by James Hunt
“It’s heavy.”
Mary aimed at one of the trees, peering through the three-white-dot alignment sight. After a few moments, the gun began to shake in her hands. Mary’s face twitched, the corners of her mouth folded downward. Finally she lowered the gun.
“I can’t do this,” Mary said.
“What?”
“Whatever it is you think we can do, Kalen. We’re not soldiers. I don’t know how to fight.”
Mary extended the pistol back to Kalen. It lingered in the air between the two of them. Kalen finally placed her hands on top of Mary’s, stepped directly behind her, and guided the pistol’s sight back up to eye level.
“Those men down there will come for you again. They’ll make you hurt long before they decide to put a bullet in your brain and end you,” Kalen said.
Kalen kept Mary’s hand steady. She continued to whisper in her ear.
“They won’t care about the type of person you are. They’ll only care what they can do to you, every terrible thing imaginable and worse. All of your fears, whatever they are, won’t be as bad as their reality.”
Kalen guided Mary’s finger to the trigger.
“Remember what they did to your parents?” Kalen asked.
Mary’s body tensed up. She could see her father lying on the ground, blood pouring from his stomach, and the biker with the smile across his face. She saw her mother lying on the bed naked with the biker on top of her. She could feel the rocking of the bed as her mother was being raped.
“Once they kill you they’ll find your sisters, then they’ll hurt them,” Kalen said.
She could see her sisters crying, begging for help. When she saw their faces in her mind she could feel a shift.
“Pull the trigger, Mary,” Kalen said.
Whatever fear she was feeling had to be put aside. She couldn’t let her sisters suffer the same fate as their parents.
“Pull it!” Kalen said.
The click of the firing pin went off. Kalen let Mary go and the pistol dropped to the ground. Kalen picked the pistol up, dusting some of the dirt and leaves from the side. She tucked it back into her waistband.
Mary looked down at her hand. It was shaking. She closed her eyes, focusing her energy on forming a fist, trying to squeeze the adrenaline out of her body.
“Are we going to die?” Mary asked.
“Only if we want to.”
***
Frankie pulled a state map of Ohio from behind the lobby counter. He spread it out on the desk, and his finger ran along the paper creases from Cleveland to Carrollton. He snatched a pen from a jar and picked up a ruler from the desk.
He placed the end of the ruler on the center of Carrollton and marked a small line a few inches out. He made similar marks of equal length around the entire town. Then he drew a circle, connecting each mark on the map, which encompassed an area around Carrollton.
Frankie tossed the pen and ruler back behind the counter and stormed out of the lobby, grabbing a bag of chips from the food pile on his way out.
When Frankie made it to Jake’s room he was on the bed, cleaning his pistol. Frankie stopped at the doorway before he entered. Scanning the room he saw that the bed was made and the trash from their week’s stay had been picked from the floor.
“Housekeeping come by?” Frankie asked.
“What’d you find?” Jake asked.
Frankie spread the map out on the bed adjacent from where Jake was sitting.
“Carrollton’s the only town for at least twenty miles in any direction. It’s just highways and woods until you get anywhere,” Frankie said.
“What’d Spence find with tracks?”
“Nothing. We think they went through the grass fields.”
Jake slid the rag along the barrel of the gun. He dropped a few bits of lubricant on the barrel’s rim, then wiped the excess clean.
“If they had transportation, we would have heard them. They must have gone on foot,” Jake said.
“Jake, whoever killed Garrett isn’t coming back. They’re long gone. The chances of us finding them are… aren’t there.”
Jake set the barrel of the gun down next to the other pieces on the bed. He tossed the dirty rag in the trash and picked up the different pieces of the pistol, examining each of them individually in his hand.
“Each part of this gun serves a purpose. They all work in an understanding that each element will do its job. The gun needs all of its parts to work properly, and when they do the outcome is exactly what the shooter intends it to be… deadly,” Jake said.
The pieces of the gun clicked into place as Jake reassembled the weapon. When he put the slide back on and slid the magazine inside, he racked a bullet into the chamber, clicking the safety off.
“This club works the same way. If we don’t follow through with our commitment of avenging our brother’s death, then we become as useless as a gun with no trigger. We lose our direction and our bond,” Jake said.
Jake pointed the pistol at Frankie. Frankie took a step back, folding the map in his hands.
“I’ll check the public records. See if there’s any property registered in the woods around the town.”
Jake holstered his pistol.
“Good.”
***
The two AR-15s were on Kalen’s bed. She shoved the last bullet the spare magazine would hold, and threw it in the duffel bag. The rest of the magazines were full with thirty bullets apiece. Counting the bullets already loaded into the both rifles, it gave her a total of one hundred eighty shots.
