by J. C. Allen
The man drove a mean-looking fist into Tyler’s stomach. Only now did it occur to me just how divided the Black Falcons were even within their own ranks. Small wonder Derek is going to win. He’s going to save me and the Falcons will crumble amongst themselves.
Tyler keeled over, wheezing and whimpering, and the man, already beginning to walk past him, grabbed his shirt collar and began to drag him along.
“Just because Falcon says he has plans for you doesn’t mean you’re important,” he said. “Keep in mind that he has plans for his whores, too, and he’s probably gonna off the traitors before the end of the night.”
Before those last few words, if I hadn’t been working so hard to not get the focus on me, I would’ve erupted in laughter. Tyler deserved whatever the Falcon had planned for him.
But now, with that plan perhaps inadvertently revealed, I had to get out. I had no choice—even if I got gunned down running after Derek, it was going to be the same result either way.
Before the men and Tyler were out of sight, the one dragging Chuck glanced back at me.
“Don’t go getting any stupid ideas,” he said. “Assuming your boyfriend doesn’t get all of you killed, there’ll be somebody along to collect you soon enough.”
At least he didn’t double down on me getting murdered.
Which probably means he remembered he wasn’t supposed to say anything and I’m still going to die if I don’t figure a way out of here.
Then, the door was slammed shut.
Free to do so, I finished my work, feeling the last part of the restraint come undone.
I was free.
But I was in just as much danger, if not more, than when I’d been in the basement.
Derek, you better hurry up. I can’t—
The sounds of more gunfire tore me from my thoughts and I moved to the window, needing to make sure Derek was okay. Unfortunately, while I could see a general mass of bikes, gunshots, sparks, and bullets, I couldn’t see much of anything else, certainly not the individuals on the battlefield. It was as much a guess as being blind as to whether or not Derek was alive.
Thinking on the madness, I couldn’t help but imagine that this was his response to my being taken—and I didn’t mean that he was coming to save me, but rather, that it was my fault he was here, in a deadly shootout with the Black Falcons. Granted, he’d said that something like this had been coming to fruition for some time, but I couldn’t imagine that, without my abduction, this would all be happening at this moment. If I didn’t do something to help him, he could get seriously hurt.
Or worse…
But, in order to do that, I had to not get myself killed. And, with the whole neighborhood turning into a war zone, that might be something easier said than done. I had a better chance of smacking Rock in the face than walking out into the street without getting hit by a bullet.
“Derek, I—”
“Come here.”
Tyler’s voice grabbed me from out of nowhere as he grabbed my ass violently. I quickly put my hands down by my side, trying to make it look like I was still pinned down. He grabbed my arm and moved me to the basement door, opening it and shoving me down. I had to jump the last few steps to avoid stumbling completely and breaking something.
“I did not take you in so that you could be of secondary concern to this club!” he roared. “If Falcon isn’t going to reward me for my efforts, if he is not going to sell you and give me a piece of the pie, then I’m going to take you for myself.”
With that, he pulled out a knife, brandishing it before me with a wicked grin on my face.
“Here are the rules, missy. You scream, you die. You hurt me, you die. You do anything to resist me, you die. And lest you think I lose if you die, I will still put my dick in your corpse and fuck you until I come, leaving you to rot in hell with my cum permanently inside you. Do I make myself clear?”
“I hope you die from choking on the dicks of the rest of the Falcons, you slimy traitor,” I said.
Tyler sighed, leaning his head forward, as if he could not believe that I would have the audacity to defy him.
“I’m going to let that one slide because I am not near you yet,” he said. “But you get no more warnings.”
He took one step down the stairs. I decided to just close my eyes—the quicker this went by from me not resisting, the quicker I could get to Derek. He took another step down, and then another.
He wasn’t kidding.
He was going to rape me.
I heard him unzip something. He snickered. And—
“Tyler! Goddamnit! The fuck did you go!”
I opened my eyes. Tyler had his hands on his pants, half a second away from pulling them down, when fury filled his face. I don’t think I’d ever seen him so frustrated.
“Get your ass up here and help out with cover before I lodge a bullet in your skull, you Savior scum!”
“I’m on your side, asshole!” he yelled upstairs, but he was buckling his pants and belt back together.
I had been given a reprieve, perhaps only of a few minutes, but one that gave me time to think just a bit.
“It’s your lucky fucking day, you little whore,” he snarled. “Same rules apply. Oh, and if you leave here? You’re dead.”
Tyler spat on me and stormed upstairs, stomping on every step as if being cockblocked—which, in his mind, he probably was.
Too bad he didn’t know what I had planned for him.
In any case, I was free, the door had bounced open after he had slammed it, and I had my chance.
As I sneaked out of the basement, I glanced around. I was officially in unmapped territory as far as my senses were concerned—I’d been so concerned about my life before I hadn’t even bothered to take in the living room. I couldn’t be sure which way led where, what sort of rooms awaited me in either direction, or even which spots on the floor might be old and creaky.
