PROLOGUE:
Crossfire Hurricane
Three days since coming here, and he had already begun to feel like a natural.
“Just keep your mouth shut and you’ll be fine” he told me. There was a slight pitch of annoyance in his usually gruff and gravelly voice. He spoke those words with a thumb and forefinger pinched firmly against the butt of his Marlboro cigarette. Regulars, I thought, and was barely even able to distinguish the foul smell in the air. It was thick and heavy, and somehow, the Marlboro’s were masking it.
For once, John Raide’s chain-smoking had come in handy.
“So what do I do again?” I asked with a bit of vitriol, and Raide simply looked at me with those callus, uncaring eyes. He’d have shot me himself, I’d imagine, if he had access to anything at all.
“Odd, that is your name, right?”
I nodded at the bleak figure wearing a five thousand dollar suit, a midnight black finish that seemed to glisten beneath the starry night sky.
“Have you ever had your ass ripped by a short guy with a temper?”
It was weird, hearing that come from him. He wasn’t prone to typical rants of chicanery, nor was he one to quote someone else. He liked to quote himself, more than anything. It was odd, because I felt as though I had heard that somewhere before, perhaps under a different term, or a different language.
Hell, for all I knew, it was a different universe all together.
“Just keep your **** wired tight, keep your mouth shut, and let me do the talking.”
I nodded. I believed that he believed he thought he was the only one this thing would speak to, and for all intents and purposes, he may have been right… but something still felt strange about all of this. Something was off about the constellations…
I looked up into the night sky, seeing the purple haze drift across the vast, ever-expanding canvas, and I looked for them all. Big dipper, Orion’s belt, I was a bit of an astronomy geek as a child—and yet I could not find a single constellation I recognized. Where the hell was I?
Come to think of it, what’s the last thing I do remember?
We had left the morgue behind and ventured out into the nightlife of that city. The warmth we felt as the summer evening’s breeze took us on our adventure, I had felt a calm peace begin to wash over me. Walking along a few steps behind the Almighty ****, I was beginning to feel relaxed and even comfortable in my own skin. That was, of course, until I realized the truth of the matter.
How I came to that realization was simple: Raide had suddenly swivelled on his heel and taken me by the throat, rushing me past a woman wearing some sort o latex bondage outfit, and slammed me against a brick wall, back first. I was about to make my own move for his wrist when I felt something sharp poking into my ribs.
Looking down, I realized either he had his **** dipped in silver, or that was quite possibly the most slender knife I had ever seen. Either way, I could feel it pressing into my ribcage, nuanced nice and close so that it’d avoid bone and slip in through the middle. I stopped struggling.
“Why’re you following me, kid?”
Following? Him? Well, yeah, I guess I was following him, but that was because I thought—
“Cut the ****, and tell me why you’re following me.”
I tried explaining to him that I wasn’t following him like he probably thought. I was just… lurking. I was watching him and walking with him, kind of like a guardian angel that watched over the shoulders of the world’s most important people.
Yeah, he didn’t buy it either, and I heard the slightest sound of flannel being ripped from the seams.
Through baited breath and an intense, stabbing pain in my chest, I finally looked at him in those steel-grey eyes, and I told him the truth.
I told him that I thought he was blowing me off, that he knew there was something off about the girl, about how she was torn apart in little cubic feet. Literally, I had taken a look for myself and realized that amidst the chaos of teeth marks and what seemed like sharp, random, animalistic incisions—there was a kind of surgeon’s grace to it all. I had also managed to piece her body back together, and discovered that, yes, cubic feet. All five-six and a hundred and thirty pounds of her.
The coroner’s report said she weighed one-eighty-three.
“You’re full of ****,” he said, his lips were in close to mine, and I could feel and smell the hot whiskey on his breath. It burned my throat to feel his hot breath against my lips. It burned like gasoline, or acid reflux, or any other myriad of acidic substance-abuse issues a tweaker like me could have.
I told him that I wasn’t full of ****, and that I knew he had something. I told him I wanted to be apart of it, that I wanted in. I wanted to see this through and he tilted his head to the side, looking at me with an appraising, quizzical look. Finally he asked, “Why?”
I stared at him for a long time then, and I honestly wasn’t quite sure.
Maybe it was because my father’s dead and my mother’s sucking dick for crack down in New Orleans. Or what’s left of it. Or maybe it’s because I live in a shitty one-room apartment, or that my landlord collects rent when he feels like it, instead of on the first of every month. Or maybe it’s because I woke up this morning and I thought to myself, ‘I’ve had enough of this freaky **** that goes on in my head, and I’m gonna do something about it’? I honestly didn’t know the answer, but I did know one thing that John—er, Raide—wasn’t giving away.
“I know why you want to do it.”
His interest was piqued, and I felt the knife’s point slip away ever so slightly. Giving me breathing room. How nice of him.
Before I spoke again, I looked around. Here were two grown men standing near the mouth of a blackened alley in the middle of summer, both fully dressed for the oddly cool summer evening breeze, and staring each other down to the point where, to the average passerby, it may have looked like we were kissing. I thought of the feel, his old lips, chapped and decayed like a rotting corpse… I would’ve given anything to think of something else.
