by Ora Wilde
Was it just out of sympathy?
A mercy fuck?
Shit! I don’t need her pity. I don’t need anyone’s pity. I’m not some sorry idiot who spends his fucking time waiting for others to show him the slightest bit of compassion.
I wanted to talk to her about it. I wanted to clear things up with her, to let her know that what happened last night wasn’t really special... if she didn’t want it to be special. I didn’t want her feeling bad, specially if last night was meaningless for her.
But how could I? She wouldn’t even talk to me. I tried to start a conversation a number of times. The most I got from her was a nod and a shrug.
We were at Ridgecrest when we almost got into an accident. A speeding car tried to overtake us, only to find itself on a collision course with an incoming truck. It immediately swerved to its right, dangerously cutting our path. We would’ve rammed into it if I wasn’t able to step on the brakes. The sudden stop made her fall forward. She almost hit her head on the dashboard.
“What the hell?!” she screamed, shocked by the near fatal mishap that befell us.
“Fucking dumbass!” I yelled in fury. I wanted to give chase but the car sped off quickly while we were on full stop.
“You almost got us killed!” she had the gall to blame me for what just happened.
“Me? Holy fuck, girl! Get your mind straight. I’m not the one who cut us off.”
“If you were maintaining a safe three car distance like you were supposed to, we could’ve easily avoided that!”
“But we did avoid it,” I reminded her. “We’re safe, aren’t we?”
“Whatever!” she remarked with displeasure, knowing that the argument was going nowhere.”
I just laughed.
“What’s so funny?” she angrily asked.
“Well, at least that shit got you talking,” I said while sniggering.
“Ha ha! I’m glad to bring you some amusement,” she scoffed with overflowing sarcasm.
I restarted the engine and continued our drive. My grin never left my face. A few minutes later and she noticed it.
“Christ! Please stop smiling!” she ordered, still incensed.
“Stop being a control freak,” I joked.
“I’m not a control freak!” she yelled back. She didn’t appreciate that tag.
“Then let me smile if I wanna smile.”
“You can’t smile when nothing’s funny.”
“Who said that I’m smiling because something’s funny?”
“Then why are you smiling?”
“My business, not yours,” I casually answered before whistling a happy tune that I just made up. I actually found it entertaining to rile her up like that, specially when she was getting miffed over nothing.
She tried to block out the sound of my skirling. She was doing a good job at it... until she lost her patience after five minutes or so.
“Stop! Just stop!” she pleaded with rage and desperation. It felt like she wanted to pull out her hair, something which I found kinda cute.
“Hey, I’m happy... can’t a guy celebrate his happiness?” I remarked in an effort to antagonize her. Her being mad was better than her being quiet, after all. The day’s drive was taking its toll on me, and her tantrum was a much needed diversion.
“Why... Why are you happy?” she asked with overflowing indignation.
“Why shouldn’t I be?” I returned her question.
She let out a furious sigh before tilting her body to face me. “If this is about last night,” she began to say as she pointed a finger towards my face, “then you have nothing to be happy about. It was just sex... as well as a mistake! There’s nothing more to it! It’s something that shouldn’t have happened and it’s something that will never happen again!”
“Well, it happened, so there,” I fired back with a jolly grin, though deep inside, I felt a pinch of sadness.
“Don’t you ever think that I wanted that to happen!” she continued her tirade.
“Oh, you didn’t?” I tried to fish for more of her elusive thoughts, hoping that I’d discover what she really felt for me.
“No!”
“Then why did you...”
“Why did I what?”
“Start kissing me?”
She turned her body once more until she was facing the road ahead of us. She looked straight into the path, firm on her refusal to meet my gaze.
“I didn’t kiss you!” she countered with fury.
“Okay... you didn’t start it. I did. But you kissed me back.”
“I didn’t want to kiss you,” she said, angrily still. “And I’ll never want to kiss you. It’s just... last night... I thought you were having a stroke or something.”
“So, that kiss... it was your version of a CPR?” I chuckled.
“No,” she answered. “It was my version of please be okay because I don’t want to deal with the crap of having to call an ambulance and accompany you to the hospital when you’re the one who’s supposed to bring me somewhere safe.”
“Fucking someone is your way of making them feel okay?” I maintained my flippant tone. The last thing I needed was for her to think that the sex we had transformed me into a fucking lovesick puppy.
“I was panicking, alright?” she defended her action. “I was just desperate to make sure that you were fine... that you were alive...”
“Heh. So, I guess the quickest way into your pants is to pretend that I’m having a heart attack, huh?”
“Shut up!” she expressed her exasperation. “I told you, I just wanted you to make sure that you were alright... that you’ll be alright. I may have gone a bit overboard. That’s a mistake and it most certainly won’t happen again. Specially not with someone like you.”
