Don’T Smile

By Priest

Some monsters are real, and the dark holds many things to fear. Carta city is growing colder, winter is coming and with it a monster stirs in the darkness. The shadows are on the move, the world growing silent. Veteran homicide detective Aiden Haxton must conquer his ambivalence and ever growing personal doubt in order to follow the clues left in the wake of a psychopathic killer claiming to be a god. A monster Born from sickness and insanity, that has a single minded intent to shape the world in his image. With his young partner Tad Russle, Haxton must battle the elements and the clock as the bodies pile up. The murders are gruesome, the monster unknown, and the messages clear. Time is running out for Haxton and for Carta city. The question remains, does Haxton have the resolve to stop the monster calling itself Code Blue, before all hope is lost? Or will he slip into memory along with the rest of the world. The answer remains to be seen, but it will decide the fate of us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781496916907

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© 2014 . All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or

transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   06/25/2014

ISBN: 978-1-4969-1692-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-1691-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4969-1690-7 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014910011

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in

this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views

expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the

views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

S.V. Mitchell artist

Purge

Copyright 2011

Contents

Prologue      Carta City

Chapter 1     Sunglasses at Night

Chapter 2     The First Sin

Chapter 3     Citizen Kane

Chapter 4     To Whom It May Concern

Chapter 5     The Recruit

Chapter 6     Secret Center

Chapter 7     First Draft

Chapter 8     Conduit

Chapter 9     A Catalyst

Chapter 10   Rest Stop

Chapter 11   Which One Are You

Chapter 12   Unexpected Suspect

Chapter 13   God Man

Chapter 14   To Witness The Last

Chapter 15   A Howl in the Dark

Chapter 16   Close Calls

Chapter 17   The Time Has Come

Chapter 18   The Final Chapters

Chapter 19   A New Age

Chapter 20   Schism

Epilogue      A New Beginning

Special Thanks…

A very special thanks to my cover artist S.V. Mitchell.

I would also like to thank my Mom & Dad, Ron & Suz, and my friends of ADDENDUM13

Alex, Macy, Marcus, Ace, Josh, & all the rest

Check out PRIEST on FACEBOOK @

Musings of a madman: The art & writings of Priest

www.facebook.com/authorpriest

And don’t forget to check out the artwork of S.V. Mitchell Artist @

WWW.SVMITCHELL.COM

Lisa DiGloria,

Book Ink Editing, www.bookink.com

Inspiration is the vein that ties the before to the after, a hope that comes not out of intention but rather need. A need to create, not from a hope, but often times the lack there of. I often feel that I have lost my hope, My personal desire for self. Leaving me to wonder if my own inspiration comes from my hope for those who follow. The road is long, the world preoccupied with what comes next. Forgetting that it’s the why that will conquer the how. Question everything, Surrender nothing.

PRIEST

I have traversed the realms of the after, peeled the skin back from the bones of the damned, and exchanged pleasantries with the Devil. Now with this knowledge in mind, what could you possibly have to offer me?

UNKNOWN

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Prologue

Carta City

October 25

1:00 A.M.

S kies are like mirrors glued to the underbelly of heaven, shifting with the weather, the calendar and the clock with a fickle tendency to reflect the mood of any given mass of life changing from clear blue with sparse white clouds to darkness shrouded in cold emotionless gray smoke that covers the sky like a mad painter stuck in a gray period of hellish proportion. It’s said that the sky can tell you as much about a place as a woman’s eyes can give away about her intentions, telling you what she wants, what she needs, and most of all, what she intends to get. An underlining to the overveil that reflects back the world under it, showing either the beauty or the black that blossoms or festers beneath its gleaming surface. If that’s true, then the sky over the medium-sized Carta City had dismal intentions on an almost permanent basis and at the moment held even more than usual. The sky staring down on the dead streets with malcontent needing, wanting, and intending to get the very darkness that seemed to seep from every poorly mortared brick in the side of every dingy apartment building wall, every crack in the asphalt, every dark, dank, wet, alley street.

Carta City was often referred to as the biggest city. No one knows about which was true to a point, but perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that it was the biggest city. No one wanted to know about driving through the streets of Carta. One might have almost thought that they drove through any of the worst parts of New York City like a back alley district that stretched on forever, an endless line of copied and duplicated fragments of wet stone with dark, dimly lit streets lined with potholes filled full with dingy water that reflected the soft street light glow back toward the building tops. An endless mirror, peaceful only on the surface.

