Hard Roads

by Lily White

  Finally lowering the gun, my dad looked over at me. His voice was soft when he spoke, completely opposite of what it’d just been. “I heard what happened to you, baby girl. I’ve got something I think will make it up to you.”

  Henry stepped around me, pushing me back in such a way that my father wouldn’t notice. JD stepped back with me, but didn’t touch me, not while my father still had a gun in his hand.

  “Joker, I don’t think…”

  “Shut up, Henry. She’ll love it.” Pointing his finger up in Henry’s face, my father’s voice took on a tone of maniacal pride and humor. “You don’t know my girl. She’s the toughest woman you’ll meet in your life. I made sure of it. I didn’t go around picking her up every time she cried. I let her pick herself up and she’s a stronger woman because of it.” His voice got louder with each word. “What I have out back will be easy for a girl like her. She’ll feel better because of it.”

  He turned to me, the flash of insanity obvious in his eyes. “I’ll even let JD watch so he can see what a real man does for his daughter or any other woman in his life. That pathetic piece of shit beside you can leave here knowing what a REAL biker can do.”

  Moving around Henry, my dad reached out to grab my arm, dragging me over the pebbled lot and to the back of the house. I was stumbling over my own feet because of how quickly he moved.

  “You’re going to love this, Holly. I’ve held onto him for two days, but it was worth it to give you this.”

  One word stuck out in my head more than the others. I pulled back to try and slow him down, but he was tugging so hard that he practically dragged me out where I could see the tall bonfires in the backyard. Four men stood around, poking at something close to the fire and laughing as they did so. Music blared in the background and the sight was like something you would see at any wild party.

  “What do you mean ‘him’? My voice was loud and I was hoping he could hear me over the music and laughter.

  It didn’t matter anyway, because the painful scream I heard boom out of the yard answered my question for him. Looking over at the fire, I finally noticed what it was that the men were poking at and my jaw dropped in response.

  “I got him for you baby. I got Hector. Fucker came sniffing around here the other night, not knowing that it was me who was in the house. We killed four of his men and buried those fuckers out in the desert, but I saved him for you. I’m going to let you get even with the sonofabitch for everything he did to you.”

  I heard every one of my daddy’s words, but I still couldn’t believe what he’d done. Fear gripped me hard and my body hurt from how tightly I was strung. Everything came rushing back to me at once and while I was caught in the terrifying grip of my memories, Hector’s screams tore out over the distance.

  Time stood still and I didn’t notice when Henry and JD had walked up beside me.

  “Daddy, I don’t want…”

  “Oh yes, baby girl, you do.” He grabbed my arm again and dragged me closer to the fire. My stomach was already messed up from the fear and tension I’d been carrying the entire day, but it was all I could do to keep from throwing up when I got closer to that fire.

  Hector was barely recognizable as the man who’d held me in that stained white room. Every minute I’d spent there flashed across my thoughts and I focused on his face, noticing how his skin was pink and his eyebrows and hair and been singed off. Glancing down at his body, I saw that his clothes were missing and his body was even redder than his face. They’d stripped him of everything, tying him up so close to the fire that it was slowly cooking him. He writhed in agony and the cuts and bruises from where they’d beat him were obvious against the angry color of his skin. But it wasn’t until I looked down even further, that I was brought to my fucking knees.

  They’d sheered him of his cock and balls, leaving nothing between his legs besides the dried blood from the massive amount that he’d lost.

  “Oh my god…” My voice failed me and my words trailed off. Tears leaked from my eyes and for the first time I noticed the faint stench of burning flesh in the air. The men standing around Hector poked at him with sticks, the tips sharp enough to tear into his skin. Because he was practically cooked, the skin fell away from the muscle where they struck him.

  Turning to look at my father, I saw a broad smile on his face. He truly believed that this would make me happy and I realized that he was just as insane as Diablo. He was so far gone, in fact, that he couldn’t see that what he was doing was disgusting and wrong.

