Buildup and Breakup
(a tale out of Breaking Benjamin)
Copyright Brent Meske 2013
(originally published by Authorhouse 2007)
This free ebook may be copied, distributed, reposted, reprinted and shared, provided it appears in its entirety without alteration, and the reader is not charged to access it.
Buildup and Breakup
Five Days Before Graduation
How were they right side up? None of it made sense.
No, this wasn’t supposed to happen. How did people get their licenses in this state anyhow? The situation crumpled down to its bare essentials in her mind: six cars all on the side of the highway. With an average of two people per car, that left twelve witnesses. Fourteen bodies to get rid of.
“Just keep calm, nobody’s doing anything,” Crandall said. “We’re going first names now. No weapons, people, these are civilians.”
Jessica Laramie looked over at their squad leader, eyes wide.
“Are you serious?” People were already out of their cars, shaking heads, checking for bumps and bruises. One of those fussed over looked no older than six. Maybe fifteen bodies to deal with, if Crandall came to his senses.
“Dead serious Lara- uhh, Jess.” He shook his own head. “It’s Jess. Jess Jess Jess.”
“Whatever,” she said, her tone full of contempt. “You’re getting us in jail and fried on the electric chair, you know that, Ronald?” She spat his first name.
“This isn’t like you, Jess. Ever since the meet you’ve been all weird. Damn, I think my leg’s busted.”
“The important thing is no panicking, and no shooting,” Jiri said. He gave his door a shove with a stone shoulder. It creaked, but gave in to his superior strength.
Someone rushed over to their car, a balding man with a huge gash over his left eyebrow.
“You kids okay over here? Nobody seriously hurt? Don’t worry; the police are on their way. We’ll have an ambulance in no time. Really nobody hurt?” He seemed to take their silence as consent and ran on to the next car.
Jess shoved her door open and lurched out onto the wet grass. There she went to her knees and threw up between them.
Two Years Earlier
“This is where you’ll be staying while you’re working here,” her supervisor said. He showed her the little room with a cot, desk, dresser and bookshelves just above the desk, set into the wall. “Standard issue one person dorm room, at your service.”
“It’ll be great,” Jess said.
The supervisor, his name was Jack, frowned. “Are you serious? This is like a locker. It’s practically a coffin.”
“I don’t have a whole lot of stuff,” she said. “Besides, while I’m here, I won’t be in my room a lot, right?”
“I guess. How old are you again?”
“Eighteen,” she lied. She was hardly sixteen. “That’s not a problem is it?”
“Not at all,” he said, shaking his head. “You just look awful young to be in premed. Come on, let’s show you the cadaver lab, and the rest of the crew.” The rest of the crew turned out to be four men, all older and bigger than she, all watching her every move. In some ways it felt way worse than Clements.
“Here’s Reggie, Dave, Neal and Chuck. Guys, this is Jessica, she’ll be working in here for the next four months or so.” The five guys stood as a whole, one mass of unrecognizable anonymity. She almost couldn’t place any features on any single one of them. Their stares undressed her, pulled her down to her knees, and did awful things to her. She knew their names from the Academy dossier on them: David Deevers, Reginald McDonough, Charles Winters, Neal Cavanaugh, and Jack Reinhart. She’d had her briefing on every single one of them in turn. Already she’d forgotten which was which. Aside from Jack, they all blurred together. “Oh yeah, and this is Amaretto. Here girl.”
Jack snapped his fingers. A honey colored mutt came over, from beneath the gurneys. Jess forgot all about the men and embraced the first dog of her life.
“She’s totally harmless, housebroken, spayed, all that. Flea free.”
Jess let go all her apprehensions about the men, and ignored their leers.
One Year, Ten Months Earlier
Jess awoke to darkness and confinement. She hit her head trying to sit up, and found the walls just to her sides. And it was so cold! Coldness and darkness collapsed her mind to a blind panic. She banged around, not knowing where she was, and started screaming.
It lasted for minutes, hours, weeks. She screamed and banged herself against the walls until her voice dried out into a rasp. Tears streamed down her face, and she wiped them away. She found just enough room to curl herself into a ball and sob.
Salvation came with the sound of a cooler door opening. Laughter met her. The cold steel under her jerked, and she was pulled bodily out of cold storage. Hands helped her tiny, shivering body off the steel cot. Amaretto stood there, whining, while their laughter slowed to a stop.
“Reggie, let her up. Come on Chuck, help me out here.”
“Aww now, come on, we do that to everybody.”
