Take One With You (2 page)

***

Claire was never the same after the attack. The man who brutally raped and beat her also left her with devastating injuries, and she became a hollow shell, a mere shadow of her former self. For so long she had been her sister’s keeper, but Melissa could not, in the end, take care of her older sister as she herself had been cared for.

Claire killed herself on the day the district attorney informed them that her attacker would be spending less than two years in prison. It was the final insult, and more than she could endure.

Melissa was tormented by guilt afterwards, and spent months in a deep depression from which she never really recovered. She was so distraught she rarely got out of bed, crying for hours every day and praying for the strength to end her life.

Claire had been everything to her since their parents died, and losing her left Melissa without a reason to go on. But she couldn’t even rouse herself to end her suffering. It seemed a proper penance, or so she thought in more lucid moments, a fitting purgatory for failing her sister so badly.

On top of everything else, she would never measure up. Claire was the strong one, the pretty one, the best one. Missy had never wanted anything more than to be just like her Clairebear, but that dream had died along with her sister.

On the night she finally decided to end her life, a chance encounter online gave Melissa a reason to live for at least a little while longer. It was her epiphany, and she began to prepare for the end. Once she found the will to die, she knew she would do so with purpose, and that, at last, would give meaning to her life.

***

Max wasn’t going down without a fight.

At the moment he realized just who had actually been taken for a ride, his mind was already racing as to how he could stop the bike and beat the living shit out of the bitch on the back. She had stones, he had to give her that.

They were traveling at one hundred and thirteen miles an hour.

He let go of the throttle and slammed his fist down on her thigh as hard as he could. Melissa howled in pain and reached for the knife in her boot. He saw the glint in the mirror and not the weapon, but he managed to bring his elbow back hard, hitting her square in the nose, sending black, starry pain from her head to her toes and the knife clattering to the pavement behind them.

They were going a hundred and four.

She nearly fell off the back, but managed to get her arm around his neck, digging her fingernails into soft flesh, drawing blood. He screamed and tried to hit her again, but she dug the top of her head into the middle of his back.

They were moving at ninety-seven miles an hour.

As he flailed at her awkwardly, she reached underneath his arm and lunged for the throttle. He slapped her hand away.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he screamed, still not fully understanding.
Is the bitch crazy?

She got hold of it on the second try. He elbowed the top of her head this time, but she held fast, and it was then that he made his fatal mistake, at ninety-two miles an hour.

Max hit her arm three times in succession, first striking her wrist, which caused the bike to throttle up, and then her forearm, fracturing her radius.

Missy screamed in pain, nearly blacking out, but she held onto the grip.

At that point, all Max had to do was to ease up on the throttle and onto the brake, guiding the bike to a stop. Missy had no strength at that point to either speed up the bike or yank the handlebar to the side, but Max had never been real smart about women, or anything else, for that matter, and he brought his fist down again.

With every last ounce of strength she possessed, Missy tightened her grip and held on, bracing for the blow. As he struck her arm, Max realized his mistake, but by then it was too late.

Bitch doesn’t want to kill me. She wants to kill us both.

The front wheel yanked sharply to the right causing the bike to wobble violently and Big Max laid her down at one hundred and one miles an hour, the bike slamming them against the roadway and dragging them against the rough pavement, burning their flesh from the top and skinning it from below across seventy feet of asphalt.

Even his last instinct was a major fuck-up; had Max just let go and not tried to save himself, he might have survived in slightly better shape.

But Big Max was never very good at letting go of anything, one of the qualities, and there were many, that usually got him in trouble.

The bike finally hit an uneven spot in the pavement and flipped, mercifully extricating the two of them from its hellish embrace, and Missy was thrown off the road and into a ditch. Her back was broken, half her face was torn away, but when she closed her eyes all she saw was the smiling face of her sister.

