Grabbing the first set that I could, I ran back through the lot, stabbing furiously at the alarm button on the fob until I heard a honk answering the silent “call.”
Telling myself again that the Crow Gang wouldn’t press charges for grand theft if I was using the car to save their leader, I swerved around a U-Haul and, spotting a familiar shoe store from our bus route, took the next left to backtrack back to our (old) apartment.
That’s when I saw the smoke.
I cried out, flooring the accelerator and hoping that I wouldn’t kill the car before it got me where I needed to go. Running two lights in the process—miraculously passing between rushing cars as I did—I brought the car to a screaming stop nearly two buildings down, no longer patient enough to trust my luck behind the wheel. Throwing myself from the car, I started at a full sprint down the street, leaping onto the sidewalk and barreling towards the burning building.
No firetrucks, I noted, looking around. No firetrucks, no cops, not yet.
Hoping this meant that the building’s blaze was a somewhat young one, I held out that Jace hadn’t been caught in the initial blast. Still running, I nearly stumbled at the sight of a familiar, flaming paintjob and started screaming at the sight of Jace’s motorcycle. Though I’d had no reason to assume he hadn’t made it there, the sight of his bike only worked to cement the reality that he was here.
And if he wasn’t out here, then that left…
Without breaking my stride, I ran up the steps and through the still-open door.
The heat just beyond the threshold was stifling. It pulsed around me, yanking the breath from my lungs and stealing my screams away at the source. Breathless, I pushed myself up the stairs, uncertain if my blurred vision was a product of tears or smoke; the stinging certainly didn’t do anything to answer my questions. I missed a step, fell, slammed my knee on a one of the stair’s corners. I hissed in pain, sucked in a cloud of reeking smoke, and started coughing.
No, I thought, thinking that I could remember reading somewhere that smoke inhalation was the first step to a certain death and just as quickly trying to convince myself that was fiction.
Worry about fact-checking later, Mia, I pushed myself. You and Jace can look it up together, you can—
I overshot the next step, guessed there was one more when there was none, and staggered out into the hallway, falling onto my hands and knees.
The floor was like the inside of an oven!
I shrieked, yanking my hands away and struggling to put my feet beneath me. I stumbled again, caught myself with my left hand, danced back and forth between scorched palms, and finally threw myself to my feet in an all-or-nothing effort. I began to suck in a relieved breath, stopped before I could, and hurried to pull the hem of my skirt up to cover my mouth, hoping it would be enough to filter the smoke. It did, but only by cupping my hot, heavy breaths back against my face and making things that much hotter and more unbearable.
“Jace?” I cried out, coughing as the heat from my cries cycled back with all the added heat and slapped me in the face. Groaning, I pulled the shielding skirt down long enough to call out again, “JACE?”
The door to Candy’s and my old apartment hung open on a single, tortured hinge. Deciding that was as good a sign as any as to where to start looking, I kicked the door open—not daring to touch it—and squealed in surprise as it snapped off the hinge and crashed to the floor. The billowing air current kicked up from this stirred the flames inside the room, and the heat flared up, sucking up the fresh oxygen and belching a stinking, hot wall of air back at me in thanks. Fighting my animal instinct to turn and run from the inferno, I pressed on, careful not to touch the walls and keeping an eye out for any fallen beams in my way. A few steps in and I saw him.
Jace was on his side, his arm reaching out towards Danny, who was lying on his belly in a pool of bubbling blood between the living room and the kitchen. Behind him, slumped in the kitchen and staring back at me with cold, vacant eyes, was T-Built A number of gory blossoms shone across his chest, but it was the one in the center of his throat that seemed the most telling.
The son of a bitch was dead!
I shivered at the sight, trying to cope with how anything could seem so wonderful and terrible all at once, and I started for Jace, working to pull him back towards the door.
“Jace! Jace, dammit! Wake up!” I called, still working to move him.
