by Layla Wolfe
So Riddlesberger had given Stomach that excruciating scar? And he stayed with the Friends? I knew the Bare Bones were a bit rougher back in the day Ford’s dad had been Prez, but to make an eight-inch scar down your Sergeant at Arm’s skull was a step too far. And putting poor Mr. Fell into a septic tank was A-OK.
Rumbling down the road in utter darkness of course brought to my addled mind the time I’d been attacked. Crashed down a rocky road to a waiting chopper, hovering between sleep and waking. I remembered a firefight with ISIL, the incessant hammering of machine guns. Everything was instinct, discipline, and adrenaline. I could use only one of those virtues now, the discipline to stay still under the tarp without even knowing what good it did me.
I was out cold for twenty-four hours after the attack. I faded in and out strapped to an EMS spine board.
The only honor in Syria existed among troops in the field. Betrayal of our troops by their commanders is what warped our brains. Our promises to the Syrians were all broken. It was incompetent criminality, that’s what it was. Decent people died on all sides and are still dying today. My mother whined that no one would ever hire me if I told my story. I wasn’t in a military family. My mother worked in business. My father was an IT executive. Things were thoroughly intellectual, and they couldn’t parse out why I’d even want to join such an organization as the army. After a few years, I wondered myself.
Now, I had to call on all my skills, the spirits of my brothers-in-arms, to defeat these fucktards.
Eventually they picked me up, tarp and all, and bounced me along to some shady structure, another barn I presumed. From the sounds of whimpering and the overpowering odor of poo and urine, I knew it was a dog barn. They tossed me like a baseball on Sunday, luckily onto some hay. It hurt like a motherfuck just to breathe. Soon the ominous voice of Riddlesberger himself entered the scene.
“He dead?” the slimy sadist asked.
“I think so,” said Stomach. “What you want us to do with him?”
“Let’s make sure,” said Riddlesberger, kicking my broken rib for good measure.
I gritted my teeth and sweated, waiting for them to tear off the tarp and discover I was alive.
That’s exactly what happened.
Riddlesberger himself ripped off the crackling black plastic. My eyelids were trembling from the pain, the searing hot rod stuck up my spine. When he kicked me in the ribs with his engineer boots, the jig was up.
I gasped, instinctively holding my hands lightly over my ribs. I opened my eyes to assess the scene, but it wasn’t hard to play the injured victim. I barely moved.
“So,” the slimebag practically whispered, his lips like liver under his John Waters ‘stache. His bicep ink—Kill me, I’ve never died before—now called out to me. “The asswipe who stole my girlfriend is back. Fucking bleeding heart lib, all caring about the dogs.” He said this as though I was a serial killer.
“You fucker,” I gasped. “You’re growing dogs in fucking cages, never letting them out. You’re tossing fucking mothers, for Christ sake, into ditches.”
Riddlesberger sneered. “The other day we shot fifty puppies instead of taking them to the vet for vaccines.”
“Yeah,” said Stomach, lifting his lip at me. “Fucking county inspected us, made us take them in and waste all that money. No one cares if they get a cheap puppy that isn’t vaccinated.”
I said, “You know it’s going to be a lot worse when the Bare Bones get here.”
“The Bare Bones,” scoffed Dingbat, the Neo-Nazi. “Who the fuck is afraid of them?”
“Yeah,” agreed Riddlesberger. “Fucking pussies let us run them out of Flagstaff.” He picked up a wooden club of some sort, bashing it menacingly in his palm.
Stomach said, “They’ll get the message when they find your body floating in the river.”
“Beheaded,” added Mumbles, the guy I’d shot through the shoulder.
Riddlesberger made a baby face and spoke baby talk. “And you’ll be all twisted like you already are, creeping along with a cane, your ugly face all warped.”
Although threatened with a gory murder, I had slowly been getting to my feet. I’d had worse than two broken ribs and two mangled fingers in my life. But I overplayed the pain to take them by surprise. Only my words were the truth. “Riddlesberger, you’re just a fucking scumbag. You took my wife off the road and the only plan was to use her as a sex slave.” Heaven was practically my wife. I intended to make her mine once I became an official Bare Bones prospect.
This made them all chuckle. “Sex slaves rule,” said Dingbat.
