Chapter 1
A series of curses pierced the silence that had been left behind when the SUV had travelled into a dead zone, leaving the occupants without both cellular service or a radio signal. The blacked-out SUV had fallen victim to a pothole that had threatened to sink the entire vehicle on the passenger side. All four of the vehicle’s stoic passengers were jostled aggressively despite the seatbelts that anchored their bodies to the dark leather seats. The driver slammed his palm against the steering wheel, cursing someone for failing to properly maintain the vehicle and replacing the burnt-out headlights. In his frustration, however, he narrowly managed to avoid a second crater by pitching the vehicle to the left and turning the large SUV towards the overgrown weeds.
“Jesus Christ,” the passenger bit, one hand instinctively reaching for the ‘oh-shit’ bar while the other laid flat against the dashboard in an attempt to stop himself from being thrown around like a ragdoll. The weeds concealed even more bumps and teeth-jarring holes, quickly thwarting any hope that the impromptu off-roading adventure was going to be any smoother than the deserted road they had veered from. “Where the fuck are you going? We’re in the middle of absolute nowhere with shit service and you’ve decided you want to start off-roading? You’re either going to blow a tire or snap a Goddamn control arm, and I would really rather not be stranded up a creek without a pot to piss in.”
“It’s up a creek without a paddle, dip shit.”
Out of the corner of his eye, the driver watched as the passenger snagged the opened water bottle out of the cup holder and chucked it at his brother in the back. “Go fuck yourself with a paddle, Nate. At least you knew what I fucking meant.”
“Would both of you shut up?” the driver all but roared, squinting through at the windshield in an ill-gotten attempt to avoid the hazards hidden away by the dying shrubbery and the non-existent headlight system. “Neither of you are going to have a pot to piss in and you’ll both be up shit’s creek without a paddle when I dump your dumbass here and make you walk back to the compound for your not so constructive criticism.”
In the wake of the silence that followed, Will could hear the under carriage of the SUV scrape against something and he cringed; for once in his life, he missed the mind-numbing music that Damon would insist on playing through the expensive, after-market sound system each and every time he claimed shotgun position. While Damon thought himself akin to a DJ, he greatly lacked the ability to read his audience and the vehicle’s bass would often wind up loud enough to recalibrate their heart rates, lest they opened the windows.
He did his best to see through the thick, bullet-proof windshield’s after-market tint, but the all-encompassing darkness that surrounded them was nothing more than an endless black hole. Shortly after the radio had begun spewing static, he had heard Nate and Scott muttering in the back seat about how great of a shortcut the abandoned road had been, and, now, careening through underbrush that hadn’t been cleared in years, he was likely to agree with them. Will had taken the darkened road on a whim when he’d realized that they were being tailed, and he had been determined to lose the sorry son of a bitch that had decided to follow them. At first, the road had been great – it was dark and deserted with plenty of places to hide their hulking SUV to gather the upper hand; however, it was proving the complete opposite. The endless pitch made it difficult to tell which way he had come from, and, with nothing visible in the horizon, he felt as if he had been circling the same area mindlessly for the better part of the last half-hour.
Slowing the large vehicle to a little above a crawl, Will was just about ready to slam his fist into the steering wheel a second time when something caught his eye. He squinted in hopes that it would help make out one shade of pitch to another, but all it did was make his eyes water. Edging the SUV on in its general direction, Will could feel the tug on the back of his chair as Nate leaned forward and the speculative, nagging feeling that he was chasing a mirage was sucked out of the window and he put a little more pressure on the accelerator.
The engine roared to life as the horses beneath the hood were finally spurred above two-thousand rotations per minute and Will tried to keep the monstrous hunk of metal true to the shadow against the otherwise dark background. He could hear Damon muttering something but he was too innately focused on the prospect of returning to civilization to care what his cousin had to say in the moment.
A hand reached out and yanked the wheel. Frustration rose like bile in his throat and the words died on his tongue, just behind his teeth, when his eyes finally adjusted enough to take in the front end of a dark hatchback that they narrowly managed to avoid slamming into. Trying to regain his bearings, Will attempted to use the faded beam of light projected by the SUV’s exterior lighting system to see at least a foot in front of the vehicle, but that proved to be futile when the rear end of a pick-up truck sped towards them much too quickly and he barely managed to slam on the vehicle’s brakes in time to miss plowing into it.
He could hear the breaks squeal and the vehicle groan in protest as its entire contents were pitched forward, debris and various lose items flying past his head to ping off of the windshield. The seatbelt bit uncomfortably into his chest, keeping him firmly pinned against the dark leather seating, though his limbs were left free to wander about the cabin. Another series of curses echoed throughout the vehicle when it fell back onto his haunches with a groan deep enough to reverberate through Will’s teeth into his gums.
