Brutal Read online

  Brutal

  Uday Satpathy

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgment

  Thank you

  Book 1

  Prologue

  Eight Years later

  1. Hotel Ritz Plaza, Allahabad

  2. 11:30 AM, Allahabad District and Sessions Court

  3. 2:35 Pm, Hotel Ritz Plaza, Allahabad

  4. Untitled

  5. Laxmi Apartments, Vivekanand Marg, Allahabad

  6. Untitled

  7. Untitled

  8. Untitled

  9. 8 Pm, Ambala City

  10. Untitled

  11. New Delhi

  12. 1 Am, Ambala City

  13. New Delhi

  14. 2:30 Am, Ambala City

  15. Untitled

  16. 7:30 Am

  17. 8 Am

  18. 12:30 Pm, Karol Bagh, New Delhi

  19. 3:20 Pm, Ambala Executive Inn

  20. Century News Headquarters, New Delhi

  21. Chelmsford Road New Delhi

  22. Untitled

  23. Untitled

  24. Forest Institute of Science and Technology, Jabalpur

  25. 2:30 Pm, AJK Umaria Police Station

  26. 7:30 Pm, Grand Trunk Road, Ambala City

  Book 2

  27. 8 Pm, Dehradun

  28. 9:30 Pm, Ambala City

  29. Untitled

  30. 10 Pm, Ambala City

  31. 8 Am, Lutyens’ Delhi

  32. Untitled

  33. 11 Am, Ambala City

  34. Untitled

  35. Untitled

  36. Ambala Cantt.

  37. Untitled

  38. Untitled

  39. Untitled

  40. Untitled

  41. Untitled

  42. Untitled

  43. Untitled

  44. Untitled

  45. Untitled

  46. Untitled

  47. Untitled

  48. Untitled

  49. Untitled

  50. Untitled

  51. Untitled

  52. Untitled

  53. Untitled

  Book 3

  54. Untitled

  55. Untitled

  56. Untitled

  57. Untitled

  58. Untitled

  59. Untitled

  60. Kushwaha Farmhouse, Jharoda Kalan, Delhi

  61. Untitled

  62. Koramangala, Bangalore

  63. Untitled

  64. Bangalore International Airport

  65. Untitled

  66. Hotel Le Regalia, Bangalore

  67. Untitled

  68. Untitled

  69. Kushwaha Farmhouse, Jharoda Kalan, Delhi

  70. Untitled

  71. Untitled

  72. Le Regalia Hotel, Bangalore

  73. Untitled

  74. Le Regalia Hotel, Bangalore

  75. Untitled

  76. Untitled

  77. Room 705

  78. Untitled

  79. Untitled

  80. Hotel reception, Le Regalia

  81. Untitled

  82. Untitled

  83. Untitled

  84. Untitled

  85. Room 703

  86. Untitled

  87. Untitled

  88. Room 702

  89. Untitled

  90. S. S. Marie Cargo Ship, Somewhere in the Indian Ocean

  91. Kodaikanal, Tamil Nadu

  Bloody Good Book

  Published by

  Bloody Good Book, an imprint of Bushfire Publishers LLP

  6th Floor, Core House,

  Off C. G. Road, Nr Parimal Garden

  Ellisbridge, Ahmedabad - 380006

  Copyright © 2014 by Uday Satpathy

  ISBN: 978-81-931821-0-9

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents have been used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, event or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN: 978-81-931821-0-9

  To my wife Astha,

  for believing in me more than I did,

  &

  To my little boy Vivaan,

  for all the happiness in my life.

  Acknowledgment

  Some 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!

  Thank you

  Brutal 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

&n
bsp; Marc Wellington

  Rajesh Shankaran

  Vivek Mundhra

  Badrinath Nuggehalli

  Annie Joseph

  Surendra Mohanty

  Raunak

  Soumyadeep Koley

  Shanthan

  Sheshagiri K M

  Antony Varghese

  Book 1

  Prologue

  2 AM, Bandhavgarh National Park

  In 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.

