by eden Hudson
He started to shuffle forward, out of the cell. Every time my side bumped against his body, pain exploded like a sledgehammer into my bones. I felt my hip and ribs shatter. I hooked my arm around his neck and my heart and lungs liquefied on the next impact, pooling in my chest.
I whimpered. I couldn’t take this. It was just a cruel joke, a new kind of torture. He would take me to the edge of Hell, then I would look up and realize he wasn’t there at all, that I was still on the floor of my cell, feeling the flesh stripped from my bones.
“Stay with me, Tiff,” Colt said. “Eyes open.”
He was still lurching forward, but looking down at me. His face and the rest of his skin glowed from within. I could see the dark, blue-green Whitney eyes I remembered so well, but this time without a trace of that feral spark. I smelled him again. The smell was him, it was Colt, though parts of it were missing. The smell was him without the baggage, without the pain, without every drink he’d ever drank to put himself to sleep, without the tattoo ink, without the gun oil or that unholy, unbalanced fury. He was whole. Healed.
I opened my mouth to ask him what he was doing, to tell him that he was supposed to be at peace, not here, not suffering again, but my vocal cords were wrecked. Nothing came out. When I swallowed, my throat closed. It wouldn’t reopen. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs fought for air. I let go of Colt’s shoulder and clawed at my throat.
He dropped me and hit his knees beside me.
“It’s not real, Tiff. It’s not really suffocating you.”
But it didn’t matter. I couldn’t breathe. My fingernails dug into the flesh of my throat, trying to open my trachea. Blood ran down the sides of my neck. Chunks of meat stuck under my fingernails. Air. I needed air. I—
“Tiff, no!”
I shut my eyes.
*
And she was there in my arms. Shannon, my beautiful Shannon. I ran my fingers through her hair. She rested her head on my chest and the bleeding I’d felt over the past year finally stopped.
“Tiffani, I love y—”
I kissed her before she could finish the lie, tried to crush it with my lips.
This couldn’t last. She was as far away as she’d ever been. Thinking about him. She didn’t want me. She wanted a distraction.
Love me, my heart begged. Want me, Shannon. Please. You don’t even have to do that. Just please, please, care that I’m here. Care that it’s me.
She didn’t.
When it was over, when she smiled at me and I saw her come back to herself and realize that it was me she’d fucked—that pain was a sharper emptiness than anything I’d ever felt. Her stomach turned just looking at me. I could never be the one she wanted. I could never be the one she needed. All I could ever be was one more thing for her to destroy herself with.
I should’ve said no. When I felt the panic flare up in her chest, I should’ve stopped her. But I wasn’t strong enough. I let her go back to killing herself just so I could imagine for a second that someone loved me.
The Music Behind the Story
If you've read any of the Redneck Apocalypse, then you know how important music is to Tough. With that in mind, here are some playlists of the songs that influenced the writing, remind me of the characters, or bring me instantly back to each story.
There are a lot of good songs in here, but the one that actually got the ball rolling on Halo Bound was “Tulsa Time” by Don Williams—that plus my youngest sister's disgust with singers who release a cover of an older, already popular song as their first single. "It's cheating," she told me. And I started to wonder…if a guy was willing to stoop low enough to cheat like that, who's to say he wouldn't stoop low enough to steal somebody else's voice to sing it with?
Halo Bound
Tulsa Time -- Don Williams
Country Road -- the Lacs
Odd One -- Sick Puppies
Dustbowl Dance -- Mumford & Sons
Country Man -- Luke Bryan
Flirtin' with Disaster -- Molly Hatchet
Hell on Wheels -- Brantley Gilbert
Big Time -- The Howlin’ Brothers
Somewhere in the Between -- Streetlight Manifesto
Free Bird -- Lynyrd Skynyrd
Right Now -- SR71
Chasin’ that Neon Rainbow -- Alan Jackson
Local God -- Everclear
Country Song – Seether
Take Me to Church – Hozier
This Year -- The Mountain Goats
Death in His Grave -- John Mark McMillan
Devil Town -- Bright Eyes
Cold, Cold Heart -- Hank Williams, Sr.
