If Jace and Danny’s plan worked out even half as well as they’d worked it out to, we’d have Papa Raven—and, presumably, any possible number of Carrion Crew members—encircled and too startled to act.
And then…
“I don’t like this,” I confessed, keeping myself planted in place on the back of Danny’s Fat Boy while everyone else started to leave their motorcycles. “I want to get closer.”
“This is as close as Jace wants us to get, remember?” Danny reminded me, glancing over his shoulder. “We gotta cover the rest on foot now.”
I shook my head, feeling suddenly very nervous. “N-no… I-I mean, I remember what Jace said—I remember the plan—but…” I shook my head again as my left hand migrated to the solid, heavy mass occupying the pocket of the leather jacket Danny had lent to me for the ride, trying to make sense of my nonsensical thoughts. “The others can walk,” I finally said, deciding it wasn’t worth trying to put my reasons into words when I could just push for the action. “But we need to be there now.”
“Jace ain’t gonna like that, girlie,” Danny said in a “but we’re already too committed not to do this”-voice.
I only nodded, settled further back into the Fat Boy, and tightened my grip around his waist.
“YA KNOW THE PLAN, BOYS,” Danny called out to the others, motioning with a wide wave of one giant arm. “WAIT FER THE REST, MAKE SURE THE PERIMETER’S SECURE, AND MOVE AS A GROUP!”
“Says the stupid sonuvabitch who appears to be going on ahead without the rest of us,” another Crow member shot, crossing the distance and laying a hand on either side of Danny’s handlebars, forcing him to stay in place. “What’s this all about? I thought we had a plan?”
“Didn’t ya just hear what I said, dipshit?” Danny said with an authoritative grunt. “Now get yer mitts off my bike.”
“This got something to do with her?” the Crow snarled, lifting one hand far enough to jab an accusing, leather-clad finger in my direction before planting it back in place on the handlebar. “‘Cause, if you ask me, I ain’t exactly thrilled with the amount of trouble that whore’s been bringing to us, Mercury. Jace might be retarded for her or whatever, but is it worth breaking rank and disobeying an order just ‘cause she asks you to?”
Something that sounded uncomfortably close to a bear’s growl rumbled up from Danny’s chest then, and the Fat Boy rose a few inches as he hoisted himself to his feet, allowing the motorcycle to support less and less of his bulk. It was a strange sensation to feel myself seem to levitate in that moment, but the magic and whimsy was overshadowed by what seemed to be a bestial transformation happening just in front of me. Any number of werewolf transformation scenes from books and movies flashed before my eyes—the word “theriomorph” coming and going in that instant—and then a hand—Just a hand! I reminded myself—snatched the mouthy Crow member by the jacket and lifted him off the ground. Danny’s arm bulged, the veins and tendons raising against his already sizable arm as he brought roughly one-hundred-and-eighty points worth of startled Crow to eye-level with himself.
“Call ‘er that again,” Danny said in a voice that was no less a growl that his previous utterance, “an’ I’ll be serving you up in front of the Carrions as a warning fer what I’ll do to them.”
The man whimpered, nodded, and locked eyes with me as he loosed a series of high-pitched apologies.
Danny dropped the man, who was barely able to catch himself before crumpling to his knees.
“ANY OTHERS WANNA STRETCH THEIR NUTS AN’ FLEX THEIR COCKS? HUH?” Danny demanded, looking around. “ANY OTHER MOTHERFUCKER WANNA QUESTION THE WAY THINGS IS GONNA HAPPEN?”
Nobody did.
Then Danny lowered himself back onto his Fat Boy, the springs groaning happily under the weight of their owner, and he shot me a skeptical look.
“Hope ye’re right about this, Mia,” he whispered.
Once more, I could only bring myself to nod.
I didn’t want to confess that I was hoping I wasn’t right.
****
We were a short distance from where Jace had been supposed to meet Papa Raven, riding a perpendicular stretch that I was only slightly surprised to see was Church Street, when I realized that I could hear the strained, roaring engine of Jace’s “death trap” from almost a block away. Even over the sound of Danny’s Fat Boy, which, to its credit, was nothing short of a constant bellow in its own right. Considering this, it seemed impossible that I should be able to hear much of anything over it—I was, after all, sitting directly on top of it while Jace was, presumably, a fair distance ahead—but, despite this, I was certain of what I was hearing.
