THARNISHED HEARTS

by Allen, J. C

  And saw him lying on the couch all the same, clearly not asleep, but also having paid no attention to Derek’s speech at all.

  “You’re not going, Matty?”

  He opened a single eye, looked at me, and smiled.

  “Nope! Day off tonight!”

  “This is bullshit,” Tara said with surprising gusto. “The Saviors are rolling out to a target and we’re here trapped like hamsters in a cage. And you mean to tell me we can’t roll out?”

  “We?”

  Roost finally opened both of his eyes and stared at her.

  “Girl got a scar size of yer face on her chest, and yer saying ‘we?’ Girl nearly got killed this mornin’! And lest you weren’t aware, it ain’t cuz she tripped and landed on a nail. It’s cuz the Falcons tried to kill her!”

  “And how much of a difference did I make in the neighborhood raid, Roost? How much did that matter?”

  “Quite a bit,” he said with a smirk. “But I ain’t the ones callin’ the shots. Ya two best settle down some. Get some sleep. That’s what I plan on doin’.”

  “This is bullshit!” Tara stomped.

  I tried to take Matty’s orders, but I had a rather well-founded suspicion that this was not going to be the last of Tara’s requests to get into the game tonight.

  3

  Derek

  We rode under the darkness of the night, the Saviors of the city, using whatever Savage methods we needed to defeat the enemy. While my father preached caution, ethics, and morality when it came to the city, I truly believed that when it came to an enemy like this, he would never have allowed them to run roughshod over the city. Some men just wanted to watch the world burn.

  And with that in mind, we couldn’t do anything but fight fire with fire.

  We had to trust ourselves that when the time came, we could douse our own fires before they destroyed everything in sight.

  But first, we’d let them destroy the first building, which about a dozen of us arrived to without any fanfare or ambushes.

  As I stood with the other members of the Savage Saviors in front of the first building, I tried to calm the rage I felt. They had followed Eve from our home, had nearly killed her, and had required a miraculous intervention on my part to stop the madness. Granted, from the sounds of things, she’d killed one of the men and could have killed at least a second with some more effective training, but I could hardly take any real comfort in that in the grand scheme of things, especially since that miracle was needed.

  The fight to quell the rage was critical, because while rage drove me, it also could have gotten me to act on my own. And in that moment, as I stood near our first target, I couldn’t lie. I wanted to go in and kill them myself; I wanted my bullets to be the fatal ones for the Black Falcons. Not just for the men here. But for my family.

  But…

  But!

  “Not the dumbass way.”

  Roost’s words echoed in my mind. I had to remind myself I had three Marines, several other men, and more weapons than I’d ever seen in my life by my side, none greater than the minds of the soldiers. If I went at it alone, I wasn’t just disregarding Eve’s and Roost’s order, I was choosing to leave behind incredible resources like that.

  I took a deep breath, knowing that anger wasn’t going to be solving anything right now. I glanced over, seeing that Bones, Rucker, and AK looked as steeled and determined a I had ever seen them, even more so than our first recon mission. Perhaps it was because they knew the likelihood of a firefight was all but a guarantee, where as there, it had seemed like a possibility but not an inevitability.

  They waited for my order. I glanced over at where the first operation and sneered as I saw an old sign that read “Orphanage” hanging beside the building. Of course, the building hadn’t been used for such purposes in perhaps a decade, but it seemed so fitting for the Black Falcons to cling to such good things and twist them for foul purposes.

  “That seems in poor taste,” one the guys said.

  “I’d say so,” another agreed.

  Don’t let them talk. The Marines are good, but you let the men talk, and they’ll talk themselves out of this mission.

  “Everyone’s armed, right? I don’t want to be in there and find out that one of us didn’t have their weapons ready,” I said, interrupting a third man from talking. “I don’t want to go in their half-cocked.”

  “We’re ready when you are, boss,” Bones said.

  I smiled, glad to see that, among others, the three ex-Marines were with us, knowing their military experience would come in handy for all of us. I nodded to the group, giving the signal, and, as one, we moved. If not for the actual danger of the mission, it was easy to fantasize about us being like a real unit, moving as the military would have trained us.

  Being the first to reach the door, I tried first to pull it open quietly. It was not a pull door. I then pushed into it, but it sounded locked. I realized that there was going to be no quiet entry into this building—there was only loud and louder.

  “I’m gonna have to bust it down,” I said, wanting to do a job so I could feel I contributed. “That all good?”

  Although the other men nodded, the Marines were the ones I paid attention to.

  “It means whoever is inside will have ears on us,” AK said.

  “They already do with our bikes,” Bones said.

  The dangers of running an MC, I thought with a smirk.

  I turned, chambered my right knee up, drove my hips forward for power, and smashed my boot through the door, breaking through with surprising ease. It almost felt like I could have punched through the door, though given I needed my hands for my gun, that seemed like it would have made for a poor choice.

  Though the sound was nothing short of tremendous, none of my team wasted a moment with startled jumps or any sign of worry at being overheard. Like me, they likely all figured that we were expected, and, as such, there was no point in doing what my old man would have referred to as “pussy-footing.” If anything, having the Black Falcons be so organized would make it easier to pick them off.

