If this thing was going to kill us, it would likely have started already. But other than being scared right out of my mind and nauseous from the smell, I felt fine.
“Just don’t touch any of the bodies,” I told Leo. “Or… or any of the blood.”
He nodded once and ran back into the road. He counted the corpses scattered there in a choked voice. Did he hope that one of his friends had made it out of this open-air charnel house? But it didn’t take Leo long to give up that hope. I could see it in the slump of his shoulders.
Instead, Leo began sifting quickly through the other bikers’ saddlebags. He came up with handfuls of cash. Was he really worried about the money? But Leo was also carefully collecting weapons and wallets, too.
Cleaning up evidence, I suddenly realized. When the cops or fire department or whoever arrived, Leo didn’t want his friends getting into trouble with the law, even posthumously.
He closed each of the switchblades and removed the bullets from the guns, then dumped it all into an empty backpack. After a final circuit of the scene, Leo came jogging back. His eyes were red and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. But that wasn’t blood running down Leo’s cheeks – he was crying.
“That’s everything… I think,” Leo said, and then took a deep, shuddering breath. “Alright, let’s go. You can call the cops from Arrow and… and we’ll deal with the rest later.”
The rest…? Did Leo mean dealing with me, or was I being paranoid? Did anything count as paranoid in the middle of all this? My dream of running away from Crayhill to see the world with a pocket full of cash had just turned into a nightmare.
But I couldn’t worry about that right now. All I could do was nod to Leo and climb back onto my motorcycle. We had to get out of this plague pit.
I would deal with the rest later, too.
“Two rooms,” Leo told the man behind the desk. “Ground floor, if you have them.”
Arrow Lodge was a cheap motel a few miles off Highway 44 and the clerk had to be used to suspiciously late-night check-ins, but he kept one eye on Leo and maintained his sour expression. He clearly didn’t approve of something, but I was way too tired to figure out if it was the hour, our leathers, or Leo’s tattoos. Or maybe we just stank. The dead Knights of Hell were two hours behind us, but I still hadn’t been able to shake the smell.
The clerk’s disapproval eased a bit when Leo paid for both rooms in cash, and he slid a couple of flimsy key cards across the desk.
“Room number five,” the clerk told us. “That’s on the ground story. Eleven is right above it. Best I’ve got.”
“That’s fine,” Leo said.
The man behind the desk gave us a final half-disapproving look before picking up his fishing magazine again and ignoring us. Leo grabbed the keys and we hurried back outside. He held out the little cardstock envelope with a number eleven written on it. I took it, but then stuck the key card into my pocket.
“Leo… we need to talk,” I said.
He hesitated, but then nodded. We walked our motorcycles across the parking lot and left them next to each other in an empty spot facing a blue-painted door marked with a brass number five. True to the clerk’s word, room eleven was upstairs, right overhead. I retrieved my backpack and followed Leo to his door. He took the card from its envelope and jammed it into the lock. A light flashed green and we went inside.
The room was small and basic, with a twin bed covered in plain white sheets. It would have fit just as easily into a hospital as a motel room. There were a few watercolor landscape prints framed on the wall, all faded into pastels by years of too much sunlight. Leo pulled the blackout curtains shut.
I dropped my bag next to the door and Leo set his own backpack down more gently on the bed. Was that because there were weapons inside? Or because they belonged to his dead friends?
Leo went back to the door and turned the deadbolt, then set the chain. Slowly, he unzipped his leather jacket and I caught a glint of steel just before Leo drew his gun again. It was a snub-nosed revolver, small enough to conceal but plenty big enough to blow a hole right through a terrified mechanic.
I gulped and stepped back until I hit the motel room wall. My heart pounded like it was about to fight its way out of my rib cage, but Leo only stripped off his jacket and set his gun on the bedside table. The tall biker slumped down onto the edge of his bed and put his face into his hands.
