Good and Evil : Freeland - Part Two (9781628547375) Read online

  Drake walked over with a side hitch to his smile. He was confident that, if it came down to it, he would know what to do if Abby was serious. He also realized that Treble and he could have been getting lead into a lust trap to see how genuine their friendship was to Brody. Neither of the two thought Abby cared about Brody anymore. It became apparent once she caught herself between two tall rides, head-whipped back her shiny black hair, and lifted her shirt when no one else was looking. One of Treble’s close friends, Marc Rivers, accidentally got an eye-full as he was walking by.

  Her abs were tight and showed contours and shadows, but not so much they resembled masculinity—just enough to emphasize her fitness. She had been tanning and a bronze sheen glistened from her skin, bringing out curves and touchable areas. Treble was trembling; a burning sensation had caught his groin. Drake coached him out of his weakness. Treble had never seen this anywhere else other than in nude magazines and when he saw his mom in the flesh.

  A chain of vehicles paraded toward the mouth of the highly-revered and feared Clue Valley Canyon, where the wedding of waters on the Shord’s Knuckle River bent the road inward. A nature-made land tunnel swallowed the light. In the middle was the entrance to a trail leading to the Love Shack, about two miles short of the mouth of the fabled dark canyon. The lead car stopped, punched in a code to open the tunnel door, and lit a path. Only few knew of its location. Everyone else followed.

  Tynan’s mom had already left the keys to her basement liquor store. He had loaded the back of his pimped-out, white with black top, king-sized four-door, four-wheel-drive, and mud bogging Terra Stomper. The wheels stood four feet high and three feet wide. When he went hill-climbing or swamp-thrashing, mud was slung in all directions. Usually, more mud got on the sides of the truck than on the surrounding ground.

  When Tynan entered the narrow tunnel, his wheels brushed the walls of the path as crumbles of red dirt fell below and were smoothed by the cars and trucks at tail. At the end of the hollow, a metal door parted open, revealing a vast expanse of terrain surrounding the hill-based Love Shack. The place had lights strung about it that lit up the night sky as everyone entered. A huge neon sign read Love Shack with a squiggly, sperm-shaped arrow that pointed to a hole in the ground. A motion sensor ignited a visible trail of red, neon ground lights on both sides of the route. The party-goers took the path that lead up the side of the hill where, at peak’s end, they widened in a circle, looking down through the ring surrounding the top of this underground party palace.

  Drake looked over at Treble and gave him a high-five as a whirlybird of rockets spun around on both sides of a now visible sign reading: Rumor Mill Bobcats—Three-peat Champions. Congrats. As more and more fireworks went off, each player’s number with their name shining about a glowing football helmet introduced all to their victory party.

  Having intentionally worn non-pocketed, loose khaki shorts, Abby widened her legs to lean each against Drake’s and Treble’s. The gearshift in the middle became Drake’s resting pad for his right hand. He draped the rest of his arm on Abby’s near-barren, left inner-thigh as a sign of dominance, or ownership, for the night. Treble still felt a bit nervous, but that all ended the moment Drake left to join the party. Treble hesitated long enough for Abby to tug on his shirt and stop him from leaving.

  Within a matter of seconds, she had him reclined in the seat and covered his mouth with hers. Swiftly, she worked her hands down his chest to his mid-section.

  On their way out to the Love Shack, the three had played drinking games with their sixty-four ounce cups of alcohol concoctions. Drake gave Abby more than her fair share of Purple Passion when she wasn’t looking. She was already smashed and doing things that she wouldn’t normally do when sober. Maybe she was just releasing the repressed feelings she had only shared with Brody. Maybe her feelings of anger were externalizing to rear their ugly heads, and she was retaliating against how it made her feel inside when he physically abused her.

  Lexie pulled in behind Drake’s truck. She and another bigger cheerleader, her best friend, Shana Mariot, got out. There was a car stereo left playing amidst the sounds of bass thumping the ground from below. Sneakily, she crept to the passenger’s side door of the pickup and leaned in to find Abby’s head in good ol’ Treble’s lap. His head was laid back against the headrest, eyes closed, and rolling back and forth with a pleasure-strained wrinkle between both eyebrows.