Max opened his good eye and stared into the setting sun. For a moment he imagined he was lifting weights in the yard, listening to the chatter and enjoying the breeze, until he tried and failed to move his legs. He attempted to call out, but only swallowed blood. He managed to roll over, and saw his favorite tattoo lying on the road beside him.

PUSSY

He’d last seen that particular prison tat in the mirror, on the inside of his lower lip.

Suddenly Max wanted to scream, needed to, but could only gurgle and spit out coppery chunks of his own tongue. He fought the urge to touch his face, which he now felt sure was mostly gone. It was debatable whether he could raise his arm, anyway.

He remembered, but only for a moment, the blonde outside the prison gate, and after much effort, was able to look around for her. She’d disappeared like a whistle in the wind. Somehow he figured out that she must have been thrown clear of the road, and Big Max began to writhe his way to the edge of the road where he hoped he could watch her die. One of her boots stood up on its heel a few feet away, mocking his slow progression.

Missy, for her part, had a couple of tattoos of her own. The one on her shoulder read Clairebear, and had remained intact despite the accident. A more recent one, a rather strange symbol on her wrist that would be noted and photographed as part of her autopsy, had been partially peeled away and thus would cause much consternation for the detective who reexamined her case much later after speaking, or at least trying to speak, to what remained of the man who’d raped her sister.

Max made it to the top edge of the slope just as the slow-moving station wagon he’d passed near the prison pulled to a stop on the shoulder, its wide-eyed driver attempting to both shield the eyes of his elderly wife and call 9-1-1, all while pulling to a stop within feet of the bloody mess once known to police and others as Big Max Cody.

He could feel himself passing out, but Max really needed to see her. He lifted his chin and felt something in his neck give way, but managed to balance his head in that position just long enough to see her one last time.

Once again, Max just couldn’t let it go.

They each had only one good eye, but they locked immediately in a fun house mirror kind of way, reflecting horrors neither could have expected.

Both of them would have been shocked to know, but shouldn’t have been, that the same image flashed through their fading synapses at that very moment, before they each welcomed the darkness fast descending upon their consciousness.

Claire. After all, it was she who had brought them together.

If she could have spoken, the only thing she would have wanted to tell Big Max was her name. Melissa Williamson. Sister of Claire Williamson.

You can’t have everything,
she thought as she faded.
This will have to do.

Melissa died as she planned; comforted by the image of her sister and the knowledge that she’d done her best to both end her suffering and take Max with her.

As for Max, his nightmare was just beginning.

2 MONTHS AFTER TOWY WEBSITE LAUNCH

Eyewitness 10 News Transcript

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VIDEO TOP STORY

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SHOOTOUT IN BROAD DAYLIGHT BETWEEN TOWY “FARMERS” AND POLICE AT WILLOW CREEK MALL

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WELCOME

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Good evening, I’m Beth Montoya…

and I’m Mike Jennings…This is Eyewitness News.

Debra and John are off tonight…

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MALL SHOOTING

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BETH

Shots rang out near the southwest entrance of Willow Creek Mall in downtown Greenville today, sending dozens of office workers into a panic during their lunch hour.

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WILLOW CREEK MALL

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BETH

Eyewitness news reporter Katy Nolan is live at the scene with the latest. Katy?

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KATY

Beth, no one was injured, but three suspects were taken into custody after police received a tip that the suspected operators of the pirate website towy.la were in the area. What happened next was shocking.

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[VIDEO]

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2259 They just started shooting. The cops barely got out of their cars.

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2267 I ran like hell, man. Them Towys are (expletive deleted) crazy.

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3531 It was chaos for a couple minutes, then the shooters just stopped. One of them waved a white rag and then it was over. Like it was planned.

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[LIVE]

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KATY

The three shooters, whose names have not been released, are apparently self-identified “farmers”, thusly named because they believe they are cultivating and cleansing the lands of evil, those who plan to follow the advice posted on the Towy web site by killing someone else, usually those judged to have escaped punishment for serious crimes, before killing themselves. Towy is an acronym, meaning “take one with you.” I spoke with Detective Thane Parks earlier, who heads the local task force in conjunction with the FBI.

