Shook
Adjective
1. Emotionally or physically disturbed; upset.
"You began at the end. Now, isn't that strange?"
–Simon Marcus, Bloodbath
I see a bad moon rising; I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightning; I see bad times today.
-John Fogerty
Part One: Bad Moon Rising
Hutch had never liked zoos.
It was an interesting opinion to declare as a young child; an obstinate preference that was met with laughter and eventual confusion as neither his peers nor his family members ever seemed to understand. After all, it was improbable that a child wouldn't want to go to zoo, and, time after time, his mother had tried to encourage him to change his mind.
"But don't you want to see the monkeys?" she had said enthusiastically. "Or a tiger? Or a bear?"
"No," he had said.
"Well, why on earth not?"
"Zoos makes me sad."
Though simple, his explanation wasn't enough—it would never be enough to convince his parents to respect his point-of-view—and a handful of times they had taken him, kicking and screaming, to the zoo.
As child he was unable to articulate how or why this opinion was formed, but as an adult he knew. He didn't like the idea of what it all meant, and, because of that, he still didn't understand the appeal of zoos.
Why would people take pride in building a monument of cages, meant to display animals for the pleasure of groups? Didn't they know that there were just some things that weren't meant to be contained? Surely, they knew that part of what made creatures intriguing, beautiful and unique was their ability to roam free, unaffected and unsuppressed by enclosures that were sure to stifle and change them. It all seemed so inhumane, such a terrible way to declare dominance over another living thing.
No, Hutch hadn't liked zoos as a child; he wasn't fond of them as an adult, but it wasn't until this moment that he realized he hated them.
Standing in the center of the dilapidated cage, surrounded by long, black rusting bars once intended to contain ferocious predators, he sunk to his knees.
"Oh, Starsk," he breathed, extending his hands only to retract them again. He had expected the scene to be bad, but he never could have anticipated this.
Though the enclosure was large—nearly the size of the squad room—it was oppressive. Sprinting through the unlocked door, Hutch was overcome by claustrophobia, momentarily crippled by the dark, foreboding space. He didn't know what he was going to find when he was anxiously stumbling through abandoned exhibit-after-exhibit of the decrepit zoo. Though he had anticipated something terrible, his thoughts hadn't done the reality justice. Stomach churning, he choked on the thickness of the air and blinked rapidly, struggling to believe what he was seeing.
There were bodies everywhere.
Black-hooded figures, lay sprawled in a haphazard, lifeless circle; one body resting on top of the other, there were too many corpses to count. Blood trails surrounded them, heaping pools of blood that were once wet had congealed, dulling the vibrant shiny liquid into dull semi-dry puddles which promised to stain the cracking cement floor. And in the center of it all—his face covered with an array of scratches, purple and black bruising, his hair matted with dirt, grime, and at least two body excretions Hutch didn't want to hypothesize the origin of—was Starsky.
Sitting in a crumpled heap on the gritty floor, his eyes were crazed, shining with panicked tears. His legs were bound but his arms were free, leaving Hutch to wonder why he hadn't untied himself.
"Let me go," Starsky said, his ragged voice cracking with strain. He was shaking, rocking ever-so-slightly in an off-putting fashion.
The action told Hutch everything he didn't want to know. What happened here had been bad, horrible enough to implore Starsky to comfort himself with what little motion he could manage. The movement was as inherit as it was telling. Hutch had seen it employed countless times by victims of horrendous crimes or traumatized children, never had he seen his partner do such a thing, but he understood the devastation it was born from, the deep-seeded need facilitating the action.
Movement was his partner's protection when things got too complicated or rough, when he needed a second to think or to escape emotions he couldn't tolerate. Starsky was a pacer, a fidgeter, a dancer, and a fighter—never a shaker.
"Please," Starsky pleaded desperately, his eyes locked on the floor. "Let...me...go."
Hutch couldn't wait any longer. He wanted—needed—to do something—anything—to soften whatever his partner had been forced to endure. Grasping Starsky's shoulders, he pulled him into an embrace.
"No!" Starsky hissed. He immediately protested the touch, pushing Hutch's chest in a disorganized fashion. Body weak, he was helpless to escape what was should have been a comforting action, he remained rooted where he sat on the floor. "No!"
Hutch gasped, unsettled by the underlining ferocity of such quiet words and a simple truth he couldn't refute: Starsky was shaking.
No, not shaking, he thought, struggling to hold his wriggling partner tightly to his chest.
"Let…me…go," Starsky demanded weakly, his tired voice quaking with strain.
Hutch flinched. Starsky was shook. Tired. Hurt. Cold.
