Predator

By Kartik Iyengar

It was the perfect evening. She was running around, getting ready for the college reunion. He was there, and she was flushed with love. He offered her a glass of red wine ... When she came to, her face was caked with blood, she was chained, her left hand was broken and her every inch of her body was hurting. How, oh how, she wished she had never met him online. The mutilated body of a young woman stirs up this sleepy little vineyard town. Another girl is now missing. It's happened here before. Old rumours, superstitions surface. The legend of the beast, the curse of the devil. But Inspector Khan has his keen eye on Joe, the owner of one of the country's biggest vineyards, and his edgy, disturbed son, Chris. Do they have anything to do with these murders? If he is stay on the trail, Inspector Khan must face the ghosts of his own past. Can he do it? The almost-famous five - Chief, Derek, Goose, Hound and Motormouth - are following a lead of their own. Will they be able to stop the madness that comes alive at night?Predator is a gory tale of megalomania and obsession, and about the dangers lurking in the shadows of the virtual world. Set against the backdrop of a thriving wine industry, this is a dark and gothic story from the author of the 'Horn OK Please' series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harper
• Release date: Jul 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9789351362821

Kartik Iyengar

Kartik Iyengar, besides being a successful corporate professional and an ardent social media digerati, is also a seasoned globetrotter who believes in the spirit of 'my way and the highway'. Committed to the cause of promoting online awareness, he aspires to be a change agent in creating a better world for the millennials.

Book preview

Prologue

‘Hush! Little girl, don’t say a word,

Daddy’s gonna slice you up, O’ sweet mocking bird;

Looking for love, haven’t you – everywhere?

Daddy’s gonna tie you up in an electric chair;

Should the bruises hurt & the cuts make you bleed,

Blame yourself for the warnings you just didn’t heed;

Save those tears for they make me smile,

Getting back online may take you quite a while;

Don’t you like these chains, the gag & stuff,

Standing there naked with your hands tied in a cuff;

I’ll carve up your face with a sharp razor blade,

Your tears & blood are like the sun and shade;

If you die easy, I’ll let the angels sigh,

You shall know more pain, don’t you dare say goodbye;

Cry, little girl, till you go insane,

My little plaything, how I love to see you in pain;

The flowers have withered, the violets crushed in these hands of mine,

Daddy’s silly little girl, you should never have come online!’

—The Predator

Claustrophobia

Grace tried to open her eyes but her eyelids were stuck together with the nearly dry blood. Realization dawned upon her that this wasn’t just a nightmare. She tried lifting her hands to rub her eyes but the effort was too great. Clang! There were chains around her wrists, the dull pain in her left shoulder hurt, she could only lift her right hand; her left hand was broken.

She tried to scream but all she could manage was a whimper. Where was she? Her blood froze when she discovered she was gagged. She tugged down the rag tied around her mouth and coughed as she spat out the cloth that had been stuffed into her mouth. Instinctively, she tried to get up, but she couldn’t. Her feet were bound. What was it, shackles?

She mustered all her strength to drag herself up to lean against the wall. Her back encountered a cold, uneven wall behind her. She lifted her right hand and rubbed her eyes with her arm. She opened her eyes to an empty darkness and an abysmal silence. Where was she?

She tried to recollect what had happened but her mind refused to respond as the excruciating physical pain overrode everything else. Even her body spurned the request as it ached all over. Disoriented and terrified, she struggled to stay upright. She couldn’t. Her legs felt like jelly and there was blood all over her lower abdomen. She felt weak and her head hurt. She’d been drugged, but by whom?

Suddenly memory crashed back in horrific detail and she stared into the darkness in terror. She cringed as she frantically tried to put the pieces together. She knew how it happened. She had a faint recollection of feeling extremely sleepy after she’d had a few sips of the Shiraz Cabernet that he had handed her. It had to be the wine!

She’d seen the world around her swim before she had passed out. She had no idea of what happened until she had woken up naked, gagged and bound in a dark, dingy den. It had been close to a week in captivity. And they were merciless.

She sobbed silently as tears streamed down her cheeks and mingled with the dried blood on her face. And then she knew. She remembered meeting this extremely charming man with whom she fell in love at first sight.

The evening had been perfect with her rushing around, getting ready for the college reunion. He had stopped by her house and offered to drop her at the party. It was then that he had offered her a glass of red wine. Although it had seemed quite innocuous, her instinct had told her that something was not quite right. One sip of the wine and she had blacked out. She should have trusted her sixth sense.

