She rolled her eyes, ignoring him. Then, she surprised me by grabbing my arm like a kid would their favorite teddy bear and squeezing it. Being I was a good few inches taller than her, I wound up looking down at the top of her head.
“I’ll be back long before baby S is here,” I said, knowing that would bring a smile to her face.
Romero took hold of her wrist and gently pulled her away from me. I stepped back, giving them privacy as he whispered something I more than likely didn’t want to hear in her ear.
He kissed her, placed a light parting touch on her stomach, and then motioned for me to walk out, silently falling in step beside me when we were back in the hallway.
“Will you two kids be able to play nice while I’m gone?” I asked as we made our way out the front door.
“They got me here,” Cobra butted in, pushing off the wall where he’d been waiting for us.
“I don’t need relationship help from either of you dickheads.”
We approached where my Fat Bob was sitting with saddlebags already secured on the rear end.
They stood back as I wrapped a black bandana around my mouth and nose, slipped on a pair of shades, and pulled my hood up. Normally, I didn’t go to such an extreme, but the heat was bearing down and this was the best way to protect myself against the elements on the ride I had ahead of me.
Once my fingerless gloves were on, I slipped an atomic slug bag over my shoulders, making sure the handle of my ReaperTac was sticking out.
“We sticking to the same plan?” Cobra asked.
“Yeah, give me four days after tonight. Come through the parking garage.”
He nodded and stepped forward to dap me. “Be safe, bro. I’ll be seeing you soon. I got a reason to break the charger out now.” His face lit up like a little kids and I shook my head.
“What?” I asked Romero when he crossed his arms and just looked at me.
“You know what,” he replied flatly. “And you know I’m right.”
I did know what he was saying, but I didn’t have a response.
“She might hate me,” I admitted out loud for the first time.
“Yeah, fucking right, she has no reason to hate you,” Cobra scoffed, easily picking up on our roundabout conversation. “You’re her stars and moon,” he fluttered his lashes and stared at the sun.
I gave him a flat look.
Romero slightly shifted, pulling my attention back to him, and I knew whatever he was about to say had him feeling uncomfortable, which rarely happened.
“You know the only thing I want from Cali is her to never stop loving me? She’s a psychotic bitch and pisses me off a good ten times a day, but she’s everything to me.
“I don’t think I’d be able to keep going if I lost her. Maybe I’m pussy for having that big a weakness, but I quickly learned not give a shit. I love that woman; she’s my fucking queen. From the day she and that annoying as shit, loud mouth girl you got a soft spot for came rollin their asses down that hill and running through the woods, I knew she was it for me.
“You knew it too; I know you did. Don’t deny yourself something like this. Trust me when I say she’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, aside from that squishy alien in her stomach.
“You’ve always been a king in your own right; don’t come back here without your queen. If you gag her ass in the process, you’d be doing me a favor.”
I could count on one hand the number of times I’d been surprised. This took two fingers. Cobra had the same expression on his face as I did. That was the most emotional shit he’d said to either of us since we’d been kids.
Hugging him would probably get me dropped on my ass and be taking shit way too far, but I felt the love of a brother just as strong as I always had, if not stronger—for the blessing I didn’t need but he gave me anyway, and the man he became for my sister.
“I agree with all the shit he just said,” Cobra commented, grounding us back to our usual self-preserved demeanors as he usually did when shit got to an awkwardly silent level.
“Call me as soon as you settle with her,” Romero said, back to normal programming.
He didn’t like saying goodbyes because they were often final. We three lived up to every fucked up expectation people had of us, but what no one knew was that when we cared about someone, we cared with the all parts of us that could still give a shit.
I was loyal only to my family; it was because of that I vowed to track down someone that had been stolen from us. And I had. And Rome was right.
I climbed on my Fat Boy, gave a slight nod of my head, and turned the engine over.
Now, it was time to bring her home where she belonged.
Chapter Four
I’d had enough.
I could no longer feel the steady rhythm of my heart. I felt cold and damned. There were these constant moments where I would disconnect. I was either numb or feeling everything at once.
I needed someone to shove me over the fuckin edge, or put me out of my misery. I was sinking; something murky was rising. My sky was falling, and the tides were turning.
I didn’t know how much time had passed since Noah gave me to those men wrapped up in a pretty bow.
My body still hurt, but whether it was all in my head or physical, I couldn’t process.
I think it was two or three days ago he’d come in and announced we would be moving again soon. His voice sparsely registered—I wish he’d shut up and save his breath, choke on his own words. I couldn’t bring myself to pretend I cared about anything he had to say. He needed to find a hobby and spare me one single second more of his company.
I’d been having beautifully morbid daydreams lately. Every time I heard him speak, and every time I flashed back to the men who took what didn’t fuckin belong to them, I drifted off into a catatonic place.
I envisioned their ligaments scattered in pieces, their entrails greedily devoured by the crows cawing outside my window as a I sang the counting song.
One for sorrow, two for mirth…
Those black carrion birds had become a source of comfort.