“We were only joking with ya, Jess,” one of them said. Jess ignored them and held the dog to her, feel its heat. The gold fur made a sharp contrast to her cold, pale skin. Her tears soaked into its fur.
One Year, Nine Months Earlier
“Hey, I hope you’re not still upset with us over the cooler thing,” Jack said.
Jess looked at the moon. She wanted to go back to Clements, pick up a gun, and massacre a target until it fell apart in tatters. Non Academy people scared the shit out of her.
“We didn’t mean nothing by it. Really, most of ‘em wake up before we even get them down there. Then we shove them in and they know it. You’re a really sound sleeper though. But I understand if you hate us, it’s totally understandable.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” Jess said. Her hand touched Amaretto and everything felt a little more okay. She didn’t hate them. They weren’t like her. She always felt lonely, even on nights like this. But the honey colored mutt made it a bit better.
“Alright.”
They walked around the grounds, and Jess felt the urge to run. Just take off running, run with Amaretto. They’d head south, down into New York, and make it to Florida. After that, Jamaica, or Cuba, or wherever. Anyplace but stupid New Hampshire. She knew it wasn’t possible though. Students who tried didn’t come back to classes. Jess didn’t know what happened to them, but could imagine a few things. She didn’t like to think about any of them, but that time inside that cooler brought them crashing back into her mind. Nothing made sense in her head now, not when that black, screaming time came back on her.
She chose a place and sat down. There was a bench nearby, but she didn’t feel like a bench. She felt like sitting on the grass and petting Amaretto.
“Look Jess,” Jack started.
“Stop it, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Well we’re sorry anyway, but I wasn’t going to say anything about it any more. I wanted to tell you…” he trailed off. She didn’t say anything, so he went on. “It’s, well, we all admire how hard you’re working, and what a smart woman you are, and how capable at the job you’ve been already. I just…well, any man would be lucky to have you.”
His hand touched her thigh, lightly, once. In her mind Jess went back, to the last Jujutsu class about the lock flow procedure. She pictured reducing Jack to a screaming, broken mass of quivering bloody mess, and shuddered. Then, she remembered the stern warnings from Headmaster Jennings on staying in character on these assignments.
Am
aretto started whining a little, and Jess realized how tightly she’d gripped the dog. Then she realized Jack wasn’t sitting next to her, about the same time she noticed the tears streaking down her face. What she never realized was the look on Jack’s face as he held his bruised and half-paralyzed hand. In the days to come, when she became absorbed in the work and her own world, she never saw that their sidelong glances had turned from appreciative to apprehensive.
One Year, Eight Months Earlier
Jess looked into Jack’s face and saw the fear there, but couldn’t for the life of her understand why he’d be afraid of her. Amaretto sat panting next to her, with her hand on his head. The dog never left her side lately.
“I wish you could take Amaretto with you. You’re serious that the school won’t let you?”
She nodded, and something passed over Jack again. Almost a flinch.
“Well, I hope you’re successful back at school. I hope you learned a lot here, and we’ll be sad to see you go. I know all the guys will miss you, almost as much as I will. And if you need anything, like…after the Academy, I’m here for you. The guys are too.”
“Thanks,” she said. Jack lunged forward and hugged her, picking her up off the ground for a moment before setting her down. He never knew how close he was to ending up a corpse for the operating table.
“Sorry,” he said. “I won’t be able to do that ever again. I had to get in at least one.”
“It’s okay,” she mumbled, still feeling his chest and the smell of his shampoo and aftershave. She still felt the warmth of his body lingering throughout her. It felt really incredible.
One Year Earlier
The body of Reginald McDonough was found in a ditch about fifty feet from his car on a lonely two-lane highway. Apparent cause of death: heart attack. He was forty-two years old. Conflicting evidence at the scene suggested a struggle, or perhaps death throes. The police declined to open an investigation because of McDonough’s family history of heart disease.
Nine Months Earlier
The body of David Deevers was discovered in the center of Long Lake, where his car was also recovered. The police report read: Deevers blood alcohol level was .18, almost twice the legal limit. Deevers appeared to have driven off the road and into Long Lake at approximately two a.m. on Saturday night. On freeing himself from his car, he became disoriented, and swam deeper into the lake, where he drowned.
The death was ruled accidental.
Eight Months Earlier
Neal Cavanaugh, Charles Winters, and Jack Reinhart were put into protective custody pending further investigation into the possible murders of their co-workers. After an extensive evaluation, and the involvement of the FBI, all were reassigned out of state, to various hospitals and police precincts around the country. Amaretto became the property of Jack Reinhart.