Will could feel his brother grab onto the back of his seat as his own hand instinctively reached for the gearshift, moving the vehicle swiftly into park before killing the engine. In spite of the near collisions, he found it increasingly difficult to pull his attention away from the shadow against the otherwise pitch-black backdrop and didn’t realize that he’d pushed himself from the confides of the vehicle until he heard his brother’s voice calling to him.
“You’ve got that look about you,” Nate stated casually before Will heard the distinctive metallic sound of a flint roller. Will craned his neck to see his brother stood behind him, casually leaning against the rear of the SUV, before raising a questioning eyebrow. The small amount of light allowed by the cigarette captured between his brother’s lips let him witness his younger sibling roll his eyes towards his hairline. “What strange, sixth-sense feeling are we following into the abyss this time, William?”
It was his turn to roll his eyes skyward, though he couldn’t diminish the nagging urge to find out what the shadows had been trying to gift him in spite of the lack of visibility, courtesy of Mother Nature herself. He worked his jaw side to side in an attempt to reduce the pressure that radiated upwards through his sinuses towards his temple before reaching to his side to relieve the Gock he kept concealed in his underarm holster. Will pulled the slide back, letting it slide forward slowly.
“Either cover my six or stay here and babysit Damon. Scott, are you with me?”
Another round loaded into the chamber, the sound nearly as loud as a gunshot in the dead silence that, and Will glanced over the hood of the SUV to see Scott’s silhouette armed and at the ready. A faint beam of light a little stronger than the high beams clicked on moments before Scott directed it towards the ground, flickering it twice to signal his readiness to move forward. Will shared a final glance with his brother, waiting for confirmation as to whether he was going to stay and monitor their whiny cousin or have his back as they headed into the unknown and nodded when he watched as Nate reached towards his own underarm holster to free his weapon.
Will vaguely heard his brother tell him to lead the way before Damon’s much too loud voice shattered the silence that had grown rather comfortably around them, gifting them with a sense of security they didn’t know they had until it was gone. “I know we’ve come to moronically trust your sixth-sense hunches but there’s no chance in Hell that that ‘short-cut’ was done on purpose.” Damon made a show of gesturing around them, though the no-doubt incredulous look etched across his face was lost amongst the shadows thrown by the interior lighting of the large SUV. “You’re not going to find our next business venture anywhere around here unless, suddenly, your father is interested in going into the scrap industry,” he scoffed, moving around the vehicle to stand by the truck that they had narrowly missed.
Nate muttered something under his breath before saying, “If you don’t like it then stay here and man the vehicle. Keep the engine running and be ready to peel out at a moment’s notice.”
With a flourish only akin to Damon’s theatrical behaviour, he removed his own side arm before reaching back into the SUV for the small flashlight kept in the glove box. “Fuck that,” he quipped, fixing his stance and raising the beam to sweep over the nearby vehicles. “I’m not staying out here surrounded by a bunch of ghost cars.”
His own small flashlight was pressed into his palm as he stepped away from the shelter of the SUV and the final door was closed, casting the surrounding area in a dark blanket. “This is why people believe you’re afraid of the dark,” Nate piped up, flicking on his own beam and directing it towards their cousin. “Man the fuck up.”
Before the quarrel could escalate, Will engaged his light, holding it just beneath the weapon that he brandished as easily as if it were an extension of his body and prowled forward. With military precision, he and his team fell into their positions, sweeping their beams over row upon row of stagnant vehicles while keeping their bodies on a constant swivel. Light bounced off windshields and windows, illuminating deserted cabs and throwing strange shadows on neighbouring vehicles. Expensive, Italian-leather shoes moved swiftly through trampled-down grass, depressing the moist ground and giving them a trail of breadcrumbs to follow back to the blacked-out SUV in the dark.
Twisting his body sideways to fit through the narrow gap between the front fenders of two closely parked cars, Will tried desperately to keep his slacks from being snagged by any sharp corners and stilled mid step when warmth ebbed from the vehicle behind his thighs. He heard a sound to his left before the familiar silhouette of his brother stepped into the dim beam provided by the small flashlight.
“It’s warm,” he stated in loud whisper, gesturing with a shrug of his shoulders to the hood of the car he couldn’t bring himself to step away from. He fumbled for a moment to hold both the gun and the flashlight in the same hand so he could place his palm flat against the vehicle in front of him and confirm the thought that had begun to form in the back of his head. “They both are,” he confirmed.
He heard Scott whispering to Damon, verifying that there were several other vehicles in the hoard that had been run recently, and he quickly shifted the flashlight back into his other hand. The muscles in his shoulders tensed as their coiled tightly like cobras preparing to strike.