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[VIDEO]

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KATY

Detective, who were the shooters and why did they open fire?

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PARKS

They’re fans of the website that’s been causing all this trouble. I don’t know why they did what they did, but it was pretty stupid.

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KATY

Have they been ID’d?

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PARKS

No.

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KATY

Is there any reason to believe the attack was planned or coordinated with the founders of the website?

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PARKS

We don’t know.

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KATY

The ACLU says the founders of the site aren’t actually breaking any laws.

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PARKS

No comment.

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KATY

What can you comment on?

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PARKS

If the founders are out there watching this, I’ll make a personal guarantee: Our system of justice is going to work for you just like it’s worked for so many others. You know what I mean. And if anyone has any information on these kids, call the Greenville Police Department and ask for Detective Parks.

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KATY

Do you know they’re kids, Detective? Do you have names?

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PARKS

What? No. Figure of speech.

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KATY

Thank you, Detective.

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PARKS

Yeah, right.

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[LIVE]

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KATY

No one knows yet who created the website that has wrought so much havoc, but the FBI now considers Greenville to be ground zero in the hunt for the Towy founders. Katy Nolan, Eyewitness News.

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A couple years before Melissa Williamson met her end in a roadside ditch about twenty minutes west of Fairview, or eleven minutes if you’re traveling over a hundred miles an hour, Charlie Sanderson, the person who unwittingly gave her the idea to kill Big Max, noticed his mother had started to hit the old Xanax even harder than before her breakdown.

It wasn’t even a serious breakdown, more like a series of bad days really, but that didn’t stop Charlie’s stepdad from insisting that she up her intake so that, in his words, “we can have a little peace around here,” which Charlie suspected was really just a way to both better control his mother and excuse his own indiscretions. The “we” was only his mom’s husband, who himself was exceptionally tense. There was not a drug yet developed that could cure that particular family of what ailed them.

In Charlie’s mind, the three of them would never be a family, anyway.

There had been other drugs before, all of them legal, which Charlie remembered even if his mother did not, and they had all been prescribed at the behest of Brad Connor, a man Charlie steadfastly refused to call Dad or Father or anything remotely warm and familial.

For all Charlie cared, Brad could fucking die.

Charlie’s real father had been a mid-level accountant, a somewhat boring but hard-working man who always had a smile on his face no matter what was happening around him. Charlie’s mom used to marvel at her husband as he handed over the last of their grocery money to the cashier at the local Safeway near the end of the month, cheerfully emptying his wallet a full week before payday.

They were never poor, exactly, just lower middle class, but there were many times his father had to pay the electric bill or other necessities with a credit card because his meager salary had not lasted a full month, usually because of an unexpected expense.

And it seemed there were always unexpected expenses.

Inevitably, the debt piled up, which became a source of tension between him and his wife that had not existed before. But that smile of his could usually melt her heart, and she was never able to stay mad at him for very long, regardless of their financial difficulties.

The Sanderson family always made do, and their little home never wanted for love and laughter. Neither Jim nor Anne ever let the sun go down on an argument, as Charlie’s father explained to his son, and Charlie was determined to follow the same practice when he grew up and got married.

If
he got married.

Charlie was a nerd and a loner, the former being something easily overcome in the days of such rapid technological advancements, even to be desired, but the latter was more problematic.

“One of these days you’ll invent some code or website or something and make yourself a billion dollars,” his mother would say, “but right now I want you to go out and make some friends not on the computer.”

That was something Charlie had always found hard to do.

He was an only child, not by choice, but because of complications his mother suffered during his birth. He knew his mother wanted more children more than anything, not because she ever told him so, but because of the look in her eyes whenever she spoke with the parents of broods larger than her own. When Charlie had questioned her about it once, she looked really angry and then really sad, and gathered him in her arms and held him and cried for an hour. It was clear she didn’t want him to feel guilty, which was indeed what Charlie felt, and no words ever passed between them on the subject again.