Two Days Earlier
“Is everyone kosher on the plan? If we’re not, we can come up with something else, definitely. But this looks like it’s going to be easiest.”
“Element of surprise,” Raspazzi said. “Absolutely. This is going to be fun.”
“Laramie?” Crandall asked.
Jess rolled her head and cracked her neck. “It’s fine. As long as the limo guy likes short brunettes.” She didn’t like the idea, at all, but it beat blowing up a moving car. But nobody could know her reasons for not liking the idea.
“Even if he likes short redheads, or short blondes, that’s not a problem.”
“What if he’s into fat girls or something?” she asked.
Crandall smiled. “I don’t think there’s any way he’ll be able to resist you.”
She gave him a weak smile. She knew Crandall meant well. He wanted her, and she wasn’t interested in him that way. She wasn’t interested in anybody, really.
Three Hours Earlier
“There he is,” Jess whispered. She looked over at a well-built man in a suit, holding a small white sign that read the name they needed: Whitlock.
“Do your thing,” Crandall said. “The rest of you spread out. Kolenkhov, you’re my point man. Make sure nobody we don’t want gets within five feet of Laramie.”
Jiri just nodded and rumbled over to the rows of airport waiting seats.
Jess swallowed and reminded herself not to pull her shirt down. It clung to her compact, five-foot-four frame just the right way. So did the jeans, for that matter, along with all their holes and rips. Her panties showed through in the tiniest places, just hints, but the effect worked really well. This fellow, they found, really got off on little girls wearing club clothes. She pulled up her carry-on luggage and took a seat just at the periphery of the man’s vision.
It took about a minute for them to establish eye contact. She gave a tiny twitch of her lips. Then, she put the carry on bag between her legs, pulled on her headphones, and started rocking to the beat.
“Take your time, Laramie,” Crandall said into her earpiece, “Flight lands in just about an hour.”
In ten minutes she pretended to notice him checking her out for the first time, and flashed him a little smile. He smiled back. She looked away and kept dancing in her seat, grinding her hips and swaying. They’d found out this guy’s frequent hang out spots, what girls he liked, where he threw his money.
She took her time walking over to him, and watched his eyes caress her feet in their platform sandals, up her legs in their ripped up jeans, over her hips to her exposed middle, and higher. She needed time to summon up her courage, and did it now. He didn’t even blush when his eyes finally met hers.
“You have no shame,” Jess said, smiling and taking off the headphones.
“You don’t know the half of what I’ve got,” he said.
“You got a limo someplace?” He nodded. “My flight leaves in two hours,” she said. “Philly. After that you’ll never see me again.” Her eighteenth birthday wouldn’t come up for another two months, which just added to the yuckiness of the situation. Jess didn’t let it show though.
“I’ve got a client in about forty-five minutes.” A little worry came over his face.
“I’ll have you back before then,” she said, looking up at his linebacker’s body. With that, she grabbed his fashionable red tie and pulled him in for the most repulsive kiss of her life.
He led the way to a nondescript black limousine, groping her once they got to the parking structure. His big hands touched and squeezed her, and she had to screw her eyes closed in order not to picture what would come next.
He forced her against the back door of the limo, pressing his body up against her. She felt his crotch grind against her and groaned in disgust. Luckily for her it sounded like a groan of pleasure. She felt his hand creep up under her shirt.
“Inside the car,” she breathed. “Let’s get inside.”
Inside were Crandall and Raspazzi, and long bladed knives.
Two and a half Hours Earlier
“He’s dead,” Jess whispered. She pulled her shirt back down over her breasts. “God, look at him Crandall. You killed him.”
“On to heaven with him, and all the better for it. What a pig,” Raspazzi said.
It wasn’t exactly true. His mouth still worked open and closed, and his hands twitched as if they couldn’t decide which wound to hold. The white shirt under his suit jacket was almost as red as the tie. Blood leaked out onto the floor in a dark puddle.
“Killed the shit out of him,” Crandall said. Mike Raspazzi laughed. Jiri Kolenkhov just looked on, stolid and unblinking. It wasn’t the first dead body they’d been forced to see. It was, however the first murder that she’d ever seen up close, real, fresh, bleeding and personal.
Crandall’s eyes went glassy, and he looked Jess up and down.
“You look good,” he said. “You don’t normally dress up like that.”
Raspazzi looked at her, grinning. “The Game’s on now.”