“What the Hell does that mean?” Damon asked in a harsh whisper that threatened to shatter the delicate silence that was perched on the razor’s edge.
Will didn’t bother to justify the question with a response – or, rather, he couldn’t. The endless darkness beyond the shitty reach of their flashlights was flipped on its head when light flooded outwards from seemingly nowhere. He ducked behind the bed of a nearby pickup truck, extinguishing the flashlight, and glanced around the tailgate, praying that the rest of his team had been just as quick to try and stay out of sight. Will could hear the idle murmur of voices and gravel crunching beneath soles overtop of something that he couldn’t quite make out. Something connected with something else and in the wake of the distinct sound of glass shattering into millions of tiny shards gravel crunched once more and then the idle murmur was cut off abruptly, almost as if it hadn’t existed in the first place.
Slowly, Will rose from his crouched position, though he took a moment before he clicked the flashlight back on, illuminating the shadows that shielded his team from prying eyes. He tried to cast the beam towards the door that the light had previously pooled out of but it wasn’t nearly enough to reach half of the way there.
Movement behind him caught his attention moments before Nate appeared to his left. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know.” Will squinted against the darkness in an attempt to pinpoint a shape amongst the Vanta black that otherwise swallowed everything whole; a crack or a hole in the armor that leaked even the tiniest streams of light. “But I’ll be damned if I don’t find out soon.”
Without throwing complete caution to the wind, Will guided his team towards the darkness at a pace that would have otherwise left them vulnerable, but he couldn’t help himself. His surroundings were too still and too silent to hide anyone or anything or allow for any sort of ambush. Even when the matted-down grass gave way to gravel that ground together beneath his feet, he pressed on quickly in dire need to cast the weak beam of light that poured from his flashlight on whatever had triggered his interest. In three quick steps, the flashlight drudged up the deep, dark secret that the pitch had been so eager to keep hidden from his prying eyes; a building in the late stages of decomposition. It seemed rather impossible for something so frail and fragile looking to house any sort of life, but, he supposed, that was part of the enigma of this place that had called to him from a distance. The building, in spite of its decrepit nature, housed life that wanted desperately to be shielded away from the outside world.
Excitement bubbled in his chest and it only took his team a few moments to figure out how to gain entry into the seemingly impenetrable building. Of all..., he started and scoffed in his mind. An unguarded door?
Pushing down the frustration and annoyance at stumbling upon an unguarded front door, propped open enough for anyone to wedge their fingers between the cracks and pry it open, Will fought against every instinct that had been drilled into him thoroughly throughout his life and tucked his weapon back into his underarm holster. He could feel the penetrating stares of his cousin, brother and friend but he didn’t care.
He had heard the murmur of many voices when the side door had opened from a good fifty feet away. If something so old and decaying could hold as many inhabitants as vehicles were parked outside without giving way; could conceal the noise of countless bodies; could contain that much light in the never-ending darkness, it was worth the risk. Without chancing a look over his shoulder at any members of his team, Will curled his fingers around the weather-worn wooden door and heaved.
“This is the fight y’all came here for!” a voice bellowed out from all corners of the room. “Place your bets while you still can! The tables are only open for five more minutes!”
Stepping to the side and condemning himself to the minuscule shadows that existed along the perimeter, Will divided his attention amongst all the goings on around him. People flooded a small table to the left of the front door, some of whom waved fists full of cash and vehemently shouted their bets. Others lingered near an elevated platform outfitted with a metal cage in the shape of an octagon, and, had he not known any better, Will would have suspected that this establishment had affiliations with UFC and Dana White.
As he surveyed his surroundings – the various speakers placed around the corners of the room; the lighting fixtures affixed to the ceiling; the thick pads clamped against every single wall – he felt a familiar presence settle in just behind him. “I didn’t know fight clubs were so sophisticated,” his brother observed, no doubt taking in all of the precautions that any normal patron would skim over.
“Find out who’s in charge,” he muttered back when he’d finally finished his sweep. There were no large men in suits anywhere, let alone gathered in a secular area. “This is too well put together to not be run by the Russians or Mexicans.”
“I really don’t want to fuck with the Russians right now,” Damon groaned, filling in the other space behind him. “Why can’t we just accept that this place is weird as shit and come back in daylight with more than just four Glocks to investigate your weird feeling?”
The booming voice from before silenced any individual conversations and Will sought him out, weaving through the endless bodies that had ebbed back towards the octagon. Standing in the middle of the cage with a microphone in hand, a man in his mid-fifties stood with a shit-eating grin spread across his face. One look at the individual confirmed any suspicions that neither the Russians or the Mexicans were responsible for this gathering and, for a fleeting moment, he was genuinely impressed by the discipline demonstrated by civilians to maintain something so polished.
