes the night crawl, at least to the boys, but Bella’s focused and keeps her eyes peeled to the road while unwrapping and eating her specialty chocolates, and Roy, out of the blue says, I don’t want to do this anymore.

    Bella’s eyes snap back to the rearview and smolder as if they have the power to clutch him by the throat.

    And that shuts him up.

    A price has to be paid for yapping it up and pulling Bella out of the hunt even for a moment, God help them all if she can’t get a vision fix—this being their third run this week and the moon’s waning gibbous and Roy’s suppressing mild panic at the thought of her coming up empty again. And that’s the catch he’s in, feed her demon to give them all a sliver of peace or keep his hands clean so his mind doesn’t suffer. Any way he looks at it, someone is going to suffer tonight.

    He thinks of home and of the woods beyond, not the ones in the back, but at the side, the east side close to the state highway and dreams of how he’d run if he ever got the chance.

    Brother Ricky shifts in his seat cocooned in the stinking moldy car and his fingernail jabs Roy in the hand, not on purpose, but because Ricky’s alive and in the backseat. He hates being here, so he told Roy late one night after Bella finally passed out from exhaustion. She doesn’t sleep much until she’s had her vision. Ricky said he’d be gone one way or another, and Roy’s a little jealous about it. Deep down he’s not sure he’d have the guts to go. That would mean leaving defect Eddie behind to pick up the slack and Roy’s not sure Eddie can survive very long alone with her.

    Sneaking around listening in on private conversations between Bella and her live-in brother Dupree, Roy’s overheard the hushed excuses of Eddie’s problems. Lack of oxygen at birth, forceps too tight at delivery, who knows. All Roy knows is how being stand-in daddy keeps him here when he shouldn’t be. Wishes he could date girls and play football like other guys.

    Eddie farts and giggles. Knows everyone can smell it.

    Roy doesn’t glance up at the rearview mirror, doesn’t want to see Bella’s yellow reptilian-like eyes, not tonight, so he prays for a semi-tractor trailer to hit them head on, end this vampirish life, jam the engine of this emphysemic car so far back it lands on Bella’s washboard chest. With her trapped, he, Ricky and Eddie could escape and watch the car ignite into roiling flames while they stand at the road and watch her burn. It wouldn’t really be her, but the two-headed demon of the moon-stop—an infection, unidentified, alien. He coined that little title for Bella as soon as he realized the girls were victims and not guests, took a while, grateful his baby brother is still in the dark about their mother’s little part-time hobby.

    Maybe in the flames they’ll see the demon for what it truly is and confirm they were right all along about how their real mother probably died years ago. Then they can put her to rest and send that spirit thing back to hell where it belongs.

    Roy picks at the faded, cracked vinyl on the armrest, picking deep into the foam underneath until his fingertips feel metal, the lights whizzing by, store fronts, power lines, trees, the street light at a bus stop with a girl seated next to a piece of ratty pink carry-on luggage.

    The Ford brakes hard and slides to a stop—Showtime.

    Roy stares the girl in the face, nothing between them but glass and grime and muggy night air, and she lifts her delicate chin because an old Ford has pulled up to the bus stop like it’s their job to pull up and say whatever, to keep company any young girl alone.

    Roy whispers to the glass, Run girl, whispers so Bella can’t hear, if she does, he’ll spend the night in the bunker for sure.

    The girl pulls her carry-on closer and Roy imagines she’s hopeful someone in the old Ford might get dropped off to catch the bus with her, someone she can talk to, talk about her big adventure. She squeezes the carry-on close to her side to be polite and smiles and Roy’s eyes squint shut to block out her pale face, to erase her thin smile. She’s going to lose it soon enough and that’s the saddest of all, when they lose the smile. That’s the thing he hates most.

    For a moment he pretends they’re old friends on the way to the mall, not the run down strip plaza of dying businesses in their cancerous little town, but the big mall thirty miles up filled with fashion styles, the fragrances of expensive perfumes, the food court and guys his age with parents who smile and don’t eye their kids with suspicion. He wants to open the door and scream at her to run and not look back. She can’t be more than fifteen. He’s gotten good at judging their age, judging them ripe for Bella’s picking. Older ones fight more. He’s got the scars to prove it, deep on his arms, crisscrossed on his forehead, on his thigh—a desperate bite scar.

    Bella tells folks her boys are rambunctious to distract anyone from their odd behavior or chance slip-ups. Roy’s not sure what that really means. He is sure he won’t look an outsider in the eye while Bella tries to explain it because he’s not sure he can hide the truth, and if Bella suspects he might tell her secrets, he can only imagine how she’ll make him pay. Make them all pay.