  “Daddy. I want you to kill that man right now, okay. Just shoot him and get it over with.” My voice shook with apprehension.

  He looked down at me with confusion in his wild eyes. Shadows danced over his face from the flames that roared up in front of him.

  “No. I won’t. ‘Cause you’re going to do it.” While pulling his gun from his side again, he reached down to grab me and bring me to my feet. He placed the warm metal against my palm, smiling as he handed me the weapon. Reality snapped back in place and anger rolled through me more violent and dangerous than the worst kind of storm.

  Gripping the gun in my hand, I stepped back in the direction of where JD and Henry were standing. My father looked at me, his eyes glancing over my shoulder at the two men before looking back at me.

  “Well, aren’t you going to do it? KILL THE FUCKER! He turned you into a fucking whore or don’t you remember that?”

  I was shaken to the fucking core by what he was doing. His words were intended to hurt me, to make me so angry that I lost my head and killed Hector as they tortured him. My dad stood there, clueless to the fact that he was reopening every wound that I had worked so hard to close. My stomach wretched and my hand shook as I raised the gun in my dad’s direction. His eyes widened and I fought to steady my breath. My heart thumped fast and strong in my chest and I felt JD place his hand on my back.

  “Holly. Think about what you’re doing. You need to put down the gun.” JD spoke softly behind me.

  Reaching up with my other hand, I steadied the gun on my father. His men turned around from where they were torturing Hector, immediately going for their own guns when they saw where I’d pointed mine.

  My dad extended his hands out, turning and calling out to his men, “Put them down. None of you motherfuckers better even THINK about pointing a gun at my baby girl.” When they listened to him, he turned back to me, begging me with his eyes not to shoot him.

  “Holly, baby, you’re pointing that gun in the wrong direction. The man who hurt you is over by the fire. I’ll catch the other fucker too if you want. I won’t let anybody hurt you ever again.”

  I don’t know where my voice suddenly came from and I don’t know who the hell was talking through me, but every bit of fear, anger and pain I’d felt over the past two months was suddenly flooding out of me on venomous words that I screamed in my old man’s face.

  “YOU are the fucker who hurt me. Not JD or Diablo or Hector or anybody fucking else! It was YOU! You are the reason any of it had to happen at all!” My hands shook and the gun waved around in front of me. “If you hadn’t gone around fucking people over, none of them would have wanted me. I would have been safe!” I took a step to storm towards him, but JD laid his hand heavily on my shoulder to prevent me from moving forward.

  “Baby?” My dad’s voice faltered, fear breaking that one word apart.

  “Don’t ‘baby’ me! Don’t do it. I’m not your fucking baby! I stopped being your baby when my mother died because of you and you left me the fuck alone and stopped caring about what happened to me.” My throat hurt from the volume in which I screamed, but I had to get this out, had to make him understand that I wanted nothing more to do with him. Henry’s words rang in my head, but despite the fact that I still loved my father, I couldn’t believe that he cared anything about me.

  “I’m leaving, daddy. I’m heading out with JD and I’m never coming back to this fucking hell hole of a life you’ve given me. If this is what a ‘
real’ biker can do, if this is what you think life should be like, then I don’t want it.”

  Swinging the gun to my right, I shot Hector in the side of the head, quickly putting the sick fucker out of his misery. I’d been taught many years before how to use a gun and my aim was dead on. His head burst open from the hollow point bullets, the blood splashing out onto the ground and into the fire. Every person stood still, their eyes locked to me and the gun.

  Swinging back towards my father, I tried to speak calmly again. “I’m leaving now, daddy, and you’re going to let me. You understand me? You’re going to let me walk out of here with JD.”

  Tears finally broke free of my eyes and I stepped back into JD’s hands. He placed them on my shoulders, his body completely still.

  My dad’s mouth opened and closed several times as he attempted to speak. Finally, he swallowed hard and nodded, a tear slipping from his own eye.

