Sons of Night

Andy’s POV
I held Braden by his shirt while Ashley and Jake held him up against a row of lockers.
“Tell me who is making you steal those tapes,” I whispered to Braden I could feel him shaking.
“No, I can’t he’ll kill my sister,” the kid begged. I took a step back and cocked my fist back. I punched him in the gut and he was gasping for air.
“You idiot. He’s going to kill everyone’s sisters if you don’t give him up,” I spat. He shook his head and I punched him again, this time straight across the face. Jake grabbed him by the hair and pulled his head up so he was looking at me. Blood dribbled down the corner of his mouth.
“Do you realize what you’ve allowed him to do? To get away with? Murder. Torture. Rape. It’s your fault, you little shit. You let him kill all those poor girls. Tell me who he is,” I growled. Braden shook his head again.
“He’ll kill me,” Braden said weakly. He tried to struggle in Jake and Ash’s hands but he was weak.
“It’s all about you isn’t it,” I snapped. My fist landed twice in his gut and again across the face, the other way this time.
“I can’t tell you who it is,” He said. I pulled his hair.
“Fine, then give me the tapes so I can figure it out for myself,” I hissed.
“He’ll kill me,” Braden said hopelessly.
“I’m going to kill you and take the tapes from you,” I said.
“Please don’t. I need to protect myself and my sister, please,” He begged. He had the tapes in his backpack, which was incidentally on his back, which was against the lockers. We’d have to let him up to get the tapes.
“Last chance,” I said.
“Please don’t do this,” He begged. I closed my hands around his throat. Both of them squeezing his airway. He kicked out with his feet trying to knock me away but Ash and Jake were too strong, and Jinxx stood by watching. Even if Braden did escape we had someone right there to catch him. I squeezed him harder.
“Don’t kill him, Andy,” CC said in my ear. I shook my head. I wasn’t planning on killing him. Braden gasped for breath, his mouth opening in a vain trying to get air into his crushed trachea. I could feel his struggles getting less and less functional, and I could see his eyes losing focus, rolling back into his head as he struggled to stay awake. I held on for a good thirty seconds after his eyes shut and he stopped kicking. Then I let go.
“Let go of him,” I said motioning to Jake and Ashley. They did and he started to fall completely lifeless to the ground. I caught him before his head could hit the ground, surely I’d caused enough brain damage for him already. I slid off the shoulder straps of his bag, handed it to Jake, and began feeling for a pulse. There was a faint thumping in Braden’s neck and I knew we had just a few minutes until he started to wake up. There was clattering as Jake pulled a few tapes out of the bag and let them hit the linoleum floor.
“I think that’s it, that’s all he’s got,” Jake announced.
“Does he have any paper in there?” I asked, “I want to leave him a little note for when he wakes up,”. I couldn’t help but smirk a bit. Jake handed me a sheet of lined paper and a pencil from the kids back pack. The message I wrote read:
You’re alive, you can thank me later. Tell him you got jumped on your way home. You don’t know by who, and beg him for mercy. Don’t worry about him killing your sister though, we’ll have him before he can do that. Sincerely, A.D.B.Leader of the Sons of Night.
I signed the note with a flourish. Ashley snorted as he read it over my shoulder.
“You’re such an arrogant asshole,” He snickered.
“I try. Give me his bag,” I said, Jake slid it across the floor to me with his foot. I put the bag under Braden’s head like he had taken a school induced nap. Then I took the paper in set it on his chest, folding his hands over the note like he was a mummy clinging to his final letter.
“Sleep tight my friend. I hope the headache isn’t too bad when you wake up,” I said patting his shoulder. The guys snickered.
“Alright let’s get out of here we’ve been here way too long already, and you had enough fun with the poor kid,” Jinxx said, shaking his head at my handy work. Jake shoved the tapes in his own backpack for safe keeping and off we went. We ran to the end of the hallway with CC’s directions in our ears. We were on the third floor, the chase had led us there and at the bottom of the stairs was a door that lead right back outside. The doors of the school were only locked from the outside and to get in teachers and staff needed a key card to get through any of the doors. That was no problem for us, though. We’d already gotten in through the ceiling.
