Bobby

Chapter 1

The day was beautiful, like God had painted the perfect scenery for Amber and Nathan’s date at Gossard Park, located in the scenic and suburban neighborhood of Stonegate, Arizona. A field of landscaped grass stretched in front of the couple while geese and ducks gathered around a large pool in the middle of the enclosure. A metallic fountain was placed into the center, shooting water into the air every hour. Amber brought Nathan here because it was a relaxing place. And yet, Nathan had a weird feeling creeping in the bottom of his gut.

“Are you having a good day?” Amber asked, lying within Nathan’s arm in the grass by the fountain.

“It’s been just alright,” Nathan replied, smirking. He didn’t want to tell her how he felt. It would just worry her.

Believe it or not, there was a time when Nathan felt no attraction at all toward Amber. When the couple first started dating, it was merely something for Nathan to do. He wanted a girl to show off to his friends he so dearly clung to within his social circles.
But as they continued to see each other, Amber’s body and mind grew more beautiful and intricate to Nathan. Any good relationship enhances the value of the people who take part. This transformation happened to both Nathan and Amber. And yet, isn’t there a problem with the relationship if Nathan thinks he’s taking home the bronze when she’s actually gold. Ultimately, Amber’s natural beauty was forced to take on Nathan’s superficiality in fearsome match to the death. In this case, beauty won.

She embraced Nathan in her soft arms, bringing his head close to her chest. They lied together in silence on the grass as the fountain shot into the air. Within seconds, rain was falling, but Amber continued to smile.

“I love the rain,” she said, biting her lip.

Amber grabbed Nathan softly and pressed his lips against hers. He embraced the moment, but that same weird feeling lingered in the back of his mind, gnawing at his insides like a loose parasite. He lifted his eyelids and was blindsided by what he saw.

Amber’s face was bleeding. Open sores had formed on the surface of her perfect skin and puss was oozing from each one. The rain was like acid, creating holes across her body that were eating away at her flesh and leaking out an endless stream of blood. Amber’s emotions were unchanged, as if she didn’t feel pain or had any recognition that something bad was happening. Nathan squealed like a pig.

“What’s wrong, baby?” Amber’s disintegrating face whispered. “We were just getting started.”

She lunged at him with her now destroyed lips. Blood was pouring from her face, showering Nathan in rivers of the hot and salty liquid. He screamed again, but Amber held him down. Her clothes had melted off, leaving her skin to face the rain. Nathan could see bones in her legs as she pressed them against his thighs to pin him to the ground. She moaned with a lustful fire in her now demonic eyes.

“This was all for you,” she said, crying.

Her tears were no different from the rain and burned what was left of her facial flesh. There was not much more to lose, as her appearance had turned to that of a skinned calf in a butcher shop. Somehow, there was a bit of life still within her eyes.

“You always took me for granted," she yelled.

Trails of rotten flesh hung from her body like cobwebs blowing in the wind.

“I’ll show you how to take someone for granted."

Amber began thrusting her hips across Nathan’s pelvic region. She licked the side of his neck and bit into it, ripping a large chunk of flesh from above his collarbone. He couldn’t even scream. The boy stared up at Amber’s decaying face in pure shock while a constant smile remained imprinted to her skull. Light was fading around Nathan as he heard Amber’s maniacal cackling surround his senses. He used to think her laugh was attractive.

The last thing he heard was the crack of the fountain going off in the park. He thought he saw a family laughing. Then, darkness took over, and Nathan saw and felt nothing more.

Chapter 2

Nathan woke up in a pool of blood. There was no light in the room, leaving the skinny college student in complete darkness. His skin was covered in sores and his muscles felt like they were being shredded apart with every movement.

With no sense of time or direction, Nathan fell back asleep. At some point, a light flashed. It was a single fluorescent bulb that hung from the middle of the ceiling.

Nathan saw that the gray walls of his surroundings created a space no larger than a storage closet.

A tall and grizzled man entered the room, opening a door made of metal. SCREECH. The aluminum corners of the door frame scraped against the concrete floor. He was young with a tan face and wore street clothes.

“Do you know where you are?” he asked, a heavy accent bringing a harsh tone to his English.

Nathan coughed and cleared his throat, hesitating on what to say to his captor.

“Where?” he said.

The man wasted no time in smacking Nathan’s cheek with his hand, leaving deep scratch marks.

“You’re not asking the questions around here,” he said, wiping a bloody nail against his jeans. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Nathan tried to wrap his brain around how he ended up lying in a bloody pool of his own bodily fluids, trapped within unknown walls. The man was silent, staring at Nathan with a studious gaze. He pulled out a flask from his pants pocket.

“Drink,” the man said. “You look like shit.”

The man brought a metal flask to Nathan’s mouth. Warm water felt cool and refreshing against the 20-year-old’s cracked lips.

“Where am I?” Nathan asked.

The man opened the door and paused. A constant buzz echoed from the ceiling and the light bulb remained hung in the air, flickering away like it was on its last heartbeat.

“You are a prisoner,” the man said. “That’s all you need to know.”

The door SLAMMED shut and Nathan was left in darkness. He wept himself to sleep, using his blood as warmth on the floor of the cold jail cell.

Chapter 3

Alex noticed a gray smudge between a white and blue stripe on his collared shirt and used his spit to wipe it away, dragging his fingers across the brown couch he was sitting on to wipe away his saliva. He had just sparked up a fresh joint. Sunlight peeked through the blinds of a window in the center of the house, revealing just how much smoke had already filled the room. The yellow walls of Nathan and Alex’s “college” pad reeked of old trash and marijuana. Wal-Mart artwork set a façade of elegance for would-be guests. A coffee table covered in cigarette packages, empty beer cans and weed sat in the middle of the room.

