THARNISHED HEARTS

by Allen, J. C

  “Fuck you, Falcon.”

  Again, that wicked laugh. That fucking wicked laugh. That thing was going to haunt me in my dreams for some time until I had him dead.

  “As it turns out, though, two can play that game. You blew up all of my places, so guess what? I’m going to blow up yours.”

  “The fuck you talking about?” I said, though I noticed Tara becoming more and more flustered, going so far as to run out of the room.

  “The man you took captive, let me ask you something. Did you pat him down?”

  Oh no.

  “Your silence has answered that for me, Derek.”

  At that moment, Tara burst into the room.

  “Guys, guys, there’s some ticking going on in there, and I don’t know where it’s coming from, God, it sounds like a bomb, help!”

  Roost hurried in without a word while I stayed on the line with Falcon.

  “Bill was a kind man, one of my best. And now, he will die helping our cause greatly.”

  “What did you do?!?”

  “Simple. I rigged a bomb to his chest that I would detonate remotely if we lost. I had strict orders for him to be kidnapped if we saw that the battle was losing. Did it ever occur to you how easy it was to capture him in comparison to the other men?”

  Oh, fuck me.

  “Your only good news, Derek, is you have sixty seconds to escape. Well, sixty as of when we started talking. Now—”

  I hung up the phone and stormed into the room where Bill was held hostage.

  “He made me do it, I swear!” Bill screamed, his voice a mixture of terror and insanity.

  Suddenly, I could hear the sound of ticking and froze.

  Fuck!

  FUCK!

  “It’s not my fault! He made me do it! I swear! It’s not my fault!” Bill said, tears beginning to stream down his face. “Please! Don’t hurt me!”

  “Get out!” I roared. “Get everyone and everything of importance out now!”

  I punched Bill for good measure, but it did no good. Roost at least had had the presence of mind to hit the fire alarm to alert everyone inside to get out as he began to bellow across the room. I glanced around as I made sure that the others were finished evacuating. Eve. I know I didn’t have much time left.

  God bless her, though, hearing the alarm had gotten her up and out of the office. She stood at the entrance of the building, looking at me befuddled.

  “Derek?”

  “Down, now!” I yelled.

  I picked her up, carried her as far as I could go, and then fell on top of her when the building behind me went up in flames, knocking us both to the ground.

  I waited until the sound of crashing debris had ended. I looked up to see everyone out of the building, including Roost, Tara, and the Marines. By all accounts, we had all survived.

  But..

  “Is everyone out?” I asked, trying to catch my breath as I caught up.

  You never know for sure.

  “We went through everywhere so yeah, I think so,” Roost said. “But I can’t be sure, ya know.”

  We won’t know until we do a head count.

  Only then did I turn around to see the shop I had spent my entire life, the shop my father had built from nothing, handing off to Roost in his later years, the shop that had come to define the Knight family name, was now smoldering debris. I could hear the distant wailing of fire trucks off in the distance, but all they would do is prevent the fire from spreading. They could not bring back my shop.

  My father’s shop…

  “Goddamnit,” I muttered as my eyes began to water.

  Eve came by and hugged my arm, then hugged all of me, and I pulled her close. She was all that I had left in this world. I had spent the previous years in pain, but I’d been able to drown that pain at the shop—it reminded me so much of my family, my loved ones, a known quantity.

  But now… it was ruined.

  Gone.

  Once again, Falcon had destroyed something that I loved.

  “Goddamnit!” I shouted, not bothering to hide the strain in my voice.

  “I’m sorry,” Eve said. “Derek…”

  Her words comforted me. At least they hadn’t gotten to her.

  It was the last thing of mine they had not gotten.

  I pulled her in even tighter, crying into her hair. I let myself sob for some time, even continuing to cry as the fire trucks pulled in.

  Finally, after the fire chief had spoken to Roost, I turned.

  “The important thing is that we are all alive,” I said.

  While it was a true statement, it was something of a bittersweet observation.

  “All of you should go home tonight. Stay vigilant. Tell anyone who is not here what happened. Spread the word. But no one here should take action. Is that understood?”

  A surprisingly strong “yes, sir,” came from the crowd. I smiled in response to that.

  “We will rest tomorrow. After today, I think we need a day to mourn. But in two days’ time—”

  “We meet at my house,” Roost interjected. “And we finish the job we thought we’d completed today.”

  “Yes, sir,” the Saviors again announced, in a unified voice.

  “Good, thank you Roost,” I said. “Go home. We will have our revenge later.”

  I took Eve aside and headed to where I had parked my bike. Though the explosion had knocked it on its side, by some miracle, it and my father’s car had emerged with only a few scratches and burn marks. It was still functioning.

  “Let’s go home,” I said.

  “Let me ride with you,” Eve said.

  I smiled, kissed her on the forehead, and hopped on the ride.

  It was a true Pyhrric victory tonight. We’d lost our base, and it felt like we had lost more than they had.

  But we still had our men. We still had each other. And we still had a chance.

  As I drove back to my apartment, there was only one thing I knew for certain.

  Falcon would regret this.