The rage roiled in my gut at that. But when Riddlesberger said, “They’re better than using the dogs,” I just lost it. All my well-laid plans flew out the barn door, and I leaped for the grip of the iron sticking out Stomach’s ass crack.
Riddlesberger got to me first with the club. When he cracked my skull, I could feel it actually cracking. It was like I could see with my inner eye a hairline crack race through my parietal bone.
But he didn’t fell me. Sure, I squeezed the trigger from a crouching position. His idiotic arm was raised, about to club me again. It was like an image from an Alfred Hitchcock film. But I was a crack shot, and my round went through his lower jaw, taking parts of his tongue, lymphs, and teeth with it. The only regret I had was that it set the dogs off. They’d probably heard plenty of gunshots in their miserable lives, but this one made their evil leader twist and drop his club.
I quickly straightened and jammed the Glock’s barrel against his temple. Frankly, I was shocked no one else was stopping me. Were they so amazed I had the guts? Did they secretly wish Riddlesberger dead too? Stomach and Dingbat both had pieces leveled at me, but sort of half-heartedly, down by their waists.
I was bummed that all I thought to say was, “You’ve had a hard life,” but hey. I was under stress and in pain. About to blow out the brains of someone I knew, not some anonymous ISIL member. I think Riddlesberger said something like “Hey, just one sec—” before I pulled the trigger. This time there was an exit wound the size of a quarter, lumpy and shiny brains splattering on the hay, on the tarp where I’d just been buried. He fell in a pile, bad side of his head turned to us, so we could easily see some bones in his jaw, the hole in his row of teeth, stained and ravaged by meth. “Good thing it’s over.”
I pivoted to the remaining three men, swinging the Glock between Stomach and Dingbat, the only two armed. Mumbles started inching out the open door and I let him, since we were in a classic standoff position.
“You’re letting me out of here,” I told the two scumbags, “and you’re telling no one what happened to your rapist buddy here.”
Stomach growled, “Oh, I think it’s three against one, pal. Do the math.”
I said, “Three minus one equals two,” and they both looked around at the spot Mumbles had vacated.
I could’ve shot Stomach in his mangled head. But something came out of the blue.
My future wife, Heaven, tiptoeing up behind Stomach, a length of barbed wire in her gloved hands.
I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing. I knew my eyes were saturated with terror, but when the two men looked back at me, I had to take my shot.
Dingbat was the farthest from Heaven’s trajectory, so I squeezed my trigger ever so gently. The bullet splashed out Dingbat’s cranium, an instant blood collar obliterating a few of the fascist tattoos. I knew the brain survived, say, the guillotine, for even half a minute. Indeed, when Dingbat finally dropped to the ground, he twitched something fierce for awhile, limbs flopping like a fish on deck. My buddy in arms Slappy strode in to shoot Dingbat again, this one in the carotid artery. Still, he flailed.
My fierce girlfriend garroted Stomach. She whipped a loop of barbed wire over his head and twisted so hard he dropped his piece. Eyes bulging, he tried to get a finger between his skin and the wire, to no avail. Heaven was not extinguishing his existence in one second. He emitted that choking noise that sounds like a clogge
d drain, and his tongue slipped in and out like a lizard.
My woman could twist those wires! Her features were grim, determined, but when she flashed her eyes to mine, her lips lifted into a smile. She smiled as she choked the life out of that crazy bastard! For their parts, Slappy and Crybaby stood by mentally noting her work with approval. Heaven, at five foot ten, leaned into her work, all her heavy lifting at the ranch paying off in spades. None of us seemed inclined to help. She had it all under control.
Fact, Stomach hadn’t even hit the hay yet when Slappy dragged Riddlesberger’s body over to some machine that stood about hip height. He kicked a switch on, and a motor started. As Stomach’s windpipe was cut, blood pouring over Heaven’s hands, Slappy lifted Mr. Riddlesberger, destroyed head and all, and shoved the head into the sky blue bin.
Oh. It was a food grinder, maybe the one they used to feed odious corn to the dogs. Slappy was literally grinding Riddlesberger’s face off. This seemed to give Crybaby an idea. He started hauling Dingbat off to the side, heading for what looked like an exercise treadmill. These guys meant business.
When Stomach fell, I put my boot on his ruined neck as double insurance. When Heaven let go of the barbed wire—forever embedded in his lymph nodes and larynx—she stood back with her strong arms at her sides, a feminine Hercules, panting. The look she gave me was victorious.
