October 14th, 1998
Jarrett landed face-first in mud. He quickly turned himself over and found the unmarked white van he had just been thrown out of. The crickets of the night seemed to be laughing at him, chirping from the darkness surrounding him. After wiping mud splatter out of his eyes, Jarrett looked up at the ones who had hurled him out of the van―people he once called family.
Being in a motorcycle gang was not exactly what Jarrett had in mind when he was a child. Of all the things that a young boy dreams of becoming, he never saw himself in one. But reality had worked its strange way over his life, molding Jarrett into someone he could not stand to look at in the mirror―a person far from the valiant astronaut he had envisioned becoming, and a person whose future was now tarnished by the past.
Jarrett spit blood out of his mouth from his split lip, watching his former brothers hop out of the van’s open back doors and stomp towards him. Grabbing him by the arms, they lifted him up and dragged him swiftly into the forest like a ragdoll.
Bruising Jarrett’s right arm with his grip, Clyde had not spoken a single word since abducting Jarrett, and Jarrett knew that Clyde’s silence was dangerous.
It was during a robbery, back when Jarrett was just a prospect trying to join the Cedar Mills Devils, that Clyde demonstrated this, when he held his Smith & Wesson revolver to an elderly man’s head. The old man insisted that he had no money and that he had no affiliation with a rival club. When Clyde kept his revolver steadily pressed into the man’s temple, the elderly man snapped and called Clyde a term long outdated for African Americans. Clyde went utterly silent and then Jarrett watched him blow that man’s head off.
Now, being dragged through the night with tree roots and sharp sticks scraping his knees to bloody shreds, Jarrett knew that Clyde was once again losing control.
Meanwhile, gripping Jarrett’s other shoulder across from Clyde, Michael’s grasp was much softer and Jarrett appreciated that. In fact, Michael had barely partaken in the beating Jarrett got back at the abandoned shipyard, only hitting Jarrett to appease Clyde and feeling like shit the whole time while doing so.
Michael had been like a brother to him ever since Jarrett joined the Club as a teenager and one of the only true family members he really had. Jarrett could now see the sadness in Michael’s gaze―the shininess of his big brown, doe eyes as they glistened with tears in mourning for him. Despite his full sleeves of tattoos and his lineman build, Michael was just a teddy bear… a teddy bear who did kill when the need arose.
Jarrett thought about pleading his case again. He thought about bribing his familiar abductors with what little he had, but knew it was no use. He had tried many times already, and all that speaking had gotten him was a few missing teeth, broken ribs, and a split lip that refused to stop bleeding. He figured it was best to shut up. The crinkling leaves beneath him and the hiss of the dark night spoke instead.
The forest opened up ahead and Jarrett squinted his eyes. In the blurry distance, he spotted the abandoned grist mill, fully knowing where he was now. It was the spot―a place where the Mills Devils would take select people who had wronged the Club and make them “disappear”. Jarrett hated this stretch of forest. He hated the thick trees and their branches that resembled broken fingers reaching into the sky. He despised its remoteness that silenced all screams from within it. He loathed how most nights, no matter how tired he was, that he could never find sleep thinking about the men he had also killed here.
Passing the mill, the trees opened up into clear flatland and the Cedar River appeared to the right, just as its gentle gurgles and sloshes became audible to the ear. Jarrett stared out at the river. Mist danced on top of it like ghosts at a masquerade ball. It was an impressive sight and was equally as striking as what sat in the dead center of the clearing.
Dispersed orange glows lit up a circle formed by the headlights of motorcycles. Jarrett tried to make out his former friends behind those bikes but could not. He saw only silhouettes instead, shadows that awaited him as Clyde and Michael dragged him forward like a ritual offering for sacrifice. Nearing the circle, Jarrett recognized the man with his arms crossed standing right in the middle of it, though. It was Lee, and Lee was about the closest thing to a father Jarrett had ever known.
Clyde and Michael promptly dragged Jarrett into the center of the circle and shoved him down into the mud before Lee. In the sunlike glow of motorcycle headlights shining his way, Jarrett could now make out the entire Club behind their motorcycles―former friends who surrounded him like a Roman coliseum crowd waiting for a bloodbath. Lee, however, seemed more hesitant about a bloodbath, wincing at Jarrett’s split lip.