We pushed through the unlocked door and out into the dark, cold, and silent air. We didn’t stop running. I felt like I was flying, we had the piece of evidence that would lead us to the killer. Of that I was sure. We ran down the snow covered streets like kids without a care in the whole wide world. A fresh snow was coming down in big white flakes, covering the grass and the sidewalks. I was as light as the piling snow. Before I knew it we burst in the front door of my house, gasping for breath. There was a grin on my face that I felt like had never been there before, and I couldn’t make it go away.
“You got it,” Dad said as soon as we came through the door.
“We got it,” I repeated, I pulled him into a hug, breathing hard. CC came out of the office smiling just as big as he always was.
“Well it didn’t go exactly to plan, but… What the Hell? You got the tapes and that’s all we need to get this guy,” He said. We all hugged and congratulated each other one by one, and we still thought that we’d only gotten the tapes. As it turned out, we may as well have gotten a confession.
“We need to watch them tonight, find out who did it and get to Mayden as soon as we can,” I said, finally catching my breath a bit. Jake nodded and opened up his bag He pulled out the tapes in one big pile. They all were labeled.
“I think this is the one we need,” Jake said holding up one that we labeled Road Outside the School. That one would show the killer taking Mayden. My stomach turned a bit at that, but it was what we needed.
“Let’s watch it right now, your dad already got the VCR out for me,” CC said. He took the tape from Jake and set it up on the TV. We all sat on the couch, gathered around like we were about to watch the movie of the century. The tape began to play and it was morning on the screen, the sun was rising behind the school and kids were walking and driving up the road.
“Fast forward it, the killer didn’t get Mayden until like six o’clock that night,” I said, looking at the time stamp. It read 7:25 a.m. Jinxx hit the fast forward button and I watched the numbers raise. Cars and kids came rapidly in and out of frame for a few more seconds and then the road pretty much cleared. Every once in awhile a car or maybe a delivery truck would drive up the road to the school and then leave a few seconds later. Normal school activity. The time stamp on the video then read 1:30 pm and I was getting anxious. I fidgeted with my hands and they were starting to sweat. Suddenly the video stopped, it had been paused.
“Andy, can you handle watching this?” Jinxx said, I glared at him. He was wasting time.
“Dude, it’s been about six hours since she was taken. Who knows what could have happened to her by now. I’m fine. Play the video so we can get this thing done,” I said. The fast forwarding continued. 3pm came and there was another flurry of activity, cars and students flooded the road and were gone in a few seconds. Everyone just wanted to be home. 5:30 came and went and as the timestamp increased by another twenty minutes I stopped Jinxx. We let the video play from there. It got dark very quickly and there was no one on the road at all. I watched intently at the school’s entrance waiting to see the familiar face of Mayden walking down the road. I didn’t have to wait too long. At 6:05 I saw the pixelated image of Mayden exiting the school. My stomach twisted, I knew what was going to happen.
“There she is,” I whispered. The room was silent except for the background noise of the security footage, which wasn’t much. We watched her walk down the road. She was walking fast and looking around nervously. She knew something wasn’t right. When he stepped out of the woods, a big man with a bald head, silently behind her I wanted to scream, but I couldn’t. He took a silent step up behind her and pinned her to the ground. I watched with my fists clenched, feeling more and more nauseous by the second as he held her down. She was fighting so hard, but he was miles stronger than her. I watched him pull out a cloth and press it over her face. She got out just a beginning of a scream before he covered her up. In seconds she stopped struggling.
Then the most stomach turning thing happened. He looked straight at the camera, like he was looking at my soul, and grinned. He knew we would come and get the tapes to try to find him. He put a show on just for me. Then he looked away from me and back down at Mayden lifeless beneath him. He took a moment and ran his hands down her body, feeling her and that’s when I couldn’t handle it anymore. I barely made it to the bathroom in time before I was throwing up over and over again. I wasn’t there for long before my mom was there holding back my hair and rubbing my back.
“He’s going to do terrible things to her,” I said, trying to hold back the contents of my stomach.
“No, no he won’t you’ll get to him in time. You can stop him,” Mom said soothingly. I sat back on my heels and rubbed my face in my hands.