“You’re doing it because she’s not home, because you woke up in the middle of a street with not a **** clue and the worst hang-over of your life. You woke up and you don’t know where you’ve been or what you’ve been doing. You figured, ‘hey, just a bad night’s drink is all’, but then you looked at a newspaper. It’s been three months, hasn’t it? It’s been three months since you disappeared off the face of the Earth, and now you don’t know your ass-end from your brain. You’ve called her house—your house—sixteen times since three days ago—when you woke up—and you’ve not received a single call back. Not even to chew your ass out for disappearing on not only her, but your newborn as well.”
Raide’s demeanour didn’t change, he was still poised to strike like a pissed off badger with a hangover, but that didn’t bother me anymore. I saw the slight twitch in his right eye—ever so subtle—and I knew the gears in that head were beginning to turn.
“That’s right, Adam made a surprise appearance right about the time you left. So as you can see, she’s not very happy with you right now. One could say she’s bordering on divorce—if you two were even married.”
He licked his lips, an involuntary twitch, much like the one above his eye, yet his eyes never broke away from mine.
“So you have no **** clue why you’re here, in this **** hole, instead of back home with you family. You’ve lost three months of your life, and for some strange reason you feel better. You feel younger. Your right knee doesn’t feel like it’s about to fall off, and despite thirty years of smoking cigarettes, you can breathe in this nice, Massachusetts air by the lung full. Point being, Raide—you’re in the ass-end of nowhere, and with nothing to keep you from tumbling, you’ve decided to dive headlong and see how deep this rabbit hole goes.”
There was nothing left to say, well…
“And me? Well, I woke up today and didn’t have a **** thing better to do than watch some middle-aged drunk stumble around looking for answers to questions he doesn’t even know how to ask.”
The forest was a deep, swampy green. It wasn’t like in the picture books, that’s for sure.
Raide looked around, waiting for something—anything—to happen. The more we waited, the more the silence of this forest seemed to grow like moss on a boulder. Rolling Stones is what we were, gathering no moss. I never quite understood what that meant, really. Probably something to do with having roots. And not the Kunta Kinte ones either.
“Why’re you here?” A voice, smooth as silk seemed to whisper into my ear.
I looked at Raide, and he had his head tilted to one side, his back to me. What…
“We’re travellers, we seek food and shelter, and in return will repay with what goods and services you may require.”
What the hell?
And the breeze, the summer’s night breeze, it was gone…
“Of course,” I heard Raide say once more, and then turn to me. His suit was dirty now, not like how it looked how… how long ago?
“Come here,” he said, still smoking a cigarette. Plumes of smoke billowing up and into the sky, and as I stepped toward him, I swear I could see… what?
“Look at me,” He said, and began to ruffle my hair, shaking my hooded sweater, he was giving me a once over for some reason…
“What the hell are you doing?” I asked.
“It won’t let us in unless it knows we’re unarmed,” was all he offered.
“And that’s why you’re feeling me up like a damn prized animal?”
Raide gave me a flash of sarcasm, not even needing words, but he gave them to me anyway.
“I’m ‘feeling you up’ you snotty ****, because you’re human, and these creatures don’t exactly like touching us. They think we’re smelly, dirty little apes. Ever smell a Sri-Lankan?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s how we smell to them. Just worse.”
What the **** was he talking about?
I felt something move, a gentle breeze erupting from in front of us, the calm, smooth voice was in my ear once again.
“Don’t mind him, he’s not used to having guests.”
“What?”
It was there, but it wasn’t. It was like trying to see too hard into a fog and only getting a mirage. A shimmering shape that seemed to refract and reflect only from certain angles. It looked beautiful from beneath the pale moon’s light.
“What the hell is going on here?”
John Raide stared at me for what seemed like an eternity. I hadn’t even realized that I was holding my breath, not until I felt his grip loosen and his hands fall away.
“What the hell are you, kid?”
I shrugged my shoulders and I smiled. His grim look dashed any immediate hopes of a friendship.
“I’m just a kid who’s bored and wants something to do.”
Raide nodded and looked around the busy city streets. I could feel the gears turning, could see it in his eyes as he thought of the possible options. He could’ve just left me then and there, but for some reason…
“You wanna see why I haven’t gone home?”
“Yeah, yeah I do.”
He nodded at me, and without a word began walking eastbound. Like the good little sheep I knew I was, I followed without a word.
Do I have some sort of nemesis? Do I have a reason for why I’m here? Why I’ve bothered coming back to pro-wrestling? Well, no, not really. I can’t think of one right now, at least. I mean, the money is good and I always did get a kick out of making other people look bad… but I can’t say that there’s any one definable explanation for why I’m here.
And I guess that’s the difference between us, after all. You, Baine, you’re here because you want to face some Vanilla Gorilla in Cory Chevelle. You want to meet another greased up white boy on steroids and say you managed to pin him down for three seconds. You want to finish your career with a win that’ll echo throughout the ages as one of the most premiere bouts in the history of this company… does that about sum it up?
