Brutal

S
ome people inspire you
, some guide you and some live your dream as if it’s their own. I have been blessed to have the support of all these wonderful people throughout the journey of writing this book.

I
am indebted
to my wife Astha Agarwal for continuously encouraging me and critiquing my work since its inception. My heartiest thanks to dear friends Subhasis Mohanty and Soumya Prakash Patra for going through umpteen unedited versions of my book, and providing their invaluable input. A word of thanks to my family too – Uttam Satpathy, Usha Rani Satpathy and my parents. I couldn’t have been what I am without you.

I
am deeply
grateful to Niyati Patel, Rashmi Bansal and the whole Bloody Good Book and Westland team for leaving no stone unturned in making my book better. Selecting a book through crowdsourcing is a novel concept in the Indian publishing industry, and I believe www.bloodygoodbook.com will scale new heights in the future. That
Brutal
is the first product of such an initiative is a source of immense joy and pride for me. This book has been made possible only by the love, praise and constructive advice from the author-and-reader community at Bloody Good Book. Keep reading and backing new voices!

B
rutal
is
India’s first crowd sourced and crowd curated book. Its publication wouldn’t have been possible without the contribution of these and many other amazing Bloody Good Book members. Thank you for reading and reviewing
Brutal
on
www.bloodygoodbook.com
. Your vote helped publish
Brutal
.

Deepak Kaul

Neha Lokhande Rajput

Vidhya Devaraj

Niyati Shinde

Antony Varghese

Mark Fong

Gunjan Sen

Sombir

Hywelpinto

Siya

Rasika

Jenny

Remesh

Yamini Algaonkar

Sanket Panda

Pooja Sood

Tarun Agrawal

Narendra Singh

Uttam Satapathy

Sauvagya Ranjan Bhanja

Sandeep Jadhao

Pearl Enginer

Priya Agrawal

Swarup Mohanty

Sabrish Nair

Shreyansh Jain

Vibhor Jain

Arnab Sarkar

Parag Randar

Subhasis Mohanty

Sarthak

Sakshi Goel

Soumya Prakash Patra

Usha Mohanty

Manish Kumar Tiwari

Joyita Bandopadhyay

Pritesh Bhosale

Yaagneshwaran Ganesh

Sapna Bhattacharya

Nalin Verma

Zahir Ansari

Nithi Subramaniam

Astha Agarwal

Damini Majumdar

Swarup Kumar Kar

Jahnavi Chintakunta

Darshan Mhatre

N. Murali

Mahrukh Chikliwala

Qais Palekar

Siddhartha Deshpande

Hetika Sanghani

Sanjana Parikh

Gaurav Thapar

Ravi Ojha

Sushma Rao

Kirti

K Sankar

Nirmala Kelkar

Praveen Vohra

Shanti Bhosale

Vishal Seth

Marc Wellington

Rajesh Shankaran

Vivek Mundhra

Badrinath Nuggehalli

Annie Joseph

Surendra Mohanty

Raunak

Soumyadeep Koley

Shanthan

Sheshagiri K M

Antony Varghese

I
n pitch darkness
, Kunal Chaubey dashed through the thick foliage, ignoring the branches and twigs clawing into his flesh. Webs of overhanging roots kept getting in his way, lacerating his face like barbed wires. Yet, he ran like a mad man. He didn’t know where he was going. He just wanted to get out of this damned forest.

For the last half an hour, his legs had been charging through the dense shrubbery, unmindful of the rodents crawling beneath. His skin was itching and stinging at odd places, with insects swarming all over. Some of them could be poisonous, he knew. But right now, what terrified him more was the realization that his body was tiring.

Even though he was a young man, all his vitals were running on overdrive. He was wheezing, with lungs on fire and legs quivering with muscular cramps. If things continued this way, he knew he would fatigue himself to death. Still a better way to die than falling into the hands of the monsters, he thought, his hands tightening around the handle of the axe he was holding. His palm was sweating and fingers trembling, but his grip on the weapon didn’t budge one bit. It was his saviour. The only thing that stood between him and the predators.

For now, he had stolen a lead on his pursuers. They were in shock. They hadn’t expected him to resist, much less fight back. But fight he did, surprising even his own instincts, for he had been a spineless wimp throughout his life. His aggression, however, was only momentary. It had come and gone like a flash of light. He was no longer a warrior, but a man running terrified.

Since his childhood, he had been afraid of the dark. And it was not some bullshit phobia psychiatrists called by weird names. It was real. Far too scary to be explained to people. He had seen things in his life people would prefer not seeing even in nightmares. Things lurking in the black shadows, slithering through the branches of trees. Like a cloud of soot that has life.

His parents had taught him to deal with these sinister entities. ‘Just ignore them’, they said. ‘It’s all in your mind, these creatures from hell. They can’t touch you. They can’t harm you.’

How wrong were Mom and Dad? They could not fathom how close they were to their own harrowing deaths. Two years ago, the demons took them away, leaving behind a contorted mass of blood and burnt flesh. Looking no different from the twisted metal they were entangled with.

People called it a gruesome car accident.
Sheer ignorance, again.

They had not gone away because of the mistake of a drunken truck driver. The man was driving beyond the speed limits, no doubt, but in his own lane. It was his parents’ car which, coming from the opposite direction, had swerved inexplicably, and leaped over the divider and run into the giant vehicle. Nobody could explain why, except him. The reason was evident on the victims’ disfigured faces, which resembled those of roller-coaster riders in an uncontrolled free fall. Their gaping mouths, bulging eyes and raised eyebrows had preserved the horror of their final moment like a negative film does. A moment in which they realized that their son’s wild imaginations were no longer just ‘imaginations’.

The incident left him shattered, filling his heart with dread. His guardian angels had departed. There was now no one left to save him. Thus far, the demons had kept a distance from him, prowling only in the shadows. But now that they had tasted blood, there would be no stopping them.

And they came, as expected, not allowing him even a night of mourning.

They came out of the darkest of corners of his house, their tentacles crawling out from the shadows. Alone and cornered, he knew only one way of escaping.
Run. Just run.
He left his home, beginning a life where he was always on the move. But, the creatures never gave up on him. They stalked him everywhere – in desolate stretches of road, in movie theatres, in supermarkets, in his engineering hostel and now today even in this wilderness.

Whump! Lost in his thoughts, Kunal tripped and fell forward on the ground. His cheeks and nose brushed against the soil. It felt moist. He picked himself up and looked around. It was a river bank. A stream of water lay ahead, gleaming under the stars.
Thank God!
With elated spirits, he marched towards the stream.

He began walking along the bank, hoping to run into a human settlement soon, where he would get shelter, and more importantly, protection. A cool breeze comforted his burning skin, luring him towards the waves caressing the coastline. Shifting the axe into his left hand, he bent down and splashed water onto his face. It felt rejuvenating. He stood there briefly, taking a few deep breaths.

His nostrils picked up a slightly pungent yet familiar smell. He instantly recognized it. What surprised him was that it was coming from his axe.
No way!
He frowned and brought its sharp edge close to his nose. A dark, viscous liquid was dripping from the blade. Its smell was now unmistakable.
It can’t be.
Warily, he dabbed a finger in the thick liquid and put it into his mouth. Every shred of doubt in his mind evaporated right away. It was human blood – salty and slightly metallic in taste. He brooded for a few seconds, and then shook his head dismissively. There was no way it could be human blood.

It was the blood of the monsters he had killed.