  I’d make sure of it.

  10

  Eve

  The emotional lows that I saw Derek hit that night were unlike anything that I had ever seen before.

  I had seen him at his most enraged and out of control when he’d gotten drunk and I’d had to leave him for a bit. I’d seen him at his most heroic when he came and rescued me. And I’d seen him at his most groveling when he came back for forgiveness after his outbreak.

  But depression? A sort of sadness? I had never seen anything like it.

  Although Derek offered to drive both of us home, I decided to take his father’s car back to his apartment, not wanting it to be in the way of any further explosions or troubles with the shop. I did my best to keep pace with him, which surprisingly wasn’t difficult—Derek did not anywhere near the normal speed that he did when I rode with him. It was, unfortunately, another sign that this was not just any other loss.

  And why would it be? If it was something that his father had built, then Falcon had basically not only killed his actual father, he had now killed a symbol of his father’s legacy. If I were Derek, I’d still be crying right now.

  When we got home, I put my arm around Derek. He had no more tears to shed, but that did not signal the end of his melancholy—if anything, it was just the beginning. That night, we did not have sex, nor did I even initiate it.

  I woke up early the next day and found that he was still sleeping. I refused to do anything other than give him the full day of rest, hoping that in doing so, he might be better.

  He eventually awoke around 1 p.m., and when he did, he came to the fridge, grabbed a glass of milk, and went right back to the room. He looked like he’d woken up an hour or so earlier but had simply chosen not to do anything when he arose. The sheets might have been comfortable, sure, but there was less than a one percent reason that was why he got up.

  “Derek?” I shouted.

  I got no response. I decided against further inquiring on his state,
thinking that if he wanted to talk, he would come and see me.

  He did not.

  I spent the rest of the day watching Netflix shows, surfing the web, and texting Tara. Thankfully, even she knew better than to give any lip about what had happened, displaying unusual levels of empathy and sorrow for Derek. I texted Matty as well, but he never got back to me.

  The entire Savage Saviors, it seemed, were taking a much needed day off from the madness and the chaos.

  That night, though, I had a strange feeling about… something. I couldn’t quite pin it, but it almost felt like a promising foreboding of some kind. Maybe it was the fact that Derek was now talking, even giving a couple of sad smiles, or maybe it was that tomorrow would finally mark a return to action. I didn’t think it was Derek returning to form.

  But somehow… I just didn’t know, but that didn’t worry me. Something told me it would be alright. As I drifted off to sleep, I couldn’t say I was smiling, but I could say that I felt optimistic about the direction things were going.

  I stood, suddenly, over a serene lake. I was wearing simple clothes—jeans, a t-shirt, athletic shoes—and had little makeup on. I had never found myself in a place like this before.

  The Falcons certainly never would have allowed me here. Derek would have but just never had the time to. My family never quite had the money to get here.

  So what was I doing here?

  And then I heard the sliding door behind me. A sliding door?

  “Hey, Eve?”

  I turned around to see Derek smiling at me with someone small—a baby—in his arms. He wore a wonderful smile on his face. He looked like he had none of the stress that had been affecting him earlier in our relationship.

  He looked at peace.

  “Baby’s getting hungry, want to come in?”

  “Baby?” I said.

  But I hadn’t actually said the word. Instead, it came to mind, but it sounded much more real than I had thought.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Remember? Our child?”

  “Child?” I said, though again, it hadn’t actually been uttered.

  Suddenly, the sun seemed to brighten with even more force than usual. When I turned around, Derek was suddenly in front of me, having covered an impossible amount of distance in that short a time. I smiled at him as he put his hand on my forehead and kissed me.

  “There’s more on the way,” he said.

  “More… more kids?”

  He smiled and nodded.

  “This is our future, babe. I love you.”

  “I love you… I love you too.”

  Suddenly, as if birth happened just on a whim, two more babies appeared in his arms. Now he was holding three, and he let out a short laugh.

  “Good thing we won, huh?”

  “Yeah… yeah,” I said, allowing myself to feel the joy every mother should.

  * * *

  It was a strange feeling to awaken not with a jolt, not with a cry, not with a nightmare, but perhaps the most pleasant dream to date.

  That was strange, really. Falcon still lived, though we were making progress. The past two days had seemed the worst of Derek’s life, or at least the worst since he and I had made up. So…

  Why the sudden good dream?

  Yeah, I think we both were thinking about kids to some degree. We hadn’t used condoms and hadn’t been especially careful about pulling out or using the pill, although it wasn’t like we were deliberately trying to have kids. It was more just a case of we loved each other and whatever happened, happened.

  Still, why would that be cause for a good dream? Especially when only a couple of days ago, I’d had the nightmare of all nightmares?

  “Derek?” I said.

  I glanced over, reaching for him, only for my grasping hand to be met with nothing, my stretching fingers finding nothing but emptiness beside me. I looked over and saw a note left on a nearby desk. I didn’t want to get rid of the warmth of the covers quite yet, so I dragged them with me as I stretched, as if doing a yoga move, to grab the note.

