CLAN

  By

  Shaun Whittington

  Amazon Edition

  Copyright 2013

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

  The author uses UK English

  About the author

  Born in England. Now lives in Glasgow, Scotland.

  Shaun mainly writes dark tales with twists, not necessarily all out horror, and likes to keep his writing spelling to U.K. English, because it's easier for him.

  He has written short stories over a number of years for First Publishing and Skive Magazine, before turning to novels.

  Other titles available

  The Woods of Red Hill (FREE ebook)

  Demons

  Billy (FREE ebook)

  The Monkey Wing

  Misty Falls

  Snatchers

  Black Hour

  Website: https://sites.google.com/site/whittingtonbooks1

  E-mail: deeandshaun@aol.com

  Twitter: shaunybopster

  Clan—a close-knit group of interrelated families, especially in the Scottish

  Highlands, a large family, a group of people with a strong common interest.

  Clandestine—kept secret or done secretively, especially because illicit.

  (Oxford English Dictionary)

  Prologue

  The red sun was lazily dipping its body into the ground and the sky hung like a tortured prisoner, stretched over black and blue. The silence was soothing, and the area now had two parked cars in it, but both engines were turned off.

  A brawny man, who arrived at the place two minutes ago, stepped out of the car that was parked ten yards behind the other. The door slammed shut and the burly man headed towards the parked motor in front of his. The windows of the parked vehicle he was heading for were down, and he could hear two male voices very clearly talking audibly, with a lot of the conversation consisting of foul language. There were only two cars parked in the isolated area, and he was about to come face to face with the people of the car parked in front of him.

  He stood by the passenger window of their car and waited patiently for any kind of verbal response from the two young men. But with the music on in the car, and the two of them with their heads back staring at the roof of the car engulfed in a cloud of marijuana smoke, they never noticed his presence and continued talking aloud with their heads back and their eyes closed.

  The man outside was sick of waiting for a response and crouched down with his face now staring into the car. The two men were stoned; both sets of eyes were still closed, and anything outside of the vehicle was oblivious to them as they remained in a haze of mental paralysis.

  The sound system in the car was at a reasonable volume, but it was churning out the dance garbage that the man outside of the car detested, and the marijuana smoke that crept out of the opened windows was making him feel queasy.

  The man outside of the car then stood back up and pointed his shotgun into the car.

  The loud bang made both men in the car jump, especially the driver who turned to see his passenger moaning in pain and disbelief. The passenger carefully put his hands on his stomach wound, and brought his hands up to his disbelieving eyes. It was dark, but it wasn't dark enough to hide the fresh blood dripping from his hands. They both turned to the smoking shotgun.

  They couldn't see his face, but it didn't matter. The man outside of the car stood back and then unloaded the last cartridge, splattering the windscreen with their blood.

  The killer then looked into their car and saw that the wide-eyed passenger was dead. The driver was still alive, but would eventually bleed to death from his chest wounds. The injured driver never uttered a word or even managed a scream. The shock of the event had muted him, as he just sat there and concentrated on his breathing, which he was clearly struggling with.

  The shotgun bearer reached into the vehicle and calmly switched the music off, and a blanket of silence swiftly covered the car.

  The aggressor, now satisfied of the carnage he had created, slowly walked back to his own car, opened the passenger door and threw the gun onto the back seat. He closed the passenger door, took one last look at the vehicle that contained the two men, then opened his driver’s side door, got in, and began whistling to the tune of Amazing Grace.

  His car left the place a minute later.

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  Chapter One

  As he stepped out of his car, he stood up tall, pushed his red rimmed spectacles back onto his nose and took a deep breath in.

  He never had much time to appreciate his town, but he was proud of where he lived when he had the time to think about it, and today was one of those days that he felt such appreciation. He took a look around his small, quiet street, and sighed with pride. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, he thought. He knew the streets well, and had spent years driving around them with his learner drivers.

  As he hit the button on his key to lock the doors of his vehicle, David Waters could see in the distance, slowly entering the street, a fragile old man. Waters held up his hand to greet Toby Newton—the old guy lived on his own.

  “Good morning!” Waters bellowed across the street, with a transfixed smile.

  The frail Newton managed a wave, which looked like it had withdrawn half of his energy. Newton was lucky if he had another five years left in him, but was respected in the street by everyone.

  He had moved into the new street when it first opened; he refused to go into an old folks home and the house was paid for by his well-off son who lived in Germany working in construction. Toby Newton was a quiet old man, never bothered anyone and had served his country for thirty years in the army. Waters saw Newton as a symbol of the town. He was a figure that youngsters should look up to, and most of them did.

  As Toby Newton scuffled his way up his drive, out of the Moseley household stepped out Alan. He was a father of three and had a wife that was a homemaker. Waters walked over to Alan.