Two Hours, Twenty Minutes Earlier
“Right this way,
Mr. Whitlock,” Jiri Kolenkhov said in a flat monotone. He disguised his faint Russian accent well. Jess watched from a little ways away, embedded in a group of people picking up their loved ones at the airport. She noticed both Mr. Whitlock, a strong looking fellow in a sharp gray suit, and his bodyguard. The guy was even bigger than Jiri, probably six seven and a good two eighty. Both held briefcases, but Whitlock’s was handcuffed to his wrist.
Bingo. “I see the target,” Jess whispered into a tiny microphone temporarily glued to the inside of one of her teeth. Crandall’s voice came back over the receiver.
“Grab a bag from luggage and follow the target. When we give the signal, drop your luggage.”
She followed them at a distance, shivering this time and not knowing exactly why. She held onto the goose bumps popping up from her forearms and waited for the luggage to start appearing.
Two Hours, Ten Minutes Earlier
“Now,” came a tiny voice in her ear. Jess dropped the bag, and everybody spun to see what had just happened. Jess lunged and shoved Whitlock toward the door of the limo.
Time ceased to exist.
Whitlock’s bodyguard spun, but a garrote caught him at the neck anyway. Jess hurtled to the side and put her shoulder into his breastbone. She knocked his hand away from his weapon and took the wind out of him at the same time. Jiri Kolenkhov yanked backwards and to the side. With contact still against the man’s body, she felt the spasm and the snap of his spinal cord shock his entire form.
The man calling himself Whitlock opened his mouth to scream, but a disgusting wet sound came out instead. Jess watched it all this time, through the open back door of the limousine. The body of the man originally intended to chauffeur him still lay where they’d left it in a pool of his own blood.
Raspazzi’s knife snicked as he drew it out of the man, and a fleshy, tearing sound as it went back in. All she saw of Crandall was one hand, grabbing Whitlock’s head and taking it out of sight inside the limo.
Two Hours Earlier
Jess watched it all with an odd mixture of fascination and, something else. She would have like to say horror, but the word just wasn’t accurate. She wasn’t afraid of it now, seeing the blood pour out of the corporate fool’s gut in a little waterfall.
Raspazzi went at the guy’s wrist with the hacksaw they’d brought, spurting blood everywhere. Kolenkhov turned away and made a small grunting sound while Crandall looked on. Jess stared into his face and watched beads of sweat stand out. All she saw were his eyes, and the way they seemed intent and far away at the same time.
“That’s done then,” Crandall whispered, and snapped his head up, away from the corpse. “We’ve got to get going, get on the road.” He dropped the long bladed knife to the limo’s floor and slipped off the almost invisible gloves, now soaked with two men’s blood. Next came the long-sleeved shirt, along with the undershirt. His well-muscled torso came into view, dappled with the tiny leavings of blood soaked through both shirts. Jess took her opportunity to join Jiri.
Crandall fished the chauffeur’s keys from his pockets and popped the trunk. With an effort he lugged the body of the bodyguard inside. The closing of the trunk echoed in the emptiness of the parking garage.
The sound of the saw cutting through the man’s bone grated on her nerves. She walked a good distance from the limo and checked out the cars at the other end of the garage.
“They’re going to have me on surveillance,” she remarked. Kolenkhov shrugged.
“Take off the wig,” he said. She did, and shook out her hair.
They both heaved a big sigh at the same time and turned to look at each other. Jiri gave her a disarming smile, and it transformed them both to giggling lunatics. It took them a while to stop laughing and smiling at Jiri long enough to actually talk to him.
“We’re going to pull this off right?”
Jiri shrugged his massive mountain shoulders.
“What if we don’t?”
He shrugged again.
“That’s not a very optimistic view on the subject.”
She watched his shoulders move up and down, slow and steady.
“I think we’re going to be fine.”
“I think this guy has like titanium laced fucking bones you guys!” Raspazzi yelled from in the limo.
“I just cursed us didn’t I?” she asked Jiri. But he only shrugged.
Ten Minutes Earlier
“Line Leader, I’ve lost you,” the little phone hissed. “We were tracking you at about a kilometer, but you’re out of visual range, over.”
Jess picked it up and looked at Crandall.
“Copy that,” Crandall said. “We’re going to hit a rest stop in about fifty kilometers, about fifteen from the border, over.”
“Copy that. What’s your present speed over?”
“Maintaining one-ten kilometers, over.”
“Copy. Over and out.”
Five Minutes Earlier
“What the fuck?” Crandall said. Jess snapped out of the Young and Modern magazine in time to see a bumper whip through the air, tumbling end over end. It clipped off the mirror on the passenger side, missing her by about ten centimeters. She only heard a little clink!