For My Next Trick I'll Need a Volunteer -- Warren Zevon
Long Trip Alone -- Dierks Bentley
Wake Up Older -- Julie Roberts
Lion’s Den
I Like It Heavy -- Halestorm
Motorcycle Driveby -- Third Eye Blind
Desperately Wanting -- Better than Ezra
Hang on St. Christopher -- Tom Waits
I Miss the Misery -- Halestorm
When It All Goes Wrong Again -- Everclear
Girl Like That -- Matchbox 20
Summerland -- Everclear
Unwell -- Matchbox 20
The Only One -- Melissa Etheridge
Love Love Love -- The Mountain Goats
Hell Bent
Speed of the Sound of Loneliness -- Alabama 3
My World -- Sick Puppies
Kryptonite -- 3 Doors Down
My God is the Sun -- Queens of the Stone Age
Daily Observations of a Crow -- Marty Stuart
Rose Tattoo -- Dropkick Murphys
Strawberry -- Everclear
Smashing a Perfectly Good Guitar -- John Hiatt
Porcelain Monkey -- Warren Zevon
Bullet -- Hollywood Undead
Work Song -- Hozier
Too Sick to Pray -- Alabama 3
Keasby Nights -- Streetlight Manifesto
God Killer
Unclouded Day -- Hymn
Frank and Jesse James -- Warren Zevon
Sad-Eyed Lady of the Low Life -- Alabama 3
All My Friends and Lovers -- Counting Crows
LA Song -- Christian Kane
I Will Not Bow -- Breaking Benjamin
Are You Washed in the Blood? -- Hymn
You're Going Down -- Sick Puppies
Fire and Brimstone -- Link Wray
Shadow Magnet -- Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke
Murder of One -- Counting Crows
Come On Up to the House--Tom Waits
Lift Your Head, Weary Sinner -- Crowder
Be My Escape – Reliant K
I Will Wait -- Mumford & Sons
Come Thou Font of Every Blessing -- Hymn
Chitlins, Whiskey, and Skirt -- The Gone Jackals
Hell Bent: Director’s Cut
This is the Hell Bent Director’s Cut with deleted Scout POV scenes. If you’re looking for the originally released version of Hell Bent, click here.
“A struggle for Heaven and Earth. Where there is one law: Fight or Die.
And one rule: Resist or Serve.”
~ Alex Krycek
PART I: BELIEVE THE LIE
Scout
I pulled into the high school parking lot, drove up on the sidewalk by the locked front doors, and shut Jax’s car off. Some people might’ve considered it bad luck to drive your dead almost-brother-in-law’s piece of shit vehicle to the scene of your sedition, but not me. I was Scout Fucking Ives. I made my own luck.
Even though it was almost sunset, the heat felt like murder. I flipped down the visor mirror to check my makeup. Still good. No sweat-runs. I know revolutionaries aren’t known for their good looks, but people are way more likely to follow a moderately attractive leader than they are an ugly one.
I was tempted to drive around with the windows down until everybody else showed up, but turning circles in the empty parking lot didn’t fit the vibe I was going for.
Instead, I picked up one of the spray pa
int cans off the passenger seat and rattled it while I practiced my rabblerousing speech. I imagined Tough at the front of the crowd, those gorgeous blue-green eyes piercing mine, that knowing look. Harper might’ve started bitching every time I brought up busting out of this prison camp, but if I ever said it around Tough, there’d be this moment of silence. And he would look at me—really look at me, like he could see all the way down to my soul. Tough knew that we were the same. He and I were meant to be free.
Emma’s S-10 rolled up, followed by Drake’s little white sedan. Everyone piled out—everyone being six people.
“Seriously?” At least half of the people I’d talked to in History of World War II had sworn they would be ready the second the call went out. And almost everybody in third block Art. Emma had said plenty of people from her class were interested, too. “Dammit!”