It sounded forced. It sounded pained. It sounded…
“Hurry,” I heard myself whisper.
Whether Danny could hear me or not—whether he could hear the sound of Jace’s motorcycle or not—he did just that, he hurried.
The Harley let loose a loud, diesel-soaked wail, lurched forward, and suddenly I could feel the air slapping all around me with a greater ferocity than it had moments before. Now it wasn’t just Jace’s “death trap” that sounded forced and strained.
Even the air itself seemed to cry with effort all around me.
“The fuck’re they?” Danny grumbled, and I peeked over his shoulder in time to see three men on motorcycles veer away from us.
They appeared to be riding out from either side of the sidewalk—two of them almost side-by-side as they started to put distance between themselves and us—while another fell behind long enough to secure something to the base of a streetlight. Then, finishing with whatever he’d been doing, he leapt atop his own motorcycle and rocketed off after the other two. A moment later, slipping one-by-one off the main road and into a gap between two storefronts, they were gone, leaving Church street eerily vacant save for us…
And him.
Further ahead, only a speck from where we were, was a fourth motorcycle, this one seeming bigger and somehow blacker than all the others. Papa Raven, I heard my subconscious exclaim, though I knew I had no way of knowing that with any real certainty.
“What were they—” I began, but interrupted myself with a gasp as I saw another motorcycle—Jace’s motorcycle!—swing out from Main Street.
“Didn’t know the old girl could go that fast,” Danny practically muttered, watching as Jace started to gain a sizable distance from us in the blink of an eye.
“Do you think he saw us?” I asked.
“Didn’t seem to,” he answered.
Frowning, realizing that he was drawing nearer to the spot where the three men had been working only moments before, I asked, “What were those guys doing?”
“Girl, I ain’t got the foggiest… oh.”
I could almost feel Danny’s bulky body go cold and solid under my grip.
“Oh? What’s ‘oh’? Dammit, Mercury, what’s—”
“BAIL OUT, JACE!” Danny screamed out, but his voice seemed suddenly insubstantial. Whether he sensed the futility or not, it wasn’t enough to keep him from repeating, “BAIL… OUT!”
“Oh no…” I heard my voice, distant and hollow, bleed past my lips as realization dawned on me.
A trap!
Something… something in the road.
Something not even I could see…
And I actually know to look; actually know where to look! I realized in horror.
And with how fast Jace was…
The roar of his “death trap”—a painfully ironic choice of words, I realized—was suddenly replaced with a deafening screech. Time seemed to slow with the flash of Jace’s brake light came on, shining back at me like a single, cyclopean eye winking back from the depths of Hell, itself. Jace’s brakes seemed to work not only his motorcycle, but the entire world in that moment. I could see the parking meters and street lights passing with painful clarity—could practically read the emblazoned sign affixed within an auto body shop’s window that read “DON’T GET CAUGHT IN THE BREAKDOWN LANE!”—and, up ahead,
I saw…
I saw…
I thought I saw…
A woman. Pregnant. Desperate. Every bit as panicked and terrified as I felt. She stood just before the trap that had been laid for Jace, her arms outstretched and her mouth held open in a frozen, sustained cry.
I stared, gaped, aghast. Could that be…
Anne?
Jace had confessed that, in his grief, he’d sometimes seen his late wife in the middle of the street when he was riding…
But that was…
Crazy.
And then she was gone. Time jumped back into play, and there was no woman; there was only Jace, struggling to stop one “death trap” before crashing into another, but…
“… not gonna make it,” Danny said with a pained moan.
“JA-A-A-ACE!” I shrieked after him.
Seeming to respond to my cry, I watched as Jace’s body tensed, seeming to coil in on itself like a spring being compressed. Then, just as the nose of his motorcycle neared the spot we’d watched the Carrion Crew members lay their trap, Jace’s body sprang out, pushing him up and away from the vehicle. His body was still careening through the air as the front tire exploded—there really was no other word for it; the tire exploded!—around some invisible barrier, the force of the impact enough to flip the metal heap up and around itself.
