Chapter One
The black Challenger barreled through the streets like an angry, roaring ghost. It was most likely a good thing that it was three in the morning, when the streets were the emptiest they could possibly be. The black car wove back and forth, crossing the center line several times; the driver was probably the luckiest person alive to not have crashed or caused a bad accident. As fast as he was going, on streets that were still slightly damp from a brief rain shower earlier that evening, it was a miracle that he hadn’t driven over the side of a cliff that overlooked the Pacific.
He made a sudden, sharp right turn and skidded into a familiar, quiet street. Another sharp right, and the car fishtailed into the driveway. Tires squealed against the concrete as the brakes were stomped with prejudice.
The neighborhood where the single-level rancher - the home their grandparents built in the 1920’s - sat was quiet and dark. It was only when this particular car came onto the scene did things get lively. It almost always happened in the middle of the night.
The occupant inside the house, even in the deepest trenches of sleep, subconsciously knew the sound those particular tires made on the street and on the driveway, and woke him up. He sat up, bleary-eyed, idly wondering why he was awake. A glance at the clock, the digital screen told him it was 3:24 in the morning.
Then he heard a car door slam that was far too close to believe that it was anywhere else but right out in front. He let out a quiet, but weary sigh. The covers were thrown back; he swiped his phone up from the night table right in front of the clock and pulled up the contacts. He tapped on the top one and put the phone to his ear as he shuffled through the house, turning on lights as he went.
Voicemail. Understandable. She was working midnights at the ER.
“Hey, Erin. It’s David. Just thought you might want to know that Dathon is here. I’ll take care of him.”
He hit the END button and dropped the phone into the pocket of his shorts. Blinking the grit and blurriness out of his eyes, he waited through the jangling of keys on the other side of the door, the few minutes that it took for the person on the other side to figure out which one went where. In the dark. He had woken his brother up from a great sleep, in the middle of the night, on his last day off before another grueling forty-eight-hour rotation; he wasn’t going to make it easy on his brother.
The front door swung open at long last. David caught a glimpse of the hand that caught the doorway, and grimaced. It looked dirty, and bloody.
“Goddammit,” he breathed.
The rest of his brother wasn’t much better. Dathon tripped through the doorway and stumbled in.
“Hey buddy! There’s the bestest brother in…ever!” His speech was slurred, but that was the best interpretation of what was said.
“Hey,” David replied with a tight, icy smile.
He was in civilians, it must have been his night off, as well. He was disheveled; there was a large rip diagonally across the front of his black t-shirt, the right sleeve had been ripped away and was dangling by a few threads underneath his armpit, and covered in large splotches and stains of old blood. His face was bloodied, there were stains across the thighs of his jeans that David couldn’t be sure were totally his blood. Their nights off were not even in the same arenas.
“Jesus Christ, what the hell did you do?”
“‘S tha’ any way ta greet yer brother?”
“When my brother is a jackass, yes.”
The moment Dathon began to stumble, David was there, jacking his shoulder under Dathon’s arm, keeping him upright, and guided him to the dining room table. The smell of whiskey wafted off of Dathon so strongly that it was all David could smell.
“Sit down and don’t move,” David instructed tersely. He deposited his brother into a chair with little care given to jostling him around, or making sure he landed gently. David had one too many nights like this one where he had to come to his brother’s rescue.
The “Dathon Disaster Kit” was conveniently located in the pantry just inside the kitchen. It was stocked with hospital-grade equipment - suture kits, gauze and bandaging, clotting agents, tourniquets, lidocaine and injectable pain meds, all kept under lock and key…just in case.
Dathon was slumped over the edge of the table, his head in one hand, his other hand dangling between his knees. Lazily dripping from his mouth and eyebrow was a steady flow of blood, making individual soft plip! sounds as they splatted against the floor. One thing that David could be grateful for was his grandfather’s foresight into installing hardwood floors instead of carpet.
“Sit up, Dathon,” David ordered, plunking the kit on the table with a little more force than he intended, but it got his brother’s attention.
“Whysit so loud…?” Dathon groaned, complying drunkenly.
“Getting real tired of this, Dathon,” David said as he ripped open a pack of gauze. “You come in here like an asshole, try and wake everybody up in the neighborhood. You wake me up on my day off…what’s your excuse this time?”
Dathon’s unfocused eyes looked away. There were sunglasses perched on his head, one of the lenses was missing, the other was cracked.