This was exactly like last month when I organized that walk-out on Coach Isewell because he was an unfair kapo and he needed to see that the only power he had was the power we gave him. Everybody acted all gung-ho about it beforehand, but when the time came, only me and Cash actually got up and walked out.
I threw the spray paint can into the seat and opened my door. Gravel crunched under my sandals.
“Is this everyone?” I asked Emma.
“Everyone I could get on such short notice.” She dug the toe of her flats into the dirt. “Sorry.”
“No, you know what, it’s fine.” God forbid we start a fucking uprising without advanced notice. “It’s not your fault people are complacent cowards who would rather bend over and dream about being free than actually getting out of their rut and fighting.”
She stared at me. I tried not to roll my eyes. Ninth-graders are such sheep.
“Pass out the spray paint,” I told her.
While Emma got the cans out of Jax’s car, I turned to face the six people—besides me and Tough—who were actually committed to breaking free of this hell-hole disguised as a town. At least they’d all dressed in black. They could follow instructions. That was something.
“You all heard what happened earlier,” I said. “Tough and Colt Whitney fired the first shot. They sent Mikal to Hell in the middle of the Armistice Celebration Welcome Ceremony. They sent the message out to the world.”
Emma went through the group—Six people? That’s more like a squad than a group. A sedition squad—through the sedition squad, handing out cans of red spray paint.
I straightened my skirt and forced myself to shake off the disappointment. This was my first public speech. People were going to remember it for years to come. It didn’t matter whether it was to six people or sixty, it needed to be inspiring if I was going to effect change.
“Big, bad Warden Kathan thinks the Whitneys are acting alone,” I said. “That his only problem is holdovers from the first war. He doesn’t know that right under his nose—in the very school he’s been forcing us to attend, the very school where he buses in fucking kapo brainwashers to convince us that it wasn’t his fault he murdered our parents, where he tells us that we’re free as long as we do what he says when he says how he says who he says—that his greatest threat has been growing. Warden Kathan doesn’t know that we’re done living under the NP thumb, done being their bitches, done selling our souls just to stay out of solitary. The inmates are getting restless.”
“Fuck yeah!” Drake said.
Somebody clapped. Everyone was nodding. Power sang up and down my arms and legs like electricity. I forced myself to frown. Serious. But inside, I was giddy. I could work with this. I had wanted an army, but I would take an enthusiastic squad if that was all I got.
“Tonight we send out the message loud and clear.” I went to the car, reached into the window, and pulled out a length of chain and one of the padlocks. “Starting with this shithole.”
While they watched, I took the chains to the front doors and looped them around the handles a few times, then pinned the ends together with the lock and snapped it shut. A leader leads by example, not force, as Sun Tzu would say.
“Emma.” I held out my hand. “Spray paint.”
She gave me a can. I shook it up, popped the lid off, then went to work on the doors. It took longer than I thought it would—I had never spray-painted anything before—but I got the job done.
I stepped back and admired my handiwork.
CLOSED BY ORDER OF THE INMATES
Finally, I let myself smile. “The warden’s about to find out that this town doesn’t belong to him anymore.”
Tough
I leaned back against the textured motel wall and stared at the dead guy. Some of the dead guy, anyway. His body was still hanging onto one arm and one leg. The missing leg was next to that dry, brownish streak on the room’s nasty-ass blue carpet. The severed arm was over by the bathroom door, leaking what was probably the last couple drops of his blood onto the tile.
My heart beat a couple of times and my lungs started breathing on their own. Drinking off a living human can make it easier to seem alive for a while because the blood fed the crow magic. Wasn’t that what Tiffani said the other day? Back when I was still going to save Desty and live happily ever after with her. I’d already thrown away my shot at Heaven to save her and Colt, but back then I still had the fantasy.
Now I had an ex-girlfriend who was probably nailing my mortal enemy, a dead best friend I had murdered, a batshit crazy brother, and a complete fucking inability to get drunk enough to deal with any of it.