“That sounds like a lot of bullshit,” I told her with all honesty before I went back to the part of her statement which bothered me the most. “Someone like me? What do you mean?”
“You’re a biker.”
“And?”
“I don’t date bikers.”
“Oh. You don’t?” I asked as I suppressed the tinge of disappointment I felt. “Is that a matter of preference?”
“Nope. I’ve met a lot of really gorgeous bikers... and I mean really gorgeous, as in drop dead gorgeous, as in melt-your-panties kind of gorgeous -” She paused and bit her lip as she realized that she wasn’t talking to one of her girl friends. She was actually talking to a guy she fucked last night.
I smirked. “Well, thank you,” I said. “I didn’t know you thought that highly of me.”
“Don’t be absurd!” she practically screamed. “You’re not one of them. Far from it, even.”
“Well, why don’t you date bikers then?” I brought her back to the original subject of our conversation.
“My dad doesn’t want me to,” was her brusque reply.
“How come?”
“I dunno. Maybe there’s still a shell of a father in that charred soul of his. Maybe he doesn’t want his own daughter to be with someone like him.”
“Or maybe he just wants a better life for you,” I pointed out.
She didn’t reply after that. She went back to her self-imposed reticence, refusing to respond to the attempts at small talks I tried to initiate thereafter.
It took us another four hours to reach Essex from Ridgecrest. It could’ve been faster, but we had to take another detour to avoid Barstow, taking the eastern route and some backstreets at Cima just to remain safe and undetected.
It was along Route 40, just as we exited Needles, when I saw a Harley parked by the roadside. It caused some alarm at first, until I saw the man who was standing beside it as well as the colors he wore. He was one of ours.
I stopped the van in front of his bike. He ran towards my side of the vehicle.
“Yo!” he greeted as he inspected my kutte before turning his attention on the girl at the passenger seat. He was quite young, twenty-five or twenty-six summers old by my approximation. His long hair was
tied with a topknot. He wore a beard but a mustache was absent. He actually looked like a New Age rabbi, a thought which almost caused me to chuckle. “The prospect, I presume?” he wanted to know.
“Yep,” I replied. “You the welcoming committee?”
“Yeah. Nicker, at your service. Our clubhouse ain’t easy to find. I’m here to lead the way.”
Prez most probably requested for assistance from their chapter. I wasn’t familiar with the place. I haven’t been here before. And if their clubhouse was as secluded as he implied, then indeed, I would need help in reaching it.
“Alright, that’ll be cool,” I said.
“Roger. The brothers were actually expecting you this morning. Hope you didn’t run into some trouble?”
“Nah, we didn’t. Just some detours here and there.”
“That’s understandable. Better the long route than the dangerous one.”
“Exactly!”
“Okay then, I’ll lead the way. Just follow me.”
“Got it.”
He rode his bike and went ahead, driving at a slow 40 to ensure that we kept pace.
“You sure you can trust him?” she suddenly spoke. She was keenly eyeing the patch as he was riding in front of us.
“He seems like a nice lad,” I answered.
“Lemme guess... you’re a good judge of character?” she sneeringly asked. What’s up with this girl? I knew women were moody creatures, but she was bordering on being bipolar.
“I’d like to believe that I am,” I replied with an intentionally wide smile to show that her words weren’t affecting me.
“Well, I don’t trust him,” she muttered as she crossed her arms over her chest.
“He’s wearing the club’s colors, so relax,” I tried to assure her.
Essex was an expansive town that, at first, seemed deserted. Aside from two refineries that we passed by along the way, we only saw a few buildings that populated the place. The rest was an endless sea of cornfields. Further into the territory, however, we encountered a sputtering of residential areas as well as a commercial district that was like an oasis in the middle of nowhere. It made me wonder, how could I get lost in a place as empty as this?
Nicker rode past the railroad and up the hills. The van, being a mere 2x2, found it difficult to climb the steep road. The path that we took branched out to several directions. Nicker turned left and right so many times that I lost count. We eventually reached a gas station that looked like it has been abandoned for years. It was situated at the base of another hill, making the building look like the mouth of a giant’s ugly mugger. If this was their clubhouse, it was both a bad and good choice for their headquarters. Bad because the place looked so decrepit and dirty, seemingly unsuitable even for people of our kind. Good because no one, in their right mind, would ever think that the place was habitable, hence, keeping it away from unwanted scrutiny.
“We’re here!” Nicker shouted just loud enough for me to hear, confirming what I thought.
I parked the van right in front of what I thought was once the gas station’s convenience store. I went out of the vehicle and opened the door for little miss grumpy princess. She went out with a scowl.