Sure, there were parts of Carta City that weren’t all bad. Some people might have even found some of the better districts even pleasing, perhaps on occasion even passing for quaint, but the silver lining of a cesspool still tarnishes no matter how hard you want to see it shimmer in the morning light of a sun or moon that could hardly ever be seen over the manmade monstrosities that towered everywhere, reaching up toward that dark mirror of hell wrapped in lace. Perhaps only the few with the privilege and ability to hold a sage-like denial over their life in Carta City would possibly be able to ignore the festering truth underneath the surface, the maggot infested underbelly of a rotting corpse, which still held its figure on the façade.

Unfortunately, Carta City detective Ayden Haxton was not so privileged as to see the silver lining of Carta, tarnished or otherwise. Haxton had been working the streets of Carta for far too long. At 52 years old, he had been behind a badge for 27 long years. During that time, he had seen everything plus some and the depravity of the creature named man never ceased to amaze him. It wasn’t as much what people were capable of doing that Haxton found disturbing, but rather more the way people had of ignoring everything around them, walking by the bleeding man lying facedown on the pavement, ignoring his gurgled, muffled, weak pleas for help just because they were late for work or in a rush to get to the coffee shop before donuts went stale.

Cruelty is an undeniable reality of life, even more so in Carta City, but it was the denial of suffering that struck a tender cord with Haxton. Maybe he had just been on the streets for too long, who knows, but after a while, anyone would have to stop looking at the murderer and start looking at the murderer’s neighbors, the ones who looked the other way, never calling the police when they heard that strange sound, that sound that on any quieter day could have almost sounded like a scream muffled by a hand, choosing indifference simply because they couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone and call the police. It was the landlord who didn’t want to lose a tenant even though the rent was always paid with blood tinged money because somehow, the $500 a month rent taken from the purse of a poor woman whose last memory was of being raped with a butcher’s knife and left to bleed to death in a dumpster was more valuable than her life was. It was the dozen noses that smelled the rotting corpse, but ignored it covering it with scented candles and aerosol sprays, not wanting to get involved. After enough time, any cop in Carta City started treating the witnesses like the criminals and the criminals like a sad statistic.

When Haxton first signed on as a rookie after completing his police academy training, he worked the nightshift as a beat cop falling into the typical stereotype of a young cop wearing the badge with pride like a fucking golden shield of valor, a symbol that gave him the power to save the world. He woke up in the morning with a leap, whistling while he dressed, not even bothering with coffee, having his duty as a Carta City police officer as the only stimulant he needed to start his day, acting like every day mattered, every day was new, fresh, every call, every case was a mission, and every criminal captured was another notch on his hand-woven belt of justice, doing every single infinitesimal detail of every single thing with anal precision, wanting to make sure that the evidence was preserved on every crime scene and every sheet of paperwork from inventory to profile was filled out to the line with perfectly legible printed handwriting and subsequently filed away in sealed envelopes. He never missed a court date and always held his composure at all times. It was in these early naive days that Haxton met the girl of his dreams and eventually married her.

Emily Sadler was her name, a black-haired angel that caught his eye at a policeman’s carnival thrown to help further delude the people of one of those better Carta City districts into thinking that they existed on top of a fatter beast whose underbelly lay just a little farther away than it actually did. For a while, his life was the perfect dream, waking up every day to go out and save the world, coming home to have his dinner waiting for him, then making love for hours just to fall asleep and do it all over again.

Haxton could still remember the way she smelled. Sometimes, breathing in with his eyes shut, gently rubbing his fingers together, the thought of her velvet skin so fresh he could almost believe she was next to him. Looking back on it all now, Haxton wasn’t sure how to reminisce, with heart wrenching doubt and regret or to laugh at how fucking completely blind he was in those rookie days. Carta City had a way of wearing you down and it did exactly that to him. With his purposeful mornings turning into a pot and a half of coffee, followed by even more once he got to the station, along with more cigarettes than he cared to count with any particular attention. His paperwork procession turned into sloppy handwriting and unsealed envelopes stuffed into the wrong drawer half the time. He started missing court appearances realizing that even if he saw the bastards do the crime, all showing up to court accomplished nine times out of 10 was watching the guilty be told by a prick in a black dress that they weren’t going to be doing the time.

