by Jackson Kane
Deep within each room, there was a distant entity watching me patiently. Barely noticeable at first, just an errant dark splotch on a beautiful, bright horizon that lingered at the edges of each bypassed life. The further down the hallway I traveled, the more different the rooms were before their doors closed. Sometimes, they’d be a city scene where I was a successful entrepreneur or a peaceful farm where I milked cows. Infinite, unique possibilities like countless paintings in an endless gallery show.
However, despite the radical differences in each room, the black ink splotch always remained in the distance until it too began to change into a being of swirling, blackish smoke that coalesced into a dark parody of a person.
Then it stepped forward.
As her face came into view the closer she got, I could tell that form was my own dark reflection—my elongated, nearing-dusk shadow given a mind of its own. That Star regarded me with contempt. “I’m coming,” it had said, but not with words. Her approaching gait had an unhurried tempo of resignation or inevitability.
Chilled to the core, I raced down the hallway as fast as I could to escape.
In each room I passed, that same figure stepped ever closer to the doorway before being blocked at the last moment by the closing door. Faster and faster, I ran or stumbled, and the closer she came to reaching me. More closing doors blurred passed. All these chances at different lives slammed shut, every one of them imprisoning that dark version of me.
I then noticed the hallway was coming to an end and that all the doors had shut. This realization made me afraid for another reason. I had been the one closing these doors all along as I passed to stop the shadow version of myself from getting out.
Had I wasted all my chances at a better life because I was too afraid to face her?
The end of the hallway barreled toward me at breakneck speed, and now there was only one door remaining. It opened just before I crashed into it.
The dark figure stood expectantly in the threshold, her wispy arms set wide, waiting in an open embrace to receive me. The room behind her was starkly empty, just a white canvas.
I was done running or falling, and, weirdly, all of my anxiety drained away. I was filled with a sense of belonging like I had found my real path. At the last moment, I embraced the darkness, and as I collided with her, I came to understand that I was the impostor.
This shadow version was the real me.
Together as one, we tumbled into the unpainted room behind her. Now whole, we could paint it anyway we wanted. The real me whispered one word in my ear before I woke... “Finally.”
My roommate found another place to hold her dream meetings after that, and wherever it was, I wasn’t invited.
Now with everything that was going on inside the police station, I simply walked toward the entrance completely unnoticed. Right by the front door was a rack with the town’s brochures. I grabbed the Super 8 pamphlet and slipped outside.
Luckily, the car had a remote key. I hunted around the parking lot, clicking the button, until a tan, mid-2000 Nissan Altima winked its headlights back at me. The car door opened, and I was in. Easily the craziest thing I’d ever done! I mean, I did shoot a guy, but that was barely a choice, and I wasn’t the one to kill him.
This, though, was all me. My hands were shaking as I opened the brochure. On the back was a small map that showed the area surrounding the motel. I scanned through the car windows and found a street sign. Then I found it on the map and plotted a course. The motel was actually very close. I would be there in no time.
The car started right up, and that thrill surged within me. I pulled out of the parking lot and was on my way.
I’m stealing a fucking cop’s car!
If I got arrested or killed, it’d be because of the choice that I made. Right or wrong, I refused to be along for the ride in my own fucking life. For the first time in my life, I made my own decision. I was done running or falling. I was embracing the real me. The one who belonged with Remy
Chapter Eighteen
Remy
“I’ll take that shirt too.” I peeled off another fifty from the wad of cash I’d taken from the convenience store and dropped it on the cracked, dirty counter.
“Somewhere between where you are and where you’re going, there’s a SUPER 8!” quietly hummed the digital advertising display above the dark-skinned man’s shiny head as he regarded me skeptically. The electronic buzzing noise of the overhead light’s bad wiring brought a metallic taste to my mouth.
Hades, I mused, glancing around and thought about the book on Greek mythology I had in my back pocket that I’d lifted from the convenience store before I set it on fire. While probably not one of the twelve labors of Heracles, this was exactly the type of motel that would be on the way to Hell.
Cerberus probably even shit out back.
“You want my shirt?” The man across from me smiled nervously as he tentatively handed me the room key. “I can’t. It’s not for sale.”
My eyes burned from the road, the night, and all the bad decisions along the way. On the best of days, my patience was extremely limited. I grabbed him by the throat and the shirt, jerking him onto the long check-in desk that was between us. The paperwork I wasn’t going to sign scattered across the floor.
This wasn’t the best of days.
He could feel my acrid breath on his face as I looked down at him with last-chance eyes.
“Okay! Okay! Take it!” he squealed.
I did.
I took the long way around to my room. The building was shaped like an L with the main office at the end of the shorter arm. An awning stretched out another twenty feet to allow for bus pickups and drop-offs. My bike was parked between the employee dumpster and the cement wall opposite the back of whatever passed for the motel’s kitchen. A passerby couldn’t see my Kawasaki unless he was looking for it.
I removed my vest from the bike bag and folded it so that none of the patches were visible then brought it up to my room with me. I couldn’t risk anyone finding my bike and seeing my colors here.