From Mary’s and Ulysses’s description there were no more than twenty bikers in town. Nine bullets apiece, she figured that would be enough.
Kalen stuffed the empty bullet boxes in the bag she brought up from the basement and shoved it under her bed to hide it. The door to her room opened, and Mary entered, holding the pistol at her side.
“When do we leave?
Kalen smiled. She picked up one of the AR-15s and handed it to Mary.
“Now.”
Mary slipped the rifle strap over her shoulder and Kalen did the same. The two headed outside, and before they reached the forest Ulysses stopped them.
“Where are you two going?” Ulysses asked.
“We’re heading to the rifle stand,” Kalen answered.
“Those things loaded?”
“No, but we have some extra magazines… just in case.”
“You should let me come with you.”
“No offense, Grandpa, but we were hoping for some girl time.”
Ulysses threw his hands up.
“Okay. Don’t go far.”
Kalen led them through the forest. They walked for fifteen minutes before she changed course and headed for Carrollton.
“So, what happens when we get there?” Mary asked.
“We’ll be outnumbered, but we’ll have the element of surprise on our side. If we can funnel them into a central location we can pin them down. We’ll be able to take a lot of them out that way, especially since they don’t know we’re coming.”
“What if they stay spread out?”
“Then we pick off as many as we can and keep moving. The moment they know where we are we’ll be in trouble. It won’t matter how many bullets we have at that point.”
Kalen acted as if she were going on a hunt with her dad. It wasn’t any different in her mind. She’d killed before. The only difference this time was the animals could shoot back.
Her mind went back to the man in the forest. The one who tried to rape her on their trip from Pittsburgh to the cabin. She could still feel his hands around her neck. She still remembered the weight of his body on top of hers, the helplessness she felt, and the greedy lust in the man’s eyes. The curling lip that formed a smile was fresh in her mind.
That man didn’t care who she was, what she wanted from life, or how it made her feel. The man had no regard for the nightmares she’d had since that day or the number of pills she took to stop making her feel anyt
hing than the hate she filled her mind and heart with to replace the fear. He didn’t care about any of that. All he cared about was taking what he wanted.
Kalen knew the bikers in town were the same way. They rode in, killed who they wanted, and had zero regard for what it meant to own something, to work for something, to truly value something.
All of them were the same in Kalen’s mind. There was no difference between the face of the man in the forest and the faces of the bikers in town.
“Kalen, are you okay?” Mary asked.
Kalen was squeezing the rifle’s handle so hard that her arms were shaking. She suddenly became aware of the sweat on her face. Her knuckles had turned white, and when she removed her hand from the pistol grip on the front of the rifle she felt her skin peel off like Velcro.
“I’m fine,” Kalen said.
She wasn’t sure how much time she was going to get before her family realized she was gone. She knew that once her dad came home he’d come looking for them at the shooting stand, and when he saw they weren’t there he’d be worried.
That was the only thing weighing on her. She knew not coming back alive would hurt her family. She understood what it would do to her father, how it would change him, but this was her choice, and it was a choice she had the right to make.
***
The rifle still felt awkward for Mary. She wasn’t used to the weight or the feel of it. Kalen had explained as much to her about shooting as she could. She did her best to pay attention, to try and focus on the task at hand, but her mind wandered.
Thoughts of her mother, her father, and her sisters flashed like lightning strikes in her mind. Her imagination ran wild with the horrors the biker gang was committing on her mother.
At night she lay awake, still feeling the rocking of the bed she was on as her mom lay next to her with that biker on top of her. She could still hear his grunts, heavy breaths, the violent commands he barked at her, each syllable sending a tremor through her body.
The longer they walked, the more she questioned what she was doing. She knew it was fear that was fogging her mind. She tried focusing on the thought of protecting her sisters, but it didn’t seem strong enough to keep the fear at bay.
Mary kept a few steps behind Kalen the entire journey through the woods. She watched Kalen, observed how she moved, how she carried herself. The girl she saw the first day she arrived at the cabin was gone.
Mary remembered seeing how out of touch Kalen was. When she took Kalen back to her room where she passed out on the bed, she figured she was on some type of drug. Then when Mary found the bottle of pills in the nightstand, which were almost empty, it confirmed her suspicions.
When Mary told Kalen what happened to her family, she saw something change in Kalen. A switch flipped. Kalen’s resolve hardened. That’s what made Mary follow her. Mary was leaning on Kalen’s strength to help find her own.
“How do you do it?” Mary asked.