  “Morning Alan, off to work?”

  “Yip.”

  Alan never made eye contact with Waters, as he was too busy rushing around and putting his jacket into the back seat of his car. He then anxiously put both of his hands in his trouser pockets frantically looking for his car keys.

  Waters felt the cold shoulder of Alan Moseley and held both his hands up apologetically for bothering him, as the man was clearly in a hurry.

  “Kids," Alan exclaimed. “My head’s been up my arse since I’ve had them. You know, I was rushing around that much I went to work in my slippers the other week. Didn’t notice until I got to the work's car park.”

  “They do take up a lot of your time.” Waters smiled.

  “Never again, I’m off for the chop soon.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Vasectomy,” Alan said. A thin smile emerged on his face as he pulled out his car keys from the back pocket of his trousers. “Got ’em.”

  “Sorry, Alan, you're probably in a rush to get to work, and here I am about to invite you to some daft get together. I did actually wanted to ask if you were okay; you haven’t seemed yourself recently.”

  “I’ve heard things,” Moseley said, his face was scarlet. It wasn’t from embarrassment, it was from fear.

  “Oh?”

  Alan was close to revealing what was bothering him. He shook his head at himself and his eyes quickly scanned the streets for unwanted eyes and ears. “Let's just say, there's a few bad apples in this street, that's all.”

  David Waters smiled at Alan Moseley thinly, and waved him off as he drove out of Averill drive.

  Alan Moseley looked jittery and nervous, and Waters thought that people in that state could be unpredictable.

  David Waters pulled out his phone from his pocket, which was vibrating furiously and answered the phone. “Jenny, what can I do for you? Got a couple of things to take care of, apart from that it's pretty quiet. You're getting a new employee? Are you expecting a busy few months then? Who is it?”

  There was a few seconds of silence as Waters listened to the woman on the other end of the line.

  “Oh, changing the subject. I've just had an interesting chat with one of my neighbours."

  Chapter Two

  I’m not here. This isn’t happening.

  No matter how many times he echoed the words inside his solicitous head, he knew it was happening, and the flaming sensation on his wrists and the gaffa tape over his mouth, confirmed that this was reality. One moment he was parking his car in his drive after a hard day at work, and the next, he had woken up in what seemed like the back of a van.

  Like waking up from a dream, it took a while before realising what was happening to him. He was lying on a dirty floor in the back of a van, his eyes and mouth were covered and his hands were tied behind his back with some kind of wire. Whatever it was, it was burning and cutting into his wrists and paranoia was already telling him that his wrists were bleeding, but they were not. His alarm multiplied thinking that he would be dead before he got to whatever destination his attackers were taking him. He thought he would simply bleed to death in the back of this dirty van from his damaged wrists.

  He had an idea why was this happening to him. But he didn’t know what they were going to do.

  Hindsight never helped anybody, and it wasn’t doing him any good either, but now he wished he kept his stupid mouth shut
. No matter what people thought of individuals, and no matter what the views individuals had of other people, they could end up confronting the wrong one, and he was now learning the hard way.

  He was a law abiding, tax-paying citizen, and this was how he was getting paid: Smacked at the back of his head, tied up and thrown in the back of a van. The trouble was, he knew his abductors, and this made him even more anxious. He knew what they were capable of, and he knew what they could do, and he stupidly had let them know that their extra curricular activities had been noticed.

  He had only got out of his car for a second when the strike to his head occurred. The last images of his house was the light that was on in the living room. There was not a soul in there, which meant his family were most probably in the dining room waiting for him to come home from work.

  The droning of the van's engine began to decrease, which confirmed to him that the van was slowing down. He didn’t want it to stop. Not yet. If the van stopped, then that meant people would get out, which meant he would be dragged out of the van and be made to face his doom—whatever that was going to be. He wanted the van to continue for a short while, just so he could stay alive for a few more minutes.

  The van came to a stop.

  His heart galloped profusely against the inside of his chest; he thought that his heart may not be strong enough to take the stress, and he released a small dribble of urine onto his underwear once he heard the vans' passenger doors open simultaneously, then shut with a deafening slam. The footsteps from the side of the van could be heard and then the back doors were opened. It was night-time, so there was no brightness to greet his covered eyes.

  Still tied up, still gagged, and still unsure where he was, he felt—what felt like to him—dozens of hands wrapping themselves around his ankles. He was dragged out of the van and his body landed on the hard concrete with a painful thud. He moaned as his left shoulder took most of the damage and was stood up roughly with the help of his abductors. Slowly, he walked with them; each arm was linked with an arm of one of the abductors. He tried to scream out through the gag, but received a punch in the midriff for his troubles.