He never expected Dathon to look him in the eyes, it was one of his defense mechanisms. But looking into his brother’s face, the face that mirrored his own so perfectly - under better circumstances, he saw a pain and rage just underneath the surface in his twin brother’s expression that he had not seen since Dathon had returned from his last stint in Afghanistan.
But his brother didn’t have shit for coping strategies; instead of listening to the counselors and therapists, he dealt with it all by drowning it in whiskey. That strategy never worked out well, mostly it led to situations such as the one they were in now.
“You wouldn’t give a shit.” His words were surprisingly clear, but his movements were still uncoordinated - he couldn’t connect a wad of gauze to his mouth.
“I can’t give a shit if you never talk to me. No one can, because you would rather drink and fight instead of facing your problems.”
“You wou’nt fuckin’ understand,” he muttered in response.
“I would if you would let me.”
“Maybe I dun wanna let you. No one should have to understand this shit!”
Dathon never met anyone’s eyes, but with David, it was different. With David, when he remembered, Dathon could let go of the things that he saw.
David felt that familiar steel fist - the only way he could describe it - grip his stomach and clench down as soon as their eyes met. For David it wasn’t as jarring as it once was; for those that didn’t know him, or came across his vengeance - the experience was excruciating.
In those eyes of his identical twin brother, he saw everything that had transpired…
Walking along the beach, he passed a lot of people - couples on an evening stroll along the water, kids chasing waves and kicking at seafoam, a couple individuals…
One gave him a funny feeling…he ignored the feeling, he kept going…
This beach was rife with rocky outcroppings, popular places for kids to go to drink or take a few tokes while watching the sunset; it was also popular among the horny and daring to go to cop a quickie among the boulders, or for more nefarious events to take place…
While he initially ignored that feeling, something tugged at his gut to wander near the big rocks…
He felt a hunger as that feeling grew stronger, and both simultaneously co-mingled as though they went hand-in-hand…
Dathon wanted no part of it, but there was a driving force stronger than his own will that pushed him into these scenarios…and maybe a small piece of him liked it…
Whimpering and sniffling reached his ears; directly behind an outcropping of large boulders he found an alcove, lying in the sand was a young woman in a very bad way… She was nearly unrecognizable, as her face had been beaten so badly that swelling and bruising had disfigured her features… She had suffered deep slash wounds to her hands and arms, some nails had been ripped past the quicks… More slashes had rendered her chest and torso to looking like a chunk of beef… Blood stained her inner thighs…
Spoken words were lost in the memories, but feelings were strong, and in Dathon was building a primal rage as he looked over the young woman with the eye of a first responder… She was going to bleed out before an ambulance could get there…
He picked her up…he carried her to his car… He placed the woman gently across the backseat, then got into the trunk where the first-aid kit was located… As a police officer, even off duty, he was never without his essential gear…
He covered her wounds, placing tourniquets above each wound that was too deep to bandage and might have the potential for causing her to bleed out… He heard the whimper from her when he cinched down the strap over-tightly, good, she was still with him… Small talk was made, words were still muffled, but he was able to get her to open her eyes…
Their eyes met…
Memories within memories were always a trippy experience, David couldn’t imagine what Dathon experienced when it was at full strength. He only got to feel it through a muted, cushioned wall as a secondhand viewer, even then it made him want to vomit and shit himself at the same time.
As their eyes met, both froze in the instant that it took to delve into what happened… When released, the woman was relieved of the burden of having to remember - while left with residual memories that would help her later, he had essentially eaten the poison contained within…
David blinked. He severed the connection. He knew what Dathon had done, what he had gone through, and why he was in the condition he was in. Dathon’s hazel eyes were almost black, watching David’s every minute movement with a perception that struck past the drunken sloppiness. A nasty little smile picked up the corners of his brother’s mouth.
In that moment, he wasn’t Dathon.
“I know what you’re about,” he muttered under his breath to his brother, “so fuck off. I’m talking to my brother.”
A low, dark chuckle rolled up from the depths of Dathon’s throat, but it wasn’t him. It was a will, a force…a piece of an entity that was older than the Old Testament, that resided within his twin. He knew this innately because a different piece of it resided within him.
Without warning, he hauled back and cold-cocked the taste out of Dathon’s mouth. Instantly, Dathon was back in the driver’s seat; his eyes were hazel again, a bit of the drunk was back, but he was more with it now that David had bitchslapped him. His hand was up at his cheek, a look of bewilderment etched across his face.
