Riding On Fumes: Bad Boy Motorcycle Club Romance (The Crow's MC Book 2)

by Cassandra Bloom

  I slapped myself again.

  I caught the driver of the car beside me, like me waiting at the red light, staring over at me. His eyebrow was arched, his face twisted into one part worry and one part confusion. He saw before him a madman seated on a roaring, fiery steel beast, sharing the road with him. He was afraid for what might happen when that light turned green.

  He should be, I thought, once again hearing both sides of my brain sync up there.

  He should be, said Logic, because you are clearly not well.

  He should be, said Defense, because you don’t owe the world anything anymore.

  Great, another part of me, a neutral part this time, thought, I’ve got a war between Logic and Defense waging in my head.

  With a brain like ours, all three of “us” thought together, who needs the Crow Gang versus the Carrion Crew.

  Still staring directly at the worried and confused driver stopped beside me, I raised my hand to myself again. This time I closed my hand, made a fist, and outright punched myself square in the jaw.

  Something must have been knocked loose from it, because a solidly whole part of me then thought, That one’s for you, Mia.

  Then the light turned, the angry red eye clocking out so that a green one could start its seconds-long shift, and my chopper carried me away. I couldn’t say for certain where I was going. I’d traveled this particular stretch of road close to a dozen times already in the random, nonsensically serpentine circle I’d been driving in since I’d left my condo. As bewildered and devil-may-care as I’d been then, I’d gained nothing in regards to senses or a mind for direction.

  It’s finally happened, Logic mused. You’ve gone and lost it. Lost all of what little mind you had left. Now the paths you ride makes as much sense as the paths you think.

  I sighed at that. Logic had a good point, but, then again, wasn’t that his purpose? I imagined him as a form of myself dressed in a snooty business suit with pretentiously treated and styled hair; a form of myself that I’d likely hate to love and love to hate. This, I thought, was ironic, because wasn’t that how I felt about myself already? Or maybe that was just Defense toying around in my subconscious, calling him a “nerd.” Certainly sounded like something he’d do. Defense, I figured, would thereby be the complete opposite, aesthetically speaking. He’d be dirty with grease and blood—As much your own as others’, Logic reminded me, trying to sway me from that path—and wearing more leather than any one man had any right to wear. He’d be sneering, always sneering, and his hair would be tussled from hours of masturbation, because Defense didn’t trust anyone enough to take them to bed with him. Defense would be scarred and scabbed with the wounds of loneliness, because so long as you kept to yourself you knew you could trust who you were with.

  But that isn’t true now, Logic chimed, is it?

  Shut up! Defense snarled.

  But it had been hours since I’d last seen Mia. Hours out on my bike, heading nowhere, and all to myself. Hours with nobody but myself to talk to. With nobody else to fight, Defense had grown weak; left to bite like a feral dog at its own tail. And with the heat of battle behind me—the toxic cloud that had been churning in my guts purged—Logic was free to contemplate.

  As one would expect—as I’d certainly expect—Logic was right. Defensiveness had gotten the better of me, gotten me to say some ugly things without much filter or reflection on what was said, and now that I was on my own—scarred and scabbed—it wanted to continue the fight all the same.

  And, lucky for him, I seemed to be three Jaces in one: the good, the bad, and the random spectator. If it was just Defense all on his lonesome he might be stuck chasing his tail for all eternity, but with Logic and Neutral sitting across from him he could war it out all he liked; have a regular party all his own.

  All on my own.

  Jace, Neutral called out then, considering all this along with me, you’re fucking crazy.

  My chopper sputtered a little then, and I saw that the gas meter had been on “E” for who-knew-how-long.

  Riding on fumes, huh, girl? I thought, absently patting the fuel tank with my free hand while trying to ignore the painful truth in Neutral’s not-words. Then, sighing, I thought, Aren’t we all? and pulled into a gas station.