“What did he do?” Lee asked Clyde, his voice stained by a lifetime of cigarettes.
Clyde sighed and walked towards Lee, shaking his head. “We caught him stealin’ money on the drug run. I really hate doin’ this, Lee. The kid’s a good kid, but how many times does he get to fuck up and keep gettin’ away with it?”
Lee stroked his goatee. His furrowed brow was ape-like, but a strong tinge of intelligence gleamed in his eyes. There was a reason Lee was Club President. His members counted on him through the good and the bad, to handle shit, and make decisions with the best interests of the Mills Devils in mind. Despite being the father Jarrett never had, Jarrett knew that Lee was in a bind now.
Slowly stepping forward, Lee crouched down on his knees in front of Jarrett. “Is it true, kid?” Lee whispered.
“Yeah…” Jarrett replied, blood in his mouth.
Lee rubbed the deep wrinkles on his forehead. “Why, Jarrett? Why’d you do it?”
“I didn’t want to do it, Lee… I swear! My little sister…the one out in Arizona―she needs money for chemo. She needs it bad! She’s got no one else, man! She’s family…”
Sighing, Lee stood up. “And what are we, Jarrett?” Lee spoke louder now, inviting the rest of the Mills Devils to hear. “Are we not family?”
With great showmanship, Lee gestured with both hands to everyone who surrounded them. Lee was definitely a showman, but there was no faking the disappointment in his voice.
“Hell, I raised you up as a kid! Got you out of the foster system…” he said, kicking the grass. “I brought you into the Mills Devils and gave you a family! I treated you like a son… Stuck my nose out for you time and time again. And then, you steal my money―the Club’s money! What am I supposed to do here, Jarrett?”
Jarrett looked up and found Lee’s eyes, knowing wholeheartedly there was no return. Nothing he could say or do would change anything. He had fucked up for the last time. His worst fear was confirmed when Michael stepped forward and handed Lee a blowtorch.
“You know the drill, kid,” Lee said, staring at the blowtorch in his hand.
Jarrett stood up and tried to bolt, but Clyde and Michael quickly forced him down into the mud. They ripped off Jarrett’s vest and his patches before tearing off his gray henley. Shirtless and flailing, Jarrett squiggled like a worm in the mud, until Clyde kicked him in the ribs with his boot, creating a vicious thud that rendered Jarrett still. Pain thundered through Jarrett’s side, and even though he stopped putting up a fight, Clyde and Michael kept him pinned down in the mud anyway.
Flicking the blowtorch’s trigger while testing its ignition, Lee took a step forward. The ignition was working. Bluish flames spewed from the blowtorch in quick, fierce hisses. Lee walked behind him, and Jarrett could feel Lee’s piercing eyes on his exposed back and observing the full back tattoo stretching from Jarrett’s neck down to his lower back. Every Mills Devils member had the same tattoo on their back. Like everyone else, Jarrett had gotten it upon officially being inducted into the Club. The tattoo was pure black and depicted a devil grinning madly while riding a motorcycle. Stretching from shoulder to shoulder, MILLS DEVILS was inked into Jarrett’s skin in a traditional tattoo font. Vests and patches could easily be taken from members, but tattoos were a different story.
Lee knelt down and grabbed Jarrett by the neck to steady him, and Jarrett knew what was coming next. Jarrett had seen men cry while getting this treatment before, and now, he was one of them. The blowtorch hissed to life and Jarrett began to scream as its flame scorched his back, contorting his skin while searing his flesh. Lee traced the tattoo with the blowtorch, burning it out of existence. Per Club rules, disgraced members did not deserve to rep the Mills Devils, and that included tattoos.
After a lifetime of pain, Lee turned off the blowtorch and Jarrett could hear the night again. The crickets were still laughing at him. Jarrett no longer cared about whimpering out loud and started crying, childlike in his sobs.
Lee knelt down in front of him and lifted Jarrett’s head by his chin. “That hurt me more than it hurt you, kid.”
Clyde and Michael grabbed Jarrett again, forcing him up.
“What the fuck are you guys doing?” Jarrett screamed. “Please… let me fucking go!”