  JD, Henry and I walked backwards as we left the backyard. Finally lowering my gun, I looked at my father one last time and turned to move around the house in the direction of the bikes. But I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy, not with a man who’d lost everything in his life except for one thing: his daughter.

  “Holly!”

  I turned back, raising my gun, but not in time to stop him.

  The blast boomed out around the yard and a flash of white exploded in front of my father, the bullet striking someone behind me. I turned to watch as both Henry and JD fell to the ground and by the time I turned back to my father, he held the gun to his head.

  “I’m sorry, baby girl, I am. But I can’t let you live your life with that man, not after what he’s done. And I can’t let myself live with it either. All I wanted was to go find your momma. I can’t live without her. I was too much of a fucking coward to take my own life, so I pissed people off in hopes they do the deed for me. I never thought it would end up hurting you.” Another tear escaped his eye and my jaw dropped when he said, “Forgive me, baby girl.”

  “Daddy! No!”

  My hand went out in the air to stop him just as he pulled the trigger, his body rocking sideways from the blast before slinking to the ground.

  Falling to my knees, I felt something warm and thick on my knees and over my palms and I pulled my hands up to see the dark crimson red of the blood that covered them once again.

  Epilogue

  Holly

  The water was hot and soapy as I dropped an armload of dishes into the sink. It was one in the morning and I was in the back kitchen of Martha’s Dine and Dash, located out in the middle of nowhere, Florida. We did pretty well because we were situated just off an exit of the main highway and this stretch had very few food fast food chains or convenience stores in the area. Mostly our patrons were truckers or families passing through, but the theme parks, beaches and other attractions in the state kept up a steady flow of customers.

  The dinner rush had been busy this evening and I was exhausted from being on my feet. I wanted to go home and go to bed, but our dishwasher called in sick and both the waitress and hostess had to go home to their families. I offered to stay behind and clean up because I felt bad keeping the women away from their babies.

  Three years had passed since my father died and in that time, I moved away, ending up in Florida after realizing how much I missed the heat. It’s weird, I know, but my body was built for sunshine and I worked my way down here after attempting my first winter away from the MC in the state of Tennessee. The snow nearly killed me and I vowed never again to live through it. After running out of money and not really having an education to fall back on, I took a job waitressing.

  “You here all alone?”

  I jumped to hear someone talking behind me. Turning around quickly, my hands splashed water from the sink so that it fell down onto my feet. I groaned when it soaked down into my socks and sneakers.

  “Shit, Cass. You scared the crap out of me. What are you doing here?”

  Cassidy shrugged her shoulder and her red hair bounced. “Pamela called me and told me you were here alone, so I was out anyway and stopped by. Need a hand with those?” She pointed at the pile of dishes in the sink. “I don’t think you should be washing dishes with that new tattoo on your wrist. I think you’re supposed to keep it dry.”

  Glancing back, I looked at the pile and grimaced. “Yeah, that would be really fucking good, actually.”

  She stepped forward grabbing the sponge out of the sink and handing me the towel. “I wash, you dry.”

  We shot the shit for the forty-five minutes it took us to clean the dishes and the diner. Most of the time, Cassidy was rambling on about the new guy she was dating. She was in love and I smiled to remember what it felt like on some nights when I was staying with JD in the cabin: the small flutters in my stomach and the way my words would jumble or get lost entirely when I looked at him.

  Thinking of those days caused my heart to hurt, an actual physical cramp in my chest that made me reach up to place my hand over it. Looking down, my eyes traced over the thick black letters, “JD”, that I had tattooed on my wrist several days prior.

  “Earth to Holly. Hello?”

  I looked up and Cassidy was smiling. Blue eyes sparkled out at me when she said, “We’re done. The place is clean. We can both get the fuck out of here and go have some fun. The bar up the road is having ladies’ night. We should go.”

