They slept three abreast, ten in a row. There was space for one hundred Apoc per tier, and all six tiers were filled to capacity.
Their comings and goings were at first accomplished through a system of storm drains, to which tunnels had been dug. There were six separate entrances to the building including the two main doors. There was no longer a need to be secretive in their comings and goings. There wasn't a neighbor left in a three-mile radius.
Most all the Apocs in Abaddon's throng stayed at the 'temple', as he called it. They ran out of space a week ago. They now also occupied the one hundred-room Oceanview Convalescent Home across the street, and the new twelve-story Beachcomber Hotel a quarter mile down the road.
The Apoc who called himself Abaddon, from the Hebrew word for destruction, lived in the posh penthouse of the Beachcomber. There was quite a contrast in the way the self
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proclaimed leader and his followers spent their rejuvenation time during the day. While his faithful spent their slumber in a David Copperfield-ish hellhole, his six-room suite was a tribute to excess.
Lavish, velveteen, red curtains draped the king sized bed in which he slept. The windows that once had a picturesque view of the Chesapeake Bay now were painted black. The walls boasted pictures ranging from the priceless originals stolen from the Chrysler museum, to the paint by numbers of Elvis on black felt. They covered every inch of available wall space. Half- burnt candles with dried pools of colored wax covered nearly every flat surface.
Objects they had looted from the new
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age stores: a statue of Suwanee the Devil dog , crystals in elaborate cisterns, enigmatic daggers with inlaid rhinestone handles, and books of magic and witchcraft fought for table space. Pornographic books and sexual paraphernalia were scattered amongst the mess.
The almost nonexistent amount of light entering the place gave the suite a cavernous effect. Abaddon lay asleep
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with a naked girl of eighteen two days into the 'turn'—on the large canopy bed. He had issued orders not to be awakened except for an emergency.
But to understand the one who called himself Abaddon, to feel his icy rage, to see the world through his hate
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filled vengeful eyes, you'd have to travel back through time twenty years to Reading, Pennsylvania, to when it first started. Back when his name wasn't Abaddon, but Brian Speakes.
CHAPTER 14
YOUNG ABADDON
Abaddon was at one time Brian Speakes, not a popular kid. Shunned in school by not only the 'in' crowd, because they thought he was nerdy, but also by the nerds, because they thought he was just simply a pain in the ass. He just wasn’t very likable.
He was always short and smart, having skipped two grades this made him even shorter compared to his peers. In the eleventh grade
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when most boys were turning 17 and already experienced their growth spurt, Brian was still on the wrong side of puberty. He was 14 and five-foot-one.
Brian also had been overweight through most of his teenage years. He wasn't what they referred to in the clothing stores as husky. Brian was fat. Big
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boned, large
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framed, heavyset were some kind ways he had heard himself described. More often, though, it was pudgy, chubby, pig, fatso or lard
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ass. Someone once called him a Weeble, after an egg-shaped family of pre
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school toys that's slogan used to be: ‘Weebles wobble but they don't fall down’. The name just kind of stuck passed down from one cruel kid to another until eventually even Russ Wiltse, high school football coach and gym teacher started call him it too.
He had mousy brown hair that was always cut wrong, his mother always cut it, saying, "Why spend money on a barber when I've got a good pair of scissors?" His eyes were an ineffectual brown behind half-closed lids. His face was round and his features plain. If you did take notice of his face at all, you would notice the constant greasy shine it always had. About the only aspect of Brian out of the ordinary was his continual too
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loud voice, which made him appear overbearing and pontifical.
Brian's home
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life was where his real problems had their beginnings. His father had abandoned his mother and Brian when he was four. He went out to get a six
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pack of beer in his pickup and simply never came back. Brian's mother had blamed Brian for his father's farewell. This was not something he had to wonder about; his mother had literally told him so
every chance he could remember. His mother had a problem with alcohol, and promiscuity.
She blamed him for tying her down, saying it was little wonder why his father had to get away from him. Who could blame him? She also had to work a lot. She had dropped out of high school and didn't have a skill, so she drifted from one waitress job to another. His mother changed jobs almost as much as Brain changed schools. They drifted from one town to the next. So to make matters worse, Brian was not always the new kid, he was the new
fat
kid.
He often wondered if he came home one day and had found his mother dead, would he feel grief or release? Many of the men she brought home would beat him and sometimes her. Most were truckers passing through and eating at the greasy-spoons where she waitressed. The ones that beat her gave him secret pleasure.
In the small two-story house they rented, Brian's bedroom was on the second floor. The house had never really meant to be two stories; the top floor was nothing more than an attic with a small square of plywood haphazardly laid over ceiling jousts. Exposed rolls of asbestos filled the gaps between the wooden beams that were his floor and the downstairs' ceiling. To gain access to the attic bedroom he climbed the drop-down attic stairs accessible through his mother’s bedroom. It was stifling hot.
One night lying in the dark, Brian couldn't sleep. A myriad of noises percolated through the floor from his mother's room below. He noticed a light in his otherwise pitch-black room. Crawling on the itchy asbestos he came to a bare spot. He could see through a crack, light coming from his mother's bedroom.
He peered into the crevice and could see his mother on her bare mattress bed. She was flat on her back and drunk. She had a bottle of Thunderbird wine—what's the price? Forty
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four twice—that she would swig from in her right hand. Her left hand was exploring. Her arm passed over her globular abdomen, marred by stretch
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marks, an appendix incision, and rolls. Brian thought it made her look like a kangaroo with a pouch.
He couldn’t look away.