Ten years into his career, Haxton was made a detective. Two years into that, his marriage fell apart and Emily, finally fed up with him left, taking their two sons, Clive who was now 14 and Christen who was now 16 with her. He didn’t blame her though, not at all. The man she fell in love with died with his job, died with Carta City, died, and joined the rest of the maggots on the underbelly. He was all purpose and reason when he and Emily had gotten married, but now, he was all distain and coldness. Twenty-seven years of back alleys and scumbags had made him that way, cold, dead to anything that resembled hope. Hell, Haxton wasn’t even sure if he actually cared at all about anything or anyone anymore and there was a big part of him that wondered why he was even still on the force. Maybe there was some deep seeded subconscious part of his mind that still felt like there might be some level of good to be done. Either that or he just knew damn good and well that if he retired and just walked away from the Carta PD, dropping that silver badge bearing the title Detective Haxton #6609, Carta City PD, in etched black lettering down onto his chief’s desk, he would still see every twisted face of every victim he had ever watched a paramedic drop a rubber sheet over. He would still see every dark alley littered with drug addicts and crack whores. He would still see the pedophile licking his lips at the sight of a playground and laughing in Haxton’s face while walking out of the courtroom a free man for the sake of insufficient evidence, regardless of the fact that one only needed to look into the sick fuck’s eyes to know his guilt.

These images had become Haxton’s dreams and they’d be there for him every time he closed his eyes, long since burned into his brain matter like Christ’s figure onto the shroud of Turin from the heat of the resurrection. They would never go away, never let him down by not being there. Haxton was trapped, if not to some degree willingly. Haxton had an unhealthy symbiotic relationship with Carta City and the sick individuals that roamed its district’s back alleys.

It was coming on the end of Halloween in Carta, October 25 to be precise. The snow was already falling, but the cold had been around since the second of the same month. Currently, Haxton was winding his way slowly through the darkened alley streets in no particular hurry. It was one in the morning, four hours into his shift, and his partner, Tad Russell, was on paperwork detail back at the precinct. There had been no calls coming in of any grand importance, at least none in the last couple of hours. The snow was already stacking itself onto the window ledges and dumpster lids, his car tires retracing the tracks left by the previous car to travel down the alleyway, pushing aside the dingy snow long since mixed with the motor oil and urine. Haxton didn’t like slow days like this one was turning out to be. Slow days always preceded a shit storm.

Haxton slammed on his brakes suddenly, the car squealing to a sliding stop, as a stray cat darted across the alley in front of his car, hurrying from one dumpster to another. Shit! Haxton whispered to himself, the skin of his right hand sizzling under the coffee that sloshed out of the paper cup he held, the cup bearing a smiley face on it proclaiming that he should have a nice day and come again real soon from the all-night convenience store over on Eighth and Hammond. Haxton hesitated for a moment, his foot holding down the brake of the older model police sedan, now unmarked, long since repainted shit brown, same as all the detective vehicles. They were old patrol officer hand-me-downs with bad bodywork. You could still see the boltholes from where the patrol light had been removed from the car top.

Haxton stared out of the icy driver’s side window that had collected frost around its edge. He looked down the side street that turned off to his left, watching the snow float to the ground, knowing that each beautiful pristine snowflake was destined to land in a puddle formed by a leaky radiator or onto the top of a makeshift box house used to shelter some fucking bum while he tied off and shot his veins full of battery acid, just another track in the flesh to serve as a memory to the memories washed away by liquid pleasure.

Haxton reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out the new pack of cigarettes purchased along with the second rate coffee that he could still feel burning his hand. Haxton reached onto the passenger’s seat and grabbed the matchbox that rested there, striking one match, then waving it out before dropping the dead match into the car’s ashtray, the smoke rolling off the frozen glass with every exhale. The sky was as black as coal. Overhead, a starless abyss reflecting all the filth right back at Carta City and as Haxton watched the snow settle, he couldn’t help remembering something that his grandfather who he used to spend his childhood summers with used to say. Don’t smile ’til the devil finds you. It was something Haxton never understood back when he was a kid, but now, he thought it was finally starting to make sense to him. He couldn’t help wishing that it still didn’t.

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Chapter 1

Sunglasses at Night

November 2

6:00 P.M.

T o look down Fromer Street, you wouldn’t think much of it. It was a lower- to middle-class neighborhood with mostly cheap apartment buildings and modest places of business including, but not limited to, the corner shops and local bookstore. It wasn’t the best district in Carta City, but by no means was it the worst, not by a mile.