No response. No sign of life. Just a head slab of weight that I was struggling to carry through Hell, itself.
And, worse yet, I didn’t have strength left to move. The air was gone from me, my body screaming for a breath I couldn’t give it, and suddenly it was an impossible task just to carry myself a step farther.
I distantly wondered if this was what Jace’s motorcycle might feel like when it ran out of gas, and then immediately wondered why I’d think such a thing.
It’s better this way… a thought came to me. Just like in one of those old stories. More… more poetic.
“Jace…?” I heard my voice, distant and desperate, croak out. “Jace,” I sobbed, choked, coughing sounds that were swallowed by the flames as soon as they left my lips. cried. “Please… come… back…”
Nothing. Nothing, leading into nothingness.
It didn’t even hurt anymore; couldn’t even feel the…
… heat.
“Goodbye, Anne…”
Words. The words… his words!
I heaved, coughed, cried out in absolute agony as my lungs screamed their curses and hatred out at me. I groaned, bitterly thankful for the pain, and turned my face to see Jace blinking up at the ceiling.
“Anne?” he said.
“Ja-ce…” I croaked.
His head turned—more falling to one side—and he spotted me, his eyes widening with recognition.
“Mia?” he cried, and he was moving with a speed that seemed impossible.
Lying… below… smoke, some still-grinding set of gears reminded me.
Oh yea… I giggled inwardly. Where was that thought when I needed it?
Scalding your hands and knees, girl, I heard myself taunt in Candy’s voice.
And then arms, weak from fatigue but still inhumanly strong as far as I was concerned, were working their way around me, dragging me in awkward bursts to something that almost resembled standing.
“C-can’t… walk… my own,” Jace panted towards me, leaning against me and prompting me to lean back just the same. “To-together,” he said, taking a step forward and nodding for me to do the same.
I blinked at this, seeing the two of us—too broken to get out of there on our own—becoming some twisted-yet-wonderful singularity that stood a chance against the fire. I nodded and matched his step. “Together,” I repeated, more coughing out the word than actually saying it.
And, as a broken-yet-whole mess, we loped out of the hell that Candy’s and my old life was burning away into and slipped out into the new day.
It was certain to be a shitty day, all things considered.
But there was something to be said about it just knowing that Jace and I would be together…
PART 5
Carry On
SEVENTEEN
~MACK~
“HEY, CHOBAVICH! YOU GOT A VISITOR!”
“Me? I do? Who is it?”
“THE FUCK DO I CARE? SAYS HE KNOWS YOUR SISTER!”
“Shit…”
…
…
…
“You Mack?”
“Who wants to know?”
“Malcolm Chobavich?”
“People don’t call me that.”
“But it’s your name.”
“What’s in a name?”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. What do you want? What’s this I hear ‘bout you knowing my sister?”
“Oh, that? No, no. I more know of Mia than having had the pleasure of actually meeting her.”
“That a fact?”
“It is. Are you aware
of her arrangement?”
“I should say so, since I was the one who arranged it.”
“Just wanted to make sure you understood that.”
“Understood what?”
“That you were, in fact, the one who told us to acquire your sister to fulfill your debt.”
“That’s what I just… wait, ‘us’? Y-you with the Crew?”
“Mister Chobavich, I am The Crew. You may call me ‘Papa Raven.’”
“That’s funny.”
“Why?”
“Last guy I talked to with the Crew called himself T-Built. Seemed like a funny guy. How’s he doing?”
“Dead.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. And your sister was not without a certain degree of involvement in that matter.”
“Mia? You’re telling me Mia was somehow involved in some guy’s death?”
“That is what I just said, yes.”
“You sure we’re talking about the same—”
“Mister Chobavich, I’d like to hurry this along. This place depresses me and I’d really rather not be here any longer.”
“Uh, yeah. That’s sort of the fucking point, Papa.”
“Witty.”
