“Mr. Breaux,” said the old man, “I’ll have the girls open the kitchen. See our guests get some grub.”
“Steaks, if you please,” said the man named Breaux. “It’s a nice night for grilling.”
The old man nodded and disappeared into the house.
“This way, boys,” said Breaux.
Breaux headed toward a fire pit near a roofed pavilion. Daniels was going to stand his ground, but Breaux said, “Don’t worry, son, no one is going to fuck with your mounts here.”
Daniels glanced to Big Billy, and the P nodded again. Big Billy clapped the back of the man Daniels had kicked in the face, who was still lingering, unsteady. The pat on the back nearly bowled the man over. “Come on, Daddy’s Boy, you’re all right. Grab a beer.”
Soon Breaux was cooking up steaks and empty cans of beer were piling up. Their hooting and hollering brought some curious onlookers, but all it took was a look from Breaux and they never ventured closer to their small congregation. Three more men approached, one with shaggy hair and a tattoo with vines or some shit creeping up his face, one decked out like a banjo player, and another with a nervy look and eyes so pale they seemed to glow in the firelight.
“Kids’ table is elsewhere,” said Breaux.
“Come on, Breaux. New guests are about the only excitement we get around here,” said the man with the pale eyes. It was clear they didn’t like each other. “Besides, we come bearing gifts.”
Each man produced a Mason jar of clear liquid.
“Shine?” asked Breaux. His face curled into a grin. “There may be hope for you yet, Junior.”
Each jar of the moonshine tasted differently—watermelon, strawberry, cotton candy—and any remaining tensions melted. They started swapping war stories, Breaux from his time overseas, and Big Billy from his skirmishes with the Brazen over territory. It wasn’t one-upmanship, but genial, and laughter flowed as easily as the shine, but these tales of combat among comrades soon became a lament about the sorry state of the world, and more important, about their country. They spoke animatedly of not just building a great wall to the south, but hanging body parts to deter climbers. They spoke of the need to nuke the Middle East to glass once and for all, and the coming, blessed racial holy war that would finally cleanse this once-great country in fire. When the talk became too solemn, the conversation turned to jokes. Jokes were tossed around like grenades, jokes about Muslims and Jews and queers, but there were so many more jokes about the blacks—the assemblage had so much more practice—that they settled on them almost exclusively, and gradually this became a game of one-upmanship, seeing who could lob the nastiest barb into the fire pit and reel in the biggest laugh. They went round the campfire, the jokes becoming more vicious and violent and explosive, until the wheel landed on the man Daniels had kicked, who’d been mostly quiet, nursing his beer and his head.
“Go on, McCarver,” said Felix. “Your turn.”
“Uh…I’m good.”
“Go on.”
“Um…oh, I got one,” said McCarver. “Why can’t Stevie Wonder see his friends?”
The men looked at one another. A few had expectant smiles.
“Because he’s married,” said McCarver.
The silence around the campfire was thick. A dud. No one laughed, except for Breaux, who exploded into laughter, shooting beer from his nose.
“I don’t get it…” said Hendrix.
“He’s married,” said McCarver.
“What the fuck does that have to do with anything?” asked Jakes.
“Well, he’s…black,” said McCarver. “Technically, it’s a black joke.”
“That’s, like, incidental,” said Anson. “In order of importance, his mongrel race is third behind his blindness and his marital status.”
“Who the fuck is Stevie Wonder?” asked Felix.
Breaux fell backward off the log he was sitting on, holding his arms around his stomach.
“ ‘Who the fuck is Stevie Wonder’? Are you serious?” said McCarver, astonished. “ ‘Higher Ground’? ‘Isn’t She Lovely?’ Fucking ‘Superstition’?” He stood up and pantomimed holding a guitar and made a string of strange, syncopated sounds. “…superstitious…”
The men around the fire went quiet as the man lost himself temporarily in the song.
“Prospect, I think you done knocked something loose in his head,” said Big Billy.
The young men in the group continued to give McCarver side-eye until he sat down abruptly and cleared his throat. “Ain’t got time for jokes anyway, what with the racial holy war and all, am I right?” He held his beer aloft. “Who’s with me?”
“Oh my God…I can’t breathe,” said Breaux, getting to his feet and wiping his eyes. He moved for another beer, staggering between the men and the fire, instead of walking around behind them. He was still chuckling when he appeared to stumble and lose his balance, only to catch himself, pick up speed, and bring his boot into Big Billy’s face.
The president’s nose exploded with a pop. Big Billy pitched backward off his log. Breaux was on him before Daniels could even register what had happened. Jakes was on his feet first, but before either of the Kobolds could reach their P, Daniels saw a glint of something sharp. Breaux produced the grill fork he used on the steaks and slid the long tines up the ruin of Big Billy’s nose.