Because they struggled financially but were in a very good school district, Charlie had the distinction of feeling like the pauper at the wedding, never quite measuring up in terms of clothes or possessions, and as such was always slightly embarrassed about his status and appearance growing up.

In the first grade, one kid who rode the bus after school told a few of the others that Charlie had a hole in the back of his pants, with “his butt hanging out,” and Charlie rode all the way to the last stop, way past his house, so that when he got off there would be fewer children to check his backside.

He never rode the bus again, unbeknownst to his parents, and walked to school every day thereafter, no matter the weather. It wasn’t far, but he was often late, and at that age, the reputation for being difficult or different travels among the teachers almost as fast as the students. He began to see the teachers shake their heads sadly as he passed, like that beggar at the feast, which only intensified his alienation.

His grades were all A’s, however, so the problems in school, at least elementary school, were mostly from the student body.

Charlie lived in his mind during those years, which was a very interesting place to be. He occasionally played with the kids in his neighborhood, who were always somehow more genial away from their peers at school, but he could also lie in the grass of his backyard for hours, staring at the clouds and having imaginary conversations with all kinds of wonderful playmates.

Once he spent an entire week in the summer of his tenth year talking to the son of Kurt Vonnegut about their fathers and writing and girls, about which Charlie had recently become obsessed, like most boys his age. He never bothered to find out whether the famous author actually had a son, but that didn’t matter in the slightest within the realm of his imagination.

The following year, when his father died, everything changed.

Charlie was the one who found him, blue in the face one Saturday morning as his mother cooked breakfast for the three of them. His dad had been working lots of overtime, trying to get a little money saved, and normally would have been up and around, working on special projects as he did most Saturdays, but that day was different.

That Saturday, Charlie was going to try out for little league, something that both his parents saw as a good sign in terms of his socialization. Later that afternoon his father was going to the practice field for support, but he’d slept in, the first Saturday in weeks he’d done so, and Anne didn’t want to disturb his rest.

They had argued the night before, about money of course, and she was feeling badly about it. She had suggested for the first time that he consider borrowing from a wealthy relative, an uncle they rarely saw, and the conversation had not gone well. She immediately regretted the idea, but something in his indignant reaction made backing down less enticing than moving forward, and so they fell into the trap of wounded pride and artifice, talking past each other until their voices could be heard all over the house and probably next door.

His mother slept in the living room that night, tossing and turning in the easy chair facing the television, finally falling asleep to a horrible infomercial about blankets with sleeves.

Charlie, who had listened to their argument from his room, crept into the bedroom where his father was sleeping and gently woke him up just after midnight.

“What is it, son?” he asked, instantly focused and awake.

“Nothing, Dad.”

Charlie stood there, not knowing what to say or do.

“Talk to me, son.”

After a long moment, Charlie was finally able to form his words.

“I know you don’t want to call Uncle Teddy,” he said, “but we could probably use the help.”

It was such a simple thing to say, heartfelt and apologetic in tone, and Charlie could tell it made his father both immensely proud and terribly ashamed. He immediately regretted his words, but Jim Sanderson scooped his son up in his arms and hugged him tightly, something both of them had not actually done in quite a while, having recently graduated to handshakes and backslaps except for special occasions. It was a father-son cycle that only fathers and sons understand, one that ebbs and flows throughout life on a tide of masculinity, and one that neither of them would experience again after this night.

When he released his son, there were tears in Jim’s eyes, something Charlie had never before witnessed, not even when his grandfather died, and at first he was even more scared and unsure than before.

But his father smiled that Jim Sanderson smile that so melted the heart of his wife and amused the grocery store checkers, and Charlie smiled back, and that was that. It was a moment they shared and seemed to understand without any more discussion, and Charlie went back to his room.

He went to sleep that night as happy as he had ever been, but he would end up haunted by those last words to his father for the rest of his life.