This was Los Lobos territory.
Whores and drug dealers littered the stairs and hallway with their battered flesh and cheap advances. Their carrion glances flitted to the gun butt that popped out of the waist of my bloodstained jeans then darted away. If they had any intention of propositioning me, it quickly dried up.
They moved out of my way as I approached.
“Room 210,” I growled loudly, turning back to them once I reached my door. I caught a few of the tougher-looking druggies sizing me up, no doubt wondering if I had anything worth stealing. “Fuck with me.”
My challenge and my scanning, squinting eyes made their idle chatter peter into uncomfortable silence as they abruptly found other—safer—things to look at.
I slammed the door behind me like a gunshot. The sound shattered that stifled silence that came from the absence of deals being made and pleasures being promised.
None of them would bother me tonight.
The room was clean enough. Queen bed. Tube TV in an equally outdated wooden hutch. The sink and mirror were on the back wall to the right of the small bathroom that only had a toilet and shower. I tossed the vest on a chair near the door, took a piss, then a shower, and finally sat naked at the end of the bed, rubbing the last of the water from my light beard. All I could do now was sit and think.
I’d been pushing it all away, burying my feelings of what happened to Bren under layers of distraction, violence, and sex. He was my brother after all. Half brother really, but we never gave a fuck about the distinction. It was the same way with Top.
Blood was blood.
Bren was a likable kid, not Einstein, but he was sharp as a motherfucker. Occasionally, I’d bounce a problem off him just to see how he’d deal with it once he was a full member. He was clever. Sometimes he’d even surprise me with an idea so good that I actually used it. He just saw through the bullshit to the simplest answer.
“Cut off their
feet and see how well they stand,” I repeated one of the lines he’d given me once.
He would’ve done really well in the ranks eventually. He might’ve even made vice faster than me, and I made vice under Top faster than anyone in Veins’ history. I didn’t ascend that fast because Top was my half brother but because I was that fucking good. I had a knack for retaliation, not just the beatings. I knew the science behind sending a message.
Rival clubs running guns in our town? We’d have broken into their houses at night and made their families watch as we cut off their trigger fingers. Some dumb fuck turned tail on a Veins’ loan, expecting to never pay it back? We’d pick him up, give the guy a gun, and force him to rob a convenience store—always in another county—to pay off his debt. We’d film the robbery as insurance for his silence and take our cut out of his take—plus an additional inconvenience fee, of course.
It used to be fun. I loved it. Even met a girl that—
I shook my head. I didn’t want to dig up that old hurt.
Maria’s death drove a wedge between the MC world and me. I slowly became jaded. Nihilistic. Had I been more vigilant and done my fucking job, I would’ve seen that war hero fuck before Bren even turned the corner. I might as well have given my brother that steaming chest wound myself.
My hands clenched and unclenched. The seething anger in me started to bubble at all the mistakes I’d made.
I gazed up and was greeted with my own black reflection staring back at me through the glass on the darkened TV. The one shitty lamp I had on cast me in a truly evil light. The truth of the image was so starkly apparent, I didn’t recognize it as me right away. It captured me, and I couldn’t look away. My face tightened, my mouth filled with saliva, and my eyes began to gloss over with water.
The reflection seemed to look right through me.
I knew that if I cried, the man in the TV mirror would not. Could not.
He had no eyes.
The light behind me highlighted only my most protruding features. Brow, nose, chin, cheekbones, and the edges of my hair. Everything else was diminished shades of gray or outright black. A hollow darkness thinly veiled in a human suit.
Was that what I’d finally become?
“Fuck you!” I couldn’t contain the fury any longer and sprang at the TV. My knuckles became rage-fueled pistons, striking the curved black screen like an old steam engine laying track spikes at full tilt.
The TV exploded. Jagged cuts ran up both arms, but I couldn’t stop the blows from landing until I had blown out the back of the console. I found myself screaming, and tears streamed down my face. I wiped them away with bloody arms and stumbled back a step. My bare foot crushed some of the many glass shards on the floor.
My reflection retreated into the mirror over the sink on the far wall when I came into view. The man’s face in the mirror was covered in blood and looked like a rabid animal in need of putting down. The image of me was as honest as I was angry. I needed to kill it. To kill myself.
“Fuck off and die!” The reflection mirrored my scream.
I reached into the wooden cabinet and tore out the destroyed TV. The flimsy screws that attached the cabinet to the wall, along with discolored chunks of drywall behind it, snapped and battered against me as I hurled the TV across the room.
The television punched through the sink mirror and embedded itself into the wall. There was a beauty in the way the sad light caught the raining glass fragments from the mirror as they tumbled down into the porcelain sink and onto the 1970s brown-and-orange-patterned carpeting.
There was no stopping it now. My apathy fell away, and all that remained was the demon. My mind was redder than the blood smeared across my face, arms, and chest.
Naked and screaming, I tore that fucking room apart.