“You can call the cops now, Jaz,” Leo said through his fingers. “They can call the doctors or… or whatever.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. My voice cracked and I cleared my throat before going on. “Look, I know you’re running from the police. Or at least avoiding them.”
I pointed with a trembling finger down at the shoulder of Leo’s jacket draped across the bed beside him. He dropped his hands into his lap, revealing eyes rimmed in red, and followed my gesture toward the rattlesnake patch.
“You recognize that?” Leo asked.
I nodded. “I’ve been playing with motorcycles since I was five years old. I know the gang patches.”
“Alright, yeah,” Leo said in a heavy voice. “I’m road captain for the Chicago chapter of the Knights of Hell. Every one of the people we found back there were my friends – and my responsibility.”
Road captain? That wasn’t the gang founder or anything, but it was a pretty high rank for a guy Leo’s age. He wasn’t much older than I was… He must have done something important. Or else he knew someone who had.
“Does all that stolen money have anything to do with what happened to them?” I asked.
Leo had slumped on the bed, but now his head snapped up and he snarled.
“What?” Leo asked. “No!”
I jumped at the sudden heat in Leo’s voice, but pressed myself back against the motel room wall and kept watching him. Some kind of horrible nightmare had played out on that little road off Highway 44 and I needed to know why.
“Then… then what did you do?” I asked.
Leo hesitated. He reached out to touch one of the patches on his jacket. Not the snake, but the flame-crested helmet. His large hands were shaking again.
“We hit a bank truck,” Leo answered at last. “That’s where all the money came from.”
“You stole from a bank,” I said. I felt like someone had to state the obvious.
“Yes,” Leo admitted. “But it’s all FDIC insured. No one lost any money except the bank. Some executive’s bonus might be a little light this quarter, but those guys already have more than they deserve.”
No bank had ever done me or my family any favors, and I didn’t feel particularly sorry for whatever white marble building Leo’s gang had stolen a few hundred thousand dollars from… But what the hell had I gotten myself into? What did this have to do with all those dead bikers?
“What happened?” I asked. “Did you kill anyone?”
Leo shook his head. “No. That’s not how I do things. A few broken bones and one of the guys Audrey hit is probably going to be seeing double for a while. You got a problem with that?”
“Uh, yeah. A bit,” I said.
“Do you know the first job I ever did?” Leo asked suddenly.
He fixed me with dark, intense eyes and I somehow doubted he was about to tell me the story of flipping burgers at some Chicago fast-food joint.
“James was road captain before me,” Leo said. “He got wiped out by some weekend driver who didn’t think they needed to check their mirrors before changing lanes. Then they drove off and left James bleeding on the side of the freeway.”
I winced.
“James survived the crash. Barely,” Leo said. “But the medical bills were more than he could pay. So I called the other Knights and we hit a bank one morning, while they were still opening up. James can’t ride anymore, but all his bills are paid now.”
I leaned against the wall and wrapped my arms around myself to keep from trembling. Leo’s expression was intense, but he wasn’t shouting. What if that changed, th
ough? The biker was twice my size and that gun was just a few feet away. Should I try to grab it? Try to shoot Leo before he could shoot me?
I did my best to ignore that line of thought, but the butterflies in my stomach were all puking.
“I don’t know what went wrong this time,” Leo said. Now his voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper. “We’ve done jobs like this a dozen times. We were just taking the haul to San Diego, like we always do.”
“Why take the money to San Diego?” I asked. “That’s a long drive.”
“Because that’s where my Uncle Carlos is,” Leo said. “He’s one of the founding members of the Knights of Hell. The original gang. He sponsored me for road captain after things went down with James.”
So I had been right on both counts. Leo’s loyalty to the old road captain must have impressed the other ranking Knights of Hell, but being related to a gang founder probably didn’t hurt either. Somehow, I couldn’t feel very proud of myself for gauging the situation correctly.
“We go to Carlos whenever we need to lay low for a while and get some cash cleaned,” Leo told me. “My uncle knows a lot more people than I do, on both sides of the border.”