Leaving the circle and the glow of headlights, Jarrett squirmed for his life as Michael and Clyde dragged him along. Jarrett could not see anything ahead, only a blur of trees and the pitch-black dark. Clyde and Michael were confident about where they were headed, though, both of them walking with purpose to some place close by. Jarrett began to weep when he realized that this destination was a freshly dug, six-foot deep grave. Clyde and Michael tossed him into it.
Jarrett landed on his broken ribs. Pain surged through him as did adrenaline. He looked up, and beyond the perfectly dug edges of his grave, the night sky looked as magnificent as ever. By the Cedar River and away from the light pollution, Jarrett could even make out a few constellations above him. Scorpius was his favorite. It was the one his mother used to point out to him. Jarrett had never gotten over his mother’s death and could not fathom how a woman so lovely could be taken out of the world like she was nothing. Jarrett was not a religious man by any means, but he hoped that one day he could see her again―in some way and somehow.
He reckoned that day had finally come.
Clyde and Michael appeared over the edges of the grave holding shovels, and suddenly, droves of dirt and mud began to rain down upon Jarrett. Jarrett tried to standup, but his ribs agonizingly cracked with each movement. Clyde and Michael paid him no mind, continuing to fill in the hole and weigh Jarrett down, forcing him to sit in the grave like a kindergartener during reading time. Dirt entered Jarrett’s mouth and nostrils and plastered itself inside of both as he cried out for help.
Taking big puffs of the cigar in his mouth, Lee appeared above him, framed by the four sides of the hole as showers of dirt continued to fall. Jarrett no longer saw sadness or even disappointment on his face. Lee’s eyes were hollow now, colder than a snake’s. Exhaling a mist of smoke, Lee eyed Jarrett like he was just another one of the unlucky souls who had challenged the Club over the years. Whatever love he had once had for Jarrett was now no more.
“Please, Lee!” Jarrett reached his hand up into the air toward Lee. “Please… just listen to me! My little sister is dying! I didn’t know what else to do… I needed the money!”
Lee shook his head.
“Lee, please! After everything? Burying me alive? I know I fucked up, but I don’t deserve this. Nobody deserves this! Please, I don’t want to die like this!”
Lee’s eyes remained empty, unlike the hole that was steadily being filled. By this time, the dirt had worked its way up past Jarrett’s kneecaps, and knowing that he would soon be unable to move altogether, Jarrett could only look up and watch as Lee walked out of his view for good without a second look.
Clyde was just as vacant about burying Jarrett alive, but Michael was burying a brother who had been with him through thick and thin. Jarrett watched as his friend wiped a tear away. Shoveling dirt onto Jarrett, Michael wanted nothing more than to hop on his bike and jet off with Jarrett to safety. He wanted Jarrett to be okay. He wanted his best friend to live.
Dirt began climbing up to Jarrett’s chest, weighing him down like quicksand. Jarrett had stopped crying, but his exhales remained sharp from the combination of the pain and the sadness he felt simultaneously. Accepting death, he thought once more about his mom―her sweet perfume that smelled like candy apples and her laugh that was really more of an infectious wheeze. As a twenty-year-old man, it had been forever since he had last seen her―fifteen years to be exact―but he remembered every single detail about her like it was only yesterday.
Listening to the night purr, Jarrett smiled and closed his eyes. The clanking of the shovels and the shuffling of the dirt began to soothe him. Jarrett was happy to hear the gentle rush of the Cedar River, too. He swore that he could feel a subtle coolness wafting through the air from the river―a coolness almost biting enough to make him feel like he was about to step foot into the river himself. It was all so serene and Jarrett focused on this, forgetting everything else that was happening. He was alone and about to die, but was now at peace.
It was in the moments that followed, that Jarrett was startled by an unearthly howl suddenly emanating from the tree line just beyond―a sound that quickly transformed into a high-pitched, piercing shriek. Clyde and Michael stopped shoveling, bewildered and utterly still as it continued to amplify, getting louder and louder as if its author was growing more agitated.
And then, it stopped.
Clyde and Michael looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders, and began to shovel dirt into the grave again. Jarrett looked up at them, savoring his final moments of life as the dirt piled up around his shoulders. Tears were pouring down Michael’s face.
