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My pulse races, fresh adrenaline coursing through my blood. The stench of piss is the first thing to hit me under the fluorescent lights. The man’s jaw cracks as Seth’s fist slams against it and blood sprays from his lip.
The man’s head sways, his hands bound behind his back in the bolted-down chair.
Many men have rushed secrets out of busted mouths in this room.
As Jase pulls a chair closer to him, to continue his interrogation, Seth steps back. His shirt is stained with blood, as are his worn jeans.
“How long has it been?” I ask him. Other than my brothers, he’s the closest approximation to a friend I have.
“Going on three,” he answers, his voice even and the man of the hour wouldn’t know it, but behind Seth’s gaze is a tiredness as well as concern.
“I’m telling you,” the man starts, before spitting up blood, “I don’t know who.” He heaves in a breath, his head still dangling. Jase lifts the man’s chin up to look in his eyes. Both are swollen, while one brow sports a gash, and the other is swollen shut.
“I’m sure there’s something you can tell us,” Jase suggests, tilting his head and urging the man to give up a name or any information that could help us uncover the rat in our midst.
A heat rushes through me as the man heaves in a sob. He knows damn well he’ll die here, if not tonight, then early morning. It’s pathetic and it speaks to a side of me I long thought was dead.
“I don’t know, I swear,” he says and with Jase’s hand dropping, he leans back as Seth moves in. The man’s cheekbone crushes beneath Seth’s fist, and his head whips to the side with a vicious crack. For a moment I wonder if Seth broke his neck.
The agony in the man’s strangled cry promises me he’s still alive. He wails and his pain ricochets off the walls of this concrete chamber. Other than three simple steel chairs, one bolted to the floor in the center of the room, there’s nothing else here in the hidden back room.
“I don’t know.” The man’s inhale is harsh and sudden. The clot of blood he coughs up forces Seth and Jase to exchange a glance. It won’t be long. This informant won’t last another hour. “They didn’t share the names,” he confesses, his eyes closed, his head hung heavy.
I move in, gripping his chin and staring down into his very soul.
“How many?” I question.
“Two.” His answer is immediate.
“Both here?” He nods, a useless, weak nod I barely feel against my hand.
“How long?” I ask and he answers, “For years.”
It’s my only consolation as I back away, wiping the blood from my palm on the man’s jeans.
In a white shirt with a nondescript logo, faded jeans and brown boots, I imagine this isn’t what he wanted to die in.
“How did you find him?” I ask Jase, although I don’t turn to my brother. I keep my focus on the man we’re minutes from murdering.
As my brother tells me, his answer fades into the background. Everything in this moment takes me back to years ago. Back to when I first knew our lives weren’t like everyone else’s. There was something wrong with us, but we would survive if we had each other.
Braelynn was there, in this memory. As Seth resumes his onslaught, as Jase screams for answers and barters lies for truth, I remember a moment with her as I left school. I knew whatever I was leaving for was something that would haunt me. I stayed after school to watch the football team practice. I’d been thinking of trying out. Really, though, I stayed to watch Braelynn working with the athletic trainers. But Jase texted me he was there; that they needed me.
As I walked down the front steps, I felt her eyes on me. It was like she knew. Like she wanted to stop me. She didn’t, though. No one ever did.
Carter was in the back of Jase’s car, his face much like the man’s tonight. The smell of alcohol was apparent, but I knew it didn’t come from my brother. My father was the only one Carter would allow to beat him like that.
I remember how loud it was when I swallowed. How Jase had to grip my shoulders to get my attention and keep me from staring at Carter.
“Everything’s all right, I just … I need you to drive.” He was nodding his head before I could answer. “Can you do that?”
“Where are we going?”
“To the water,” Carter answered, his tone dull, but he patted the back of the driver’s seat with a welcoming gesture. It was a rare day where I felt genuinely needed. For most of my life, I’d been the kid crying, the kid who was in the way. “Get in.”
When we were halfway there, Jase and Carter discussed how long it would take to dig. There was a hill at the dock; it led up to thick woods on the left and a dense field on the right. “We’ll bury him by the field. It’ll be spring before they even find his body.”
That was the first moment I heard them say it out loud. There were so many things we never said out loud. We didn’t talk about how we missed our mother. We didn’t talk about how hungry we were or how fucked the house was with all the repairs it needed. We didn’t talk about how Dad was killing himself with alcohol. And how he took out his anger on my oldest two brothers.