That was who Leo had been talking to on the phone back at the filling station. There was a weight of history and all sorts of subtext when Leo talked about his uncle. Carlos was clearly an important man in Leo’s world… But something had gone really, really wrong in that world.
And now the Knights of Hell were dead. Leo wiped his eyes. They were bloodshot and tears shone across his knuckles in the light of the bedside lamp.
“Leo…” I began.
What should I say? What could I say…? His friends were all dead. But if we didn’t figure out what the hell was going on, we would end up the same way.
“Was the cash you stole… I don’t know… mob money?” I asked. “Did someone come after them to get it back?”
Leo stared down at his tattooed hands and clenched them into fists.
“No,” he said. “It was just the bank’s money. Cash from the federal depository in Chicago. It didn’t belong to any particular account. It was only going to sit in a vault until someone withdrew it. And my Knights weren’t shot. They were… sick.”
“The government, then?” I asked.
I stood and paced over to the window, peeking out through the drapes into the parking lot. Our motorcycles sat outside and it felt weirdly like Leo’s Packmaster was glaring at me. I closed the curtains again.
“Jaz, the Knights didn’t get into a shootout with the cops,” Leo said. “Or state troopers. Not that Texas has those…”
“How do you even know that?” I asked.
Leo gave me a smile so weary that it barely qualified. “I’ve made this run a dozen times before, remember? But nothing like this has ever happened.”
“Maybe it was some kind of biological weapon,” I suggested. “The sort of weaponized super-virus you see in movies. But why use something like that against bikers who stole an insignificant amount of money?”
“Hey,” Leo objected, but his heart just wasn’t in it.
I crossed my arms. “On the scale that the government wastes money every day? Have you ever seen the federal budget? I’m pretty sure everything you’ve ever stolen is less than a drop in the bucket.”
“Yeah… I suppose,” Leo said. But he kept staring down at his clenched fists.
“Maybe it was something on the money,” I suggested. “Some experimental deterrent?”
Leo’s fists tightened until his leather riding gloves creaked and his knuckles popped like miniature gunshots. I flinched, but then shook my head.
“Wait, no,” I said. “We’ve both been handling the money for a couple of days now. So have my parents… I haven’t gotten any more panicked calls from my dad and I feel fine.”
Well, that wasn’t quite true… But I felt scared and lost, not sick. Leo finally looked up at me.
“What about that hallucination?” he asked. “That thing we both saw?”
The green-eyed demon on horseback was straight out of my worst apocalyptic dreams. Apparently, my nightmare was tired of being forgotten by the second cup of coffee.
“But you hallucinated something else,” I pointed out. “You saw a man in a suit, right? On a motorcycle?”
Leo nodded slowly. “But it wasn’t human. I think it was the same thing you saw. Just… in a different skin.”
Well, that was a horrifying idea. I shuddered violently and tightened my arms around myself.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I don’t know!” Leo answered in a deep snarl. “I don’t know anything. All of my friends are dead and I don’t even understand why!”
I didn’t know, either. None of this made any sense, but whatever it was, it was dangerous. A bunch of badass bikers with guns were all dead and I really didn’t want to end up the same way. Leo stood and began pacing the length of the motel room like a caged tiger.
“If someone or something did that to your gang, are they going to come looking for you next?” I asked. “Did they know where you were going?”
Leo stopped pacing to stare at me, the blood draining from his face.
“Shit,” he said. “I need to call Carlos.”
Leo grabbed his phone out of the pocket of his jeans and dialed, jabbing at the screen so hard that I worried he might shatter the glass. Leo paced away from me, but he turned up the volume loud enough that I could hear the line ring.
And ring. Leo gripped his cell phone until the case groaned. Finally, the ringing stopped and there was a click.
“Uncle Carlos?” Leo asked. “Are you there?”
“I’m here,” said a voice on the other end. “What happened?”