  Abby stopped for a second and looked up as a string of spit dribbled from her mouth to Treble’s stomach. With one hand still gingerly upon it, she looked up vacantly. Her lower jaw dropped for a moment. To Lexie, she appeared dumbfounded or perhaps just intoxicated. She looked strewn, a bit awkward, in a setting where she probably didn’t want anybody finding out. Well, Lexie wasn’t the type of person to start any gossip. So much had already been flung on her, but Shana, on the other hand, was all about letting everyone know other people’s business. There were no secrets with her. Unfortunately for Abby and Treble, she happened to stumble to the door and look in. Making matters worse, Abby put one finger to her lips as if to attempt to tell them to shush. Her eyes slowly faded as her head rolled back. Instantly and without any warning, her mouth opened wide. A chute of stinky, yellowish-purple liquid, with bits and chunks of Maverik nachos and Bahama Mama Sausage, sprayed Treble’s pants and lower shirt. She passed out in the puke. So much for her and her girls’ plan of eating before they drank to help them better handle their alcohol.

  Treble came out of his wave and looked down at Abby. Her straight, jet-black hair was glistening from the wetness. He realized what had happened as he looked out the window for an escape. Lexie and Shana rolled on the ground in laughter. With both hands covering their mouths and a sour expression on their faces, they were in disbelief that this happened. Treble beckoned for them not to tell anyone. It was too late. Drake, in a fit of impatience and jealousy, herded a group of people to frame Treble, one of Brody’s closest friends. By doing so, he started an all-out war.

  One of the many standing about Drake’s truck was Isaic. He just happened to bring his party-cam goggles. Before the evidence could be cleaned up, the recording was secured, and on its way to Brody via video mail.

  The commotion carried everyone to the underground. A loud wave of thumps, choreographed to light displays, emerged once the roof to the Love Shack opened. An elevator shaft lowered the first group of party people until swallowing them whole with neon rays. Isaic was on the first ride down, still filming everything for Brody.

  On a platform of liquid lava, several skimpily-dressed dancers dodged swinging cords. At the end of each wire were fireballs of mirrors reflecting a dark green gel below. Gauze strips of neon orange swirled into yellow and barely covered the dancing chicks’ breasts and mid-sections. A look down from them was a lighted dance floor where the lava flow dumped below the glass stage barrier. The fluid pushed outward to form an estuary of lit attraction. The river beneath the glass dance floor rolled back and forth, synchronized to the hip-hop-spun new wave music.

  The elevator released its passengers, spitting them out at the bottom. Back up it went to the top of this forty-foot high, domed ceiling. A look up was visually captivating. Light rays were roving everywhere. Smoke rolled around as fans swirled it into a cyclone. The elevator disappeared for a moment and then appeared again with more pleasure seekers.

  The Ice Bar was an elongated, makeshift stack of ice blocks with steam rolling over the edges. No stools or chairs were next to it, just a waist-high ledge with dividers extending upward about two and a half feet. Every drug a person could imagine was available at each booth. The most popular was a cross between ecstasy and acid, a highly charged freak-fest called Excaliburn. The lights would swirl and dance across the canopy of this party chamber. In-sync with the drug user’s motions, occasionally the lights would brush the person’s arms and legs to bring a highly pleasurable feeling that shot up and down their bodies.r />
  Several people, mainly the deviants in school, stepped away from the booths with the look of being lost on their face after taking their hits. They frequently brushed their fingers across closed eyelids as their heads lifted toward the ceiling. The drugs were provided for those who used. It didn’t mean anything to a lot of the players, one of whom was Drake; he only liked to drink. Drugs weren’t a part of his persona.

  Jessica Glethry, once again, came out to the Love Shack. Drake tried to hit on her but failed once Zon took over. They had a fling a time ago, so Zon had the advantage. Jessica’s jet-black hair, long past her shoulders, was layered at top and hung low over her eyebrows. She blew it to one side by overlapping her upper lip. Beautiful brown eyes lit up her slightly tanned face. Zon waltzed up to her and lifted the two-time reigning prom queen (not bad for having only been in the running twice) and twirled her away to the dance floor. Drake walked off with a bruised ego.