My throat went dry again. I swallowed and took a breath through my nose. Everything in the room faded out to gray and black ash. Except the blood. That glowed bright red against the bathroom floor.
I could probably lick most of that up if I tried. It would burn going down, just like liquor always did before it hit me. For now maybe that would be enough.
Except it hadn’t been enough before. Not even when the guy had screamed and Mitzi and I ripped into him.
The vamp part of my brain tried to react to that memory, but I shut it down. This whole thing made me feel like I was playing one of the Blood City video games with Jax. Like I was pushing buttons to make stuff happen, but it wasn’t really me doing it.
“Hello? Tough? Earth to man-whore.” Mitzi was standing naked in front of the mirror, lip gloss paused halfway to her mouth. Not a real practical place to be standing, considering she didn’t have a reflection. But you couldn’t tell Mitzi that. She did the weird shit she did and she didn’t give a fuck what anybody else thought about it. “I said you’re not going to do that stupid new-vamp thing where you freak out, are you? Because it’s not like you even deserve to be upset. How many people have you killed now, anyway? Like a hundred during the NP-Human Conflict, right?”
That didn’t count. I hadn’t killed any humans during the war, just mortal NPs—and not very many because I’d only been eight when fighting broke out. Probably ten kills, tops, and about half of those with help from Sissy.
So far, for humans, I’d only killed my brother, my best friend, and now this random vamp groupie.
Mitzi went back to spackling on the lip gloss, then rolled her lips together and popped them at the mirror. “You killed a human, you used to be human, mortality this, death that, good, evil, Heaven, Hell—I can’t stand that shit. Just accept what you are now and that you get off on killing. That’s all I want—one newly made vampire who doesn’t go through a postmortem existential crisis.”
Listening to her talk was like having someone jam sixteen-penny nails into my eardrums and twist them around. I hated silence—I always had—but her voice was so much worse. But I couldn’t tell her to shut up because I didn’t have a direct vamp connection with her. To talk to Mitzi, I’d have to go through Tiffani. Call me crazy, but I didn’t really want everyone in town to know that I’d gone running back to the psycho-bitch who’d helped her dickhole husband steal my voice and screw me over.
“—because if you think you can lie to me about how much you like it, remember I’ve been a vamp
ire since before your grandparents were born. Probably your great-grandparents. I am a predator. The apex predator. I know what a rush it is to—”
Man, I hated Mitzi. I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten how much I hated her.
The vamp speed kicked in and I was across the room before I realized I was moving. But Mitzi was faster and stronger than me, and she had a better handle on her reflexes.
She slammed me to the floor. “That is so cute. As if you could take me down. Even—”
I grabbed the back of Mitzi’s head and tried to pull her down for a kiss—anything to stop that godawful noise coming out of her mouth—but she laughed and smacked my hands away like they were nothing.
“You want to play, Romeo? Let’s play.” She raked her fingernails down the side of my face. The skin shredded.
I winced and kicked the floor. That nasty burning-hair, rotting-blood, hot sauce smell filled the room as vamp venom oozed up in the scratches.
The pain faded way too fast and the vamp healing started up. If I was going to hurt, I wanted to hurt worse, to never stop hurting. I grabbed Mitzi’s hand and put it on my chest. She took the hint and tore in.
The healing kicked in before she could do any real damage.
“Ooh, somebody likes that.” She hopped onto my lap and dug a line down my stomach. Then a handful more down my neck. She smirked at the way I arched into her fingernails. “Now who’s the psycho-bitch?”
Still you. In fact, I was willing to bet my undead ass that she had her sex knives hidden in the room somewhere. I made a slashing motion with my hand and mouthed, Knives?
“And here I was worried you weren’t going to be any fun now that you’re cold.” Mitzi grinned. “I think this might be the beginning of something wonderful.”
Desty
Night settled in as I made my way back toward town. The walk from Colt’s cabin was probably less than five miles, but it felt infinite. Trying to swallow the self-hatred from breaking up with Tough had really worn me out.
