Warriors (Gutter Dogs Book 5) Read online

  Contents

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Visit www.careylewis.com for more!

  The “Gutter Dogs” Series:

  The Split

  Transformers

  Underdogs

  The Van Halen Guitar

  Warriors

  Generation Z

  A Life Untold

  Summer of 94

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by Carey Lewis

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

  may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

  without the express written permission of the publisher.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Dax sat across from Lex in a booth near the back of the McDonald’s. The kids screaming and running around with ice cream on their faces belied the topic of their conversation.

  “You’re talking about murder,” Dax said.

  Lex nodded, taking a sip from his double mocha frappe, his lips puckered around the straw. The constant ding of the door from customers walking in started to sound like a ticking clock in Dax’s mind.

  He made Dax order the coffee drink instead of his usual cheeseburger meal, Lex did. They were entering into grown up territory now. They were adults. Dax’s iced chocolate coffee drink sat between them, the condensation starting to pool on the table.

  “Not just murder, but murdering our friend,” Dax added when Lex sat there, sucking from his straw.

  “You’re not down?”

  “Fuck no I’m not down, you crazy?”

  “Look at it this way. You remember Jose?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “See?”

  Lex leaned back like his point was made. Sucking on that goddamned frappe again. They both looked over at a mother chasing and screaming at her child. The kid had stripped himself of his clothes and was running around the restaurant in his underwear.

  “You’re going to have to do better,” Dax said.

  “You don’t remember Jose? Used to be our friend in second grade, we hung out all the time.”

  Second grade was a long time ago. Dax did the math in his head coming to the number of twelve.

  “I don’t remember a kid from twelve years ago, that makes murder okay?”

  “Keep your voice down,” Lex said.

  “What’s one got to do with the other?” Dax whispered.

  “You’re not friends with Jose no more? Neither am I. You don’t think about him and neither do I. Right?”

  “Forgot about him until you brought him up just now.”

  “Okay, so Zax is the same. We don’t remember Jose. We were all friends once and now we’re not and it’s because we just grew apart and the friendship ended. It’s about time our friendship ended with Zax. Man just up and grew apart from us.”

  The kid in his underwear ran by, his mother in pursuit, catching him when he tried running under a booth behind them. His mom grabbed his arm and dragged his naked body along the floor, bringing him back to her table.

  “So we just ignore his texts. Murder’s pretty far off from that, way to end a friendship.”

  “You know we can’t do that.”

  The reason why they couldn’t was because they were in a gang and Zax was the leader. Two others rounded out the gang, Max and Rex, but they weren’t at McDonald’s that day.

  Their gang was called the Outcasts, they wore black shirts that said ‘Outcasts’ on the front in a spooky font. They wore ripped jeans, Chuck Taylor shoes or Doc Martens, and had mo-hawks that weren’t spiked - that was their gang look.

  “Maybe we just talk to him again. I don’t see why it’s got to go this far,” Dax said.

  “You think I haven’t thought about that? All these situations, any way around this? I thought of them all and it’s just no going. There’s no reasoning with him.”

  Lex had been talking to Zax for weeks now, telling him about this other gang called the Boppers that seemed to be making moves. Their membership was a few years younger in age than the Outcasts were. Matter of fact, Dax’s kid brother was a member.

  He wanted to make a move on the Boppers, Lex did, take whatever they had so they could grow. He saw the Boppers becoming something, moving up the hierarchy of gang power. Lex figured taking them out would move the Outcasts up the ladder instead. Zax declined him every time, telling him he was happy with what they had.

  “You know why he says that right? He says that and it’s two-fold,” Lex said after the last time he talked to Zax about it. “One is, he’s in charge, got no want for it. The other is he’s got no vision. But that one even goes back to the first. Got no vision because he’s in charge. What’s he got a want for?”

  But Dax still wasn’t convinced. He liked beating people up. He liked scaring people and stealing and all the vandalism and prestige that came with being in a gang. He wasn’t exactly down for taking another life.

  “Why don’t we just branch out on our own, leave Zax behind? I mean, is Max and Rex even down?”

  “They know some things got to get done, so yeah, they’re down.”

  “They tell you this?”

  “Yes, Dax, they said ‘you go kill this motherfucker and we’re cool with what you do.’”

  “So? Let’s just go on our own. Better yet, we go on our own and join the Boppers, then we get in on what they’re doing. You think about that?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “No,” which revealed the real motivation behind Lex. He just wanted to be in charge. All the other things that came out of his mouth were nothing more than a smokescreen.

  Now the mother was spanking her kid, right there on the table in the middle of McDonald’s. The sharp slaps brought Dax’s attention over to her. It was brought back when he heard a loud metallic clunk in his booth. He turned to see a brown paper bag sitting in front of him. He didn’t have to look inside to know it was a gun.