  With help, he went through a door and walked, what felt like, a long corridor; they turned left and went into another room. But what was that smell? Chlorine! He wriggled and thrashed as hard as he could, but the men put him onto the floor with ease.

  Chlorine!

  The journey in the van only lasted five minutes and he knew that he was still in his hometown. There were only two swimming pools in this town; one was open to the public, and the other was on the school premises.

  He was on the school premises, he was convinced he was, and as his feet entered a huge space, the smell of chlorine hit him. He began to cry uncontrollably. It was pathetic. But he was convinced he was going to die; he was never going to see his wife again; he was never going to see his beautiful kids again; he was never going to attend his cousin's wedding next summer, and what saddened him the most was that his parents were going to have to bury their only son.

  No parent should bury their child, no matter what their age. This would surely kill his father, he thought. It had only been two years since his father had had a triple heart by pass operation. Surely this would, if not kill him, at least take five to ten years off him.

  He felt a sharp thud inbetween his shoulder blades that appeared without any warning; someone had pushed him. Then suddenly, he couldn’t feel anything under his feet. A second felt like a minute, as he briefly thought that he had been pushed off something high, he almost felt like he was flying. These short-lived ideas were quashed once he was engulfed in the chlorine filled pool.

  His hands were still tied, his eyes still covered and he furiously thrashed about even though he knew that his wouldn’t do any good whatsoever. He felt his ears gently pop as he quickly sank; it felt quite painful, and his feet eventually touched the bottom of the deep end of the swimming pool. He knew that the deep end was eight feet deep, as his son had just completed his yellow badge. He was going to die in the very same school where his eldest son attended, and he was going to die in the very same pool where his son had his swimming lessons.

  His heart smashed against his chest, and despite the gag, an unwanted gulp of water was swallowed. He knew there was no oxygen about and if the swallowing of water wasn't going to kill him, the lack of oxygen to his body would. His head was beginning to hurt; his ears were also smarting from the constant popping. He felt like the water was going to gush in and flood the inside of his head; the pain was becoming insufferable. He couldn't put his hands on his throbbing head, so he thrashed his cranium about under the strong water, hoping it would make some kind of difference. But what was the point? He was going to die anyway.

  Any kind of air that was left in his lungs was blown out of his gagged mouth in two small bubbles, and he stopped moving. He had accepted his fate. He no longer felt afraid; he actually felt peace and comfort like he had never felt before.

  His peaceful state was interrupted by a tug on the back of his shirt and he could feel his whole body rising quickly through the water, like a torpedo from a submarine. Although he was aware of what was happening to him, he didn’t care anymore.

  He felt the strong hands grab his shoulders and felt his knees hit the floor, and the cold air that hit him told him that he was out of the water. He was in a kneeling position, and his head drooped as if he was about to be beheaded by a terrorist. His head was still throbbing; his chest felt like there was a huge weight on it or it had been punched.

  The soggy tape was ripped off from his mouth, and he unexpectedly released projectile vomit that consisted mainly of swimming pool water that had been recently swallowed through the weak gag. He then began to cough uncontrollably, and more pool water was brought up due to the ferocity of his cough.

  “Just leave me alone,” came the muffled words from the abused. “Leave me alone, please.”

  He was pushed sideways to the floor, and he gave off a surprised yelp as he felt the rough fingers clumsily pull his blind off, accidentally poking his left eye in the process. The poolroom was dark, but it was still light enough to make him squint at the full fat body of the moon that shone through the windows in the murky night. He then looked up to see one of his attackers; it was a face he knew well. The menacing figure flashed a devilish smile.

  The huge figure pulled out the knife, and the scared man lowered his head, convinced that his life was going to end right there.

  Chapter Three

  It was seven in the morning, and another below average nights sleep for thirty-five-year-old Jake Campbell was completed. He had woken up at four, and painfully walked slowly to the bathroom across the hall. His bladder was full and the pain had forced him to walk hunched over. The release was heavenly, although he had a little concern when he realised that the colour of his urine was a light brown colour. It was a clear sign of dehydration, and his throbbing head confirmed that a litre of water would be exactly what his body needed.

  He had spent the last three hours staring at the ceiling, and all he could think of was his work. He worked as a prison officer and had one more shift, starting at nine, and then he was off for a well-earned vacation for a week. He wasn’t planning on going anywhere special, although he had toyed with the idea of taking his son, Thomas, camping to Brittany for a few days. But what was the point?

  Thomas would miss a week at school and besides, Thomas would only spend the whole time moaning about the break, the conditions, the camping and being in France alone would give the argumentative sixteen-year-old an excuse to whinge throughout the whole holiday.

  I’ll wait till he’s eighteen, Jake thought to himself. At least at that age he will be over the height of his puberty period, and by then he should be able to string a sentence together.