Next came a muffled sound of impact, and Jess watched in horror as a little red car spun into the concrete median, smacked it, and slid right into them. Her seatbelt sucked all the wind right out of her, and her head hit the passenger side window. Everything went gray and dizzy.
Other crashes sounded in the distance, and they were struck again. This time it happened from behind. Their airbags deployed, hitting Jess again. The squealing of tires filled her world with noise.
Crandall jammed his foot on the gas pedal, and their green sedan leapt forward like an eager animal, through all three lanes of traffic and into the shoulder. Beyond that, the steep decline led them to a line of trees. They rolled, once, then twice. Jess closed her eyes and wished it to end.
Now- Five Days Before Graduation
Jess stared into her puke and got to her feet, wobbled, and used the car to help her stay standing. She had an impression that puking from a headache might be bad, but she pushed that aside and took in the situation. To her right, and up on the road, cars rolled by with staring kids and wives inside. Thousands of potential witnesses all taking in tiny bits of incriminating information as they passed by. Some might be thinking ‘oh, look at that short young girl with the blood on the back of her pretty curly brown hair’.
She whirled so fast that she nearly lost it again.
“The trunk,” she croaked, but Kolenkhov didn’t hear her. She made her way back there, hand over hand on the car, and breathed out a huge sigh. The trunk, somehow, hadn’t popped open and spilled their cargo out.
Beyond their car sat several others in their own states of disrepair. People stumbled or struggled inside or out of them. She counted seven people. She turned and faced the other way, and counted three more cars. The man with the gash in his head ran up to the farthest car, waving his arms like he intended to make a takeoff and fly right to the hospital.
“Jess, are you going to be fine?” she heard Jiri’s deep voice, tinged with his Russian accent, but the words blurred out like her vision. The blur went gray, then a warm black.
Now- Four Days Before Graduation
Midnight came painful and slow for Jess. She waited through it in a dull ache, and answered questions as best she could on the information she remembered from the brief. Her head felt overstuffed, as if it might leak out of her ears if they weren’t stopped up with cotton. Were they stuffed up with cotton? It felt strange to answer every question with a lie, but it was unavoidable.
“Were there any possessions inside which were damaged?” the balding insurance man asked. Insurance people hovered everywhere. So did the police. She didn’t like the look of them, or the feel of them, or the feeling that they had guns and she didn’t.
The insurance guy meant personal possessions. Like anything but
the guns or the other equipment that was still (bless him for losing them) in Raspazzi’s car.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Should I head over and check the car over? I’ll be taking pictures of the exterior anyhow. If I had the keys I could make sure your bags are still in the trunk, and nothing’s broken.”
Their possessions were a lie. The names on the insurance certificates were lies. The names on their driver’s licenses were lies. The entire thing coalesced into a massive lie, one big stinking heap of a falsehood.
“No,” she winced, trying to shake her head. Had Crandall or Jiri gotten all the sidearms out of there? “How long was I out?”
The insurance guy looked over at a passing nurse, and back to Jess. “You have a pretty bad concussion, they’ve been waking you up every hour so you don’t slip into a coma.” She didn’t remember that. “You’ve been out all day.”
“Where’s Jiri and Cr- uh, Ronald?”
“I’m here, Jessica,” she heard the familiar rumble of Jiri’s voice.
“Can you ask Jiri the questions?” she asked. “I’m so sleepy.”
“Of course,” he said in a tone that suggested that he’d already tried with Jiri and failed. She didn’t doubt that Jiri had been a silent mountain, as he always was, and had said nothing.
Now- Three Days Before Graduation
At about two in the morning, Jess awoke to someone shaking her arm. She swam blearily out of unconsciousness and back into a big lake of pain. At the end she found Crandall.
“Hey Jess,” he whispered. “We’re getting out of here. Raspazzi got us a hotel room and some liquor.”
“Liquor?” she asked. “What are you talking-“ but she didn’t get to finish.
“Shh,” he said. “Just get up and get your clothes on. This place is crawling with police. Raspazzi’s waiting for us outside.”
So she got up, and pulled the IV from her arm. It hurt, and that was good enough to divert some from the pain in her head. She stumbled and struggled toward the bathroom, and had to turn back to collect up her clothes, before finally making it there after all. Dressing proved just as annoying and difficult in her condition, and Jess cursed Crandall for all his stupidity. Somehow through the pain she walked out, straight-backed, into the night air and into Raspazzi’s car.