The Wrath of David Read online

  “All I need is something, John,” David finally said, surprisingly calm and clear. John relaxed in his seat a little at David's peaceful tone. “A name, an address ... a license plate number. I'll do the rest. You don't have to worry about me wasting any more of your precious time or your god-forbidden resources.”

  John sighed and glanced away. He was finding it hard to meet David's cold, steely stare. He gently shook his head. He wished to God he could give David something, anything, but in all honesty, he had absolutely nothing for him.

  “I'm sorry David,” John finally replied. “Maybe one day ... when this whole shit-pit mess is resolved ... we can start bringing certain people to justice for their crimes against humanity. But until that day, I'm afraid you're just gonna have to come to terms with the fact that Ashley's killers might never be discovered or brought to justice. Hell, they could even be dead already.”

  David remained silent and still. His intense stare never left John for a second as he continued to bore a hole straight through the front of his face.

  “Well that's just ... unacceptable,” David eventually stated, still calmer than John had anticipated. Before John could find any relevant or comforting words to say in return, David had pushed his chair away from underneath him. He stood abruptly to his feet, turned around and left the office, all without saying another word.

  ***

  After leaving the police station in a silent rage, David calmed his thoughts by jogging all the way back to his council estate home on the south side of the city. When he entered the front door, he immediately made his way down to the basement – a basement he'd kitted out himself and turned into a makeshift gym after his first few weeks on the island.

  He had a whole array of self-made gym equipment at his disposal, from blunt wooden stubs to strengthen his bare feet when stepping upon them to pull-up bars, sandbags and scrap metal weights. He had punch bags made from sewn-up bed sheets filled with mud, dirt, gravel and sand. He had more buckets of sand which he agonisingly carried in his bare hands, pacing up and down the basement steps, over and over again, losing all track of time in the process.

  David worked out in his basement gym for the remainder of the night. He mixed his frantic exercising with hundreds of pull-ups, hanging sit-ups, intense weight training and countless hours on his various punch bags and kick boards.

  His favourite exercise of all, if any could be considered enjoyable, was to perform a basic handstand then walk around the basement floor on his hands for as long as he could endure it. He also enjoyed trying to pick up and move things with his feet and toes while standing upside down, which added to the level of concentration he put into the activity. It was a gruelling exercise of balance he had learned from none other than his lost love, Ashley.

  To finish off the blood-curdling session, David used all his remaining will and might to kick his shins at a sturdy, thick tree trunk until they were both bleeding and sore, left shin and right. He did the same with his bare fists, this time upon an already dented and crumbling basement brick wall, which he’d punched all kinds of living hell out of on many previous occasions.

  After his workout, he took a long, hot shower to wash away all of his newly acquired sweat, blood and tears. With his overgrown skinhead gently bowed, he leaned bleakly against the shower cubicle wall for an eerily long time. He didn’t move or flinch in the slightest, not even after half an hour when the hot water eventually ran cold all over his body.

  Finally though, like a sculpted stone statue coming to life, he stepped out of the shower. He stood in front of the large bathroom mirror and calmly began to shave his overgrown skinhead with a sharp razor. When he finished, he took one of the spare razor blades from a packet and held it over his already scarred wrists. After a slight hesitation, he dug the razor deep into his skin, yet hesitated in making the final incision up and along his forearm.

  Images flashed in his mind – smiles, laughter, happiness. A couple in love, Ashley in his arms, kissing, caressing, making love, hand in hand, walking along the clifftop of the Scottish Highlands, more smiles, more playful antics, laughs and jokes. Then an image of Ashley's unrecognisable black and burnt body lying in David's arms as he sobbed and cried out with raw grief, right up to the ignorant heavens above.

  Back in front of the mirror, and after another tense few moments, David placed the razor blade against his throat. He stared directly into the eyes of his unnerved reflection as he gestured aggressively, threatening to slice his own throat wide open. He even drew the slightest trickle of blood.

  “Come on! What are you waiting for?” David's reflection suddenly roared right back at him, like some enraged demon from within the dark underworld. “Do it, you fucking coward. DO IT! ...FUCKING DO IT.”

  David finally screamed, then roared out. As soon as his cries peaked, he threw the razor into the wet sink before leaning over the basin to sob.

  Chapter 3

  Louise had just turned 15 when the war broke out in her beloved Edinburgh. A city where she was born and bred. A city that was just as much her home as it was anyone else's who lived and paid their taxes there. Yet because of the colour of her skin and who her father was and where he had come from, Louise and her family had been targeted and violently driven out, forced to leave the city she loved, along with the country of her birth. There were millions of others just like her too, all around the country and from towns and cities all over the un-United Kingdom, all caught up in the brutal, racist, fascist, one-country, once-race Nazi uprising.

  Louise was now only a few months shy of her 17th birthday and already stuck in a new, maddening, heartless world that was slowly but surely consuming itself from the inside out. A world that in a blink of an eye had taken giant leaps and bounds back in time, back to the old days of barbarian cavemen, no less. Yet at least the cavemen didn't go around endorsing slavery and racism.