The man brandishing the microphone did a full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin with his arms outstretched, goading the audience to get louder as he introduced the next fight. “That’s what I like to hear!” He laughed into the mic; the sound almost deafening. “Y’all ready for a fight? We’ve got two returning champs here that are ready to duke it out for the title of ultimate champion. What do you say to that?”
A roar so loud it could have ruptured eardrums resonated through the crowd and Will’s eyebrow shot up towards his hairline. Impressive sound proofing, he mused.
“Put your fucking hands together for Taylor T.K.O. and the Mother of Dragons!”
Will was cast further into the shadows when the lights along the perimeter winked out those that displayed the octagon dimmed. Twin lights flickered on overhead, illuminating the wall across from him, displaying two figures that emerged from rooms Will hadn’t realized were there.
They stalked forward with a swagger and aura of ease surrounding them that had Will searching out his brother’s reaction through the crowd. Thankfully, Nate hadn’t made it far in his assignment to determine whether or not this enigma of an establishment was run by an organization, or whether it truly was something one of a kind. His brother’s expression mirrored his own; appreciation and slight amazement.
“What do you think?” Nate asked once he returned to earshot.
Will glanced back at the figures that were stepping into the octagon as the MC proceeded to read out each of their credentials. The male was undefeated, a champion among men. Notorious for his boxing abilities, Taylor “T.K.O” was known for striking first and asking questions later, and peppering his opponents with merciless strikes. He had the most total knock-outs out of the entire roster. He was tall and bulky, no doubt a muscle head before turning towards the sport; the crowd loved him.
Scott cleared his throat, gesturing with a shift in his shoulders to the table that had been previously swarmed with people eager to place bets. “That place is a fucking nightmare,” he exclaimed with a shake of his head. “Bets are all over the place. One person’s sheet has this T.K.O. as the favourite to win, by knockout, submission, and decision, and by rounds. The other guy’s sheet is just as fucked up, having both T.K.O. and the Mother as favourites. I couldn’t make heads or tails over what the hell was going on.”
“How the Hell does that work?” Damon grumbled.
They’re definitely not as organized as they let on, he thought to himself, stepping out of the shadows to peer towards the octagon through the crowd. But at least there’s suitable foundation.
He heard the bell signaling the start of the round and stepped out of the depths of the shadows, moving to his left so he could see through the mass of bodies that ebbed towards the raised platform as a wave of anticipation captivated them. Will watched T.K.O. shuffle his feet before his attention was pulled to his side by Nate, who pointed towards a group of people along the far wall that didn’t appear to blend in with the riff-raff that otherwise occupied the space. He let his eyes roam over the figures, relying on his innate capabilities to kick in and confirm the suspicion that captivated his younger brother. After a few seconds with no nagging feelings in the pit of his gut or tingling sensations at the base of his spine, Will shook his head and turned his attention back to the center of the room, only to discover that the fight had ended.
The man brandishing the microphone all but jumped the octagon to get inside, trying to get around the referee to get a firsthand account of Taylor T.K.O. laid out on his back, asleep. When it was clear that neither the referee, or the few members that had previously caught Nate’s attention, were going to let him get closer to T.K.O., the MC turned his attention to the Mother of Dragons and dragged her to the center of the structure, thrusting her gloved hand in the air with such vigor that he nearly dislocated her shoulder.
“It’s all over!” he shouted down the microphone. “It’s all over! We’ve got a new champion! Y’all bow down to the Mother of Fucking Dragons!”
Her chest heaved as she fought to catch her breath from the fight that had lasted – Will glanced towards the ceiling where mechanical component flashed with bright red numbers – forty-five seconds. Annoyance flashed across her face for a fleeting moment and Will suspected that it was directed to the way the MC refused to relinquish his grip on her wrist, keeping her by his side and ensuring that her arm remained extended above her head. Will watched her put up with the manhandling for a few more moments while the MC continued to shout into the microphone before pulling her arm out of his grasp and retreating from the caged-in octagon.
Unlike T.K.O. who had been dragged out by his entourage, limp and sawing logs, no one waited in the wings for the Mother of Dragons. Several fans were quick to rush towards the door to the cage, shouting words of enthusiasm, but no one stuck around for very long; they were all too eager to rush the table near the door to collect their winnings.
Will watched her from across the room, acutely aware that his brother’s question still hung in the air, unanswered. One of the two men that had manned the small table near the door approached her as she neared the door she had originally exited from, no doubt handing her her own winnings for the night.
“I think,” Will stated, never once turning his gaze away from the door the Mother of Dragons had entered a few moments prior, “we might as well find out who previously owned this establishment. It’s about time they met the new owners.”