She knew it was too late when she saw those dark, ugly figures looming around her, their hands groping, touching and feeling her all over. She had been too numb to react. The macabre paint on their faces made them seem inhuman. They were beasts. They had no soul.

They were tearing away at her clothes in a frenzy. She had tried feebly to push them away. She could not. Those fists had rained merciless blows on her face, chest and abdomen until she bled. She had heard her rib cage crack and she’d howled in agony. They had laughed like hyenas.

And when one of the painted faces forcibly tried to enter her, she somehow managed to free one hand. She grabbed his face, and tried to gouge out his eyes. She twisted to try and bite the forearm that had a stranglehold on her neck. As he pulled away, she saw she had smudged the greasepaint on his face. She was shocked when she recognized the face beneath the maquillage.

‘You bastard!’ she’d screamed.

A terrible ache was tearing away her insides. She had been savagely gang raped by the brutes. The wine, laced with a powerful sedative had made her extremely drowsy, and slowed her reflexes. She’d watched helplessly as they took turns in raping her, over and over again.

Her blood froze when she had heard the voices once again. They’d come back to ravage her body, or what was left of it, yet again. The familiar, deep voice was there in the pack as well.

This time, more than the pain, it was her helplessness and desperation that was making her scream her lungs out. A strong hand clasped her cheeks and covered her mouth ruthlessly. It left her battling for air while the rest of her body was being brutalized.

The pain was too intense and she didn’t have the strength to scream. Then again, she heard the sound of sickening, maniacal laughter all around her. They had returned for more. One of the beasts had an iron grip on her wrists while forcing himself into her mouth while another was brutally raping her.

Another one grabbed her from behind. A grotesquely painted face sat in front and watched the gruesome act with a sneer on his face. She couldn’t quite see just how many of them were there this time. This was probably her fifth day in captivity.

The last thing she remembered before she lost consciousness was being punched and kicked on her chest. She howled in anguish when she saw the long metal rod thrust into her vagina and then passed into merciful oblivion.

The silence in the dungeon was deafening, after the beasts left. She realized she was being held captive at some remote location, a place too isolated for people to chance across. The bastard! Or how many bastards, she didn’t know.

When her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, she realized that she was a prisoner inside a room of some sort. The room stank of urine, blood and defecation. They had kept coming back for her like vultures. A sense of gloom and abject despair overcame her and her heart shrieked out for help. But nobody heard her.

Maybe they would still come back to ravage the corpse once she died. God had left the world a long time ago. She wished she were dead.

The chains clanged as she tried to get up. She couldn’t. She slowly moved her bound hands over her stomach. There was blood all over, so much of it. Her heart sank as she realized that there was nothing she could do. She tried leaning back on the cold, bumpy wall. As her chains clanged against it, she realized it was a ghostly glass wall of empty wine bottles stacked from the floor to the roof.

Her mind was racing trying to figure out where she was. The wind moaned somewhere far above. Tears streamed down her face as she realized that she was trapped in an underground cellar.

Her broken arm hurt as the chains ate into her wrists. She tried to get up but the chains around her ankles hurt. Had God left her to die like this?

Bereft of strength and pride, her body slumped to the floor. As a cloud of darkness descended into the dungeon, she felt happy that death would soon embrace her. She hated herself for being so careless and trusting.

The overly sophisticated bastard had just wanted her nude pictures online to wank off and jizz all over until he could have sex with her. It had never been love.

She wished she had never sipped the wine. It had never occurred to her that he could be the Predator.

She wished she had never gone online …

ONE

The Rainbow

London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down;

London Bridge is falling down, My fair lady.

But here you are, all tied up, all gagged up, all trussed up;

Blame yourself for your woes, for your pain, my fair lady.

But now you’ll never be stolen away, taken away, led astray,

No, you’ll never ever be whisked away, my fair lady.

I’ll watch you all night, smoke my pipe, watch you bleed,

No, I won’t fall asleep, watch you die, my fair lady.

—The Predator

Christopher’s Pain

Chris lay sprawled on an oversized couch that reeked of leather. He was mildly irritated. It was like lying on something dead with cotton and springs inside it. The opulent velvet spread over the couch only added to his woes. Like his mother, the couch was too soft and overly sophisticated for his liking. She was dead too.

It was a boring, sweltering afternoon, as boring and nauseating as his father. Even the air conditioner had succumbed to the humid summer wind blowing outside. The ceiling fan created more noise than it circulated cool air.