I imagined them arriving just to keep me company, as if they knew in their majestic little heads that this kind of loneliness was new to me.
See, I’d always been kind of a loner, but never intentionally. I laughed a bit too loud, and my soul was a tad too wild for me to ever really blend in with normal folks.
This was different, though. This kind of lonely came from feeling like I no longer knew myself. I’d known exactly who I was before, but I didn’t know who I was becoming now.
I’d had typical vengeful notions just weeks ago. These twisted thoughts were foreign to me. I swear I’d lost my mind; it felt like I was slowly going insane.
My life had been completely shaken up and rearranged. I knew I would always be partially to blame for that, and that there was nothin to be done about the events that led me here.
I wasn’t going to deny those facts.
I’d fucked up, but I was sick of thinking about all that was. I was tired of feeling lost.
I stood in the dull bathroom under a lackluster light and boldly dared to look at my reflection. Someone who didn’t know what I’d been through would look at me and not see anything wrong, or anyone other than the same old Arlen Prosner.
The bruises between my thighs and missing patches of skin I’d scrubbed at too hard were only evident to me and the men who left them there. I couldn’t shake the feeling of their heavy breath on my neck, or the way they felt me up.
No matter how many times I washed myself, I felt like I was coated in layers of grime and filth. My body was a temple, and they’d tainted it. Invisible scars weighed me down heavily.
Like a moth to a flame, my wings had burned away. I dug down deep inside myself, searching for the part of me that cared, but whatever it was that shifted had me caring a little less lately.
I wasn’t sure about this new me. I thought I’d picked up all the broken pieces, but the ones I h
ad didn’t align anymore. This Arlen was a stranger, and she offered no explanation.
I’d waited for my shadow, but he never came. Turns out this whole surviving thing was pretty goddamn hard. It was even harder when you had nothing left to lose and all you felt was a cruel, never-ending wanting.
At what point did I stop facing denial and ask myself what I was struggling to survive for?
Chapter Five
I rode for a full day and night to get where I needed to be, stopping only to refuel, knowing exactly the range my Fat Boy could handle before it would start to sputter.
On my final stop, I stashed the bike in the exact spot I’d mapped out the week prior, pre-fueling with the gas can I’d stashed under a caved in portion of the abandoned garage.
All that was left to do was wait.
I munched on smoked jerky and sipped some hooch to pass a little more time, before taking a piss and then prepping to move into a proactive position.
I snagged my ReaperTac from my bag, now secured with the others, and then attached the suppressor to my Glock 17 after checking the magazine. The black gun was simple to use, durable, ubiquitous, and took the most easy to obtain ammunition there was: 9 mm Parabellum.
Cutting through a few weed-covered yards, I moved closer to the house I knew Arlen was being held at. The heat was a sonofabitch, but the oncoming shadows helped to shade me from full on exposure.
I’d lived in this fucking place my entire life, spent half that time on the road, and still abhorred the sun. I couldn’t stand its intensity or its light. I was a creature of the night.
The dark was easier on the eyes, and much better for killing, hunting, and getting pussy.
And that was why I’d planned to make my move when the sky was a deep purple and the Badlands’ natural terrain was only lit up by a crescent moon.
The house had been easy to find; it was the only dingy blue one in the entire run-down neighborhood. There was a dark green pickup truck parked right on the front lawn, and I watched a laughing Noah climb into it with three other men.
I wasn’t there for him. Not this time. His hourglass was near empty enough. I couldn’t wait to shred him apart with my bare hands. My objective right then was to get to my girl.
Not knowing how long they would be gone, I tracked the movement inside the house, trying to get a feel of the precise layout.
I needed to get Arlen out ASAP, but I was never one for rushing into shit without taking in as much detail as I could. Acting brashly got people killed for being complete dumbasses and not using their heads.
Me and my brothers learned that at fourteen when we sat back and watched a group of cannibals get slaughtered trying to steal a dairy cow, of all things.
The family had set traps around their property to prevent that very thing from happening. Lucky it was those fuckers and not us, because that’s exactly what we’d been there to do.
We still ended up with the cow in the end; we just took out the family later that same day as they cleaned the bodies up. But it was still a beneficial learning lesson.
Carrion birds perched on the house’s depleted rafters, and the dying tree off to the side of it. They had a habit of showing up when shit was about to go down around me.
I hadn’t figured out why, and I couldn’t lie and say it wasn’t creepy the first few times this happened.
But as with everything else that shaped who I was, I’d come to like them, and it heavily attributed to my alias.
Estimating there were four people inside and that my girl was naturally being kept in the room with the plywood over the window like a caged animal, I moved.
Sticking to the darkest part of the shadows wasn’t something I did intentionally. The dark had a way of gravitating towards me. I used it to cover me as I made my way to the side door and found my initial assumption correct: the dumb fucks inside hadn’t locked it.
Easing the poor excuse of a barrier open, I slipped inside and reclosed it. Laughter sounded from the right…the living room. A pipe groaned as someone shifted closer in a room to my immediate left—a bathroom, I guessed.