  Louise and her white Scottish mother constituted one of the rare and lucky mixed-race families of refugees to be granted at least some civil rights and citizenship on the Isle of Man. They had been recently housed on the poor and overcrowded west side, which, although overpopulated and ridden with crime, drugs and prostitution since the influx of refugees, was still an absolute palace compared to the overcrowded, disease-riddled refugee camps outside the city.

  That very afternoon, Louise had returned from the rations shop on the north side of town. Because she was from a mixed-race heritage, she had to patiently wait her turn at the back of the queue until all the white British folks had been handed the supplies and rations to which they were duly entitled. Even though she was now in the neutral zone the colour of her skin still played it’s part in her daily life and routines. And once the poorest of the white Brits were attended to, Louise and her fellow mixed-race civilians had to fight it out for the scraps.

  Louise entered her one-bedroom apartment that she shared with her mother, carrying four tins of the lowest edible food known to man – food in tin cans with no labels and no indication to what lay inside. A national food bank lottery determined the contents. She just hoped and prayed it wasn't bloody spinach again.

  When she entered the dreary living room, her junkie mother was lying wasted upon their only piece of sitting room furniture – a decayed, stinking, mouldy green couch. A heroin needle stuck out of her arm and she seemed to be drifting in and out of a dazed consciousness.

  An old photograph of a happy family from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, lay flat on her chest. The picture was of Louise, her two mixed-race brothers (one older, one younger), and her white Scottish mother and Pakistani father.

  When Louise saw the dirty syringe hanging out of her mother's pus-infested arm, she dropped her bag of tinned goods and rushed over to her in a heartbeat.

  “Ma!” Louise cried in her soft Scottish accent. “You said you wouldn't do this again. Oh, Ma…”

  Louise took the needle from her mother's arm, then quickly hugged her. Her mother suddenly wheezed into life, h
aving forgotten, for one bliss-filled moment, where she really was and how she'd actually ended up there.

  “Louise,” her mother wheezed in her thick Scottish accent. “Am sorry, ma wee dear ... sometimes ... sometimes ah just need tae forget, ye ken. I didnae hink you'd be back hame fur hours.”

  Louise released her hold on her mother. She placed the dirty needle she'd been clutching down onto the filthy coffee table nearby. Drips of water from the ceiling were leaking slowly and continuously onto the table, over and over, just like they'd been doing ever since Louise and her mother moved in.

  Louise continued to crouch beside her mother's limp and pale body. A body riddled with pus-filled sores and scabs. They'd been trying for months to get access to some kind of doctor here on the island while the sores grew and spread throughout her mother’s body like wildfire. But with an island population spiralling ridiculously out of control, if you didn't have any contacts within the armed forces, all you could do was pretty much pray for your good health.

  Louise turned to face her mother again and propped up her limp head with a small cushion from the other end of the couch.

  “Do ye hink ... Do ye hink ye cud get me summere gear, likes?” Louise's mother shamelessly asked her daughter as she wheezed slowly and softly, in and out, almost in unison with the drips from the ceiling. “Cud ye no get me summere gear fae that Billy tonight ... please, ma wee lass?”

  “Ma, no!' Louise protested. “We dinnae have the money for this shite. We dinnae have any money, in fact. And I told you to stay well away from Billy. He's nothing but a vindictive, manipulative wee shitebag.”

  “Please,” her mother begged. “Ah huv a wee bit uv money put away ... please, ma baby girl. This'll be the last time ... ah swear it ... ah swear tae ye ... the last time ... ah swear.”

  A tearful Louise glanced down at the picture of her family still lying upon her mother's chest. Everyone was smiling in that damn picture, taken only a month before the war, and now she had come to loathe and detest it. It was a constant reminder of everything and everyone she had lost in her life. A reminder of a past she was never ever going to get back.

  Louise kissed her mother gently upon the forehead before standing back up onto her feet. She had a gut feeling that her mother's time on this planet was almost at an end, regardless of whether she kicked her drug habit.

  “They books,” her mother wheezed. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide tae the Galaxy.”

  Louise looked a little perplexed at her mother's words, but nonetheless she approached the old, bulky book cabinet filled with dozens of damp and smelly books. She glanced along the rows of novels for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. She found it on the third shelf down, squeezed between Theresa May and Donald Trump biographies. Louise shook her head and grimaced. All the books had been there when they were first allocated the flat, so the random collection had nothing to do with her.

  Louise opened The Hitchhiker's Guide and was surprised to find various pound notes littered inside, making up at least 30 pounds in total.

  Her first instinct was to turn to her mother and snap at her in anger. How dare she have all that money stashed away when they hadn't even had a half-decent meal in months? But when she saw the pathetic state of her mother just lying there, helpless, deflated, sore and defeated, all but given up on life, her heart disintegrated. Louise’s anger quickly subsided and was replaced with pity and love.

  She knew her mother didn't have much time left in this crazy fucked-up world. And if a dose of heroin would make her even the slightest bit happy, the slightest bit comfortable and pain free again, even for just a few hours, after everything she'd gone through, everything she'd lost – who was Louise to deny her that?