  Eight Years later

  1

  Hotel Ritz Plaza, Allahabad

  Something woke Prakash Sinha up. He felt dizzy, his eyes burning as he tried to part his eyelids. He looked at the wall clock and groaned. 8:25 AM. Damn. Yet another sleepless night. He had slept only for 15 minutes. That was the best he had slept in two weeks.

  He lifted his five-foot-ten body from the bed and stood up, immediately greeted by a pinching sensation in his right knee. Yeah, good morning to you too, he sneered, stretching his leg. The pain had been bothering him since the last few days, stinging often when he got up or sat down. It was one of the ‘gifts’ from his last assignment. He stroked his fingers over his knee and noticed a tiny metal splinter protruding from his kneecap. Another Goddamn piece of shrapnel. Not today!

  Today was a big day. He couldn’t allow it to go wrong. He was a Special Correspondent at Globe News, getting back into the field after three weeks of leave, a period he had spent in severe depression and trauma. His face looked wan, eyes bloodshot with dark circles under them. The salt-and-pepper hair he prided himself on appeared more salty than peppery. Yesterday, while looking at the mirror, he had remarked that he looked sixty. He was only thirty-five.

  His ordeal began one month ago, when at the peak of a glorious career, he took up an assignment to cover a story in Banka. It was a Naxalite hotbed and a place notorious for the bloody battle between the government and the rebels. He had taken a team of cameraman Ojas Patel and a local freelancer with him. Both of them had died in the very first week. He woke up in an ICU, his body full of shrapnel, enough to give him a lifetime of suffering.

  The doctors were able to remove a few major chunks of metal from his neck, thighs and back. But they had to leave untouched the minor fragments embedded deep inside his body. He was discharged in a week – body fragile, mind tormented.

  Night after night, he would wake up with a splitting headache and spasms coursing through his body. Some days, he would hear explosions and then squeeze his ears with hands. Nightmares made him spend nights under his bed in terror. He tried sleeping pills; even drinking, praying for an inebriated slumber which never came. It didn’t take him long to realize that he was lying in a cemetery surrounded by graves. One belonged to his career. One to his happiness. And one to his life. All buried for good.

  If someone had told him that he would soon leave the gloomy walls of his New Delhi apartment and fly to Allahabad to cover a story known as the ‘Nitin Tomar case’, he wouldn’t have believed him. But
he was well on his way to do it. And it was made possible by Seema Sharma, a close friend who was also an ace journalist with the Century News channel. She kept visiting him, often against his wishes, even on days he closed himself up in his room sulking in darkness. She was the only one who could persuade him to come out of his shell and get back into the field. Begin with an easy case, she said.

  He had begun to hate journalism, maybe even fear it. But he also badly wanted things to get back to where they were a month ago. So, he agreed to her suggestion, just to give himself one desperate shot at redemption. He knew nothing about Nitin Tomar or the crime he committed. He was going as a blank slate, unprepared, like a rookie. Beginning his career again, like he did twelve years ago.

  He picked up the mobile phone from the bedside coffee table. There was a message from Seema. This must have woken me up. He read it. ‘You are coming to the court, right? Will kill you if I don’t see you at 11:30 AM. He smiled and nodded in agreement. There was one more message. It was from Ritesh Pandey, his boss, the editor for crime beat at Globe News. It said: ‘Best of luck. Be the stubborn bastard again that we all knew.’

  He had a quick bath, dressed formally and then went over to the restaurant area of his hotel for a breakfast. It was a long time since he had eaten in public.

  He was halfway through his breakfast when he saw a short, stout man with a balding head enter the restaurant. Dilip More. This man was his old companion and cameraman. Like him, Dilip also lived in New Delhi, but they hardly got to see each other nowadays.

  Prakash smiled and called out his name.

  Dilip looked back, smiling. “So, the lion is back into the game!” he said, before hugging him. It was a long hug. From a colleague who was now almost a brother.

  “How is the great Dilip More assigned to such a low profile case?”

  “Ritesh Sirji called me up. He said you are going to cover the Nitin Tomar case at Allahabad. That was enough for me to…”

  “So you have come to babysit me?” Prakash muttered.

  “Now c’mon bhai, everybody can do with some help,” Dilip said, settling into a chair across from him. “Look at yourself. You look fucking tired.”