  “Falcon called. Going to the shop to check on a few things, then going to Roost’s. Nothing imminent, but things happening soon. Come to Roost’s when you wake up. I’ll be there. Love you!!!!

  -Derek K.”

  It was amusing to me how, even though we’d lived together and shared some of the most intense moments a couple ever could, I was still learning the little things about Derek that made Derek, Derek. Like that he signed documents Derek K.—perhaps he didn’t want to sign them D. Knight since his father and brother both started with the letter D., and writing De. Knight might look kind of ridiculous. Either way, these little things provided an unexpectedly large warming of my heart.

  In any case, though, if Derek had already left for the shop and for Roost’s place, it meant that the time of mourning had come to an end. He’d let himself mope, he’d let Matty mope, and he’d let the rest of the Saviors mope. This was confirmed as much when I saw that Matty had texted me back.

  “Saw your message. Took day off yesterday. Ready to go now! Come over whenever Eve.”

  It was kind of surreal as well to see Matty’s words written in plain English, compared to the thick accent that he normally had. I always imagined that if he wrote like he sounded, all of his high school English teachers would have had a heart attack.

  But in any sense, it was nice to hear from him as well.

  I yawned, stretched out, and decided to get my day on the road. I slid out of bed and plodded on still sleep-goofy legs to the bathroom. As I sat down to relieve my aching bladder, I caught my drifting eyes wavering before finally coming to land at the small cabinet beneath the bathroom sink. It wasn’t the most sanitary thing to think about, but I couldn’t help but wonder when the last time was that I had gone to my cabinet, as it had my box of tampons.

  I’d been out the last time I’d gone to check, finding the box empty. I remembered this clearly because, with my period already starting, I’d been left in the uncomfortable position of asking Derek if he could pick me up a new box. This request, I remembered, had been met with a warm, understanding smile, a reassuring kiss, and a prompt gone and back again visit to the corner store. It was, though an unorthodox memory to be dubbed “romantic,” one of those moments with Derek when I knew I was finally in the right place and with the right man.

  And there, in that cabinet, was a nearly new box of tampons.

  Only one missing.

  Wait… I thought. When did Derek buy—

  Then all the pieces started to slide into place in my mind.

  How long had it been?

  Four weeks.

  Couldn’t be…

  Four weeks.

  But that could mean…

  Four… weeks!

  I froze.

  Sure enough, about three to four weeks was roughly the time that we had started having more and more unprotected sex, roughly around the time that Derek had rescued me from Tyler. I suppose at the time, the thought was “well, if we were that close to dying, might as well enjoy everything there is”… but what if…

  What if, subconsciously, that close a brush to death had made me want to…

  Have a baby?

  No, that was crazy. Crazy! I wasn’t really ready for a kid. There was too much going on. This was all just a freaky coincidence. The stress of everything going on, the constant shooting—it all had thrown my period out of whack.

  I mean, Derek and I had really only known each other for a little over a month at this point. It was surreal to think it was so short, but it wasn’t wrong. I’d met him right after having my period—I could remember because Rock was growing impatient that I wasn’t “healing” quickly enough. So why… why shouldn’t it be the case that the stress had just delayed it?

  Right?

  I squeezed my eyes shut, wondering if I was actually pregnant. The odds seemed more definitively in favor of it the more I thought about it… and the more I thought about it, the more I grew terrified. />
  What would happen if I was actually pregnant? How would Derek react? Would he want to have the kid, or would he want to abort it? Would he get mad at me? I was a little mad at myself; it wouldn’t be completely unjustifiable on his part. Maybe if he thought we could take the Falcons down within the next nine months, but if not…

  What now?

  With everything going on with the Saviors and taking down Falcon and the Black Falcons, this couldn’t be a worse time.

  I keeled forward, trying to fight the growing nerves that didn’t seem to be clearing up anytime soon. I squeezed my eyes shut, finally calming down enough to get it together. I stood up and began to dress, deciding that I needed to call someone objective who could help me.

  As much as she was going to kill me later for it, I didn’t want to call Tara. She might be able to keep a secret better than I was giving her credit for, but she definitely couldn’t keep her voice low enough—and if she was at Matty’s and that’s where Derek might’ve been, then I couldn’t tell her until later.

  But there was one person who could help, and so I dialed him.

  “Hey girlie.”

  “Matty, are you free right now?”

  “Uh, yeah, what’s goin’ on? Do I need to kick Derek’s ass?” Matty said, his tone getting serious.

  “No, no,” I said with a calming laugh, although I still sounded like a nervous wreck. “Although you might have to kick mine.”

  “I find that very hard to believe, but anyway, what’s up?”

  I let out a long sigh.

  “You can’t tell anyone there about this, Matty. At least not until I spread the news. Not Derek, not Tara, not any of your hookups. No one.”

  “Hold on, lemme get somewhere private,” he said.

  The phone muffled as I heard him talk to someone that I couldn’t identify. My stomach turned into knots, as if the need to have this talk was going to break me—and maybe the baby inside, I thought darkly. That, of course, wasn’t literally going to happen, but I did wonder as Matty moved someplace quiet what complications stress would produce on a baby.