It was 6:00 P.M. in the evening, November 2, and there was nothing special happening. It was not a holiday or local time of revilement and most of the Carta City residents, which occupied Fromer Street, were either already parked in front of their televisions, blank-faced, watching whatever was currently passing as prime time entertainment or they were just making their way home from work, briefcase or purse in hand or over the shoulder, juggling their door keys in one hand while trying to maintain their slender grip on the odd grocery bag from a local shop. The older of the residents were probably already in their beds along with the younger, of course, while the in between grabbed a moment either to themselves or with their significant other, just the same routine that had been acted out the day before, and was destined to be replayed the following day. However, in this tapestry of seeming normality existed an anomaly, for one thing was out of place by far further than anyone could have known. At 347 Fromer Street sat a small affordable duplex. The second floor was vacant and had been for around three and a half months, but an elderly couple, Beth and Robert Coleman, occupied the bottom floor. Normally, at this time of the evening, Beth and Robert would be watching Faith Revisited on channel 27, a talk show of sorts with a religious context that went off the air at 6:45 P.M., and just before the credits would have rolled, Beth and Robert thought of their bed, already being worn out from another day of doing very little.

Robert, at age 69, had been retired for seven years and Beth, who had never worked in her 62 years on earth, watched their kids grow and leave the house. Now, the older couple had nothing to do besides make light conversation and do crossword puzzles. However, today was different. There was no sweet elderly couple sitting on the floral print couch. There was no religious program on the television. In fact, the television wasn’t even turned on. There were no open crossword books and no one was getting ready for bed. Why was it that Beth and Robert Coleman had deviated from their iron set routine so drastically? What was it that could have so altered their lives and the course of their evening in such a way? The answer was inside of a closet in the tightly locked and very vacant upstairs apartment in the shape of a sweet elderly couple propped against one another in the cramped confines of the small room, the very place where Beth and Robert Coleman had been placed 17 hours earlier, the bodies stiff now and bowels long since purged onto the closet’s floor, seeping through the wood, gravity pulling the fluids toward the basement. Their wrinkled skin was cold and drained of moisture, the insects just beginning to find their way in following the slowly increasing scent radiating from the bodily fluids, which leaked through the floorboards into the downstairs apartment, trickling down the walls, leaving behind a distinct odor of decay and forgotten summers of rotting meat and burnt out freezers.

Past the first floor in the basement of 347 Fromer Street played the devil that had knocked ever so slightly on the Coleman’s back door. The devil that had waited patiently for Beth to make her way to the door with awkward creeping steps made on top of bad hips with the aid of a wooden cane. The devil who had taken the breath away from both Robert and Beth before tucking them ever so neatly away in the upstairs closet. However, the Coleman’s were simply in that devil’s way, nothing more, but it was in the basement of 347 Fromer Street where that devil played out his true purpose, working on his first masterpiece.

The basement was dark, dingy, and dusty, long neglected. The room was still for the moment, the rhythmic sound of a leaking water pipe tapping a tune onto the seat of an old bicycle left behind by Jerry Morgan, the last resident of the upstairs apartment.

In the basement’s center hung a young girl wearing only a matching set of underwear, a pink see through bra and thong with red piping. She was hung by her wrists, chains wrapped tightly around them and looped over a hook hung from the first floor girders above her. The girl’s feet dangled cruelly an inch above the cement floor, her hands having long since turned a sickly shade of black and purple with the pain and dying circulation, the sensations fading from agony to burning, followed by no feeling at all. She had been hanging there practically naked for 14 hours fading in and out of consciousness. The young girl hung lifeless from her dead hands before once again stirring back to reality, although she hardly recognized it as being such. She slowly stirred awake and in the distant shadows of the basement through bloodshot eyes clouded with 14 hours of periodic tears she saw her torturer, she saw that devil as he stepped out into the soft light that covered the room from a lone hanging light bulb. The man, the devil, was dressed in black from head to heel. He had a leather coat on open at the front of his leather-clad legs, which tapered up to his waist where it grew tight around his torso, chest fastened with numerous buckles that shimmered silver, the clasps dotting his chest like crooked stitches in a sea of black, a jagged silver smile played out on treated animal hide. His skin was pale and somewhat transparent with the blue hue of veins being visible just beneath its surface. The devil’s eyes were covered in small round goggles that were strapped tightly to his face by a cord that wrapped around his head, the cord hidden by the long wavy black hair that hung down around the man’s face swaying side-to-side, as he stepped closer to her once again before turning to the table that sat just to the girl’s left, putting a bare fair-skinned hand on a roll of black leather that sat on the table. Pushing it to one side, the bundle rolled across the table’s top and in its center, tied by a single piece of string, sat a straight razor with a black handle and silver blade, which caught the soft light, just the same as his coat buckles did, black and silver, a stereotypical color scheme for the calm monster that pulled the string, freeing the razor from its prison.