“I used a lot of barbed wire in Cornucopia,” she explained. “Had to make a lot of chicken fences.”
As bloody as we both were, we had to embrace. Love simply flooded my veins. The scent of her hair as I buried my face, her boobs pressed against my chest, even her bloody gloves grabbing the nape of my neck, the entire moment gushed some long-forgotten hope in me, and I muttered,
“Please marry me.”
“Of course,” she whispered breathlessly. “Of course.”
The grinding continued, and only then did I realize that every dog in the place was barking madly. Gunshots and grinders were not sounds that promised enjoyment. When I released Heaven, I went to the cages of a few who looked the most spry and unlatched them. The Leonbergers wandered out tentatively, the bulldogs a bit more certain. One bulldog went directly for Stomach’s throat, licking and chomping on raw flesh.
Heaven kicked the body in the groin. “I always wanted to kick him in the dick,” she reminded me.
Slappy had finished his job, and let the body drop, face completely unrecognizable, just a mass of muscle and even ground bone. “Good job, Heaven,” he commended her. “Looks like Crybaby’s exercising that moron’s face.”
Heaven said, “It must be some kind of treadmill, like to get the puppies up to speed.”
I said, “Well, since this place is shut down permanently, I’m releasing these poor pups. Heaven, close the barn door. Let’s keep them inside the barn for now, until the humane society can come, the rescue society.”
One Leonberger puppy was so soft, I couldn’t put him down. Of course he smelled to high hell, but his little face told me he had not been put through the entire trial of trauma just yet. Just as Heaven started rolling shut the door, a few familiar faces appeared as friendly silhouettes.
Lytton Driving Hawk said, “What you need us for? Need us to put down a few puppy millers?”
“Heaven!” cried Sock Monkey. “What are you doing with all that blood on your hands?”
Heaven raised her gloves proudly. “Just taking to ground an unfriendly.”
I hitched my jaw at her. “She used barbed wire, just like she did in Utah.”
Slappy ambled over. His hands were bloody too from shoving Riddlesberger’s face into the grinder. He should’ve used an apron. “I say we get these pups into a safer place pronto.”
“I agree,” said Tanner, sticking his gun barrel down his jeans now that it wasn’t needed. “I brought the SUV cage with a few kennels in the back. Unity’s prepping to receive them.”
We went around taking puppies out of cages—I kept the squirmer in my arms, soft as goose down—and filled Tanner’s kennels. Tim Woodstock and Baron Funkhauser helped. Funkhauser kicked Riddlesberger’s mangled body in the groin too. Sock Monkey went to the treadmill where Stomach’s face was pulp and turned off the machine. He made a gesture at Crybaby like “enough.” The guy was dead.
Lytton asked, “What about these dogs eating the bodies?”
“Shee-it,” said Funkhauser crassly. “They need to eat too.”
I took Heaven aside. In the midst of the gore, the emotion, the heightened sense of danger, I had to reassure her. “I meant what I said. I want to marry you.”
“I know,” she said, her eyes brimming with tears. “I can’t have children, you know.”
I smoothed a lock of hair from her face. “That doesn’t matter. We can adopt.”
She seemed about to burst into a crying fit as she pet the puppy with the back of her hand. “Like this guy?”
“Yeah. His name is Fubar.”
She laughed and cried at the same time. “Fucked Up Beyond all Repair?”
“That’s about it,” I said. “But we’re not anymore.”
And I knew we’d make it through.
Epilogue
Town
Mickey Finn wagged her tail.
Yeah, it had taken six months. She’d been sleeping upstairs in our room, waking us each morning by snuffling at our heads. She just needed time to grow accustomed to the routine of our ranch, a place for her to heal.
And yes, it was Darcy Bard who convinced her to wag.
“Are you a good girl?” he asked. “Yes, you are! Yes, you are!”
Okay, sure, Bard was on shrooms. We all were. It was a shroom party at our ranch to celebrate our new species of magical mushrooms—the Flying Saucers. Bard had been working on his Cinderella Complex issue. His desire to please the Friends of Distinction had created a sharp separation in his mind between what he was doing, and what he truly wanted to do. They had tortured him into luring me with the box of puppies—that was the turning point for him. He still had nail holes in his hands. He found the Friends repellant but simply could not stop looking for their crumbs. Women usually had the Cinderella Syndrome. It was a fear of independence.