  Louise hesitated. Her mother seemed to have drifted off back inside her little world of dreams and happy memories of a good life. She took a deep breath and placed the money back inside the book. It could stay there until they both really needed it. Save it for a rainy day she thought, like her old, cheerful mother used to say.

  Louise tucked the book back into its place on the shelf again before making her way out of the house. She had other things to trade with besides money.

  ***

  Louise walked nervously towards an upmarket street on the east side of city. Every house on the clean and posh estate stood completely alone and detached from the others – a sure sign of wealth and power if Louise had ever seen it. Each house had its own large front garden lawn, side garage and front driveway. Some even had a swimming pool or two out back.

  Louise flashed her papers at two soldiers standing outside an army checkpoint at the beginning of the street – one of the few streets on the island to have such a privilege. Louise was interested in only one house. The house with all the thumping, head-banging music blaring out from its vibrating roof and umpteen walls. The house with all the people partying, inside and out.

  Louise entered the jumping house party. It was full of mostly white teenage boys and girls, although there were a few mixed-race teenagers mingling around, just like her. This was the tolerance and neutral safe zone after all, and she wasn't the only mixed-race teenager on the island with a white British parent.

  Most of the teens were dancing to the loud music. The others were littered around the rest of the house, talking, singing, drinking, even procreating or consuming some kind of new age drug. Even though a race war was going on all around them, the teenagers didn't stop doing what they were born to do and considered the norm.

  The huge living room had become a makeshift dance floor and was filled with a mass of dancing, sweaty bodies. Louise approached a random teenage boy who danced blissfully by himself on the edge of the incoming hallway.

  “Where's Billy?” Louise called out.

  The teen didn't even open his eyes or acknowledge her in the slightest; he just pointed up towards the next floor.

  Nearby, some teenage girls who had watched Louise enter the house gave her a cold stare before smiling slyly and whispering amongst themselves. Louise ignored them, not even giving them the satisfaction of an acknowledging glance.

  Louise made her way upstairs and past another mass of sweaty, half naked, hormonal, teenage bodies. When she reached the first-floor landing, she quickly realised that the mass of bodies on the stairs was, in fact, a huge queue leading to one of the main bedrooms at the back corner of the house.

  Two huge bouncers stood outside the bedroom door, guarding it like the old and very last King of England was inside. They seemed to be letting in people only one at a time. Louise sighed and glanced back at the queue. She then turned to face a punk/goth-looking girl with a pink mohawk. The girl’s face was caked with white makeup, black lipstick and eyeliner. She seemed a little spaced out but on her own and close to the front of the queue.

  “Is this really the line to see Billy tonight?” Louise asked, keeping her tone a few beats under the loudspeaker system that seemed to be hooked up to every nook and cranny of the house.

  The girl nodded with her eyes firmly shut. In fact, she looked like she might struggle to open them ever again, she looked so wasted. Louise frowned and waited patiently for her to answer. The girl finally spoke but with a slur that suggested she'd had way too much of a bad thing absorbed into her bloodstream that evening.

  “You didn't think it was the queue for the fucking bathroom now, did you darling?” said the girl with an exaggerated chuckle.

  Louise let out a sly smirk and glanced at the queue of bodies spiralling down the long winding staircase and beyond. Suddenly an idea lit up inside her mind and she turned back to face the punk girl with a big, warm, friendly smile.

  “Cynthia. Long time no see. I've missed our wee chats so much,” Louise cried, making sure everyone in the queue nearby heard exactly what she'd said. She then leaned swiftly in to hug the punk girl before whispering loudly in her ear. “I'll give you my last two cigarettes if you let me slip in line behind you.”

  The punk girl hesitated before answering.
“How about a nice, cheeky little snog too while you're at it, beautiful?” the girl replied with a wink and a sly grin of her own.

  Louise let out a weary sigh. “Sure. Why the hell not?”

  Chapter 4

  David sat upon a huge leather armchair in complete and utter silence inside his living room. He held a small glass of whisky in one hand while the almost empty bottle lay cushioned against his lap on the inside of the chair. In his other hand he held the engraved silver lighter, but loose against his fingertips, which gave the impression he might drop it at any given moment.

  David stared with an almost hypnotic gaze at the few photographs that decorated the walls of his otherwise bare living room wall. Some of the pictures were of David in his army days. Some were of his family, friends and loved ones. All gone now from this world. Precious photos to him, though, salvaged from his old family home on the mainland.

  One picture was of David and six marines. The photograph contained four men and two women to be exact, all of them from a long and forgotten squadron on tour in some foreign land or another. They were all posing in a hot and sandy desert. Most of the men and women seemed to be of a similar age, yet of various colours and ethnic backgrounds. All of them British born and bred in their own right.

  Another picture showed David posing in full uniform while casually holding a machine gun. A black soldier stood by his side, holding a similar gun. They were both smiling warmly, looking happy for the camera.

  Another photo showed David with his arms wrapped around a pretty young redheaded girl. Both seemed to be of a similar age, while a much older woman sat happily in a wheelchair below them.

  Away from the pictures, an old Magnum gun rested upon the coffee table directly in front of David. One single golden bullet lay beside the gun as if its only function was to taunt him.