  “I’m just asking if you’re in or out, not for your council,” Lex said.

  And in that moment, Dax knew he didn’t have a choice. The only choice he had was if he wanted to live or die.

  “Who does it?”

  “We do. Tonight,” Lex leaned back into the booth, sucking the last remnants out of his frappe.

  “Why not Max and Rex? They’re the muscle.”

  “Because we’re doing it. Tonight. What you got t
o do, got to grow up sometime.”

  Dax looked at the whipped cream melting in his drink, at the pool of condensation that grew on the table between them.

  “And then after this, what? We go take out the Boppers? Shoot them dead too?”

  “No, they got a different plan coming to them,” Lex took the plastic top off his cup and held his drink above his head, patting the bottom to get the last pieces of chocolate to drop into his mouth from his grown-up drink.

  “Take that shit off man, you trying to get identified?” Lex pointed to the white lettering of ‘Outcasts’ on his shirt.

  “I didn’t bring another one.”

  “Turn it inside out then.”

  Dax took off his shirt and turned it inside out then put it back on. They were in Lex’s bedroom at his mom’s house, his mom and step-dad in the living room watching some loud war movie, Black Hawk Down Dax thought.

  Lex had clothes strewn all over, covering the floors and bed, seeming to have spawned from his closet. There were posters of punk bands along the walls, The Clash, Ramones, Sex Pistols, mixed in with grunge bands from the nineties like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. He was sitting on the bed, tying up the Doc Martens over his white socks. Some thrasher band played on the stereo, a joint smoked in the ashtray.

  Lex split his time between his mom’s place with her new man and his dad’s place. He’d spend a few days a week at either house, coming and going as he pleased. He didn’t really live with either parent, just bounced between them whenever he wanted.

  “You ready?”

  All Dax could do was nod.

  “Stay here while I tell my mom we’re playing video games all night,” Lex said and left the room. Dax couldn’t stop shaking and before he knew it the joint was gone, the roach burning his fingertips.

  When Lex came back, Dax asked why he told his mom they were playing video games. Dax explained that it was for an alibi, dummy, and then he opened the window and climbed out.

  As they went down the residential streets, passing all the houses with the glowing windows from late night TV, the cars idle in the driveways, a weird sensation came over Dax. None of the people inside these homes, going on with their normal, everyday lives, winding down from their day, none of them had any idea what Dax and Lex were about to do. It would be easy, just walk into one of these houses and plug the person inside. One second, they’d be getting their popcorn ready for the late movie, the next, they had a bullet in their head.

  And then if there was another person there, that person would have to become dead. If it was a person that didn’t live there, they’d have to track down who knew about the second person at the house, then they’d have to go kill those people. Dax lit a cigarette as he tried to forget the tangled web he formed in his mind.

  When the truck came out of the driveway, Mr. McGregor Dax thought it to be, going to his night shift at the plant, Dax woke from his daydream. Mr. McGregor saw him so now he wondered if after they killed Zax, they’d have to come back and do Mr. McGregor, that tough Irish prick. It was like a single path that led into a forest he thought, with a million paths that had to be walked to find the single one to lead you out. People often got lost and died alone in a forest. Help coming too late.

  They found themselves in front of Zax’s house, Lex snorting a line of cocaine from his wrist. He’d never seen Lex do hard drugs before. They smoked pot, even some hash, once in awhile dropped Ecstasy, but they never got into the hard stuff.

  “You ready?” Lex asked.

  “Give me a minute,” Dax pulled out a joint and lit it, sat on the curb. Neither of them talked. Dax sat there, smoking his joint, trying to go numb while Lex stood stiff as a board, staring at the house. The lights were off but there was a glow coming from the basement windows.

  When Dax finished the joint, rubbing it out with the sole of his Chuck Taylor All-Stars, he looked up and saw Lex had the gun out already, his fingers constantly wrapping around the grip of the .38 Special he stole from his dad. He always thought the gun looked cool, but that was when it was tucked away in a box in the closet. Now it scared the shit out of him.

  “Do a bump,” Lex said, shoving the gun under his nose where Dax saw a small mound of cocaine on the snub nosed barrel, barely two inches. He looked up to Lex, his eyes bulging out of his head, focused. He looked at the cocaine on the barrel, shaking slightly back and forth. He watched as granules of the powder started to tumble away, down the side. That’s when he knew Lex was nervous too, scared, and someone that was nervous and scared was unpredictable. He snorted the cocaine.

  They walked up the driveway, moved to the side of the house, let themselves in the door, then down the steps to the basement, ducking their heads so they wouldn’t knock against the wooden rafters.