I suppressed a shiver at the screaming possibility that any step I took from this moment might inadvertently alert some unseen member of the Black Falcons of my attempted escape.
And then what? Would they finally just grow fed up with trying to juggle the whore and finally put me out of their misery? How bad would they make it.
It’s not a question of if, it’s how bad.
You better get this right then, Eve.
For Derek.
I leaned a bit more, craning to get a better angle, and saw an opening to a hallway a short way to my left. Beyond that, though the angle was bad and offered only what looked to be either a TV stand or a bookshelf from the side, was what I imagined could be another living room of sorts.
Turning towards the hall, where the sounds of gunfire got louder, I began to head down the area. The entire house was dark and I fought not to let fear take hold of me. I was so close to Derek… just a bit longer and I’d get to him. I continued down the hall, wondering just how long this damn hallway was.
Get a grip, Eve. This is just your fear talking. It’s a normal hallway!
You think it’s bad now? Wait till you get out to the streets. It’s gonna be ten times worse than this.
I took a deep breath.
Suddenly, I was standing in a dining room with a large window to the right. I looked over, seeing that the window looked out to a driveway leading out to a circular drive area. I frowned, realizing that they must’ve set up in some sort of housing community. It provided me the same view as before, but for some reason, perhaps because I had a clearer hope for the future, I saw the battlefield much more clearly.
Which wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Blood lined the streets, dead bodies surrounded the bikes, and dead Falcons lay strewn out right by the houses.
That’s when I saw him.
Derek.
Alive.
Standing back-to-back with Roost, shooting out around the area. My heart swelled at just how awesome he looked; how strong he was.
I’m dating a badass! I crooned to myself.
The gunfire
stopped suddenly, though the two still stood poised—guns raised and sweeping—and I realized that the last of the Falcons they’d been firing upon must have been killed. As the sudden silence swept the immediate area, I began asking strange-yet-logical questions.
Just how much of this area is owned by the Carrion Crew?
Will the next people to arrive likely be with us or them?
And, riding just behind these questions…
How much time do we have?
How much time do I have if the gunfire has stopped?
That question, on its own, was enough to motivate me to move forward. I turned away, from the sight of Derek, and started to head towards the door.
I was so close now!
Then cold metal pressed against the nape of my neck, stopping me in my tracks.
“Imagine my surprise,” Tyler said, keeping his voice low, but he sounded confident and empowered. “I told them, ‘I think she’s up to something.’ I said, ‘She’s going to find a way out if we don’t keep eyes on her.’ I told them that the only way you’d escape was if they pulled me away from you.”
He took a deep inhale then, seeming to huff up the aroma of what he viewed as success. I noticed, too, that what was pressed on my neck was no longer a knife, but a gun. I didn’t know what to make of this other than being fully aware he could still kill me with what he had.
“So imagine my surprise when they told me—allowed me, more like—to stay behind and make sure you stayed put until somebody came with a dog carrier to cart you away properly? Hmm?”
He dug the gun deeper into my neck, snickering as he pressed his hips into mine. I could feel the erection in his pants, and I wanted nothing more than to karate chop it and break it off of his body. I wanted to kick him, smash his balls into a million little pieces, and leave him crying on the floor.
But in this space, I had nothing. I was badly compromised on my position and saw no way out.
“So we’re going to go to the basement, you and I, and I’m going to fuck you until my legs give out. Clear?”
“Fuck you, Tyler,” I growled.
“Oh, is that a promise? I think I’m going to be in for a surprise with you!”
He giggled viciously, but I’d had enough. If I was going to die here, so be it, but I wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
“You like surprises, don’t you?” I muttered, feeling a hot rage cook in my stomach. “You like this?”
I spun then. The gun barrel tensed against my skin, and I let my knees give out—letting my body drop in mid-spin—and felt the air burst from my lungs as the sound of the gun firing forced me to exhale in surprise.
I felt the heat from the shot against my head; felt the damn bullet kiss the topmost hairs of my head!
Something like a cry escaped me then, but it was distant and muted through the ringing in my ears.
But I was alive, and I was facing Tyler.
But I was also on my knees in front of him, a fact that, in an instant, I saw him reveling in.
“Just as you should be, whore,” he said. “Now, since you’re still alive, you—”
Disgusted by the wide grin on his face, I did what whores do best in that situation.
I went straight for the guy’s dick.
I went straight for it with a closed fist, dropping him to my eye level. I stood up, turned, and almost made it to the door.
And then he grabbed my ankle, pulling me to him.
“Not today, whore.”
15
Derek
Fuck!
I’d never shot for this long.
All around me, it felt less like a suburban neighborhood and more like a battlefield on Sudan. The Savage Saviors and I had pinned ourselves down behind our bikes, enclosing so tightly that one man’s boot could kick another man’s groin across from him. We raised up when the fire died down, laying a burst of machine gun fire into the men in the garages and windows of the various houses.