The plush house reminded him of his parents when they were together. A façade of luxury and comfort, while Chris’s world burned within like a dormant volcano. His life was trapped beneath an ocean of endless arguments and violent fights between his mother and father. Maybe, someone would make a movie out of it someday and call it The Boring Life of Christopher Jones.

Only his older sister, Florence, could understand him. He hated the fact that now everyone called her ‘Salmonella’ for some strange reason.

Chris stared at the ceiling and a sense of emptiness engulfed him. He wondered where his life was taking him. He hated being a couch potato. The sense of ennui around him was defeating. The grass on the lawn outside had probably grown by an inch while Chris lay trapped between the couch and a stagnating life.

The howling of a wolf came from somewhere inside the large room. Was he hallucinating? Chris let fly a cushion to shoo away the imaginary, pesky animal. The effort was in vain for he could still hear the persistent, aural cacophony. Feeling too lazy to get up, Chris chose to investigate the surroundings sleepily from his couch with just one eye open.

The repetitive howling was the ringtone of a phone and he realized it was his smartphone. It was ringing incessantly. He glanced at it with disdain. Chris hated it every time he got a call from his Dad, the rich and famous Jonathan Jones. He chose to ignore it.

It was one of those mandatory calls every evening just to remind him that he was still living in his father’s shadow. The custom ringtone of a howling wolf that he usually tried to ignore was specially designed, the signature tone for his Dad’s calls.

Just because he’d peed with him once when they both were drunk, his Dad had started to believe that Chris was obligated to share his innermost feelings with him, always, and be available to him all the time. Just because his father always bailed him out didn’t give him the right to intrude into Chris’s privacy all the time.

His father, the rich and famous Jonathan Jones, wanted his useless son, Christopher Jones, to grow up to be a man like his father and become worthy of his inheritance. ‘My ass’, mumbled Chris, as he remembered the time when his Mom and Dad had argued for the last time about everything.

The memories of his childhood were like pieces of nightmare with several blanks left unfilled. The bits he had heard and remembered left him with more questions. The acrimonious slanging matches between his parents had the word ‘mistake’ screamed so often that it was seared into his brain. It always made him wonder whether he was the ‘mistake’.

Or perhaps, it was his Mom who was the biggest ‘mistake’ his father had ever made. She was just another weak woman who was no match for the mighty Jonathan Jones.

Although Chris had loved his Mom, she always seemed to love his older sister, Florence, a lot more. She’d always compared him to his sibling and found him wanting in every respect. For her, Chris was genetic trash while Florence was the angel who could do no wrong. She played with her Barbie Doll all the time and never got into trouble.

The day he had turned ten, Chris had witnessed a ferocious battle between his parents ending in domestic violence. Mom and Dad were evenly matched when it came to verbal combat and decibel levels.

His rich, presumptuous Dad had always gotten a blistering earful from his Mom for spoiling her son silly when he was way too young to handle it. The Rolex watch which his Dad had gifted to him for his birthday had triggered a night full of miasma – a domestic hell complete with the stench of sulphur and brimstone. Wrath had flared in his mother’s eyes as from a furnace, but even more frightening had been the evil lurking in the depths of his father’s soul that was reflected in his cruel eyes.

From a child’s perspective, the tectonic upheavals seemed like a chain reaction to his Dad buying him something foolishly expensive or trying to initiate his son into his business.

In retrospect, Chris understood his mother’s fury somewhat. The tokens of paternal love were actually unscrupulous payoffs, or bribes if you will, to enslave the child and make him want to emulate his father.

It was more than obvious that she had always regretted marrying Joe. Perhaps his Mom realized that Chris was being robbed of his childhood in these seemingly innocent father-son bonding gestures. Or, perhaps, his Mom was merely stuck in her staid, old-fashioned, Catholic upbringing, and was afraid that the devil would take Chris’s soul. The bottom line – she paid the ultimate price for trying to stop her husband corrupting Chris.

On the other hand, his Dad believed he was God himself and his son, a demi-God.

Chris liked to believe it too, that someday he too would become God – it would be the day he stepped out of the shadow of his famous Dad. As time went by, his own footprints were manifesting the influences of the familiar footprints of his father. The distinction was diminishing; which meant the day was not far away. But his mother’s footprints were nowhere to be seen.

At the time, Chris had wanted to talk to Florence about it, but she’d shoo-ed him away for she had to put her silly doll to bed. The only real friend in the world he’d thought he had was his sister, and even she preferred a dumb, plastic doll and loved it more than her brother.

If only Florence had played with him more than she played with her Barbie Doll, he wouldn’t have done what he did that night. Something inside Chris had snapped. He waited for everyone to go to sleep.

