character :: Darrell Glover
”Now, we wouldn’t wanna go around spreading a filthy truth, would we little lady?”
Darrell Glover is exactly the type man the media had in mind when they first announced the Roadtrip Rapist had been captured. He was old, white, and balding – working a blue collar job in a small town in Tennessee. He travelled the United States for fourteen long years, absolute chaos in his wake. He had unlimited time on the road as a truck driver – and unlimited victims at his disposal.
I wouldn't ask God for his time
Darrell took full responsibility for his crimes, knowing that his past was not the cause of his misdeeds. He was a troubled young boy from a broken home, as much of an excuse as that was. His father, a highly religious and extremely abusive man, refused to let his wife work even though the family struggled to make ends meet. Destitute and deluded by his father’s iron fist, Darrell developed an extremely disturbing pastime – playing “keepsies” with the neighborhood girls. By the time Darrell finally got into any real trouble for his little games of kidnapping, locking his little friends in his dad’s power tool shed, the mark had already been made.
Darrell would only ever treat women as objects.
Darrell would describe himself as “homely” if you so much cared as what he looked like. He began losing hair before high school graduation, a fact he vainly tried to hide via use of any hat he could find. But once the word got out, the volatile and disillusioned teenage Darrell had already had enough. The pretty girls never paid attention to him, even when he was nice to them: and Darrell’s dark desires began.
By the time Darrell were old enough to leave the nest, his fate might as well have been sealed: he married his high school sweetheart and took up any job that got him out of the house and away from her nagging. After the birth of their daughter, June, Darrell answered the call of the open road and landed himself a job as a long-haul trucker; and the world became the Devil’s playground.
Over the years, his victims would go to the police from time to time: but rarely could they describe the man who committed the crime. He targeted the young and impoverished, many women who spent their time around truck stops looking for lonely men to entertain for a fee. For quite some time, his name graced the headlines of newspapers and the odd web story. Hell, Darrell was right proud of himself when they dubbed him the “Roadtrip Rapist” as he mapped himself all around the country. There were suspicions that the man were a truck driver, but with hundreds of thousands of drivers on the road running the same route, the ability to track such a dangerous criminal was beyond the capabilities of law enforcement.
Darrell thought he was above the law, free to run amok without fear: until one fateful night, when cleaning out an old box of free junk from the side of the road, Darrell found a low-power radio broadcaster that would be his undoing. In his downtime, the trucker began a traveling one-man talk show: filled with the delusional rantings of a man driving overnight with small amounts of cocaine in his blood and a message that the world just had to hear. Someone recorded the man’s racist, sexist, and offensive rambling and uploaded the bizarre happening to youtube…the rest is history.
A woman recognizes the unique drawl of Darrell’s voice in the viral video, and suddenly the police are hot on the trail. When Darrell is finally arrested, he had quite a streak behind him: 15 proven victims, with a possibility of at most 45. Darrell never confesses to his true number in court.
Caught in California, Darrell is sentenced 30 + years in San Quentin prison. His wife finally escapes the abuse of her husband and is free to divorce, and women all over the country seem to come out of the wood work during his sentencing. The deranged man just laughs at his sentencing, claiming that “he had a good run out there” and now it’s “time to retire.”
The truth is that San Quentin State Prison holds no secrets, and Darrell earns himself quite a reputation in the population. Five years and countless prison tattoos later, Darrell finds himself on the winning end of a beatdown; a pedophile serving a life sentence for the death of a little boy. After the man is buried, Darrell and his not-so-friend Antonio get landed (unfairly) with life sentences: and now Darrell has nothing to lose. Life in San Quentin should have been the end of this story: but for Darrell, the lucky son of a bitch was just getting started.
It was summer, hot and muggy, when the prisoners got one of their very few luxuries stripped almost overnight: no more television, and no more radio. Darrell submitted to playing cards with his cellmate The Doctor, when the rumors began. Some said it were a political move, an attempt to show zero tolerance to an already subjugated population. Then, if that were the case, why were fewer and fewer guards on night duty? Visitors stopped coming, even the most loyal wives. Darrell was one of the first to notice when one of his guard buddies didn’t show for his Tuesday shift with his shipments of smuggled cigarettes: what a hard week that was. The trickle turned into a flood when only a few tense guards ran the entire prison: and the weakness was too tangible to not take advantage of.
I wouldn't be sorry
The riot began on July 7, and the sirens blasted for over a week. It wouldn’t be long before the prisoners knew why the guards had stopped showing up for work and why the televisions were locked away; monsters begin to press themselves against the exterior fence in the Yard, attracted by the noise. The end of the world had happened almost a month before the riot, and the prisoners didn’t even know.
After the fires had burned out, the last of the guards slaughtered, and the sirens finally dismantled with their bare hands; all they had were dwindling rations, thousands of the undead trapping them like rats, and gang violence. Darrell survived by hiding with The Doctor and his prison gang for weeks, barely scraping by…there were only one way to make it. He had to escape San Quentin Prison.
A band of one unnamed gang, lead by Antonio, had constructed a fleet of makeshift rafts to be used the next morning…surely they wouldn’t miss just a dozen or so. Darrell saw his chance, grabbed his prison wife and his men, and fled into the night: out of the frying pan, and into the pot. Antonio was not far behind, and why yes, he did miss his rafts after all. The two played cat-and-mouse over the California countryside, escaping zombies and each other by the skin of their teeth. It had become a rivalry of survival, their need to outrank each other driving them further and further toward their intended goal: Sacramento. The pickings would be lush for Darrell, who, despite the chaos, wanted to get back into the game.
But something went awry along the way: either Antonio couldn’t read English as Darrell had so offensively commented, or a hoard or two had sent them scattering toward the North; but of some blessing, the California countryside blossomed into some of the most exquisite estates that Darrell had ever seen. Droves of men from San Quentin Prison had somehow annihilated their way to Napa Valley; and the pickings were lush indeed.
The band flooded into the Valley, choosing lavish estates as their home bases. It took some brain (and some brawn) but the rich assholes that had holed up in their mansions were no match for the bands of killers, rapists, and thieves that would infiltrate their lines. Darrell, although a rapist, had never considered himself a murderer until he held a gun to the head of the man who owned the home Darrell wanted to run. He killed him and his two sons, keeping the wife and the daughter for himself.
And Darrell’s reign of terror began.
This is not a story of survival, nor a story with a protagonist and antagonist. This isn’t a struggle of good vs. evil: this is a story devoid of good, when evil is allowed to play. Napa Valley is a complete wasteland, filled with criminals who run an empire. Who could stop them?