The wooden desk was in ruin, the couch and bed overturned, the TV stand toppled.... Finally, all the lights gone. My limbs and core pulsed with spent rage as I collapsed along the back wall. I could hear my blood pumping through my ears. The adrenaline high made me strong, numbing the pain. And then, like a flash in the pan, it was gone.
Alone, exhausted, and covered in my own blood, I laid there on the floor. Just another pain junkie getting his fix—except that my drug of choice wasn’t something you could buy. It had to be bought by fucking up and poisoning everything around me.
The red behind my eyes faded. I knew what this was. I was so weak that instead of facing my problems head-on, I cowered behind a wall of brutality. I hated this life. I hated Bren for dying. I hated Top for accepting him into the club so early. I hated what happened to Maria. And I hated what almost happened to Star.
But most of all, I hated myself.
I hated leaving Star.
She was beautiful, innocent, and courageous, and… she had a strength about her that was unmistakable. Most women would’ve folded up and disconnected when faced with that much horror.
Not Star. She stared at it right in the fucking eye.
I took Star because I needed to save at least something that night after Bren died, and she did look a little like Maria. Same build, same cute ass. Shoulder-length, light brown hair, large almond eyes, button nose. Star was a little prettier. The glasses and slightly chubby cheeks really did it for me.
I couldn’t stand by and watch Top or Tee or anyone put slugs into her. And I sure as fuck wasn’t about to let Top or, even worse, that piece of shit Rio put anything else into her.
I rarely played things by ear. I was methodical in keeping her from danger. The distraction in the bar, the power play on Muse—everything had at least some measure of planning. Everything except vouching for her in the bar and killing Rio. I never expected to let myself be pushed that far. I didn’t know what I initially wanted with her, but I knew that if I didn’t keep her alive, I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself.
I looked around at the hotel room in ruins and sardonically chuckled.
This is what it’s like to live with myself.
I would’ve rather left Star at Muse’s when we all rode out, but standing over Rio, I knew that option was off the table. I hadn’t just chosen her because of who she was—a pretty girl in way over her head who needed a hero. I also didn’t save her just because she looked a little like my dead wife. I chose to rescue Star because, in her, I saw that one last piece of my soul that hadn’t been reduced to ash like everything else in my life.
That final spark of goodness within me would have died along with her.
I turned toward the exterior light filtering in through the dirty windows and wiped more tears from my eyes. I missed her. I didn’t know what could’ve been between us, but I was so scared to lose her—to lose that part of myself that went when I threw her away instead.
I screamed again, the pangs of loss tearing up my insides worse than anything the glass had already done to my skin.
Right before I walked into that convenience store earlier tonight, my imagination was filled to the brim with dread. I saw Star caught in some crossfire, bleeding out in the filthy road, that shining spark fading from those beautiful auburn eyes.
I’d never scared easy, but that image terrified me.
At least with the cops in this town, I knew she’d be safe. That’s all that mattered. I could die knowing I’d done at least one worthwhile thing, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. I would do horrible things to keep her with me, just to see if there was hope for us.
That’s why I needed to give her up.
Hope was far more dangerous than men with guns. Men could only take your life.
Hope could tear your fucking soul out and rip it to shreds.
Chapter Nineteen
Remy
The slow, high-pitch creak of my hotel door opening didn’t wake me. It was the footsteps crinkling the glass on the carpet that did it. My pistol was in my hand before I even had my eyes open. I heard a woman’s self-muffled scream when I pointed it toward the noise.
The morning daylight bitterly flo
oded the room, blinding me. Once I saw that there was only one figure in front of me, I lowered my gun and motioned for the girl to shut the door. That sobering light needed to die.
The shitty curtains cut the edge, but the room was still lit enough that even with the door shut, the aftermath of my tantrum was laid as bare as I was. I hadn’t moved from the spot I collapsed upon last night and didn’t give a thought to putting on clothes yet.
“Who the fuck are you?” I demanded.
She didn’t answer.
I could see her surprise as she surveyed all the damage. It didn’t look like this is what she had prepared herself to walk into. Was she with one of the dealers outside? Was she supposed to lower my guard so that other people could rush in and take me out? I whistled, startling her from her survey of the room.
She winced under my stare, and it quickly became obvious that she wasn’t a threat.
That was a shame. I’d have liked to see how that played out.
Deciding I needed a cigarette more than answers at the moment, I tapped my face with a two-finger smoking gesture and pointed to a pack on the ground near her.
She carefully picked it up and tiptoed it over to me through all the debris.
I snapped the pack out of her hand and bumped up a cigarette. My whole body ached from the ass kicking I gave the room last night. The dull muscle pain with exertion mixed with the sharp, continuous sting from the multitude of fresh cuts. The sink was completely fucked. I’d have to reposition the upside-down couch-chair to get to the shower.
“Fuck.” No lighter. I riffled through the glass and displaced plaster around me to no avail.
She said something and handed me a lighter. That wasn’t English or Spanish. Wonderful.
“Know any English?”
She looked at me regretfully, shrugging at my question. At least she had some comprehension.
