A Dark Beginning

So much can happen in one lifetime.

Even more can happen over the course of many lifetimes.

This tale starts on a dreary night in our hometown Carson, the night that started all the treachery.

Lightning lit up the sky as the dry storm took over the sky. The year is 1951 and seventeen-year-old Neil Striker is drinking his sorrows away in the middle of the lit-up football field.

Just an hour earlier his brother Adam Striker scored the winning touchdown, sending Carson High to the state finals.

Neil tried with all his might to remember every second of that game and drown out everything that happened afterward to no avail. His two best friends, Peter Haggan and Alan Parker found him right as he got his buzz.

“Hey,” John nods at him carefully.

“C’mon, you need to get back, your mom is worried,” Alan, the moral, persuaded.

“Is she though?” Neil replied sarcastically, angrily. He is staring out at the field goal line where his brother made that winning touchdown. “Can you believe it, fellas? Just last night, I was sitting here with my adoring parents.” He jumps up and then yells, “Adam Stirker! The All-American boy! He was running down that field with that football cradled in his hand and……. touchdoooooooowwwwwwn!”

His face suddenly turns dark. “And less than two hours later……what happened? What happened to that man? The man that everyone looked up to, even me, the washed-out younger brother?”

He looks over at John and Alan. “Well, boys, I will tell you what happened. I will tell you what happened to our young blue blood brother. He was hit and killed….by the drunk Hudgens kid.”

“You got to let this blue blood thing go,” Alan says quietly.

“Never! We are the reigning blood of Carson!”

“So, our families are well off and survived a few generations, not a big deal, no one really cares,” John, the daredevil says, popping open on of Neil’s beers.

“Oh, they will care soon, good ol’ Haggan,” Neil says. “Because we are going to become the best, the bravest, the…….”

“Drunkest?” Peter laughs, taking another swig of his beer.

“You joke now……but I’ve got something cooking up here,” Neil points to his temple and looking off into the distance past the goal line. “And fellas…. it’s going to change things around here.”

On November 12th, 1951 Adam Striker scored the winning touchdown for Carson High.

After the game, Adam was driving home when Mark Hudgens ran a red light and crashed into Adam who was on his way home.

Adam died upon impact.

Mark Hudgens walked away with a bruised rib and a mild concussion. He made bail that night.

The loss of Adam Striker was a major tragedy for our town.

It set off a dark chain of events that the town did not recover from.

A month after the accident Mark Hudgens mysteriously disappeared.

Two and a half weeks after his disappearance his body was recovered at the bottom of Lake Secretos. The police suspected murder due to injuries on the body that could not have been self-inflicted.

There was a disturbing marking on the body that the police did not release to the public.

The markings were on his back, harshly carved out with a knife most likely. It read: quia sanguis.

For the Blood.

The blood gang became well known in Carson and the surrounding towns.

No one knew them…….yet everyone knew them.

In 1965 the gang was believed to have disappeared after the Striker family fell bankrupt. Carson was put at ease, as they believed the extinction of the unnerving blood gang was the final verdict.