“Glad you approve.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh…”
“The fact of the matter, Mack, is that your sister has run off from her duties. She was made aware of the circumstances surrounding her arrangements, and she—”
“WHOA! HEY! What? She knew that I’m the one that sold her to T-Built?”
“No, Mack, we were certain that she would refuse to work if she was made aware of that. She was only made aware that her working for us was for your benefit; to keep you from harm.”
“Oh. Well, that’s good, I guess.”
“It was. Yes.”
“So what happened?”
“A rival gang took her.”
“A rival…? What the fuck? How many you fuckers out there?”
“Just the two. Mia went willingly, saw fit to convince another of our ‘workers’ to go along, as well. And then she blew up a building with T-Built inside.”
“Sounds like you guys lost control of the situation big time.”
“That’s certainly one way to put it. Another way to put it would be that the one thing keeping you alive is no longer an asset.”
“What do you…? Oh! Whoa! No, wait! Hold on! There’s got to be some other way! Something that we can work out!”
“Why on earth do you think I’d be here with you right now if I wasn’t hoping to do just that, Mister Chobavich?”
“So… you ain’t here to off me?”
“You think I’d go through all the trouble of coming here if I simply wanted you dead?”
“I… uh, can’t say. Not like I know you too good, you know?”
“You’ll have plenty of time to get to know me, Mack.”
“That a fact?”
“It is.”
“So what do you want?”
“Doesn’t it seem obvious? We want your sister back. We want the man that took her dead. And we want the other gang out of the picture.”
“Not sure I can do all of that, but I guess it wouldn’t be too tough to find Mia. If she was willing to hit the street to pay my debt then I imagine she’d at least still be willing to answer a phone call from me, right?”
“Our thoughts exactly, Mister Chobavich. Our thoughts exactly.”
Running on Fumes
The Crow's MC
BOOK TWO
Cassandra Bloom
&
Nathaniel Squiers
Copyright© Cassandra Bloom, Nathan Squires 2018
PROLOGUE
~MACK~
“HEY, CHOBAVICH! YOU GOT A VISITOR!”
The guard’s call caught Malcolm’s already nervous breath in his lungs. His time in prison hadn’t been the easiest of his life—there was a morbid curiosity that ebbed at his mind, demanding to know who’d taken more cock since he’d been put away, him or his sister—and the life of a prison bitch was, as he’d come to find out, much happier when people didn’t come to visit.
But the folks who raped Malcolm were inmates or, on one “special occasion,” a guard who’d been having marital issues. On that occasion, he’d been called “Stacy”—the guard weeping and laughing, beating Malcolm one moment and stroking his hair the next—and on all the other occasions, when his partners had been the more straightforward and, in Malcolm Chobavich’s honest opinion, the more sane inmates they’d simply called him “mine.”
No, Malcolm—Mack—didn’t think that the day had come when rapists started coming in from out there, but it didn’t make the news any easier to take.
Especially since the people out there were a lot more dangerous than the ones in here.
Hell, if it came down to being let out or staying behind bars, Malcolm Chobavich would sooner don a wig, fake tits, high heels—hell, the whole shebang!—and strut around as Stacy, “Mine,” or even that big, purple, Down’s syndrome-lookin’ Micky-D’s muppet that looked an awful lot like a fuzzy butt-plug.
Just strap me down, lube me up, and call me “Grimace,” he thought with morbid humor, nearly throwing himself into a giggling fit. He did not giggle, however. Instead, Malcolm, feeling everything below his waistband tighten with worry, asked, “Me?” and then, realizing that sounded stupid, added, “I do?” Even this seemed to carry with it a tone of idiocy, though. Then, still picturing the eerily cheery face of the butt-plug burger muppet and wishing it was just the guard with another pent-up Stacy-complex, he asked the question that really mattered:
“Who is it?”