  Thinking about the words that my old man liked to use reminded me of my father… and how Falcon had murdered him… and everyone else I loved…

  Good, I thought, stampeding past the threshold with my team. Little extra fuel to light this bonfire.

  Just don’t let it spiral into a complete loss of control.

  “Move but be quiet,” I said. “And stay in the shadows.”

  It didn’t take but a moment’s glance to spot a half-dozen men initially. The next moment added another five. The interior, though still obviously in the midst of renovations, appeared to be nothing more than a vast, open space.

  Though I could have been wrong, it looked as though somebody had just gone through the old building and started kicking out the walls that had once divided the giant space into smaller areas. The renovation job, at best, was half-assed, not at all thought out, and still in progress. Now, the place was just a big, dusty mess awkwardly filled with shipping crates and a few movers that still bore the name of an old shipping company.

  I would have laughed at that if we weren’t still trying to maintain some degree of silence and subtlety.

  The fucking Black Falcons, supposed new owners of the city and so-called scourge to the entire Savage Saviors, was actually renting another company’s equipment! And they couldn’t even do a good job of controlling the area.

  Despite all of this—despite all the humor that I would most certainly be carrying over to Roost when all this was over—there were two points worth noting in that instant:

  We were about to take out their new cargo plant.

  And there was nowhere, save for the stacks of crates, for the eleven members of the Black Falcons to hide.

  “Bones,” I said. “They see us, right?”

  “They know we’re here.”

  That’s… actually an answer for my question.

  “The longer we wait, the better pos
itioned they’ll—”

  “Then fire!”

  I didn’t quite shout this, but I whisper-shouted it, loud enough that all of the men with me all had their guns firing in a matter of half a second. I did the same, and the war for the first location began in earnest, gunfire seeming to emanate from every direction at once.

  I dove, headfirst and blind, to the side, listening to a string of automatic gunfire slap the wall just behind my feet as I did. Hitting the concrete floor, I swallowed the wave of pain and began a clumsy roll away from the wall until I’d planted myself against one of the few sections of wall that still remained. Though the Black Falcons had obviously gone to great lengths to create a storage facility out of this place, the structure still demanded a series of supports to keep the roof as… well, a roof.

  I was certain that any number of the lesser-educated Crew had wanted nothing more than to take a bulldozer to the interior—the haphazard nature of some of the stacked crates told me that they were wrestling with what they had—but they clearly didn’t realize that ceilings tended to need things like load-bearing structures where they craved open space.

  No explosives had sounded yet, which made me believe this wasn’t going to end in a mass suicide on the Black Falcons’ part yet, but then again, with them, it probably didn’t require a deliberate death on their part.

  At that moment, ducking behind one of the few load-bearing structures left in this building, I was thankful that the Black Falcons had at least one educated member who’d managed to keep them from all-out caving the roof in on themselves. Or, more likely, they just hadn’t gotten to it. It was, after all, the only thing at that moment separating me from what sounded like a raging storm of lead.

  “Goddamn,” I said. “Guess the Falcons need some engineers.”

  Another Savior who’d been forced to duck behind the same barricade as me looked up at me, questioning, and I shook my head at him.

  “Keep shooting,” I shouted. “I’ll be with you in a second!”

  I rolled my eyes at myself as I began to fire out, focusing somewhat on aiming—knowing I didn’t have the time to do it to the fullest degree possible, nor have the skill to match my Marines—and working to send as many bullets as I could in the general direction of the source of the bullets coming back towards us. I knew that, if I could force the Black Falcons’ shooters to take cover and plant themselves, the other Saviors stood a better chance of getting a bead on them.

  I just hoped that not everyoneof the other Saviors was thinking the exact same thing. We hadn’t exactly had the time to dive into building schematics, combat operations, and tactical strategies—our plan mostly came down to “cover Bones, AK, and Rucker, and shoot at the targets as best as you can.”

  What saved us was that, by all appearances, this was a more coherent plan than what the Falcons had. Would it be enough, though?

  As if answering my momentary concern, I spotted AK and Rucker slipping forward and then parting in a ‘Y’-formation. Taking a series of vantage points from their new posts, I saw the pair begin to train the barrels of their weapons, holding their fire and taking stock of the whereabouts of our enemies. I knew nothing of military operations, but the confidence with which they moved told me they’d be able to take care of their objectives.

  Daring a look around, I spotted the rest of our group as they also began to take cover in their own tactical positions—all but two avoiding the too-convenient crates while the other two actually started climbing the crooked stacks for a better vantage point. Watching them climb like hairless spider monkeys, I couldn’t help but be impressed by their guts.

  Then, just as I thought this, I watched in horror as one was shot down. With only a general idea of where the shot had come from, I swung my arm out and unloaded four shots back in their direction. This is why there are no heroes. They all die in battle.

  Don’t be a hero, Derek. Just do your job.

  It’s what your father would’ve said if he were here.