Straight ahead of me were half missing stairs that led down to what had to be the basement.
Ascending the short three stairs off to the side of me that led to a small landing, I pushed another door open when I knew it was clear.
I stepped into a small hall that expanded outward into a filthy kitchen. There was a laundry room with a rusted washer and dryer caddy in the corner from where I stood, and another door was wide open across from it.
By the low grunt and pair of jeans I could see around a set of hairy ankles, someone was taking a shit in a toilet that didn’t work. There was a distinct stench emanating through the hall that could only have come from other people having done the same thing before him, and leaving all the feces to build up.
I readied my Glock and eased towards the bathroom. The suppressor wasn’t going to completely silence the shot—this wasn’t an action film—but it would reduce the muzzle flash and confuse the others in the house as to what they’d heard or where it had come from.
The man had his head buried in his hands when I pulled the trigger.
I’d just done him a favor. The kill was fast, instead of fatally wounding.
He didn’t have time to react, and even if he did, it wouldn’t have mattered much.
The bullet burned flesh as it formed a circular hole rimmed with abraded skin right in the top of his dome. It slid right through his hair and muscle, as if it were a silken caress. The casing made quick shrapnel of his calcium, phosphorus, sodium, and collagen case before splitting apart tissue and fibrous membranes.
All that gorgeous handiwork from a little bullet, and he was gone in a fraction of a second, without getting a moment to admire it or feel the inside of his head being ripped apart. The only thing he left behind was the smell of shit and a spray of blood, bone, and brains on the wall.
Hearing what sounded more like a loud door slamming than a gunshot, the other people in the house immediately began to investigate.
I slipped across the hall to the laundry room and waited, placing the Glock in my waist band in place of my ReaperTac.
There was a loud “What the hell?”, before one of them opened the front door, another took the stairs to the second floor, and the third came my direction, calling out the name of his dead friend.
Not getting a response, he peered into the bathroom, recoiling like a spring the second he saw the body slumped at an odd angle.
Before he could react, I moved from my position. He never saw me coming. I clamped a hand over his mouth and nose to shut him the fuck up and muffle the expulsion of air I knew would be coming.
Instead of slicing into his neck, I stabbed my curved stainless steel blade into the side, going through an artery, and gripped the handle a little tighter, dragging downward.
Most of his blood ran down his throat instead of spilling out all over the damn floor. His body lowered with silent spasms. He tried to speak, asphyxiating on his own ichor.
This was always messy, and I tried not to make it too gory.
The method of the kill wasn’t what excited me. Neither did the begging or the torture—not that I didn’t enjoy those aspects of my work. It was the final outcome, death, that made all this worth it.
The moment when someone realized their life was slipping away was my favorite part of the job. No matter what they did or how they lived, death would always show up in the end. I merely helped conduct their souls to the afterlife.
I liked my job. I was good at my job—so fucking good even the devil admired my craft. I had to live in hell, so why not enjoy myself and purge some motherfuckers from it?
I left the man behind and made my way through the rest of the house. Whoever had gone out the front door was nowhere to be seen. He could wait.
Darting towards the stairs, I swapped melees again and popped the man who’d started coming back down as I was going up, sending a slug right be
tween his eyes.
I sidestepped as his body took a tumble past me, landing at an obtuse angle below and leaking blood onto the floor.
At the top step, I saw there was only one closed door out of three. I didn’t even bother trying to undo the excessive number of locks on the outside. I kicked the piece of shit right in.
And there she was.
She was sitting in a barely lit room on a full sized bed with rope wrapped around her wrists. There was an almost crushing feeling of relief that coursed through my chest merely from seeing her again. I felt like I’d just found something I didn’t know I’d lost.
Her reaction was delayed. I knew then that she was different.
I wasn’t surprised by that—nor did we have time to sing a sad song about it, but damn did it fuck with my chest a little bit.
She studied me as if she wasn’t sure I was real. I did my damndest to make sure my eyes didn’t stray from her face. Whatever the fuck she had on left little to the imagination.
I focused on her eyes that reminded me too much of sunlight and spoke a vocabulary that was all their own. I didn’t dwell on the fact that I understood the language because it was mine. I didn’t dwell on what the darkest part of my sub-conscious mind already knew. That whatever just fucking happened between us when I kicked in the door was the magnifying of a spark that would soon be an inferno.
Instead, I told her to get the fuck up and that we needed to go.
Chapter Six
I was leaving the bathroom as he was entering the bedroom.
He had what looked twine partially bunched up in his hands, and one of his cronies standing in the hall behind him.
My face gave away exactly what I was thinkin: wrapping that damn rope around his neck and cutting off every ounce of oxygen flowing to his brain.
I could watch him gasp for air, and when he thought it was over, I’d give him breath just so I could swiftly take it away again.
I spotted the prod in this new man’s hand. I was the first to speak, surprising both of us, “He supposed to be your protection?” My voice sounded so hollow I tried to pinpoint when the last time I’d used it was.
Outcasts (Badlands Book 3) Page 4