Because, though it sickened him to know, Malcolm “Mack” Chobavich already knew why somebody from the outside world should be coming to visit. And, while the curiosity sickened him, he wanted to know just who-in-the-fuck had come to kill him; which of those sons-of-bitches with the Carrion Crew had finally decided that their little deal wasn’t good enough and that blood was finally due to pay past debts.
“THE FUCK DO I CARE?” the guard wailed back, his patience with Mack and his questions gone the way of the dodo and the Macarena. Then, deciding he maybe had a shred of patience left, he offered, “SAYS HE KNOWS YOUR SISTER!”
Well if that didn’t just staple the flapping folds of doubt right down to the unforgiving surface of certainty nothing would. The world—hell, even his own damn family, it seemed—had all but forgotten that the Chobaviches had had more than one little critter running around the front yard. Mia’s little claim to local stardom back when she was still a kid had put the name “Chobavich” on the tongues and in the ears of just about anybody within a hundred-mile radius. She had, after all, stumbled across a body, uncovered a murder, and become something of a sob story for everyone to fawn over until some brat found themselves at the bottom of an old well or another brown baby washed up from some third-world shithole. Nevermind the fact that Mia wouldn’t have found shit—wouldn’t have mattered for shit—if Mack hadn’t snuck out with her; if Mack hadn’t busted the lock to the locked-up basement of the seemingly abandoned Creely house. Mack had taken all the risk—granted the booze he stole from their old man and the girl he was feeding three fuck-fingers to that night were on him, he knew—but Mia had gotten all the glory. After that night, the world had basically forgotten he existed, and that was just the way it had been. That was just the way it was as the years passed, and those years had a way of amplifying the distance that was wedged between troublesome Malcolm Chobavich and the good-for-nothing, gamble-happy degenerate and the Mack of here-and-now. The only people who knew that the Mack of here-and-now was once Malcolm Chobavich and that he, seemingly only by association anymore, had any ties to Mia Chobavich were him, Mia and the rest of their family (presumably)…
And the Carrion Crew.
Because that’s who owned Mia now.
Because that’s why Mack was alive.
Because that was the deal.
&nb
sp; Wasn’t it?
“Shit…”
A long, ugly silence passed then. It barreled like a drunk driver—all jerks and swerves—ever-nearer to the vicinity of Awkwards-ville, population two (with one on the way, it seemed), and then veered off down a dusty, unmarked road. Because what was really awkward about all of this? Had Mack really believed that his debts to those psychos could be paid with his sister’s pussy alone? Had he really believed that she’d go along with it? Or that the Carrion Crew could truly make her into a whore?
It wasn’t that Mack didn’t think his sister had the goods. He knew she did, a fact that he was embarrassed to admit even to himself. If asked aloud, he’d deny it left, right, and back again; Mack wasn’t a sister-fucker, and he’d certainly never aspire to be.
That was his story, and he was sticking to it.
That he’d instantly and without question named her to the Carrion Crew as “prime piece of pussy-meat” as a means of saving his own skin was more an act of cowardice than anything else. Mack could live with being a coward, after all; but being seen as a pervert who lusted after his own sister…
No. That simply wouldn’t do at all.
And if it was Mia’s face that came to him when he was getting called “mine” or “Stacy” or whatever, then that was just happenstance, right? Just coincidence.
That was the road that led to Awkwards-ville, population Mack and only Mack. It was barred-off, barricaded, and littered with “ONE WAY” signs—and that way was out. And now that Mack had a visitor—a visitor who knew about Mia, which could only mean a visitor with the Carrions; a visitor coming to collect on their unsatisfied debt—he figured the only way out of Awkwards-ville was on a bullet train.
He heard “POW!” in his head just as the gate opened and a man started into his cell.
My visitor’s coming in here? he thought to himself. They’re not even going to stick me in the yard or something to make it look like an accident… but they’ve just got that much power, don’t they? They’ve just got that much power…
CROWS MC SET-TO LOAD Page 33