    What haunts him the most is his need for truth; the truth about his father, a secret no one is willing to tell, but most of all he doesn’t trust anyone in his whacked out family. The only one that gets truth is Bella who’s always able to dig the truth out by looking in a person’s eyes, right down to their soul.

    Roy suspects it’s the demon that can read minds, the one that feeds on the blood coming straight from her rotten heart and knows exactly what’s going on. But Roy stares at the girl hoping she’ll catch on, read him like a billboard and run.

    Leave the damn bag! Who cares, leave it and run, and never look back. Live your life, whatever life it is, don’t stop, don’t listen, don’t be kind and happy thinkin’ someone cares, that someone wants to help you out with no price to pay.

    He mutters, You’re gonna pay, his breath coming back at him from the glass—sour, toxic rage bubbling up like it always does. He can’t stop looking at her delicate fingers wrapped around the strap of her carry-on, nails he’s sure to feel—doesn’t want to hear her voice, because for weeks he’ll hear it in his nightmares. Like the others, left alone with them trying to explain, but they won’t hear. They all beg the way girls do and he hates them for it, can already imagine what her voice sounds like even though soon he won’t be able to get it out of his head. Murmurs, Run girl.

    Eddie opens the door on his side, nods at Bella then steps out of the car still holding that disabled smile.

    Roy’s eyes drop to the floorboard so he can’t see, but he watches in his mind’s eye, he’s seen it over and over, knows what Eddie will say, how he’ll hold out his hand as a gesture, an invitation, a promise. Roy wonders when it will end, this trolling like a lone shark, the old Ford cutting through deep mystic water, murky green, him and his brothers attached like remora, Bella the mouth, the wide mouth with teeth, bits of flesh from past kills stuck between the white triangles, the dead eyes with no real purpose, no end in sight, to troll mile after mile of highway hoping for a bite. He prays some crusty hero can rescue him and his brothers from the dark inside.

    Would it end if he somehow put an end to Bella, stopped her cold, slit her throat, dumped her body in the lime pits to rot? No burial for her. There are no words to stop her; she’s dead to his voice, blind in denial, converted by a religion of her own making thanks to the old guy down the road, the doctor she connected to believing he could see deep inside her suicidal glories.

    Roy knows this because she screamed it at them in the middle of dinner like it was their fault. She’d said it more than once, and Roy in his seventeen-year-old brain knows he doesn’t have anything to stop her. Comes up stupid empty. There’s fear and loathing of the sounds that are coming, and the smell of this victim that will stick to the inside of his nose like the metal stench of fresh blood on him now.

    How old will he be before he can stop her? When will Bella feel filled up, satisfied and say, Enough is enough.

    What would happen if he jumped out?

    All he has to judge the consequences is what he knows from the past and none of it worked out, so he detaches to be-come a little less human. There’s no time to whisper to Ricky who sits chewing his fingers, his way of staying out of it until Bella needs him to do clean-up. Too late for little Eddie who’s cloaked in Bella’s wooing spell, him speaking for her with no thought of his own. No time to set a plan into action because any plan is doomed. They’re all doomed and Roy realizes his heart’s pounding deep in his neck like a lizard trying to claw its way out, his sweaty hand trembling on the faded door handle.

    The decision is now or never. Once Girl’s in the car it’ll be too late. Once the door swings shut and the transmission drops into drive, it’ll be too late. For her and for them. And then—it’s over.

    Eddie makes the hand gesture that tells Bella this girl isn’t the one, can’t be because she’s defective. Bella’s taught Eddie well, like how to test and inspect whether they meet her standards. Bella says retard girls are off limits because of defective blood like TB or the VD. Eddie doesn’t really get the whole standards thing, so he told Roy, but he can spot a retard—point dead being his talent like the bird dogs they used to have—until a girl like her flushes and then he has to let it go.

    Bella waves Eddie back to the car and Roy watches the girl’s face and how her expression doesn’t change, how she can’t appreciate her luck on this miserable muggy night. Bella hands Eddie a five dollar bill from the open window, says to pass it along and starts the engine. Roy can see the girl doesn’t suspect what this is all about other than some nice people drove up and gave her cash.

    Soon enough, Bella’s shoe-polisher will hit on the right one and he’ll grin with little kid excitement, watching Bella’s face for approval, a precious commodity only Eddie gets.