Jarrett closed his eyes again, accepting his fate.
Seconds later, Jarrett heard the sound of a man screaming for his life. Clyde and Michael jumped, dropping their shovels at once and running out of Jarrett’s view as they drew their sidearms. Not long after, gunshots rang out.
Jarrett could only stare up at the sky and listen to the gunfire. Soon, it had become a full-blown firefight and Jarrett knew that something was terribly wrong. The peculiar shrieking had also returned, followed by the screams of more men. Jarrett began to wiggle himself out of the dirt, wincing in agony with each movement.
What was happening out there and why the hell was the entire Club discharging their weapons?
The gunfire abruptly died down, and then, it all came to a sudden stop. Silence now took the place of the uproar that had just ensued―a silence so deafening that it scared Jarrett more than the firefight itself. The shrieking, whatever the hell it had been, had also ceased. Beyond the parameters of his grave, Jarrett listened for anything…anything at all. He could hear the river and the crickets, but that was it.
And then, out of nowhere, he soon heard the quick swish of an incoming object being thrown his way. It landed in the hole right in front of him. An arm, bloodied and severed right at the elbow, leaving an exposed opening of tendons and slashed bone, lay before Jarrett. He gasped in horror, trying to make sense of what his eyes were seeing. It was an arm alright―an arm with black tattoos inked into its skin and hidden underneath fresh splotches of blood. In a moment of clarity, Jarrett observed the tattoos on the mangled limb and immediately recognized who the arm had once belonged to. It was Michael’s.
Jarrett clawed his way out of the dirt, and, despite the pain, managed to stand up and grab ahold of the grass above. Using the corner of the grave, he then shimmied his way upwards, pulling himself up inch by inch until he was above ground again. Flat on his stomach in the grassy mud, Jarrett fought to find his breaths. He took a second to regather himself, squinting his eyes in agony. When he at last looked up, his heart stopped.
The bodies of each Club member were scattered about the flatland, bloody and disfigured in wild confusion. In the spotlight of the motorcycle headlights that were still on, Clyde’s lifeless body lay spread about the center of the circle, severed in half right at the waist and his intestines leaking out of him like meaty noodles. His eyes were void of the intense leer they had once held, replaced now by a look of horror etched permanently into his face from his final moments. The corpses of other Club members lay around Clyde, each one still gripping their guns and horrifically mangled to unrecognizable states.
Jarrett recognized Lee, though. Hunched over his 1963 Harley Davidson Panhead, Lee’s neck had been slashed in one brutal swipe, his head barely hanging on to his body by a miraculous strip of skin. Jarrett figured that Lee had tried to make a getaway on his bike but had not made it out. Something had stopped him. Something had stopped all of them.
Looking at Lee’s lifeless body hurt Jarrett’s soul deeply. Seeing Michael’s body, however, affected Jarrett even more. Ten yards from where Jarrett was standing, lay his brother and best friend, Michael. He was scrunched down into the mud on his stomach, his head and skull smashed in like an egg of red yolk. Michael had come back for Jarrett, his right arm stretched forward toward Jarrett’s grave like God trying to touch Adam in Michelangelo’s renowned painting.
Suddenly, another roar blasted through the night―a singular, demonic roar. Jarrett ducked for cover in a panic, wondering what the hell was going on. Cautiously, with fear pulsating within his veins, Jarrett peeked his head up towards where the terrifying sound had come from and could not believe what he was seeing.
By the river and standing upright on two legs, something stared back at Jarrett. Its green skin resembled bumpy tree bark and its mouth was an open vortex of jagged teeth. Seven-feet tall at the very least, the creature stood monstrously large―too large to even fathom.
Its yellow eyes glowing like searchlights, the brute beast turned around and ambled into the river, its knife-like claws grazing the water as it slowly sank from view and vanished beneath the surface.
This has been Chapter 1 of my upcoming sci-fi horror novel, CEDAR MILLS. Grab a copy—(in paperback, hardcover, ebook, and audio)—when it comes out on August 1st, 2025 via Savage Realms Press.
Check out some recent pre-release reviews of Cedar Mills below!
-Dylan
Dylan James 