“Do what?”
“Act like you’re not afraid.”
“I don’t.”
“Well, you’re doing a good job of hiding it.”
“That’s just it. You can’t hide it. You can’t shove something that big into a corner without it being seen. So you expose it to the light for everyone to see, then instead of you being afraid of the fear, the fear becomes afraid of what you’ve done to unmask it. The fear yields to you.”
“What if you can’t control it?”
“Then it kills you. Either way, your struggle’s over.”
Was that her fate if she accepted her fear? She’d never been in any position like that her entire life. She’d never experienced the type of fear and pain that she’d felt over the past two weeks.
There was a time when the only things she was scared of were the final exams at school and seeing what she got on her report card.
But the lump in her throat wouldn’t give way, and the pit in her stomach wouldn’t fill up. What she was feeling was endless, and she couldn’t see a way out.
***
Frankie dumped the rest of the red fuel cans on the concrete next to the bikes. He managed to pull a total of twelve five-gallon cans from the mechanic’s shop.
“We can try and siphon some gas out of the cars, but aside from that, this is it, Jake,” Frankie said.
Jake counted the bikes in the row. Most of them still had some fuel left in the tank, but the majority of them were low. The ride from Cleveland drained a lot of the gas they had. The old bikes they rode here managed to survive the EMP blast because they didn’t have any microprocessors in them, but they also had terrible gas mileage.
“Any bike that’s below a quarter of a tank, fill it up. I want everyone able to ride,” Jake said.
Frankie grabbed two other members, and the three of them started checking the bikes’ fuel gauges.
Jake pulled out the map with the radius of how far the girls could have traveled. He figured they stayed close. There were a handful of cabins Frankie was able to find in the county office. He wanted to start hitting those first. If they traveled through the woods, it would be a good place to start.
Tank, Jake’s vice president of the club, came up behind him. Tank’s eyes were hidden behind his shades. His long gray beard was greased with grime and clumped together from weeks without a shower. His belly poked through the space between his cut, the buttons barely holding back the weight behind them.
“Jake, we need to talk,” Tank said.
The two men walked out of earshot of the rest of the club.
“I don’t know if this is the best time for us to be doing this,” Tank said.
“One of our brothers is dead. You don’t want to make sure whoever did this pays for that?”
“You really think those girls killed Garrett? C’mon, Jake. They’re long gone and starving somewhere in the woods.”
“Well, if they’re close by just sitting under the trees in the shade, they’ll be easy to find.”
Jake slammed his shoulder into Tank when he moved past him. Tank put his hand on Jake’s shoulder to spin him around, but Jake twisted the old man’s hand. Tank winced.
“We are going to find whoever did this. I don’t care what it costs us, you understand me? Diablos don’t let one of their own die without the bastards who killed them answering for their crime,” Jake said.
Jake let Tank’s hand go. Tank backed away slowly, both hands in the air, surrendering.
“Okay, brother. Okay,” Tank said.
“And you make sure the rest of the club knows that too,” Jake finished.
Keep the club together. That’s what Jake needed to do. He couldn’t let his club waver now, not with what they had in front of them. He knew his men would need a distraction. If the group wasn’t heading somewhere, anywhere, with a goal in mind, they would fall apart.
Jake passed the pile of burnt bodies on the way to his room. For better or worse, he was their leader, and no matter what hell he brought on them, they’d follow him to the end. That was their brotherhood, a family of death.
***
The perimeter of the town was deserted. Kalen couldn’t see anyone on patrol. From what Mary had told her, the biker gang had men on watch around the clock.
When she double-checked the east end of the town, she figured they were either gone or focused on something important. Either way, they had a clear entrance.
When Kalen came back from scouting, Mary looked like she hadn’t breathed since she left.
“You ready?” Kalen asked.
Mary nodded her head quickly, avoiding Kalen’s eyes. Kalen grabbed Mary’s chin and pulled her face toward hers.
“We can’t have any doubts once we cross this line. I need to know now if you’re ready for this,” Kalen said.
“I’m ready.”
“All right then. Stay close behind me. I’ll find you a good spot with cover, and then I’ll position myself. I think they must be gathered together since there aren’t any patrols. Let’s go.”
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The two girls left the cover of the tall grass and headed for the first building on the right side. They inched their way up the street, ducking behind cars, doors, anything large enough to hide behind.
Kalen kept glancing back at Mary, still behind her. Every time she checked to see if Mary was there, she expected her to be gone or frozen in the last spot she saw her. Kalen was having second thoughts about bringing her along. She needed someone who was willing to do what it took. She needed to have confidence in her partner.