  Zax laid in his bed, wearing nothing but his white boxers, taking a hit off a bong. He saw them, smiled as he held his breath, keeping the smoke in his lungs. His blond hair flopped over the side of his face. Lex took a seat on the old chair Zax got when his grandmother died. This wide green number that scratched your skin as soon as you touched it.

  “What’s up guys?” Zax asked, letting the smoke out of his lungs, filling the room, offered the bong to Lex. He took it with one hand, the other dropping the gun between the cushion and his back. He lit the bowl and took a hit.

  Dax looked at the TV, the only source of light in the room, saw it was playing Black Hawk Down too. He watched Eric Bana and the Delta team come up to the bad guys on the truck, took them down using night vision, the shit they were in about to come to a head on that night.

  “Kenzie around?” Lex asked, offering the bong to Dax who declined. He handed it back to Zax.

  “No, she took off. War movies aren’t her thing.”

  Lex looked at the TV now for the first time, sliding his hand behind his back to grab the gun again, saying “I like this one. The part where the one goes deaf because the other one fires too close to his ear? That kind of shit they don’t show you in these movies.”

  “It’s a good flick,” Zax said, taking another hit before putting the bong on the floor beside him.

  “You sure Kenzie ain’t around? You guys bone all the time.”

  “Did that already. She don’t like war movies.”

  Dax saw the glow of light coming from the bathroom, a little one Zax’s dad put up off to the side some years ago when Zax wasn’t going to move out but wanted his own space. He saw a faint shadow break up the light and figured Kenzie was in there, probably naked, why she didn’t want to come out. He was glad she made that choice.

  “You got something behind your back there?” Zax asked. Lex smiled, brought his hand out to show the gun, displaying it before putting it on his lap, pointing it at Zax sideways, relaxed.

  “That your dad’s piece? Shit, you finally took it huh?”

  “I did,” and then he pulled the trigger. Zax’s chest exploded, knocked him to the side. Lex stood up, walked around the bed and stood over Zax. He pulled the trigger again, putting a hole through his head.

  He wasn’t kidding about the sound from a gun, how loud it was in real life. He could barely hear when Lex turned and said “let’s go.”

  She just finished peeing, not even flushing yet when she heard the voices. Before that, what she really wanted to do was shower, being sweaty and naked, having just finished with Zax. His bright idea to do it while a war movie was playing, added to the excitement he told her. She just found it distracting.

  Then she heard the voices, recognized them as Lex and Dax, for some reason he didn’t want them to know she was there when Lex asked about her. She worried about him seeing her clothes on the floor then making an excuse to go to the washroom so he could see her naked. She could picture that happening, Zax would laugh about it telling her it was no big deal.

  Kenzie knew people would come over and let themselves in while Zax’s parents were away. Hell, they let themselves in all the time, no matter if his folks were home or not. That’s what really bothered
her about the war movie, something about a helicopter. It wasn’t that it was a war movie, how was she supposed to hear when one of his bonehead friends came through the door with the sounds of bullets and bombs going off?

  So she was just waiting them out when she heard the first shot. Found a sound escaped her lips she prayed wasn’t heard. Then she heard the second shot and for some reason she was trying not to cry. She wasn’t exactly sure why she started to cry, but she knew if she was heard, she’d be dead.

  Then she heard what she thought were footsteps, then a door close. She stayed in the washroom, naked, covering her mouth, fearful to make a sound. She listened intently for what felt like hours, but was probably closer to ten minutes. She was afraid to leave the room, her sanctuary.

  When her hand went to turn the knob, she was surprised to see that it was shaking, so she didn’t open the door just then. She went over to the toilet, sat on it, feeling every muscle in her body being tense.

  Eventually she calmed herself down enough to go to the door and slowly opened it. In the glow of the TV was Zax, half his body on the bed, the other half on the floor, staring at her, blood running out of his chest and forehead.

  Kenzie had never seen a dead body before. She thought she’d scream at the sight of it, but was surprised when she didn’t. She slowly came out of the room, her gaze never breaking from the lifeless stare of Zax’s body, grabbed her clothes from the floor and went back into the washroom where she changed.

  When she came out again she looked at the TV, the Soldiers running along a road, exhausted. Looked over at Zax again, saw he hadn’t moved, felt the room caving in on her and ran to the door. About to open it but stopped. She was surprised there were no sirens, no cops running up the driveway to her. There was nothing. Only the music from the movie, the sound of their boots on the pavement.

  She went back to the room, looked around for anything that belonged to her - another shirt, some makeup, her keys, can’t forget those. She looked back to the TV, saw the older guy trying to clean up all the blood on the floor, all those people dead on gurneys. She looked back at Zax, the bed, saw her favorite shirt he always gave her to wear. She took the Clash shirt and left the basement, confident she didn’t leave anything behind. Knowing that Zax wouldn’t be found until his parents came home three days from now.