“Andy! We found something you’d like to see,” I heard Ashley call from the living room. I staggered to my feet. With my mom’s hand on my shoulder. I came back into the living room wiping my mouth on the back of my hand. Ashley was standing with a small white card in his hands.
“Jake found it, it was stuck between the tapes we took from that kid,” Ash explained. I took the card into my hands and looked. It was a teacher’s I.D. card, one that also doubled as a key card so whoever held it could get into the school, even after the doors locked. The picture on the card was of a large bald man, smiling the same sick smile that had been on the tape just moments before. It was him, he must have given his card to Braden so he could steal the tapes for him after the doors locked. The name under the card read Robert Schrock.
Mayden’s POV
I was shaking uncontrollably with fear. I had been in the dark room for hours, my hands had gone numb because the bindings were so tight. I had tired myself out completely by struggling against the bindings, but it was no use. They were strong plastic, it felt like, and I couldn’t wear them away or fray them on the rough wall. I couldn’t get my breathing to slow down. It was so dark that I couldn’t see anything, not even my legs on the ground in front of me, I could have been blind. A second after I had that thought I was proven wrong. There was a bright flash of light and I had to close my eyes to keep from being blinded. Someone had turned the lights on in the basement. My fear grew to astronomical levels and I struggled to open my eyes. I squinted into the bright room. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all grey cement. Directly to my right there was a red wooden door. Directly in front of me was a staircase, with gross green carpeting running up them, I could hear heavy footfalls coming down those steps.
“Are you awake?” I familiar voice called down the steps. I couldn’t reply, I was gagged. Instead I struggled against my bindings even harder in one last attempt to get away.
“Oh yes, I hear you struggling down there. You are awake,” The voice said, it was sickeningly sweet like it was talking to a pet. The footsteps continued and first I saw thick legs in khaki pants then a red button up shirt. It was an outfit that I had seen that day. Next came the face, my stomach did a backflip. It was Mr. Shrock, my calculus teacher. I yelled intelligibly around the gag in rage.
“What’s that my dear? Didn’t think that old Schrockie was the killer, did ya?” He grinned and I cringed inwardly.
“You and I are going to have such fun together. I might even keep you a bit longer than the others. I always liked you anyway,” He said smiling even bigger. I glared at him and clenched my numb fists.
“Now don’t be like that. You and I really can have a good time. In fact why don’t we start right now?” He said rubbing his hands together. I pulled and strained on the bindings but again it was fruitless. I watched Mr. Schrock go to the door to my right and open it. The door open outward towards me and I couldn’t see inside. Schrock disappeared into the room and came out a moment later. He had a battery and some wire hanging off of it with a switch hanging off the other side.
“This one’s a whole lot of fun because I can do it however much I want and it won’t kill you,” He said and he winked at me. He slid off my left shoe and sock and looped the wire around my toe. I tried to pull away but he held my leg down. I kept fighting with all of my might, I even managed to kick him in the face, which turned out to be a mistake. He looked up at me, face red with rage.
“Well now, if you’re going to fight then I ought to make it so you can’t, right?” He said. He stood up and abandoned the battery with wired on the cement floor. He went back into the small room and came back out with three cinder blocks. He laid two of them down so that they were standing tall. Then dropped the other block next to my hip. He took my legs and propped each of them up on a cinder block,I was uncomfortably stretched. The only part of my leg that was on the ground was my butt. My knees were a good six inches off the ground.
“Now to teach you not to fight me,” He said. Schrock lifted up the cinder block and held it over my already hyper extended leg. I shook my head violently but he just smiled and let the block go. It crashed down on my leg bending it even farther in the direction it was not supposed to go. I screamed in agony as my leg broke. The white hot pain seared up my leg and consumed my being. Then the block crashed down again, this time on my right leg the pain doubled. I almost passed out.
“Now, now there don’t pass out on me. There’s still much fun to be had, and now you can’t run. If you resist again, next your hands will be crushed,” Mr. Schrock smiled sweetly at me.

Notes

Nice long one for you and early as well. I hope you enjoyed leave me a comment and let me know what you think! See you all next week.