    Roy thumps his head against the glass, once, twice. As they drive off, he squints his eyes close as the bus stop disappears in the dark.

    ***

    On the drive home, Eddie repetitively mutters, Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie, and slides into a barely audible conversation with some imaginary friend that has more to say than Eddie wants to hear. Suddenly gone is his exuberant grin and endless restlessness.

    Roy rests his head against the cool glass, nothing visible in the dark but the warm glow in windows from homes passed in the night.

    Bella lights a cigarette, pins it between her fingers to burn without ever coming to her lips. She’s deep in prayer, it too barely audible as she recites some damn bitter incantation of her own invention. To Roy, it sounds like a desperate plea, the possible acknowledgment of failure that she’ll pay some hellish price for. He wonders what price could be worse than blood-letting.

    He can’t help but wonder what would happen if she decided not to go out? He itches to know that answer, questions the stupid reason for these late night car rides and hitcher pick-ups. How much more trouble can he get into by asking a simple question any normal kid would ask? He’s pissed her off enough to get put in the bunker, so if he asked her, what could she do? What does he have to lose?

    And before he knows it, he asks, So, why can’t you use the one we got in the back?

    Roy hears his words, but he can’t stuff them back in his mouth for his own protection and yet he’s queerly relieved. Even Ricky comes out of his haze and stares Roy in the face, mouths something Roy can’t decipher in the dark and at that moment—the car slows and pulls to the side of the road.

    Eddie says, Mama’s gonna take care of her, ain’t that right, Mama?

    They all hear the confidence in Eddie’s little kid question, because as far as Eddie’s concerned, the tarp-covered Girl in back has taken sick after a playtime scuffle with Roy—apparently didn’t witness him bash her head into the door post—and has faith that Bella has the sole power to cure her. Doesn’t clue in that the Girl’s not said a word or moved in over an hour. Time is a relative thing to a ten-year-old.

    They sit in the Ford on the side of the road in the dark as late night fog slips across the windshield, and beyond, a vaporous sea. No one speaks. The boys try to suppress their breath. The curl of Bella’s cigarette smoke winds around their heads as they stare at the back of her head and the sharp outline of her famished cheeks.

    Her eyes fixate beyond the glass, lips murmuring a language no one can interpret.

    Ricky whispers, You’re gonna get it now.

    Soon as they get home, Bella keeps her promise. Roy’s banished to the bunker. Doesn’t even get a chance to go back into the house. Gets locked up, first thing.

    Roy’s not sure what’s moved in with him out here. Not in the dark. Once he found a scorpion and poked at it for hours with a broken, chewed pencil stub until he got bored and stabbed it into the dirt, cutting it in half. Afterward, he played with the smooth, toxic stinger, scraped it down his forearm then gently poked his skin, tempting fate. He never did break the skin, but thinking back on it, next time he might. Next time he won’t kill it, but manage it, corral it with gentle movements, stroke its back and dare it to strike, and at the very last second—kill it. He imagined the stinger was Bella and secretly hoped it would poison him and this life would be over. At least for him. But he has brothers who don’t deserve her justice.

    Who’s left to keep watch on her, her brother Dupree who’s mental and ignores his dysfunctional family for the prize of his own collections? Roy wonders if being poisoned would be so bad. How much more toxic can a scorpion be compared to Bella? Yeah, a scorpion’s poison got nothing on her.

    The only light in the bunker is a half-inch slit at the roof vent. In the dead of night with an anemic moon, Roy can’t see much. Can’t see what’s living with him either.

    He knew it was coming—getting shoved into the bunker. That’s what Bella calls it. A ten-foot section of corrugated steel road pipe repurposed for emergencies like tornadoes or nuclear fallout. At least that’s what the guy said who sold it to Eddie’s dead-beat father years back. A crew of shifty, dirt-crusted day laborers crawled from the back of a pickup and dug a big hole out back. Partial berming they called it. Pipe was trailered out on a flatbed and dropped in. Has a smaller pipe through the top for ventilation and a jacked-up tin door for an entrance and no windows. Instant security.

    Roy doesn’t feel so secure. It stinks of putrefied water from seepage weeping through the rusted steel, and piss from him and his brothers’ regular visits—the pipe not meant to sit below water level indefinitely without being sealed. Said so in the brochure.

    He sings, Across the river in Hoochie Macoo lived a ding dong lady with a fling-a-mafloo. Wonders how long Bella will keep him out here, believes he’s being made an example. Examples are real important to her, uses them for leverage like yesterday when he had to drag his mattress to the road while the others stood on

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