  Drake (a.k.a., “No Jaw”) would’ve had more luck with the ladies had he not been born with an overbite, and not just a slight overbite, a full-drawn cave-in of the lower jaw. He didn’t let it affect his esteem, but contemplated sometimes about getting it corrected through surgery. Nevertheless, he was on to the next prey. This girl was known for her easiness. Drake quit trying for the night and settled with Miss Mattress-Back, Farrah Rodeo, whose mom was a bona-fide horse trainer. They grinded on the dance floor as everyone else joined.

  Treble teetered a bit as he stepped out of Drake’s quad-cab truck. The fireworks had died. Leftover were tracers fading slowly in the night. To the surroundings was owed a brilliant highlight.

  Abby felt sick again as misery accompanied her to the floorboard. In a fetal position she tucked and quietly entered a blank slumber.

  Treble had to take a leak, so he cantered to the edge of a deep-sloped hill on the exterior of the Love Shack. As Treble was aiming outward and leaning over at the same time, a loud chopper noise sounded from the neighboring hill. A spotlight caught him with his pants down to his ankles. Not yet finished urinating, he quickly pulled up his soaked pair of undies, getting them even wetter. The fright he felt was interrupted by a feeling of uncertainty. Why was there a helicopter not one hundred yards away, shining a light on a half-dressed teenager and wrecking the celebration of the year?

  The answer: the overlooking-chosen of planet Trendago had GPSed the location from a tip-off. Once word reached the underground that the helicrew was moving in and Sgt. Meane was leading the bust, Zon completely lost it.

  Treble sent his legs down the shrub-covered slope toward the door of the tunnel. Upon approaching, the corridor of ground lights flickered and then disappeared. All was dark. He felt around, slowly using his extended hands as antennae. Not only drunk but blind as well, he unintentionally snagged a root with his toe and slid down an algae-covered ditch. Trickles of descending water glistened ahead, working their way toward him as he remained hidden for the time being. Noiselessly, he lay within the concealment of the ditch.

  After resting momentarily, he haphazardly belly-crawled toward the tunnel door, which was only twenty-five yards ahead from the washout. One of the helicopters kept an extremely bright light aimed at the rustic door to his freedom. Treble had to wait patiently in the cold, wet trench. His fingernails, full with muck, served as stabilizers while he stayed still for the moment.

  The electricity to the Love Shack had been unplugged. Now the hole was dark and smoky. The most sober of party-goers tried to huddle everyone who would listen to an unlit corner furthest away from the elevator. Through the settling smoke and the noise from those too high to realize this wasn’t a joke, the hole opened enough for noisy propellers and roaming spotlights to catch a lot of the dancers below. Over a loud speaker someone sounded. The music stopped and so did the dancing.

  “All right, you little hooligans; I want everyone to the center of the floor. No one talks; just huddle together like I said. The first person to try anything funny will be drained of their life by our trusty sharpshooter. That’s his red dot encircling you all. Don’t think I’m afraid to use tranquilizers on any of you little troublemakers.”

  Two of the deviants who had taken several hits of a stimulant/pot combo, called Hyperbowlic, thought they were going to act the hero. Both strenuously dragged out an oversized, skin-melting, laser gel combat rifle-taser and aimed it at the helicopter while it was charging with potential energy. They were almost in time to pull the trigger and release the actively-charged positive ions. Seconds before, a sedation dart, with glowing feathers on it, entered the middle of a red dot on each of their shoulders, and the boys dropped spiritless to the floor. They convulsed a couple of times like victims of a seizure. Seconds later, a white, foamy froth emerged out both of their noses and mouths. No one moved in fear they would be next. Jessica Glethry buried her head in Zon’s chest as she cried in fear. Suddenly, the bodies disappeared, gone without a trace, and no mess to clean up. Even the magistrates were awestruck by this freak occurrence.

  Out of all 284 people amassed at the stage of this murder/suicide, none expected this party would turn out as such.

  An allergic reaction between the drugs and the dart venom caused the deviants, Shane Poole and Den-Den Saddlesby, to fall short in this second life. The reason it was a suicide is because they chose to do the drugs and way too much of them. The dart was merely a catalyst to ignite the drug’s reactivity. To the Creator, both were sent. In front of him, Shane and Den-Den would need another review. The one question everybody asked aloud was: “If we died tonight, would we go to heaven or Nostradama?” None felt worthy to surpass their second chance. After Trendago, it was either back to Earth (heaven) with the good, to DSOH for a mental resurrection, or to Nostradama (hell) with the spiritually estranged. Procrastination got everyone down on their knees, asking forgiveness and hoping desperately it wasn’t too late.