Charlie woke up early the next morning. He could see kitty-corner across the hall into his parents’ bedroom. His dad had rolled out of bed again, and was fast asleep on the floor. Jim had gained a little weight during the last year, and usually snored like a truck driver, but that fact didn’t register with Charlie at all, and he went back to sleep for another twenty minutes.

When he woke up, it was to the smell of bacon in the kitchen, and he padded out of his room and into the hall, where he could see his father was still sleeping in the same position as before.

Something didn’t seem quite right, so Charlie went to where his father lay and touched his shoulder.

“Daddy, time to get up.”

There was no response. His father was lying on his side, facing away from Charlie, so Charlie reached again for his father’s shoulder and this time he shook him. Jim Sanderson rolled over, and his face was very dark.

The curtains were drawn, so Charlie flipped the light switch and turned back to his father. His skin looked blue, with lips an even darker, almost purple tint.

Still, Charlie was not fully aware of what had happened. It did not register to this highly intelligent boy of eleven that something momentous had occurred, something that would deeply affect him and alter the course of his life. All he knew was that, in his words to his mother, “Daddy won’t wake up.”

His mother was sitting in the chair she had slept in, reading the morning newspaper. When she looked into the eyes of her son, that was when Charlie knew his father was dead. He could tell by her eyes.

His mother jumped up and went to the back of the house, followed by her only child, and the two of them shared a moment no mother and son, or anyone, should ever have to share.

They looked down at the corpse of their husband and father.

“Call 9-1-1,” she said, and sank to her knees, trying some crazy television version of CPR, to no avail. She was not crying, just working feverishly. Anne Sanderson was not generally one for histrionics. She was a doer, someone who saw a task to be performed and did what had to be done.

It was the words of her son from the hall that finally caused her to break down.

“My daddy’s dead,” Charlie said into the phone, as positive of that fact as he’d ever been of anything.

Anne burst into tears and ran to the phone.

“Please send an ambulance!” she yelled, and gave them the information they needed. As frantic as she sounded, she knew, as did her son, that there was no more need for CPR.

She left the line open and made the attempt as instructed, however, more out of duty than hope, until finally she told Charlie to hang up and help her move his father.

“What?”

“Help me move him,” she said, and Charlie didn’t question her again. The two of them each took an arm, and dragged his body out of the bedroom, down a short expanse of hall, through the kitchen, where the smell of bacon still filled the air, and into the living room, finally laying him beside the chair in which Anne had slept the previous night.

It was not a long distance, probably less than thirty feet, but it seemed to take forever, and several times Charlie had to stop, each time carefully putting one hand beneath his father’s head so that it wouldn’t bump against the floor. Then the two of them would straighten up, breathing hard, never looking directly at each other or the deceased, and somehow sensed when it was time to continue.

Charlie never asked his mother why she insisted the body be moved before the paramedics arrived; his thoughts were more on blaming himself for going back to sleep after first seeing his father on the floor.

The funeral was much as those things go, a blur of emotion and tears and relatives with food and awkward neighbors. There was a freshly stained wooden box sent from Jim’s work containing a special bible, with a small insurance policy that enabled Anne to buy Charlie a computer, which changed the trajectory of his life, and the lives of a great many people afterwards, though not in the way that Charlie, or anyone, could have possibly imagined.

Charlie grew his hair long and became a handsome young man, a real head-turner, but he never quite escaped that inner lonely child, and thus lost himself in an online world, much as other kids do but not at all for the same reasons.

He and his mother became even closer after that, and were almost like best friends, at least until she met Brad, which was when everything really started to fall apart.

Brad owned what Charlie assumed was a shady insurance business, and he was slick and handsome and rich, everything his father was not, and it broke Charlie’s heart when his mother took him aside and told him that they were to be married. Somehow that moment would be just as clear in his memory as the moment he saw the look in his mother’s eyes the morning his daddy wouldn’t wake up, and that only made him hate his stepfather more.