  I shook my head “no” almost immediately. “I can’t. It’s the three year anniversary and I just need to get home and…”

  “Oh come on, Holly. You can’t come out for just one drink?”

  I shook my head, sorrow touching on my thoughts and exhaustion ravaging my body. “I’m sorry, Cass. I just want to go to bed.”

  Her bottom lip pouted out and she gave me a sympathetic look. “Well, okay babe, but is it going to be like this for you every year? I mean, I get it, you’re hurting, but sometimes you have to leave the past in the past in order to move forward, you know? Shit happens and sometimes it really fucking sucks, but you can’t keep focusing on it or you’ll never escape it. Trust me, babe…” She placed her hand on my shoulder and I flinched away, the pain consuming me too much to allow the slightest bit of comfort. “…I’ve had to let go of a lot of baggage and I’ve been my happiest since moving on.”

  Tears burned at the back of my eyes and I nodded, desperate not to let her see the pain in my expression. “Yeah, I know.”

  When I looked up, she was staring at me as if she was studying me, attempting to see through the façade I’d worn for three years. I’d never given up my secrets of what had happened to me before I came to Florida. I didn’t want to weigh other people down with sympathy or remorse for what I’d been through. It was my burden to carry and it was one that I would hold close to my heart and protect from the outside world.

  “Alright, well drive carefully. You look tired. Head straight home and text me to let me know you made it. Okay?”

  Giving her a fake smile, I nodded my agreement before turning in the direction of the back door and heading out to my car. It was a piece of shit little thing. Red like the one I’d been shoved into when Hell’s Rebellion had taken me so many years before. However, I couldn’t fault it for all of its flaws because the engine was good and that made it reliable to get me back and forth between home and work.

  Driving along the dark road, I fought to keep my thoughts from going back to the road that led to the deserted house in Nevada. Even more than that, I fought my thoughts from going back to what that house represented. So much blood, pain and death had been poured over the arid ground, sinking in and taking with it the memories of men who’d touched my life in one way or another.

  I’d never forgiven my father for what he’d done. I could never forget the torment and pain that I endured as a result of his inability to forgive himself for what he’d done to my mother. Sure, he’d taken her from a life where she was abused and hurt, but he’d thrown her into another life where she had to endure a differen
t type of pain. I’d thought about it for so many hours and days during the passage of time since his death and I decided that maybe it had been me that kept her in the life she’d chosen with him. Maybe I had been that small piece of light in the darkness of the MC that had kept her youthful and alive. Given the amount of time she’d dedicated to me in those years, it made sense and I hoped that she would be proud of me for having escaped, for making something of my life where I could be in charge of my own destiny. No longer was I held down by the hand of a man, but instead I was lifted up, set free from a life of bikers and crime, of drugs and weapons and all the bad things that come with it.

  Regardless of whether my mom herself would have ever escaped, I guess it only mattered that she’d survived. Like her, I’d found my own way to survive and I’d put the past where it needed to be: behind me.

  Pulling up to my small, one bedroom house, I looked over the garden that I’d been working on for several months. It felt good to sink my hands into dirt that was damp with life, not arid and washed out like the Arizona desert where I grew up. The bulbs I’d planted were beginning to peek up through the soil and I smiled to see new life.

  Stepping inside the house, I set my keys and purse on a side table in the front hall, grabbing my phone out to send a quick text to Cass like I’d promised I would. The house was dark and I attempted to navigate my way to the bedroom. Passing through the living room, I banged my knee on the coffee table and found myself hopping around on one leg as I held the injured knee and muttered every cuss word I could think of under my breath. Fucking shit hurt.

  Passing into the bedroom, I stripped off my dirty work clothes and moved into the bathroom to shower and wash away the turmoil of the workday. The warm water over my skin relaxed the tension in my muscles and brought a smile to my face. After climbing out and drying off, I looked down at the tattoo on my wrist and blew out a heavy breath before applying some A&D Ointment over the thick black letters.