Carlos’ voice was far more accented than his nephew. It was deep and rough, like his vocal cords had been dragged behind a motorcycle for a few miles. Not exactly the voice of an angel, I thought, but Leo slumped in obvious relief against the wall of his rented room.
“I… I found my Knights, tío,” he said, voice shaking. “They’re all dead. Something killed them. They were all sick with something… unnatural.”
“I know,” Carlos answered.
Leo straightened up, his eyes wide and expression shocked. I suspected I looked pretty much the same. Carlos knew? What did he know, precisely?
Leo stepped in close to me and angled the phone so I could hear better. It didn’t help much, but I appreciated the thought – especially since this whole thing was making me an accomplice in grand larceny and possibly biological warfare. It was the least Leo could do.
“What happened to them?” he asked. “How do you know?”
“I know who did this,” Carlos answered. “And I know what’s happening to you. I know about your dreams.”
“What?” I blurted.
I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to be quiet, but I couldn’t help myself. Was Uncle Carlos talking about my weird-ass recurring apocalyptic nightmares? Was Leo having some kind of dreams, too? Leo caught my eye and I didn’t think he could stare any harder, but I swear that I felt that look in my soul.
And it burned.
“You’re not alone,” Carlos said, and he didn’t make it sound like a question. He had heard me, apparently.
“Yeah,” Leo admitted.
“Who is it?” Carlos asked.
“That’s Jaz,” Leo said. “She’s the mechanic who’s helping me with the Packmaster.”
“Has she been having the dreams, too? Of the war?” Carlos asked.
Leo looked at me and I nodded slowly.
“Yes,” he answered.
“You felt it, didn’t you?” Carlos said in his low, engine-growl voice. “The call. There were other garages and other mechanics. But you wanted her.”
Leo’s eyes widened and my heart pounded. We both stared at the phone.
“Yes,” Leo breathed.
“Something is happening to you,” Carlos said. “Both of you.
But we can’t do this on the phone. Come to San Diego as fast as you can.”
“What?” Leo asked.
“Get your ass to San Diego. Burn up the road and be ready for action. I’ve got answers and solutions for you when you get here.”
“I’ll be there soon, tío. Be careful,” Leo said.
“Drive fast and drive hard,” Carlos told him. “I’ll be waiting.”
That seemed to be about as much of a goodbye as either of them were going to give and Leo hung up, pocketing his phone again.
“Umm, what the hell is going on?” I managed to stammer. “How does your uncle know about my weird nightmares? And… and you’ve been having them, too?”
Leo nodded. “Dreams about demons fighting angels? Yeah.”
“For how long?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” Leo said. “But I never told Carlos about them. They were just dreams.”
“Until today. Why the hell would we both be having the same dreams?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Leo said. “But Carlos does.”
“Do you trust him?”
Leo rounded on me with anger burning in his brown eyes.
“Carlos is family,” Leo said. “He’s the only reason I’m alive.”
“Okay, okay. Easy on the gas there.”
Leo sat heavily on the corner of the bed again. “I’m sorry, Jaz. You didn’t deserve that. But yes, I trust Carlos more than anyone else on this planet. If he says he knows what’s going on, then he does. And if we want to understand, we need to get to him.”
I was scared, more frightened than I had been in my entire life and my heart was still seriously considering a coronary. My feet moved of their own volition, taking a step toward the motel room door. I had to get away from this whole terrifying thing. This wasn’t just a weird dream anymore… People were dead and I didn’t know why.
But Carlos said he had answers. If I ran now, I would never learn them.
“I can’t get all the way to San Diego without your help,” Leo said. “I need you, Jaz, and I need to know why this is happening. Don’t you?”
I froze in front of the door. The urge to run away was overwhelming. Every muscle in my body was taut as a guitar string and my pulse raced… But when push came to shove – and I felt pretty damned shoved – I knew the answer to Leo’s question.
400 Horsepower of the Apocalypse Page 6