“Fuckin’ wire,” Danny grumbled, navigating the Fat Boy towards the scene. “That’s how those cocksuckers did it!”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t care. I was too transfixed in horror at the scene unfolding almost half-a-block ahead of me:
Jace’s arms pinwheeled around, working to stabilize himself despite being almost entirely at the whim of physics in that instant. His hair, wind-tussled and free—WHY, WHY, WHY COULD YOU NEVER WEAR A GODDAM HELMET, YOU IDIOT!—but, with his body facing away from me, I couldn’t be certain of what sort of expression he was wearing. Though this seemed an insubstantial thing to worry about at that moment, it occurred to me that a simple sign of confidence would make my thrumming heart feel a little less near to mimicking his motorcycle’s front tire and exploding in that instant.
But, then again, what might happen to me if I saw a look of dread on his face?
By some strange miracle, Jace kept his body upright. His arms continued to work for stability as his legs started an awkward, mid-air “sprint;” he muscles of his body straining against the confines of his leather jacket and his denim pants as he worked his entire body in an effort to survive the fall.
“Stick it,” Danny whispered, his voice so low I more felt the vibration of his words through his shoulders than actually heard them. “Stick it! Fuckin’ Stick it!”
Jace’s first touch to the ground was nearly enough to topple him. The toe of his left boot clipped the asphalt, dragged his foot and then the rest of his leg back, and I was certain I was about to watch him smash his face into the street. Then, kicking out his right foot in the next instant, he caught himself in mid-fall, propelled himself forward in a spastic half-jump, and then began what would have otherwise looked like a goofy hop-run. As he did, Jace’s upper-body teetered back-and-forth; one moment leaning too far forward and then, in the next, leaning to far back—the overall appearance seeming dissociated and almost cartoonish. None of his parts seemed willing to collaborate on the next moment with any other part of him.
And yet, somehow—somehow!—he remained upright for four… five… six steps.
Then the still-cartwheeling “death trap” that had been his motorcycle came around in another shrieking arc and slammed into the small of his back.
We were near enough by that point to hear a high-pitched bark, one part surprise and one part pain, and Danny brought his Fat Boy to a stop just before a still thrumming length of wire that had been tied off on either end of the street. Ahead, Jace fell back, knocked by the force of the motorcycle’s impact, and he dropped in a half-seated position. The motorcycle, skewed by its impact against its former owner, flopped to one side and screeched to an anticlimactic stop a short way’s away.
And Jace, panting and shaking, was left sitting in the middle of the street.
“J-Jesus… ti-titty-f-f-fucking… Ch-Ch-Christ,” I heard him stammer out between sharp, gusting inhales. “A-am I…”
“JACE!” I called out in a sob, throwing myself off of Danny’s Fat Boy and starting after him at nearly a full sprint.
Jace jumped as though he’d just been shot, his entire body thrumming just like…
I barked out my own pained surprise as I started to trip over the wire that had nearly gotten him killed.
Half-laughing and half-crying, inwardly scolding myself for actually forgetting that the damned trap was there, I clamored to remain upright and closed the distance between me and my man.
My man…
“Oh my… JACE!” I shrieked again.
“Mia?” he said my name as though it was a voice from another world, as though it was the last thing he would ever expect to hear aloud in that moment, and then he was looking over his shoulder; looking at me. “MIA!”
Shaky as he’d been—hurt as he most certainly was—I would have never suspected he could move as fast as he did. In an instant he was up, on his feet, and working his legs in a mad-dash back towards me.
It was the most beautiful thing I had ever—
“BACK!” he was screaming even as his arm hooked around my waist. Then I realized he was calling back to Danny, waving his opposite hand in a frantic gesture, as he repeated, “GET BACK!”
And then the shooting started…
SEVENTEEN
~JACE~
I barely had a chance to come to grips with my survival before I heard Mia’s voice. It was beyond surreal. I’d been so certain I’d seen Anne—she’d practically been close enough to reach out and touch—standing by the Carrion Crew’s tripwire, and I’d been so certain that I’d heard Mia’s words from the other night. The two phantom presences had been so real to me in that instant just before my inevitable death that there’d been no separating the fact from the fiction.