  Sgt. Meane wasn’t the bearer of forgiveness, nor was he looking for anything other than to perform his duties of separating the bad from the good. His redemption from the iniquities of ago was to erase those tribulations by making certain all who walked the desolate plains of Trendago were on the righteous path. He was, more or less, a guardian for lost souls, a resuscitator to those who needed reviving, despite having his flaws in need of amending.

  Sgt. Meane lowered the elevator manually. He took a stern chain from a winch on the bottom of the helicopter and hooked it to the cage of the shaft. The first group of people Zon delegated to be caught were the retards who got strung out on dope. This gave him time enough to devise an escape plan.

  Tynan knew the Love Shack the best. To the cops, there was only one way out. To Tynan, there was a back door, per-se, and he was alone in knowledge of its whereabouts. Well, besides Zon who was the actual person who founded the Love Shack.

  A heli-bus arrived and gathered a majority of those already captured. It was two stories high, as well long, with fourteen propellers that created an excruciating whine, piercing the cavern. Drake took his hands off Farrah’s belt and plugged both ears as he followed the football team through a ventilation duct that ended at the river. Just in case it might be needed, Zon grabbed the ionic rifle taser. He was pretty much the only one strong enough to use it. The gun was still charged; all he had to do was undo the safety and pull the trigger. In the meantime, he was extremely cautious.

  The two-hundred-member group of teens single-filed through a six-foot-tall air duct. A strong current sucked them in and continued pulling them along the tunnel. Zon had to squat low so as not to hit his head on the entrance, but was easily tugged in this enormous vacuum. Like skiers paralleling down a slope, they used the sides as balancers still sliding toward the exit.

  Floor smoke was thinly dissipating into the vents. The rolling fog abnormally undulated to the slits of vents in the airway’s door. From inside the Love Shack, Sgt. Meane followed its trail, knowing the bodies inside were causing t
he fog to slow through the outer vents. He didn’t know how many he was up against. The oversized, spiritual law enforcer entered the air funnel in spite of that fact.

  With wheels equipped on his all-purpose cop boots, he caught up to the slowest of skiers. One question: what were the youngsters planning to do when they reached the end where the fan was as wide as the entry? There was no way they were going to pass through. If they didn’t think of something fast, they would all end up getting pureed and processed through the bottom of this vented air blender.

  One by one, Waylon shackled the slowest of teenagers and electronically tagged them as he started a chain of captured people. While the fan was getting closer, and the tunnel was getting shorter, a light was getting brighter. As to what this light was, no one had a clue. There was the reservoir of water outside the air passage. Maybe one of Trendago’s moons was reflecting beams off the low, choppy river, and the steely blade of the fan was glancing it tunnel-ward. Whatever the case, it was enabling Waylon to see silhouettes of the rest of the group.

  Ten more teens were tagged and Waylon was gaining pace. On the twenty-eighth attempt, he ran into the wrong person. Harvey Tucker was the center for the Bobcats. He was a couple inches shorter than Zon, and not nearly as strong, but he weighed one hundred pounds more. Body-weight-wise, he had him by at least thirty percent more fat. He was still too much a young man for Waylon to overcome. Waylon went to tackle Harvey but slid beneath his center of gravity. Having grabbed a hold of Harvey’s new championship t-shirt, he fell to his back on the smoothness of the conduit and slid like butter on a hot skillet. The line kicked at his head and shoulders as he continued to pass all of them. By the time Meane had gotten to Zon, in the front, the burly youth had clenched a hold of the officer’s dark blue, bulletproof vest. Like pulling a water skier into a boat, he hoisted the muscle-bound pig off the tube and held him with one hand in the air. Waylon chicken-kicked a couple of times and reached out to pull himself closer to Zon. His efforts didn’t matter because Zon’s arms were the longest in reach. The length of his arms made annual boxing matches a breeze when the high school would entertain new golden gloves prospects.