“It smells good in here,” Nathan said, taking a seat next to Alex on the couch.

Alex laughed.

“I’m celebrating,” he said.

The joint had burnt to a roach. Alex saved these as pick-me-ups for later in the night to relieve stress when his demons came out to play. He twisted the finished joint against the marble surface of his dragon-shaped ashtray.

“Everyone’s complaining that we don’t have that pure Molly shit.” Alex said. “I’m sick of it.”

He picked up a bag of pill shells with an obvious stimulant or narcotic inside. There must have been at least 200 of these white and plastic encasements, if not more. A closer look at the pills showed tiny crystals inside of the shells. They were filled about halfway with these little rocks. There was a certain shine to the crystals, as if foreshadowing their effect.

“So, I went and found us a Molly hookup,” Alex said, waving the pills back and forth in front of Nathan’s face.

“How much are we selling them for?” Nathan asked.

“10 bucks a pop. And trust me, they’ll pop like crazy.”

“There’s a show at Kingdom this weekend,” Nathan said.

The pair frequented nearly every club and bar in their scene, but Kingdom was the spot they regularly used as an unsuspecting front for their drug dealing. Big name DJs performed there and the drunken partiers of these shows became prime targets for potential sales.

“The rave kings and queens you’ve come to know and love at Kingdom are not increasing our profits,” Alex said. “Other than getting my dick wet, there’s not too much else they can provide for us anymore.”

“We are taking weekly trips to Vegas, eating like royalty and buying out clubs.” Nathan replied. “Why do you want to mess up an already perfect formula?”

“Fuck Vegas, man. Let’s go to Cuba on a private jet.”

The two differed in where their “business” was headed. Nathan used drug dealing as a way to provide for his expensive lifestyle of drinking his way to the next hook-up. Alex was looking to turn the business into an empire that spanned across the country.

This was a life that only a child of privilege could imagine. Nathan had been locked inside a bubble that sheltered him from the outside world. He dreamt of a more dangerous locale than Stonegate, the dreary suburb he called his hometown. Still, it was immature for Nathan to be so confident in the idea that he could ride out this line of work in peace for as long as he wanted.

Alex was also an idiot, but for different reasons. He wanted to make drug dealing a full-time job. It didn’t help that he had family connections within the business. That’s who sold them their product.

“I’ve been talking to my cousin,” he said, lighting up the roach. “He wants to involve us more in the business.”

“I’m definitely not getting involved with the Cartel,” Nathan said, grabbing the joint from Alex.

“So he’s from Mexico and deals drug, and you assume he’s a member of the Cartel. That’s racist, man.”

Nathan laughed.

“I’ve never even met the guy,” he said. “He sells decent stuff, but Christ man. I don’t even know his name.”

“It’s Abraham,” Alex said, pronouncing the second and third ‘a’ in the name like ‘ahs’ instead of ‘ayes,’ leaving the ‘h’ in the middle as nothing but a whisper.

“He works at a biology research center in Mexico. He’s smart and goes to school. But he also sells dope on the side.”

“So what is he offering us, this weekend, that Kingdom is not?” Nathan asked.

“Job security,” Alex said, inhaling another drag from the joint.

“Look man. We’ve had this conversation. I’m not doing this for the rest of my life.”

BZZZ

Nathan pulled out his phone. Amber texted him.

“What are you doing tonight?” the message said.

Nathan didn’t respond.

“You’ve made thousands, I get it,” Alex said. “But it won’t last forever. I’m thinking of my family and yours.

“If I do have a family, I’ll be making money, legally,” Nathan replied.

“I’m talking about a deal that would give you 100 grand in cash on the spot.”

Nathan smiled.

“I’m listening.”

“See now you want in,” Alex said.

“Don’t tease me. What’s the deal?”

“There’s this music festival in Mexico City coming up in a month, and Abraham is planning selling a lot of Molly there.”

“That doesn’t sound sketch,” Nathan said.

“Would you let me talk?” Alex said. “We have enough money to hold out on selling for a month, for two months maybe. I don’t know. I haven’t done the math yet. But, if we buy our normal amount of cocaine and keep these beautiful Molly pills to ourselves, Abraham will buy them from us at a bigger price.”

BZZZ

It was Amber again.

“Let me come over,” the message read.

Nathan ignored it and went back to the conversation.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” he said. Why would he want to do that?”

“Because he can sell these pills for three times the profit at a festival this big,” Alex said. The demand is, well, high. No pun intended. And he needs a place to stash that amount of drugs.”

“So we’re his drug mules now?” Nathan asked.

“We’re not moving the product, we’re just holding on to it,” Alex said.

“What about Kingdom? If we’re not selling, someone else will take over.”

“There’ll be some high school shithead who thinks he is taking over,” Alex said, cracking his knuckles. “But we’ll set him straight.”

“What the fuck does that even mean, man? This is some serious shit you’re talking about.”

Nathan’s anger was visibly growing.

“I’m not going to be a part of this delusional drug fantasy you have in your head,” he said.

BZZZ

It was Amber once again.

“I made plans,” the message said. “Have a good night.”

Nathan didn’t reply.

“Look, Abraham is coming to visit my family in a week,” Alex said, burning his cashed roach once again into the reflective black skin of his dragon ashtray. “I’ll introduce you. He’s a super nice guy.”