Around midnight, he had tiptoed into her room, and took her doll away as she slept. Chris had gone back to his room and locked the door from inside. He had then pulled out the hunting knife that his Dad had gifted him when they’d visited a forest reserve near Sikkim.

He had felt a surge of power when he stripped Barbie naked and laid it on the bed. Then he had stabbed it repeatedly with his knife. The savage act made him feel powerful and manly as the helpless doll stared back at him and said nothing.

But Barbie was certainly a lot stronger than his weak mother. Unlike her, the doll would always stay smiling. He blamed his Mom for being too weak and submissive. Maybe, that’s why she whined like a bitch all the time.

His sweet sister’s Barbie Doll needed to die for him to get Florence’s undivided attention. In his mind, he’d wanted both to die that night. But since he couldn’t kill Florence, it had to be her doll. After all, it was her constant companion who had stolen his sister away from him.

He had then stared at the countless cuts on Barbie’s neck, arms and legs for a long time. They were deep and passionate as though carved by a sculptor. He had then chopped her hair, gouged the eyes out and sliced off the ears of the ever-smiling Barbie doll, as it helplessly lay on his bed, naked. The stupid doll continued smiling.

Chris had then taken the mutilated remains of the doll and doused it with kerosene. He had taken it to the balcony and set it on fire. He had gleefully watched it burn with a slow crackle as the plastic smile melted from her stupid face. The stench of the burning plastic had given him a new high. As the smoke rose into the air from the melted heap, his soul glowed with satisfaction.

Now his sister would love him again. There would be no sharing of love. He’d loved every moment of the gruesome act. His sweet sister would never shoo him away again. Chris smiled. Although he was a mean bastard, he loved Florence and would always be her cute, little brother.

Somehow, it didn’t come as a surprise to him when the next morning his Dad announced that his Mom was very ill and she’d soon be gone. She died a month later, on 18 October, the night before Florence had announced her decision to leave the house forever. Chris was relieved. In a way he was happy for his Mom. He had watched her writhe in agony for a long, long time.

He’d always wondered if Joe had poisoned her. Young Chris had maintained a month-long vigil by her side. Not out of sympathy or love, but watching her in pain gave him a perverse pleasure beyond reason.

One down, one more parent to go; and his life would be under control once again. Life as an orphan, especially without Dad, beguiled him – a life out of the shadows.

He’d never blamed Florence for leaving the house and moving in with her friend. Perhaps she knew something more about the circumstances of Mom’s death. Although Florence had been very young then, she had always been brilliant and knew stuff. She now had an IT job and could take care of herself.

Florence, now ‘Salmonella’, had always hated her Dad. When Mom was alive, the siblings had an unspoken pact that while Chris would be around for Joe, Florence would be Mom’s solace, and together they’d present a happy-family façade for society. She couldn’t bear to see her Mom’s agony, while the complete-waste-of-space, their asshole of a father, delighted in it.

The years of living in the shambles of domestic violence had made her strong as steel. Now, dealing with the four-letter word ‘life’, was a piece of cake.

Joe’s wife had died under mysterious circumstances and Salmonella had moved out. Chris was disappointed and sad. Selfish woman, he thought. He hated her for leaving him alone with Joe.

The moment Salmonella stepped out of the house that fateful night, Chris felt like a mouse trapped in a cage full of cheese. The only ray of hope in his life had cut her ties with their dysfunctional family.

Chris turned into a frosty snowman while Joe became the powerful God that the stupid townsfolk loved. He hated this hick-town where everybody knew everybody. Chris decided he’d be the coolest dude around, so cool that if he were to get any cooler, he’d freeze over and die of hypothermia.

The years had rushed by since that fateful night and it was soon to be the 18 October again. Death Metal blared on his Internet radio as his iPad popped messages from his girlfriends. Chris decided to have a bath. The cool water from the jet-spray trickled down his body and made him feel human again.

He stepped out of the shower and looked at himself in the mirror. He saw a handsome, athletic man, the most eligible bachelor in town. His strong biceps glowed and the symbolic tattoo on his bulging chest made him look menacing. His deeply tanned and chiselled body with the great six-pack made him an altogether perfect Adonis. He let his hand rove over his chest and smiled. He was a good-looking, suave and sophisticated dude who women just loved to love.

Good education had taught him to camouflage the true persona beneath his sun-kissed skin. He was the proverbial God’s gift to women. Joe, the almighty God of the vineyard, had grown a lot older now, burning like a candle