  I startled myself when I saw one of the Black Falcons roll off his own crate and slump to the floor. I looked down, saw Bones moving in, and then saw a Black Falcon with a perfect shot at him!

  “Bones! Drop!”

  I watched as Bones spun to his left, blindly taking my order to heart, and dropped to one knee. A series of shots sailed over his head as he dropped below them, his own gun raising to take aim before his body had even come to rest on the floor. Before I could come to realize I was holding my breath, I watched as he took out another two. He hit the ground, sent up a cloud of dust, and began to glance around the room for another target.

  How… how the fuck did he just do that?

  Most of me was too flooded with adrenaline to think about what he had done too much, though. Still, I wasn’t going to forget that maneuver—it was something straight out of a movie. It was also a rather convenient reminder that I didn’t have anywhere near the skill that he did.

  Forgetting what I was thinking just as quickly as I’d started thinking it, I took a step back so I could detach from the battle and examine the situation. I started a mental inventory of my own team and weighed it against a rough estimate of the Black Falcons’ own, trying to remember just how many men I’d seen. I decided to just use twelve for now until I could get a better number.

  We had taken out three so far, which left another nine to get. Trying to keep track of this, though, was going to be nearly impossible—the place was filled with dust, quick bursts of light from guns firing, and the sounds of gunfire and structures being hit. Perhaps detachment made sense for someone with experience or someone not in the battle, but for me, my attempts to make sense of it all just felt foolish.

  Get in there and fight, I admonished myself

  The familiar pattern of the Marines firing resumed, the three of them having gotten into proper position. I watched as several more Falcons caught their onslaught in the worst way possible. Who needs to detach when you have these motherfuckers on your side?

  Just like that, a man fell from the railing, his body splattering on the ground.

  Eight left… I began a silent countdown.

  Then I saw it.

  A Black Falcon with a clear shot to one of my men. Instinctively, I raised my gun and fired, not thinking about anything—my hands willed my body to kill the man.

  “Thanks, Derek!” the man shouted.

  “Thank me when these fuckers are all dead!” I shouted back.

  And it was just as well, because I watched as one of the Black Falcons stood from where he was hiding and aimed at another of ours. I took fire and cursed as the other Saviors also took fire.

  And then, with a precision and ease that still terrified me, the Marines killed two more men.

  And then there were… six.

  Shit, guess I miscalculated. At least I think I see them all now.

  I looked back at the guy I had saved, only to realize that he’d been shot and wasn’t moving. For some reason, this image briefly trigged the fortunately false image of me arriving to Eve too late, the blonde Falcon having killed her just seconds before my arrival. No time for that. Fight!

  I caught sight of Bones, Rucker, and AK. The three were doing a perfect job of holding their ground—even seeming to gain a bit from time-to-time—and taking out another two of the Black Falcons’ members. They were ruthless and unbelievably effective, to the point that I wondered why I didn’t just have them taking out the Falcons themselves. Hell, I’d give them a day, maybe even rename the group the Savage Marines.

  “Fuck yeah!” I said as the men moved forward. “Keep at it!”

  For the Marines, it was like mowing down target practice. I never saw them flinch, never saw them fall back, and never saw them shout for help. By the end, I even had my men falling back, letting the three of them clear the room like pros.

  Within a minute, all of the Falcons were dead.

  Well… all of the ones visible.

  I could have been wrong in my count, bu
t I felt sure we were missing someone. The leader of the place, probably. Coward would go and hide.

  “Think we’re still missing someone,” I said as the Saviors gathered around me.

  “What? Who?” one of the other Saviors asked, looking around.

  “Not one of ours,” AK corrected him.

  “The leader,” Bones said. “Stay alert. It’s dark and he will use that to his advantage. Get back into cover.”

  “You heard him,” I said as we quickly darted and spread out, the better so it would take time for the sole Falcon—if there was one—to find us.

  Once I found cover before the half-existing wall that had not yet been torn down, I took a cautious look around for the missing Black Falcon before daring a glance around the blood-soaked scene. The place was littered in rubble, splinters, and bodies. Though the Falcons had undeniably lost more in this shootout, I knew that we had lost at least two men, likely more once we had a chance to examine the area.

  Though I had looked forward to this battle, I had not looked forward at all to the deaths on our side. It was an inevitable part of motorcycle club conflicts of this degree, but rationally understanding it and seeing it with my own two eyes were very different. I hated Falcon, and would stop at nothing to kill him.

  But, goddamn, this shit exhausted me and made me that much more eager to see an end to it all.

  How could I not? It was a shit-ton of dead bodies—and by the end, those words might be a bit too literal for comfort.

  But for now, we needed to add one more body to that count, or at least get him interrogated. And it was the most important body of all.

  Their leader was around here somewhere and if we didn’t take him out, it wouldn’t be long before this place was back and running. I knew nothing of this leader, having never seen him in a position like this before—necessitated by all of the killing we had done in the months prior—but that just meant it was possible he could be like, or worse than, Rock. The last thing I needed was someone that fucking malicious running this place.

  “Where could he be?” Rucker said, looking perplexed.