“I’m supposed to stay here?” she asked begrudgingly as she tied her hair into a ponytail.
“It ain’t that bad,” I lied just to make her feel a bit better.
“Yeah, you’d be surprised,” Nicker commented as he walked past us. He overheard Samantha’s grumbling. “Don’t mind the facade. It’s meant to look like shit. Wait ‘til you see the interiors.”
We discovered what Nicker was talking about a few second after we entered the station. Though the lobby that greeted us was expectedly as run-down as what we’ve seen from the outside, the surprise that awaited us didn’t reveal itself until we reached a door at the farthest end of the building, one that I thought was a backdoor to the garage or the dirty kitchen.
It wasn’t.
It led to an ornately designed hallway, the walls of which were filled with photos and memorabilia from the chapter’s glorious past. Group shots and studio solos of the club’s previous presidents as well as hilariously mundane items like speeding tickets, search and arrest warrants, court summons, collages of mug shots, newspaper clippings of their exploits and female underwear were displayed in neat rows and columns. At the end of the hall was an equally lavish wooden door, and carved on its surface were the words: Welcome To The Pound. It was then when it struck me.
Their clubhouse was inside the fucking hill.
“This place is fucking cool!” I expressed my amazement.
“Yeah,” Nicker agreed with a proud smile. “Our prez, Pancho... his son’s an architect. He had his kid build this joint in 2008 or 2009, if I remember correctly. We didn’t get any contractors for this project. Prez’s kid was the foreman and the brothers were his carpenters, masons and plumbers. Everything was in-house. So it took a while before we finished it. In fact, we just moved in a couple of months ago.”
“See, Sam? Their clubhouse is like a 5-star hotel compared to ours,” I told her.
She just curled her lips into a pout. She didn’t look impressed. Maybe it was just a show, though. I was beginning to think that she’s some kind of a schizo chick.
Nicker excitedly held the knob, looking at us one last time before we entered, wanting to determine if we were just as thrilled as he was.
But he didn’t open the door.
The smile on his face vanished immediately as soon as his hand touched the handle. His eyes left us and scampered towards what he was holding.
Then he reached for the gun hidden inside his kutte.
“Something’s wrong,” he tensely blared. “Step back.”
I grabbed Samantha’s arm and pulled her behind me.
“What’s the matter?” I asked him. I focused on his hand which just left the knob.
He was examining the rest of his fingers with his thumb like he was ungluing something sticky that he inadvertently picked up. I didn’t have to inquire further. What I saw was enough to make me pull out my own handgun.
Blood.
Samantha saw it too. He held on to my arm. I could feel her shaking with fear.
“Lenny... I’m scared...” she whispered. It was the first time she called me by my real name. Her usual spunk wasn’t there. It was clear that the girl’s terrified.
“Stay close and stay behind me,” I ordered. I felt her head bobble against my back. She was nodding. “I’m here to protect you. That’s my job, remember?”
Nicker glanced at me as he cocked his beretta. I took that as a cue to raise my Glock parallel to my face. It was easier to fire if my hand was to pull downwards than upwards. I had to be ready for the worst.
He tipped his head, his way of telling me that he was about to open the door. I bobbed my own head to tell him that I was ready.
Nicker knew he had to open the door fast as soon as he turned the knob. We didn’t know what we were up against, but no one has attacked us yet so we most probably had the advantage of a surprise attack. So, Nicker did what he had to do. He kicked the door so hard that it almost flew out of its hinges.
He was the first to enter, pointing his gun at every angle, waiting to catch sight of anything that moved.
He didn’t fire, which meant that there was no one inside the chamber.
But I heard a thud. I instructed Samantha to stay where she was. Then I walked, slowly, towards the newly revealed area.
The stench was undeniable. There’s no doubt that it was blood. I peeked to the left before I entered. I saw Nicker, still holding his gun as he was kneeling on the floor. No one made him do that. It seemed like he just collapsed, drained of his strength and with weakened legs, he buckled under his own weight. He was breathing hard and fast while making some incomprehensible sounds... mumbling curses or so I thought.
A couple of seconds more and I realized that he wasn’t cursing at all. He was praying.
My eyes dar
ted from him towards the corner he was staring at. Then I understood the reason for the horror in Nicker’s breath.
There, eight dead bodies lined up the corner, seated on the floor with their backs resting against the wall. All of them had bullet holes on their foreheads. Blood... their blood... was splattered all over the surface. It was clear that they were executed.
But that’s not all.
All eight of them had their right hands ripped off from their torsos. They were still wearing their kuttes - kuttes which displayed our colors - as they were roosted on the floor. Pools of crimson formed beneath their carcasses.