  Heads turned my way as I coasted up beside a free pump, and I could almost imagine the worried and confused driver following my movements with his eyes and letting out a sigh of relief that the self-beating psycho on the fire-hog was no longer sharing his road. A deep, hot rage flashed up at my own thought of the random driver considering it “his” road, and I realized that Defense was so eager for a fight that he was willing to wage it with a fictional version of a person I’d only spotted in passing for a few seconds.

  Turning off the chopper’s engine and swinging myself out of the seat, I decided that was a dangerous way to live.

  Logic thought that was a good step in the right direction.

  Defense wasn’t thrilled with it.

  Neutral wondered if this gas station had decent beef jerky.

  ****

  The tank was full, my bladder was empty, and the saddlebag, for better or for worse, had close to thirty-bucks’ worth of beef jerky in it. Though I had no way of knowing if the prescription would work, I’d decided to self-medicate with leathery strips of black pepper, citrus-lime, and teriyaki flavored steak-wads.

  That, and the cheapest, nastiest-looking liquor on the shelves.

  Because what went better with black pepper, citrus-lime, and teriyaki anything than exhaust-heated cotton candy flavored alcohol?

  I wasn’t sure what these purchases amounted to in the long run. Lord knew the cashier had given me a pretty funny look as he’d rung them up. Then, adding another twenty bucks’ worth of gasoline to the tab, the pockmarked little shit eyed the tank I’d specified, spotted my bike, and his face had edged a bit closer to something resembling the driver I’d been stopped beside at the light. I’d toyed with the idea of punching myself again—I was overdue for another “reminder” according to Logic—but decided against it. Between visiting the dank, smelly restroom and loading my arms with my goodies, feeling more and more dead inside with every step I took, I’d finally come to decide on a place to go.

  It was not a happy place, and so it was not a happy decision. Truth be told—and Lord knew I couldn’t lie to the three thought-processes chattering in my head—it was a very exhausting decision to make.

  And so, unhappy and exhausted—feeling still more and more dead as I ran through the motions—I didn’t have it in me to beat myself in front of a gawking twerp.

  No time to hate myself later. I was already fully committed to hating myself now.

  Still unsure of what the purchases amounted to (other than a truly heinous form of self-punishment), I dumped the proverbial medication into the saddlebags of my chopper, fueled up, and started off, reviewing my menu while I aimed myself for my morbid picnicking spot.

  You’re going to make yourself sick, Logic, Defense, and Neutral all agreed. You’re going to make yourself sick, and probably puke your insides out until you die.

  Good, I thought, no longer certain which part of me I even was anymore. At least I’ll be in the right place.

  Black pepper, citrus-lime, and teriyaki flavored beef jerky washed down with lukewarm cotton candy flavored vodka…

  The groundskeeper at the cemetery was in for one hell of a mess if I didn’t survive this.

  ****

  “Hey, Anne,” I finally said.

  I’d been standing in front of her grave long enough that I’d come to lose track of how much time it had been. It felt like hours. But, even being crazy, I knew that time had a funny way of moving in places like this; had a funny way of moving in situations like this. Death had an especially strange way of warping time. Caught up in the throes of death, either in its grip or witnessing somebody you cared about wrapped up in its clutches, it could creep by so slowly you were certain you were being tortured by each se
cond or it could be over so fast that you’d never come to fully know what happened.

  In a single night—not long ago and yet somehow too long now, it seemed—I’d experienced both versions. I’d watched my entire world rolled out as though somebody had replaced my eyes with monitors playing the slow-motion footage of the scene, and I’d been certain I could leisurely walk beside the ambulance as it drove off. I’d have dragged each foot along, pacing myself against the inching tires, and run my fingertips along the cold, lifeless siding of that vehicle in a mockery of how I used to trace her form when she lay beside me. Then, only moments after that, a man had pulled a gun on me—meant to put me in an ambulance all my own—and put a scalding-hot reminder of what a dumb, worthless fuck I am right over my heart. And, looking back on that now, that part was all a blur. Everyone else had seemed to move with superhuman speed—like everyone had stepped out of a Flash comic book and wanted to act out the entire scene with their powers.

  Introducing The Incredible Adventures of Mister Sixty-Three! In this issue: Mister Sixty-Three Versus the Crow Killer in… “T-BUILT SENDS HIS CONDOLENCES!”

  Also featuring Jace-the-Too-Slow-Joke…

  Yeah, death had a funny—fucking HILARIOUS!—way of warping time. Death, and places that remembered death, celebrated death. Places like this: a cemetery. The cemetery, as far as I was concerned. A farm where people planted corpses, watered them with tears, and slabs of concrete grew. A forest of dead names where not even the flowers left in their memories sustained their vitality for long. Worn paths from decades of dragged foot traffic scored bald spots on the surface of the ground as uncertain and random as the lives of those buried beneath it.

  It was a place where the grass grew in grayer than it would in other places.

  It was a place where the songs of birds sounded hollow and wrong.

  And now—for this one miserable and stupid son-of-a-bitch, at least—it was a place it was a place where time didn’t want to make sense.

  For who-the-fuck-knew-how-long I stood there, silent and time-warped as death itself, before a smoothed-out chunk of etched rock. Standing there and resenting it. I resented it for everything it was and everything it was supposed to represent. And, along with it, I resented myself.

  And then the cycle began.

  It was a cycle that I’d come to know quite well, but one that I’d thought—I’d hoped—that I’d gotten over; one that had numbed and, I’d thought, fallen away like a rotted stump from a healthy body:

  Pain led to resentment. Resentment to bitterness. Bitterness to anger. And, of course, a few yaddah-yaddah-yaddahs later, and—you guessed it, class—we reach hate. Self-hatred, to be precise. It was a speech that anybody from this century might have been able to recite back, and in a certain ever backwards-talking muppet Jedi’s voice, no less, but it took a true master in the art of hatred to know it in their hearts rather than just in their brains. It was a Padawan’s hate that shot only forward and never back. Only a Jedi master of the deepest and most vile of scorn knew its true form, not of an arrow pointing at others but of a tangible ozone that all-but surrounded anything and everything. It was in all things and cycling back to its owner until they knew nothing but that hate. And then, hating everything like they did, it came back to them. Like a sort of echolocation, the process of hating—truly hating—wasn’t complete until it bounced back and came home.

  It wasn’t enough to just hate the rock, the master knew, the journey wasn’t over until you hated yourself for hating the rock.

  Hello, hatred, my old friend…

  Thinking of that tombstone and the bones buried beneath it stirred up a fresh gumbo of hatred in my guts. Two-hundred-and-six adult bones, plus another two-hundred-and-seventy that would never fully develop. Those numbers had been a part of me for a long time. In a morbid fit of desperate curiosity, eager for some dark trivia to rub like some form of mental ash into the open wound of Anne’s recent death, I’d taken to Google to find out how many bones had been carted off in the ambulance that night. Two-hundred-and-six. The adult body contains two-hundred-and-six bones. Interesting and painful as that thought was to me at the time, Google decided to twist the knife. I type in “how many bones are in the human body” and out comes the simple answer… and then a secret prize you didn’t know you wanted.

  Two-hundred-and-seventy bones at birth. Google told me, its bold, all-knowing script still somehow clear despite how blurred with tears and drunkenness I’d been at the time, that the total number of bones decreased to that aforementioned two-oh-six by adulthood.

  Thanks, Google; so my dead pregnant wife represented—what?—four-hundred-and-seventy-six bones? As though the pain of losing a mother and unborn child wasn’t bad enough, the number of bones they represented had to serve like some sort of cosmic taxation for just how terrible the whole fucking mess was.

  Fuck you, God, I remembered thinking after consulting my cell phone’s calculator, what gives you the right to take an extra sixty-four bones from my life?

  There was a lot of hate in those times. I hated my family and my gang for getting us roped into that shit, of course. I hated T-Built and the rest of the Carrion Crew for taking it to that point. I hated the cops, the medics, the mortician—Who gave him the power to declare that a dead person was dead? I’d thought, followed sickeningly with, just because they’re no longer alive. And, of course, I hated myself for not being able to stop it; for not being able to just die alongside them. I blamed God—any one of them, who was I to theologically judge at that point—for any of the other points of hatred I’d already made, and I also blamed him-her-them-it for not just taking the extra sixty-four bones from me.

  If a tax was so desperately wanted; so absolutely needed, I’d thought, why not just take it from me and leave me crippled physically for it? What good does it do to break my mind and leave the rest of me in tip-top order?

  Fuck…

  I really thought that I’d left all that behind when I started feeling for Mia.

  But now…

  So it was that I finally—finally!—after staring at her tombstone and reminding myself how to truly hate all over again said, “Hey, Anne…”

  And, go fucking figure, Anne’s tombstone said nothing.

  Or maybe she’s just taking her own sweet time, a thought chimed, though I couldn’t bring myself to decide if it was Logic or Defense. Eerily enough, it seemed like something either would say.

  I muttered “fuck” and then smashed the top off the vodka bottle over the top of a neighboring headstone. It was sloppy and loud and probably a good way to wind up with a throatful of glass, I knew, but there was a million-and-a-half miles between knowing and caring. Jason Presley had covered enough miles that day, I decided as I started to chug from the broken, jagged mouth of the bottle; no way I was gonna try to cover one more, let alone a million-and-a-half. Besides, my throat already felt like I’d been gargling with razorblades—I’d caught myself in the middle of a few screaming fits on the road, and who knew how many I hadn’t caught myself in between there and here—so what was a bit of broken glass?

  Realizing I truly must have been cursed, I swallowed a full gulp of room-temp, sugary-sweet liquor with no shards of ouch to distract from the taste.

  “O-oh sweet merciful god of fuck!” I coughed around a disgusted retch that decided halfway through to turn itself into a dry heave—my guts refused to give up the payload, though; so I simply lurched over my dead wife’s grave—until I finally managed to stave off the fit. Then, wiping off my trembling lips with the back of my chapped hand, I took another pull, shuddered, and whispered, “Never will I ever wonder what a clown’s cunt tastes like…”

  Anne’s tombstone still said nothing, so I said “fuck” again. This time, when I moved to drink from the busted bottle, the motion of tipping my head back sent me into a half-spin. Worrying that I’d either cut my face or fall (and then probably cut my face), I opted to sit down and did so promptly against the marker that was suppos
ed to represent Anne and our baby. Then, wrestling blindly in the other saddlebag—because it was just classy to park one’s motorcycle across a row of graves, wasn’t it?—I yanked one of the bags of beef jerky and tore the top away with my teeth. I braved another pull of vodka, imagined an orgy of drunk pixies dragging their assholes across my tongue, and then pulled a strip of dried steak free of the mystery bag with my teeth.

  Teriyaki.

  I puked on myself before I’d even gotten a chance to try chewing.

  Then, washing down the remnants of sick with a splash of the vulgar vodka, I said, “How’d it ever get this far?”

  I’d been meaning to ask Anne’s grave, talkative as it had been so far, but realized I was extending it to whatever might listen. Three non-existent hands raised from three non-existent bodies in the non-existent classroom of my painfully existent mind. Rolling my eyes, I stayed any possible out-loud responses my subconscious personae might care to offer with a mouthful of dreadfully salty meat.

  My stomach toiled, tightened, and gurgled something that I was certain translated to “FUCK YOU!”

  I clenched my teeth against the threat and told my belly that it’d take the abuse or I’d let the whole machine drown in puke right then and there.

  Realizing that—HOLY SHIT!—I meant it, my stomach settled and took what was coming, no doubt crossing itself and reciting some gastrointestinal rendition of the Lord’s Prayer.