Help me out here, Baine, because I’m trying to figure out exactly what your story is.
The way I can see it, it all started with a little promotion called UWE, a place where you had come in and within months proven your dominance. The people loved you, even when they hated you, they couldn’t help but feel that you were something worth watching. Something worth supporting. You had title reigns, you held the world championship of this promotion, and you’ve done everything there is to do in UWE. You’re quite possibly a certifiable UWE Legend. Of course, that puts you in such high esteem as others like… like… James Jowers… and The Who… and… yeah, maybe this isn’t such a good story after all.
The point I think, is that you’ve done a lot in your career. You’ve done a lot and seen a lot, you’ve experienced every clichéd up and down that you can in this sport… and now you’re looking to find out how it ends, aren’t you? You’re looking for that one last triumph or tragedy, and you think you’ve found it in the one man I like to call, Honky Kong.
Does that about sum it up for you, Baine? Are you this enamoured with the thought of ending your career by defeating a man that very few care about? The dude survived a fatal car wreck, good for him. He also managed to stay underground and let people think he’s been dead for the past few years, but hey, what kind of a guy doesn’t do that? I mean, there’s a perfectly viable, reasonable explanation for Cory Chevelle deciding to rise from his grave to compete as the most pasty looking dough-boy zombie in the history of pro-wrestling, right?
And of course, that brings me to you—and why I can’t seem to figure out your fascination with this Chevelle guy. I mean, granted, for a dead guy he’s pretty good… but do you really want to become Van Baine – Zombie Slayer? Is that your chief motivation for returning to the UWE? If it is, then I guess all the more power to you… but the problem with that, Baine, is that you’re looking over the one obstacle in your road you should be paying attention to.
That’s right, wrestling.
You’re unproven, Baine. Whether you want to face the facts or not is entirely up to you, but the truth of the matter is that you’ve got rust. You’re not as good as you once were—if that was even good at all, comparing the standards…
You’re the big guy who’s making his comeback, yeah, but the problem with this is that you’ve done it all with smoke and mirrors. You haven’t competed, but you’ve made a lot of Goddamn noise about wanting to challenge another big, hairy gorilla. You’ve made a lot of noise about capping off your career with finding out just who was the better big man. You’ve been using these promos and these wild sound bytes, trying to hype your way into a premium pay-per-view match with a dead man walking, and daring to even label it as big as Godzilla versus King Kong.
Maybe it is, maybe I’ve just lost touch with what the people want…
… but **** what they want.
You want to get to Cory Chevelle? That’s fine. Have at ‘em. I couldn’t give less of a **** about him. That’s not who you’re stepping into the ring with this week, Baine, that person is me. And you can go ahead and call me a nobody or even go ‘hur hur hur I’m gonna squish you’ all you like, it’s not going to change the fact that you’ve allowed yourself to rust, Baine. You’ve let yourself go and you’re not the same man you want the people to believe you are. You’ve used smoke and mirrors up until this point, but I want you to know that when you step into the ring with me on Friday Night, you’re not going to have any tricks or sideshow antics to keep the people from seeing the truth, Baine.
And the truth of the matter, is that you’re just a dipshit old man who doesn’t know when to quit.
And so that’s how it’s going to happen. Just as quickly as you came to UWE, it was the nobody John Raide who sent you packin’ just as fast. The nobody you couldn’t even be bothered to acknowledge, or even show a shred of respect. The very same nobody that is a seven time world heavyweight champion. The very nobody that has kicked more ass in this business than you’ve seen in your entire life. The man who has bled for this business, the man who has shed every single piece of integrity, honour, and dignity just to hold the world championship high above his head. You’re stepping into the ring not with ‘some nobody’. You’re stepping into the ring with The Almighty. You’re stepping into the ring with the Crimson King. You’re stepping into the ring with not just another hand-me-down piece of cannon fodder, Baine.
You’re stepping into the ring with John **** Raide.
And that’s where the truth will shine, because they’ll see me, Baine. They’ll see me and they will remember. I will make them remember what I’ve done, and prove to them that I can do it all over again… and you? You’re a memory. A nostalgia act that tried to make it back to the big time, but couldn’t. You’re the one thing that people are going to be laughing at when it’s all said and done, because when you step between those ropes and into my world, you’re going to realize that you’ve just jumped off the deep end, and you’re not as big as you used to be.
See it, Baine. Know it. Know that when you enter my world, when you come into the ring and face John Raide one-on-one, you’re going to wind up just like every other motherfucker who’s stepped up in the past. You’re going to wind up flat on your back and staring up at the lights—and there will be no laughter, no cheers, no boos, there won’t be applause on your final curtain call, Baine. The reason? Because all the people you’ve tried to fool, all the people you’ve tried to convince of your stature, they’re all going to wake up and see you for what you really are.
A washed up has-been who should’ve just stayed home, and gotten drunk on the memories of better days.