The hanging girl’s name was Tabitha Connelly viewed by some as a party girl, wild and unbound by any strict set of moral codes or self-respecting limitations, viewed by others as the best thing in the neighborhood since the invention of the bicycle and twice as fun to ride, and viewed by even others still as simply the neighborhood tramp. She looked a lot older than she indeed was. Tabitha was only 16, but passed easily for 20 and did so on numerous occasions. Her promiscuous way of dress only served to make her look even older, drawing even more attention to her, which indeed was her intent.

The man in front of her, that devil that played behind those simple round goggles, had come out of nowhere, stepping out of an alley as Tabitha walked home from just another desperate plea for attention in the form of a three-way sexual debacle with Jeffery and Frankie Doman, two brothers who lived a couple blocks away from her. The man had asked her if she had a light, holding out his hand, grasping an unlit black wrapped clove cigarette and when she looked up from the sidewalk at him then, she could have sworn he looked far less sickly, but seemed to be somewhat unsure of her own memories now perhaps due to the torture she had endured over so many long hours. Somehow, thinking back, his face seemed ghostly, like a dream that had been forgotten and clouded with the waking of the dreamer. She remembered his skin being normal, even flush and healthy, more so than her own pale Victorian pigment. The tight goggles he wore, now strapped so tightly to his head, were simple black-framed glasses with round lenses shaded just enough to keep his eyes hidden. In fact, young Tabitha had found him somewhat dashing in his long flowing dark trench coat that hung to the sidewalk, although it hadn’t been made of leather then, she remembered, but a softer material, suede, she thought, and it wasn’t tight as it was now and also not black, but rather a dark brown. The long black hair that hung in his face had been shorter then as well. It had aroused her when she saw the distinguished albeit slightly oddly dressed man with the rugged black hair hanging just slightly into his eyes. Tabitha could even recall being made even slightly wet by the stranger’s rouge-like swagger and casual confident manner.

In response to his request for a light, she had pulled a cheap toss away lighter from her purse, the fluid sloshing around just under the purple plastic. She walked up to him in her recently removed skirt that had been so high as to hide little of her delicates and the tight baby T-shirt that proclaimed her to be a spoiled bitch in full trailer park splendor. Even though it wasn’t visible at the time, she was still wet with semen from Frankie Doman, one of the brothers who had played doctor with her, climaxing onto her breasts only minutes before she had run into the mysterious dashing stranger.

Tabitha approached the man and struck the lighter as he lifted the black cigarette to his soft lips. The cool crackle as the flame hit the clove seemed to hang in the air with a sweet smell, then time slowed down or at least looking back on it that’s how she remembered it, like a clock with dying batteries ticking slower and slower as the stranger spoke words that she couldn’t recall at all now, only seeing his lips moving in her mind. Then he turned in slow motion, his dark brown coat swinging around him like a superhero’s cape.

She had followed him into the alley, time creeping down slower and slower, as she followed until he turned back toward her, smoke billowing from his cracked lips as he pushed the clove scented air out of his lungs, licking his lips, and then the last thing she remembered was giving him a wicked smile before kneeling down in front of the stranger and watching as his zipper found its way down and that was all she remembered of their encounter.

The next memory Tabitha had was of waking up, hands burning for the lack of blood in them, seeing that the dashing stranger who had asked her for a light had turned into a leather-bound monster with sick skin and depraved intentions shimmering in his goggles. For all the hours that Tabitha had hung there, he had done practically nothing besides stripping her to her bra and panties and hanging her up by her hands, which she didn’t even remember him doing. The dark stranger hadn’t said one solitary word or touched her at all since, but that time she feared was rapidly drawing to an end.

Tabitha struggled now to maintain consciousness. She had passed out several dozen times due to the pain in her blackened hands, wanting to scream, but being unable with her mouth stuffed with a torn piece of her T-shirt, a stretch of rope wrapped around her head to hold it in. The black-coated man left the razor on the table and walked slowly over to Tabitha softly grabbing her by the bare ribs and giving her a playful spin. Even though her hands had long since numbed completely, dying on the ends of her arms, the movement of the spin sent new waves of pain through her body and into her shoulders.

The man stopped her with a jolt. Her eyes were fresh now with new tears and her cries of agony were muffled under the gag hindered by the semen soaked fabric stuffed between her teeth. The sickly man looked into her eyes as they jolted in every direction in panicked response to the coldness of his touch.

I bet you’re wondering who I am, the dark stranger asked in a whisper with a raspy voice, but Tabitha didn’t care what his name was, although she couldn’t give