Though Hutch could feel the heat radiating off of Starsky—signs of infection, or worse—his skin felt cold and clammy, damp despite the worn, black robe hiding the majority of his body from view. Tattered and dirty, it was secured around his waist by a line of fraying rope, unsystematically weaved in and out of ill-sized holes cut in the material. The bottom of the rope was stretched downward, binding his bloody ankles together and anchoring him to a steal D-ring mounted in the middle of the room.
The cage, the thought echoed through Hutch's mind before he could ignore the horrendous implications. They kept him locked in a cage like an animal.
"Please," Starsky pleaded softly. "Please… Let me go."
"I'm tryin'."
Reaching around his quaking partner, Hutch struggled to grasp the end of the rope, then fumbled with the knot. It was a difficult to unravel given their current placement—with Starsky practically sitting in his lap—and without a knife to swiftly liberate his partner's red ankles from their confinement, but eventually he succeeded. Dropping the rope on the floor, he grasped Starsky's knees, encouraging him to extend and stretch his cramped legs.
"No," Starsky whimpered. "No."
"Come on, Starsk. Jesus, it's gotta feel good to move."
"What do you want from me?"
The frantic question was absurd.
"What do you mean, what do I want? I came to help you—"
"Hutch!"
"Right here, babe."
"No." Starsky shook his head weakly, his face contorting with grief. "You have to call my partner… Hutch…Ken Hutchinson so he can come and take me from this place."
"Do you not know who I am?" Hutch whispered, almost to himself. The idea was so foreign—so wrong—that it hadn't occurred to him. How could his partner not recognize him?
Cults are a hell of a thing. That was what Captain Dobey had said, nearly a year ago, when regretfully assigning them such a high profile case. And over the course of their investigation, Hutch had become convinced that no truer words had ever been spoken.
Cults were a hell of thing, created by devils to entertain savages; there was no limit to their barbaric acts. They took people because they could, tortured and killed them just to pass the time. The bodies they had recovered were brutalized and dehumanized, ghastly images that were forever burned into the depths of Hutch's memory, waiting for the most inopportune moment to be recalled. The youngest victim had been fifteen years-old, the oldest forty-five; there was no correlation between who was abducted and accepted into the group or tortured and killed. Nothing to predict who would be taken or returned.
There had been survivors, of course. Starsky and Hutch had been fortunate to find a few people alive. Starved, assaulted, and brainwashed, they were unrecognizable shadows of themselves, impossible to interview for an official statement and incapable of describing even the smallest of horrors they had somehow managed to survive.
Out of the handful of survivors, one had been the most memorable—at least to Hutch. A young man, nearly twenty years-old, he had his whole life ahead of him before he fell in with the wrong crowd or was sucked into its vortex. They had interviewed him one afternoon, struggling to glean a cohesive picture of how he had been abducted and why he had been allowed to live. But it wasn't to be. Though he had survived his captivity with The Marcus Family, it had rendered him unable to utter a word. Lying motionless in a hospital bed, the only thing he was capable of was staring. This type of absent behavior wasn't due to a lingering physical ailment—the man's doctor had advised—rather a mental one. Whatever he had been through—whatever hell he had endured—had left him catatonic, non-verbal, save the for unpredictable, violent outbursts and occasional, nonsensical sobbing fits. The hospital held him for two weeks before transferring him to Cabrillo State.
"Death would have been better," Starsky had said grimly. "Imagine having to live your life in a place like that? Stuck, being forced to live day after day remembering all the ungodly shit that was done to you? He won't ever be the same. He can't be."
And in situations like that, Hutch agreed with Starsky, dying was better than living. Being dead and buried was more appealing than being left alive, burdened with the pain of everything that had been done. The young man they had failed to interview had survived but for what? What kind of life was he destined to have?
Holding Starsky's writhing body tightly, Hutch closed his eyes, fatigue overwhelming him as he suddenly wondered the same, not about a stranger, or another unfamiliar name scribbled on missing person's file but about his partner. His best friend.
"Let...me...go...!" Voice cracking, Starsky dissolved into a fit of crazed sobs, his breath hitching painfully in his chest.
"Shhhhhh," Hutch soothed automatically. "Buddy, it's okay; I'm here, now. You're okay."
But it wasn't okay, anyone with eyes could see that.
He's only been missing for two days, Hutch thought, desperate to hold on to any hope he could. But it was fleeting, quickly erased by their grisly surroundings, Starsky's sunken facial features and dull blue eyes. What could have possibly happened to him in two days?
"Please…! Call my partner," Starsky pleaded desolately. "I...just...w-want to go h-home."
"Buddy, I'm here."
"J-just... l-let me go h-home."
"It's gonna be okay," Hutch whispered, his voice tight with irrepressible tears. "I promise, I'm gonna take you home." He shouldn't be like this. Christ, this is too much. It's only been two days.