And, because he was a Vietnam combat veteran, I hooked him up with the VA for counseling. Since he was too old to deal with his sheep anymore, he’d sold off a lot of his land that reminded him of the horror of dogs. He had shown us the septic tank where poor George Fell decomposed, but since it was on his land, we simply moved the corpse up to Riddlesberger’s rental house and Tobiah made an anonymous call to the cops. We didn’t like working with cops but, well, Tobiah wasn’t officially a club member. The remaining Friend, Mumbles, had been taken in and charged with the murder of Fell as well as Riddlesberger and Stomach.
But I had my PROSPECT patch, my middle back patch sporting the skull and crossbones of the Bare Bones, the bottom rocker specifying the Pure and Easy Chapter. I’d have to wait until I was fully patched to earn my top rocker which would state The Bare Bones MC. Right now, I was just a dumb flunky, and treated as such. For instance, this was my party, but I was tasked with filling the dishwasher with dirty glasses and bringing out clean ones. Not to mention the toilet. I was just lucky no one had yet made me go to the store to buy tampons. Heaven had been joshing that I’d taken away a lot of her chores, lightened her burden. “Just for today, sweetheart.” Tomorrow I’d be back at the clubhouse doing the same.
Bard sat atop a picnic table we’d rented for the holiday party. Heaven had strung lights between trees, we’d blown up snowmen and deer, and Knoxie had been DJing, now playing Fingering and Praying, yes a real flute album by someone named Loretta Fudge. Ol’ Loretta was noodling away between the overhead twinkling bulbs and snow-laden tree branches.
“Good scene, Bard,” I commended.
Bard regarded me with watery eyes and a jutted jaw. His teeth were corroded, and not from meth. He’d been in the Au Shau Valley in Vietnam, in the mess of Hamburger Hill, and had gone secretly into Ca
mbodia. They took away all his IDs and said his mother would not be notified if he didn’t return. The VA owed him a lot. “This gal’s come a long way since I used to feed her corn. This new fresh food is doing wonders for her skin. Another puppy mill up in Braxton is going the corn route. I know the owner, Buckner Fanning, has fallen on hard times since the U.S. Department of Agriculture won’t license him. He’s a good man at heart. He just needs to spend a little more money taking care of those dogs.”
“Feeding corn, eh?” growled Baron Funkhauser. “We’ll see about that.” Funkhauser had become very involved with the correct breeding of dogs. Some millers had gotten around Arizona’s new laws by cutting their breeding stock down to four females. Then they could still sell to pet stores. It was a complete crock of shit because the four females still usually suffered.
“Yeah,” agreed Tanner. “Let’s dig into this Buckner Fanning moron.”
Darcy said, “I know nothing about him or his situation.”
Tanner knew the drill. He slid a fresh twenty from his wallet and fingered it over to Darcy.
Mr. Bard took the bill, looked both ways, and said, “He’s located at 2420 Western Drive. Take the turn after the Greyhound bus stop. I don’t need to mention, don’t drive a BMW.”
“We won’t,” vowed Funkhauser.
Bard continued, “He was hit by a BMW once when in his forties. Left him with a permanent limp.”
Sock Monkey said, “Unlike yours, Cap’n Spiro. You’re walking perfectly fine.” Under his cut, he wore a T-shirt that proclaimed, “If you can read this, the bitch fell off.”
However, my grin still remained crooked. “Yeah. I had the vertebrae fused . . . at the VA,” I mentioned, with a particularly dark look at Darcy. He just grinned impishly, a new expression for him.
Then Ford Illuminati yelled at me to get fresh beer glasses. Linus followed. He was very good with Mickey Finn. This was Mickey’s first Christmas as a free woman, and she’d welcomed the Bare Bones, old ladies and children with tail wags and kisses. Heaven had bought Christmas presents for all Bare Bones children—yes, all thirty of them, even the teens and twentysomethings belonging to Faux Pas and Duji—so there had been a giant pileup of wrapping paper and gifts under an outdoor awning. I was proud that this endeared her to the old ladies, but Heaven was already a shoo-in. They adored her, her hardworking ways and sweet disposition. And Mickey Finn just lay there panting, letting metallic bows and shreds of colorful paper rain down on her.