A large man by the named of Fitz Whitecloud stepped into the boy's field of vision. He had seen the man before and didn’t like him. Except for a hat, the man was naked. He staggered then snatched the bottle of wine away from his mother while she drunkenly protested. After taking a huge gulp, he poured the rest of it over her and tossed the bottle against the wall. She was obviously turned on by this because she made cooing sounds.
Against all of Brian’s willpower he was starting to become aroused.
Fitz wasn't ready yet. He reached beyond Brian's field of vision and started to pull on something. A young flat
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chested woman with stringy black hair was thrust on top of Brian's mother. Fitz grabbed the back of the stringy
-
haired woman's head and threw her into his mother.
The woman with black hair looked like she could have been in High School. Brian was at full attention..
Both women seemed hesitant at first, but with Fitz's insistence, grew to enjoy it the cuddling. The big man sat on the edge of the bed, his ample gut rolled onto his thighs, and watched as Brian did in the room above. The scene below continued to play out for several minutes.
Brian felt his groin area grow tight,.
Fitz must have felt likewise. He moved closer to the two women. He told them it was his turn, yet they persisted. He stepped out of Brian's field of view again for a second and reentered it with a belt in his hand. The women seemed oblivious to the man looming over them. He lashed the belt first across the back of the stringy
-
haired woman who rolled over in surprise. The next was across the huge white breast of his mother. Raised red welts appeared on the pale, white skin of the women.
Brian was shocked by what happened next. Instead of the two women crying or becoming upset, both smiled. Not just smiled, but displayed the belt marks like a trophy to Fitz. Brian couldn't believe his eyes. He could understand how someone could inflict pain and enjoy it, but to be the recipient of that pain and actually enjoy it was a new concept for him.
And enjoy it they did, for they taunted and teased, the man to do it again. He did it again, and again ‘til the exhaustion was self-evident on his face. Pink lash marks
--
some already turning to bruises—covered their bodies. They brutally pulled Fitz down onto the bare mattress and like demons devoured him.
Did people actually like it when you hurt them? His old fat mother?
He moved on the asbestos, pulling and pushing to get a better view through the crack near the ceiling joist. The plasterboard beneath him split along the crack and he fell onto the bed below, on top of Fitz, his mom and the black haired girl.
Brain passed out from the beating at the hands of the big man. He woke a day later on the couch, so battered and bruised he missed that entire week of school.
As he lay on his mattress, now thrown on the floor of his mother’s bedroom, he thought about what he had seen.
The people that weren't able to openly display love, was hurting another way of showing affection? When his mother beat him with a belt, or a broom, fly-swatter or two-by-four, was she really saying I love you? Oh sure, she was taking out her frustrations too
--
but was this a way for people who couldn't show love in any other way to show they cared? He never saw Fitz Whitecloud again, but he never forgot the big man’s lesson.
Brian was thinking about this the next Monday in school. He was eating lunch alone again in the crowded cafeteria. He perceived Fitz as a symbol of raw brutality. Finally he realized that raw brutality might have its attributes. To see the man's massive shoulders and arms working like a machine to impose pain was exciting to not only him as the observer, the man as the giver, but the women as the recipients also.
The rule of the jungle seemed to be at work here. Not only did the strong survive, but oftentimes they excelled. Take it a step further, Brian thought, couple the savageness of a bear with the cunning of the fox, and what you'd have would surely be the king of the forest.
He thought maybe he had been approaching everything in the wrong way as he took his tray to the cleanup station. Possibly, he wasn't so bad after
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all. He pushed his way through the people milling in the hallways. He was so engrossed in his current musings that at first he didn't hear what the senior had said to him.
"What's the matter Weeble? We already know you're dumb, but are you deaf too?"
The word 'Weeble' had brought Brian back to the present. He was in the middle of the hallway with what seemed to be every eye in the school upon him.
"I said, can you get milk out of those big titties of yours?"
Riotous laughter bombarded Brian from all sides. There was a volcano churning within him. Brian hung his head in embarrassment and decided not to push the issue. Especially since he was so badly out-numbered. The tall, good
-
looking, senior named Tad Robertson, however, had other ideas for him.
"Hey not so fast tubby
-
two
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boobs, I'm not done talking to you yet," Tad said. He stepped directly in front of Brian. Is it true weebles wobble but they don't fall down?"
Lava from the volcano was starting to flow over the edges inside Brian.
"Answer me when I'm talking to you fuck
-
face!"
"What do you want?" Brian said staring up into the larger boy's face.
"I want you to answer my question. Is it true that weebles wobble but they don't fall down?"
Trying to placate Tad he said, "Yes, it's true."
He felt before he actually saw, the larger boy strike him with both hands on the chest. One of Tad's friends was on his hands and knees directly behind Brian's legs. Brian went sprawling backwards, landing hard and unflatteringly on his hind
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end.
From his vantage point on the ground, he watched the boys. The one who had been on the ground, stood up and shook Tad's hand. The image of the boy and Tad linking arms with their girlfriends and walking away was permanently etched in his mind. The sound of their laughter echoed in his ears.
He wouldn't react now for he remembered the motto of the Mafia: "Revenge is a meal best eaten cold." Soon, he thought, it'd be time for dessert.
Brian knew that Tad was on the football team and that he'd have to practice after school. Then after practice Tad would ride home on the activity bus. He got up an hour early for school the next day and rode his bike. Brian waited for all the kids to get off the school buses in front of the building. The last bus emptied and Tad hadn't been on any of them. He waited just inside the doors until the first tardy bell rang—still no Tad.
Just as he was about to give up
--
thinking that maybe Tad was absent—a black Lincoln pulled in front of the school. Tad jumped out of the passenger door. Brian cracked the large double
-
door and tried to listen to what Tad was saying to the driver of the car. He caught just enough to give him hope: