by Avelyn Paige
HEAVEN SENT
Avelyn Paige
Copyright © 2015 Lauren Davis as Avelyn Paige
EBOOK EDITION
Cover Designer: The Final Wrap
Editor and Formatter: Ready, Set, Edit
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it to the seller and purchase your own copy.
Cold. All I can feel is a deep chill blanketing my body. My eyes open to complete darkness as a voice calls to me. Its muffled tones send shivers down my spine with every garbled word. A sense of familiarity floats around me as its words become clearer.
“Run, Dani,” it pleas from beyond the black veil shrouding the room. “Escape while you can,” it continues. Panic courses through my veins. Where in the hell am I? Why can’t I see anything? The pleas go unanswered as my voice fails to render sound.
“Help!” I scream internally, “Please, fucking help me!”
The voice’s call fades with each word.
You need to get the hell out of here, Dani. You need to move. Find a wall and escape, I coach to myself. A cold chill of air sweeps into the darkness encompassing me as I try to feel the space around me. My fingers plunge into a dense, sticky liquid as I crawl forward, causing my body to slide with each movement. A hard surface is finally inching its way under my fingers.
Crawling upward, I splay my hands against the cool wall. “You’re on your feet, Dani. The hardest part is over now. Time to find a door or a light switch, something to get us out of here,” my internal coach continues.
Keeping close to the wall, I finally find a switch. Flicking it upward, the light shines brilliantly. As my eyes adjust to the light, my hands come into my vision. A scream barrels out of my throat when I see the sticky, red blood covering my hands and clothes. My heart races as I frantically wipe the blood away. Blood begins to pool at my feet, inching toward me. Rushing away from the blood, I fall backward into a solid but warm obstacle. Before I can turn around, hands grasp my arms as a person’s hot breath trails down my neck.
“Hello, Dani,” a different voice whispers in my ear. “Welcome to Hell. You’re mine now,” the voice crackles as my body is pulled into black oblivion.
I scream as I wake up, huddling against the cool glass of the bus window. Instinctually glancing at my hands, I find them clean. A sigh of relief forces my body into relaxing when I notice several sets of eyes staring at me. “I’m fine,” I tell the others that sit around me on the bus. “It was just a nightmare. I don’t sleep well in moving vehicles.” The lie spills from my mouth just as I’ve practiced in preparation of my nightmares happening in public. I know that simple statement eases those around me, but it does nothing to ease the pain and fear enveloping my body. I know the truth about the origins of my screams, but I keep those close to my heart. If any of the people surrounding me on this bus knew the truth, I’d be in handcuffs immediately. These nightmares are far from fictional nighttime fantasies. They are my subconscious’ attempt to make me relive the worst night of my life.
It’s a memory of the darkness that lies back home. The origin may be washed from my hands, but it will always stain my soul, never will it be washed white from its contamination. That night ruined my semi-happy life. I had a family and friends that loved me, but love isn’t something I can afford to rely on any longer. It can’t keep me safe from him. That gruesome night set me on my escape path. I left behind the girl I was and the life I had in Cleveland when they died that night. I had no choice but to leave while the demon plaguing my life slept. It hurt to leave the only place I’ve ever known, but I’ve forced myself to never look back. I would end up just like them. This was the only way I could have some semblance of peace and serenity in my life. I can only hope that I will find them in the destination that lays ahead of me.
Just thinking about their faces allows tears to pool in my eyelids. Their faces and voices linger in the back of my mind for hours after every nightmare ends. You need to stay strong if you’re going to survive this, Dani, I chant to myself. I can’t let the darkness win. I need to fight to survive.
Wiping away the tears, I stare out the window of the bus. It’s been three days since I watched Cleveland shrink in the distance. Ohio has been my home my entire life and I just left it in the past like a dusty, unwanted photograph. I didn’t want to leave, but the things that happened in that house forced me to escape. I tried to stay but I knew that if I did, things would only get worse. With nowhere else to go, I took a taxi to the closest bus depot in the middle of the night and never looked back. The bus wasn’t exactly the quickest way to travel, but it was the cheapest. Cheap is the only thing I can afford right now; I am running on financial fumes and need to find a new source of income quickly.
The time I’ve spent on this bus has given me time to plan out what my new life might be like. I decided quickly that staying under the radar and finding a job would be the hardest part. Even if I manage to procure a fake ID, I will never be able to find work that involves the usage of my social security number. Being paid under the table and off the books is my only alternative and will likely be a pretty shitty job.
I just hope that the $760 in my pocket will secure me a clean room and food until I figure shit out, but life in California isn’t exactly as economic as it is in Ohio so I will need to be frugal with my spending. To be honest, I don’t know why I chose California as my destination. Maybe it was the fact it was the first Greyhound bus that left the Cleveland station when I barreled into the bus depot at three in the morning. Or maybe because it was as far away as I could get from the house of horrors. Honestly, I didn’t care where I went. My need to get away from the situation outweighed my ideal destination. Had I chosen, I would have gone down south to New Orleans or Florida, but my cards were dealt for California.
I had grabbed a map before I boarded the bus to use as a research tool for the bus’s destination. I’ll admit that Upland, California looks promising on paper. It is a small suburb on the outskirts of the city and has everything I need from thrift stores to Wal-Mart. Even the housing options don’t seem too outlandishly priced. Using the Wi-Fi on the bus, I browsed housing options on my iPad. I needed to live on my own, but rent for a one-bedroom apartment was far more than I could handle. Knowing I could be tracked using my old e-mail address thanks to all of those crime shows I used to watch with my dad, the first thing I did was create a new one; I wasn’t about to let my newly found freedom be snatched away because of an e-mail. I spent much of my first day on the bus browsing a rental website looking for something I could afford. It wasn’t until today that a woman had emailed me back and even offered to pick me up from the bus station to look at the house. The rent was affordable at 400 dollars per month for a split of a two-bedroom furnished apartment. The landlord even pays the utilities, making it even more appealing. As long as it isn’t a whore house or a drug den, I’ll likely be calling it my home in only a few ho
urs. I just hope my potential roommate isn’t a fucking nutcase.
The bus cruises through the desert and soon I find myself stepping out of the bus and into the sweltering heat. They may not have humidity here but even without it, 102 degrees is still fucking hot. The bus depot has beautiful flowering trees everywhere, which surprises me since I assumed with the heat that nothing but cacti could even grow here. Only having the picture she sent me to go by, I search the crowded station for my potential roommate. I finally spot her leaning against a post. She looks normal enough. Her bleach blonde hair is drawn upward into a ponytail. She’s wearing what I would call the typical California look with a tank top, shorts and flip-flops. She seems like a low-grade Valley girl, but at least she doesn’t seem like an axe murderer. I can at least deal with a Valley girl. Living with an axe murderer would mean blood stains on the carpets and a loss of our security deposit or well, my life. She scans the crowd several times looking for me before I approach her.
“Are you Dani?” she asks, flipping her long ponytail behind her.
“Yes, are you Erica?”
A huge smile spreads across her face. “That’s me!” she squeals in delight. “Please, call me Ricca. I hate Erica because it makes me sound so prim and proper. If you can’t tell, I’m about as far as you can get from either of those ladylike traits.” Her giggles and excited tone puts me at ease. She’s friendly and seems like a fun person to be around, which is good for me because I need someone like that in my life. I can already tell that she’s a little ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. “Are you ready to go see your new place? I really hope you'll like it here. I’ve had so many creepy scumbags trying to move in with me that I felt like my apartment was starting to be a half-way house for the lost and perverted. One guy asked me if he could do my dirty laundry. Gross, right?” Her laughter is loud and contagious as she throws her head back with her giggles.
A perfect stranger has managed to make me crack a smile for the first time in days. Her bubbly personality is just what I need to feel normal. I’m tired of showing the world my resting bitch face. I need to have fun with the time I have left in this world. She directs me to her bright yellow Jeep. I try to stow rolling my eyes because I knew she’d have something bright and bubbly for a vehicle to match her personality. I slide across the warm seat and toss my bag between my feet as she peels out of the parking lot and turns to merge onto the freeway.
I try to count the cars passing us on the crowded freeway, but after a few minutes, I give up. The amount of people I see driving on the highways blows me away. Sure, Cleveland has its periods of rush hour traffic during the workweek, but I’ve never experienced anything like this at one o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Ricca weaves through the traffic like a seasoned pro and finally takes an exit ramp. She laughs when she sees me clutching the seat-belt strapped across my chest. This woman drives like she could be in NASCAR. Turn after turn, I feel like she has her foot planted on the floorboard until she finally pulls up along the street by a small apartment complex. It doesn’t seem to be too dangerous of a neighborhood since there are kids playing basketball in the small park next to the complex, seemingly happy and safe. Just like the bus depot, the streets are lined with flowering trees and dotted with large palm trees Californians sure know how to beautify their state, but it makes me wonder how in the world do they keep them watered with the intense drought they’ve had over the years.
I note that one palm tree, in particular, looks odd. “What’s wrong with that palm tree?” I ask Ricca. “It looks different than the others.”
Ricca laughs hard when she sees what I’m pointing at. “That’s not a palm tree. That’s a cell phone tower that looks like a palm tree.” Looking at it again, I can see the wires hanging out of it.
“Huh, you don’t see that back home.”
Ricca jumps out of her Jeep and motions for me to follow her. We snake through the garden linking the buildings until we pass a doorway with the number three nailed onto it.
“Now, I want to warn you about something before we go in. The previous tenant really liked colorful paint. I’m like ninety-nine percent sure she was a hippie because the place reeked of weed when I moved in. It took me weeks to get the apartment aired out and not smelling like Woodstock.”
The apartment is just as small as I figured it would be for the price with a couch and a single easy chair sit in the living room surrounding a small flat-screen TV. She leads me through to the very small kitchen with just a small countertop, stove, microwave and an apartment-sized refrigerator. It’s much smaller than the kitchen I had in the house in Cleveland, but I doubt I’ll be cooking anything bigger than a microwave meal until I can save up more money. Steaks and crab legs aren’t exactly on my gourmet menu so it will have to be macaroni and cheese cups and ramen.
Next, she leads me to the bedroom, and I finally realize what she meant about the bright colors. A vivid blue that you could probably see from space covers the walls. “Shit, that’s bright! It’s like the face of the sun is shining from the walls of the room. You need sunglasses to walk in here. How you do stand it?” I say while squinting from the brilliant pigment.
“I warned you that the old bat was an extreme hippie. My room was a neon-orange with yellow swirls before I re-painted it hot pink.” Hot pink doesn’t exactly tone down the brightest of a room, but I guess she was using Ricca logic. We both laugh as I make my way into the room. The room is simply furnished with a bed, small dresser, bedside table, and lamp, but even the linens on the bed that seem to be clean. “Well, what do you think? Will this work for you?” Ricca asks. I see hope building in her eyes that I will take it. This is the only decent, affordable place I found online and she seems nice. Hell, I’d have taken a shit hole as long as I didn’t have to deal with a bat-shit-crazy roommate.
“I’ll take it.”
Ricca jumps in the air, screaming like a teenage girl at a pop music concert about to see the boy band she’s crushing on. “I’m so excited! Once you get settled in, we’ll go grab dinner at In N’ Out since it’s the California tradition for newbies. Everyone needs to christen their first day in this beautiful state with a burger from that place since those burgers are so so damn cheap yet oh so good. I’ll take you tomorrow to meet the landlord and get the paperwork signed so we can make it official. My last roommate was paid up until the end of the month so you won’t owe rent until the first of the month. I'm SO SO excited! EEEEK!” she delightfully squeals.
She leaves me to unpack the meager bag I brought with me. I put the few outfits I stuffed into my makeshift luggage into the small dresser and put the picture of my parents next to the bedside lamp. Sitting down on the bed, the mattress creaks from my weight. My eyes turn to the photo, which sends all the emotions and painful memories I’ve tried to stow away on my journey here flooding back to me. I need to stay strong for them and try to make the best of the time I have here since I know that they’d want me to try and be happy. I may have to work my ass off to secure what my parent’s dreamed for me, but I will have it for as long as I can hold it. The past that lies hidden in Cleveland will always linger and threaten to take away my freedom, but I can’t think about that. I survived its horrors and escaped as soon as I could, and no one will take away my choices again because I’d rather be dead than go back to that life. I only hope it doesn’t come down to that.
Today started off just like any normal damn day. Woke up hungover as shit, fucked the club mama who warmed my bed last night until she was sore, and went to Church, but as soon as I walked into our meeting room, I knew today was going to be fucked all to hell.
“Nice of you to join us, Hero,” says the president of our club, Raze. The smirk on his face tells me he knows what I was doing. Most of the guys in this room probably got their dick wet this morning, so the fact he’s calling me out is bullshit. Shrugging my shoulders in return with a shit-eating grin on my face, I can’t help myself from not dishing it back.
“Sorry, Prez. Just had
to get my daily dose of vitamin T & A for breakfast. I’m a growing boy, you know,” I say with a laugh while taking my seat next to him. Raze just shakes his head at me while the other men surrounding our table all laugh. Tyson, our club treasurer, nods in agreement and leans close to me.
“Was the pussy worth being late?” he asks in whispered tones. The night’s activities might have been hazy, but the pretty little pussy I pounded into for over an hour this morning satisfied my cock.
“Isn’t good pussy always worth it, Ty?”
“Fuck yes, brother, you never pass up a chance for that grade-A choice pussy you picked up last night. Wish there was more of it around here,” he states with a laugh as Raze clears his throat.
“Now that Hero’s gotten his rocks off and his ass in his seat, we can finally start Church,” says Raze. The meeting moves on as normal as we discuss our upcoming charity runs to raise money for a local kid with cancer. Timmy is on the road to recovery, but his medical bills nearly bankrupted his folks. The Heaven’s Rejects MC may be filled with tattooed, meat-head bikers that would make even a devout nun rip her panties off and offer herself to one of us, but we take care of our friends and neighbors. We take care of those who take care of us, and Timmy’s dad took care of some warrants we needed scrubbed off the books for one of our newer brother’s. Sure, Upland, CA is typically a pretty quiet suburb, but it has its moments like any town. Before the club was established in 1986 by Raze’s dad and our former Vice President, Jagger, thugs hiding from the authorities called Upland home. Those bastards were the first to go as the club cleaned up the town. We have enough shit to deal with our own version of outlaws. At least our guys knew to keep their illegal shit behind closed doors back then.
The Heaven’s Rejects MC is known for our protection services. We make our money with the guns attached to our shoulders instead of the guns at our hips... Our phone rings off the hook with business proposals from concerned rich daddies worried about their perfect little whore daughters going out for a night on the town to the occasional politician needing some muscle for a back alley campaign money deal. You can say we cater to all walks of life as long as the money is good,.. We do the dirty work that no one else will handle We don’t carry the 1%ers patch marking us as an outlaw club, but we don’t exactly follow all the rules of decent civilian society either. You could say we toe the line of being civilized.