Thinking went completely out the window. It was like being caught in a space in which the natural desires to breathe, eat, and fuck were replaced by the immediate desire to kill, kill, and kill some more. It was not so much a thought that I wanted to kill the Black Falcons as it was just a part of my DNA. There was no arguing with an automatic process.
Unfortunately, that was also programmed into the DNA of the Black Falcons, and while we laid down such fire that more of their men fell than ours, it was not completely lopsided. Some of our men fell, wounded, while a few even hit the deck, dead before their bodies had finished crumpling. I knew their names and their faces; their histories and their dreams; and their triumphs and their failures.
But in the heat of the moment, they were just pieces on the chessboard who had fallen. I could not and would not fall prey to emotions in the middle of the battle—that was a good way to ensure not only did I die, but so did the rest of my team.
It felt like an entire day’s worth of battling had passed, even though the night sky had not changed at all to a brighter dawn. With all but only a couple of houses remaining, I sat up, preparing to unleash a torrent of fire to the second-furthest house away—the only remaining house without Eve.
And then, the side of my face went hot.
I dropped down immediately, putting my hand to my face. Had I been shot?
Was I about to die?
I did not feel any blood, nor did my hand reveal itself to be soaked in it. The skin, however, was hot, and my hearing had faded a bit.
Just an inch to the side, I thought. I’d be dead.
In any other moment, the misfire of an inch would have been grounds for some deep reflection on my mortality. It would have made me consider if I was serious about this war, or if I just liked posturing in the face of the Black Falcons. It would have gotten me up and serious.
But here? I just shrugged, waited for the firing to end, and then got up for another round.
Such was war. It had no mercy, no peace, and no pauses when it was actually ongoing.
Finally, at some point, we knocked out the second to last house.
But then, something strange happened.
No one else was moving.
No one else…
They were breathing, sure, and they made little motions, but they weren’t moving for the purposes of firing.
Had I…
Had I lost my mind?
Fuck!
“Derek!”
I felt slaps at my cheek. There was a ringing in my ears—that was something real I could hold onto in that moment; like a thought preserver in the vast, roaring sea of my rattled mind—and a face inches from mine.
I may have lost my mind, but I had not lost my awareness of those massive bear paws that never quite knew their own strength.
“Roost?” I grumbled.
Unsure of what to say—unsure of anything, really, having just been in my first shootout in ages—I just grumbled the first words that came out.
“I’ve killed eleven people.”
“No, son. No,” he said, continuing to slap me awake. “Today, ya only killed nine. Nice try, though; no stacking points ya ain’t earned, got it?”
“K,” I said as I slowly gathered my senses.
I peered over the motorcycles, a little more sober and a lot less drunk on the high of battle. Black Falcons lay scattered on the ground everywhere—they had outnumbered us, but it was clear their training was severely lacking. I didn’t do an exact count, but I guessed we had anywhere from six to ten people dead or severely wounded in my little circle.
The Falcons, though? I could count six to ten just per house, let alone total.
Slowly, bringing myself back to reality, I remembered the whole reason I was even here.
“Any sign of Eve?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Roost admitted. “But that’s where Tara said they were holding her, so ya wanna—”
That was when I heard a gunshot ring out from just inside. A gunshot…
Eve!
>
I think I said something then—probably calling her name, but once again, the flood of adrenaline had shut off my conscious thought process—and I was running for the door.
I distantly heard Roost call after, “Get yer ass goin’!” But the words were as much background noise as oxygen.
The only sound I wanted to hear was of a bullet going in and out of Tyler’s skull.
After finding the damn door locked, I kicked down the door multiple times. It finally came down just beside the polished doorknob. I pummeled the wooden slab a few more times with a series of violent kicks—tiny, enraged screams belching from my lungs in increasing volume with each one—until the door finally shrieked around its thrown deadbolt and swung open.
Inside was…
Nothing.
No Eve, no Tyler, no sign of whoever had fired the gun or anything. There was just nothing.
No noise at all.
Either I’d gotten through in time, or I was already far too late.
The cold dread that began to swim its way inside was washed away with hope. I couldn’t let myself think Eve was gone. If she was…
If she was…
Well, everyone would have to join forces to protect the world from me if that had been the case.
I raised my gun, holding it at the ready—smelling the occasional wisp of lingering gun smoke ooze from the barrel as I worked my way deeper into the house—and mentally counting how many shots I’d fired since my last reload. By my best guess, I had about three bullets left, maybe less. For the sake of when I saw Tyler, I had to assume I had one.
One shot to kill him.
One shot to save Eve.
One shot to end this relapse of emotional failure on my part and to make up for it.
As I looked around the empty rooms, the dread began to grow and this time, I was struggling to rid myself of the feeling.
Come on, Eve. Where are you?
I froze, hearing a creak in the floorboards and turned towards the source of the noise. As I made my way down a ridiculously long hallway, I side-stepped into the neighboring living room, gun raised—leveled and ready. That creak was definitely not just the house moving with the evening sky. It was something to it. It was…