On any other day, I could see Anne’s “ghost” standing at the end of the road and think, “She’s not really there; it’s just me being crazy,” and that would be that.
On any other day I could hear voices or replay old dialogues in such clarity that I’d forget that I was in the now and not still way back in the then, but then I’d remember (when) where I was and that would be that.
I still wasn’t sure whether it had been Anne’s “ghost” working alongside the inexplicably convenient replaying of Mia’s conversation or just me putting the pieces of the past together just in time. I was on my ass—beaten and, quite frankly, still scared nearly to the point of shitting my pants—and I didn’t even have a moment to ponder whether I owed my continued survival to the paranormal or good, old-fashioned deduction. I was about to decide that it didn’t matter, that being alive was really the only important thing in that moment, when two very aggressive realities that superseded that otherwise relieving thought arose:
Firstly—I heard Mia’s voice, actually heard her real, live voice this time. Which meant that she was here… now… at the absolute worst moment.
And this, God help us all, was because of the second reality that arose:
My old man and my brother hadn’t just been killed by their motorcycle accidents.
There’d been a “Phase Two” to their assassinations.
And with me surviving “Phase One,” the Carrion Crew was likely to be implementing that phase any moment…
Right here…
Right now…
Right where Mia had arrived.
Fuck…
I thought I knew pain by that point. I thought my body had experienced some pretty aggressive aches and pains in its days. I thought, with all that I’d been through throughout all those years, I’d gotten a good taste of the grand banquet that was all the world had to offer in the “OUCH” department.
> I thought fucking wrong.
Pain, known to me at that moment on the molecular level, is tearing yourself off the ground right after surviving something like that and having to haul ass as though nothing is wrong…
Because things were about to get a whole hell of a lot worse!
“Hello? Nine-one-one? Yeah, I’ve been in a terrible motorcycle accident. What’s that? Oh, right, well… I had to bail off of an overturning bike, twisted my ankle pretty bad in the landing, and then got royally spanked by that very same overturning bike and knocked flat on my ass. Did I mention that I slammed my ribs into the steering column on the bailout? Or how I smashed my knee on the handlebar when I lifted off? Yeah, ‘cause all that hurts pretty bad, too. The ribs? Well, I guess if they’re not cracked they’re at the very least decently bruised? My knee? Well, if you’re asking if that son-of-a-bitch is swollen up like a cantaloupe and about as eager to bend as a solid length of mahogany, then, yeah, it sure-as-shit is! What’s that? My ankle? Is my ankle broken? Not sure—haven’t had a chance to check, actually. Why? BECAUSE MY GIRLFRIEND AND I ARE ABOUT TO BE FUCKING SHOT!”
“BACK!” I shouted, forcing myself to run through the bright-hot agony assaulting my leg with every step.
The pain was brilliant, almost religious in its transcendent form.
If I weren’t struggling so hard to fuel my lungs and call out to the others I might have actually taken a moment to laugh at just how magnificent that pain was. Though I’d never considered myself a religious man before that, I was ready to believe in a god then-and-there solely because there had to be an artist of a deity occupying a cloud up there who’d created this sort of suffering.
In a word: “Ouch!”
It was like some sort of twisted symphony. My left ankle feeling like a bowl of broken glass that the bottom of my leg had to stir around inside just to keep my foot landing flat on the pavement. Then, when my left foot was finally free to leave the ground, my right knee got the spotlight; the process of bending it was an outright act of strength that felt like I was busting boards across my kneecap, then the thrumming, burning sensation of straightening it just before the dreaded impact—the tremor of each new step traveling up my calf and hitting the joint like a baseball bat. And then there were my poor ribs. At least two had suffered some sort of rough impact in the accident, and with every jarring step it felt like they were being splintered and scraped against one another. It was as if some sadistic carpenter had just torn through my midsection with a length of sandpaper and started going to work polishing various lengths of bone. Every now and again, as if to mix up the chorus of this twisted symphony, I swore I could feel the bones dragging against something soft and spongy—something that didn’t much like getting dragged against. I tried to remember enough from my high school biology days to get an idea of which organ I was likely scraping with my jagged rib fragment, but it occurred to me that I’d never been very good at biology even when the information was still fresh.
CROWS MC SET-TO LOAD Page 89