“I can deal with your brand of assholery, but I’m not dealing with the other,” David told his brother matter-of-factly.
“Oh.” Dathon blinked, he looked as though he wasn’t quite sure what was going on. “What the hell…”
“You’re back home, dude,” David said as he packed up the kit again. “I don’t know why you’re still keeping that shitty little apartment when you spend ninety percent of your free time here anyway.”
“Reasons,” Dathon muttered, rubbing the new sore spot that was the left side of his jaw.
“I’m not ignorant of those reasons,” David said, his tone softened from its previous curtness. “You’re going to have to talk to her, you can’t keep running from it.”
Dathon scoffed and sat up straighter, but leaned precariously to the right as the world wobbled dangerously. “What the ffff-*hic!*-…uck do you know about my problems?”
“You haven’t been talking to anyone, so Erin talks to me. She miss–”
“You been talkin’ to my wife?”
If there was one guy on the face of the earth that could match David in the battle of wills and strength, it was his twin brother - but not the brother that stumbled and tripped towards him in a drunken stupor. Maybe at full sobriety, it seemed that Dathon spent more time drunk those days than he did sober.
“Yeah, Dathon, I have. And if there were anything wrong with that, you’re not in any condition to do something about it.” David backstepped carefully, leading his antagonistic brother to the back door; Dathon followed like a drunk lion after a tasty chunk of meat.
Dathon zigged and zagged, bouncing his left shoulder off the corner of an archway - he barely noticed it, except for the hitch in his progress. David’s left hand eased the lever-like doorknob downward; just as Dathon got near, the door was swung open, ushering Dathon out into the night.
“Go dry out in the ocean, I’ll see you in the morning.”
David closed the door before his brother could react - he barely registered what was going on. Unceremoniously, David closed the door and engaged both locks. The light in the kitchen was flipped off. His brother was nothing if not a creature of meticulous habit - even as drunk as he was, Dathon always dropped his wallet and keys in the bowl on the table next to the front door. David picked up the key ring out of the bowl, opened the door, and locked the Charger down with the fob.
He glanced dubiously at the clock on the wall - maybe he could salvage another hour or two of sleep before he had to be awake for the next forty-eight hours in the emergency department. The doors would be unlocked, and there would be water, food, and aspirin waiting for his brother whenever he found his way back in the morning - just as there always was.
His brother’s problems were gargantuan but not unsurmountable, Dathon just needed to gather the courage to stand up and face them.
Dathon’s momentum carried him out to the back of the house when David opened the door, then his feet failed him and the world turned up on its nose. Dathon crash-landed in a bellyflop onto the grass.
Thanks to David’s fist connecting with his jaw, he had a little more wherewithal than he did thirty minutes ago. That didn’t assuage the building, frustrated rage when he realized what David had done. Somewhere in his foggy brain, he heard the as the horn of the Charger blatted twice, the sound took a minute or two to register exactly what that meant… It meant he wasn’t going anywhere.
“Fuck. You.” He rolled over onto his back and sloppily threw a clod of dirt he had pried up with his fingers at the door that had been closed and locked. It exploded harmlessly against the wall, two feet too wide of the door.
“I don’t need ANY OF YOU!” he screamed, aimed at the sky. He fell back, panting, sprawled out, trying to get his bearings, but all he was getting was the spins. Behind all of that, and the ever-increasing feeling that he was going to vomit, there was a pull - it was like a man dying of thirst being instinctually led to the oasis. Dathon’s oasis was the ocean - he heard it, he tasted it, he could feel it.
Their grandparents’ house was situated right in front of the Pacific, it was always his favorite place in the entire world to go. He could never explain it fully or completely, but he always felt a sense of calm, a sense that he was whole and he was okay when he was in the ocean. Other big bodies of water could suffice for a short time, but he never felt like he did when he was in that ocean.
Everything from his throat down to his intestines were burning, the ocean was going to help him purge it. His lungs, especially, felt like they were filling with a black tar - and all-too-familiar feeling. He had purpose, he had drive - to not suffocate on his own toxicity. His feet were working again, not entirely in sync with one another, but enough that he could bumble his way to the water.
Dear God, don’t let me die tonight, I’ll do better, I swear! A quick prayer thought through and directed to the heavens when he glanced upward at the sky littered with stars. He meant it…in that moment, who knows what would happen when morning came.