“Ah ah ah,” said Breaux. He was still laughing.
Big Billy stopped squirming.
Daniels was calculating if he could get over to his P and place a boot on the side of Breaux’s head in time when two guards, clad in black, seemed to materialize out of the darkness. Jakes was reaching for the 9mm at the small of his back, under his belt, when one of the guards placed the barrel tip of a semiautomatic rifle to his man’s neck, gentle as a kiss. Jakes slowly raised his hands. Daniels followed.
“Shoot this motherfucker off me!” spat the president.
“Aw, come on,” said Breaux, “don’t get your nose out of joint,” and this began a new peal of laughter.
“It’s an ambush, Billy,” said Jakes. “They drew down on us.”
Daniels had full faith in the brotherhood of the Kobolds, that they were the baddest of the bad, but the prospect saw they were outnumbered, outgunned, and isolated in the middle of the woods.
Get them talking, he thought.
“What the fuck, man?” he said. “I thought all were welcome.”
“Well, if you ask the old man you are,” said Breaux. The man was sitting astride his president in such a relaxed manner it infuriated Daniels. And scared him, if he was being honest. There was no bravado, no chest thumping. Breaux was completely at ease. Daniels had not registered any tells before the sudden violence. Even now the prospect didn’t see Breaux’s eyes so much as widen. Daniels took the rest of the men in. The man with the tendrils on his face looked delighted. The old man’s son, Felix, watched with intense, narrowed eyes. The dandy tried to look nonchalant and the idiot McCarver stared at them all horrified. It was clear that none of them knew about the ambush. That made Daniels even more afraid of the calm, laughing man.
“Thing is,” Breaux continued, “Drexler gives me a lot of latitude. Consider Välkommen a really selective nightclub and I’m the bouncer. I’m afraid I have to kick you gentlemen over the velvet rope.”
“What the hell we ever do to you?” asked Daniels.
“Shut the fuck up, prospect,” said Jakes.
Daniels stared at his SAA, then cut his eyes toward the men with the semiautomatic rifles, then looked back at his P. In any other circumstance he would never have given such a brazen look—it would have been met with a beating for insolence—but his glare communicated Look around, we ain’t punching our way out of this.
Jakes let out a breath.
“Nothing personal,” said Breaux. “Y’all are just not good for the mix. Now, Big Billy, I’m a nice guy. I’m gonna get off of you now. Are you gonna be a nice guy too?” He chuckled. “I wouldn’t recommend nodding your answer.”
“Yeah,” croaked the P.
“Good. Shh, shh, shh,” said Breaux, as if shushing a child as he slid the long tines out of the man’s nose. He hopped off Big Billy, and his president sprang to his feet in an instant, furious, but took no steps toward Breaux. Blood ran down his mouth, but he made no move to stanch it. The guards prodded Daniels and Jakes over to their president.
“Like I said,” said Breaux, “I’m a nice guy. So I’m gonna let y’all ride out of here tonight. Drexler answered your questions. We gave you a nice meal. Now hop on your bikes and go.”
“You just made the biggest mistake of your life,” growled Big Billy. “We’ll leave, but we’ll be back, with every goddamn Kobold on the East Coast, every friendly club, every prospect, every old lady, and we’re going to burn this place to the fucking ground.”
“That’s the difference between us, friend,” said Breaux. “You never see me coming.”
He pointed to their bikes with his fork. Big Billy spat onto the ground between them, but they marched to their mounts. They each kick-started and revved. It was a throaty bellow, loud enough to echo off the trees and jolt everyone in camp awake, but for the first time, Daniels felt it was hollow.
Big Billy roared out of the roundabout in front of the yellow house and shot up the main avenue of the camp like a rocket. Jakes followed right behind and Daniels brought up the rear. A moment later the three men passed under the archway and were on the sandy, wooded road with Välkommen in their rearview mirrors.
Daniels mulled over what would happen next. It would be war, obviously. This would rival any skirmish they’d ever had with the Brazen. This kind of direct assault on a club’s P could not go unanswered. The only question was how long it would take to get everyone together. A couple of days maybe, but when they came back, it would be a raiding party like no one had ever seen. It would be Sherman’s March bad. Little Bighorn bad. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse bad.
Daniels began to feel better the farther they put Välkommen behind them and the road gradually widened to more than a path. After a mile or so, the riders were able to spread out just enough that they were no longer in single file. Had he been directly behind his P and his SAA, he never would have seen the deer.
Maybe Big Billy thought it would dart off at their roaring approach, because his P maintained his speed. The deer was a large one, a stag, and it did move, but not in the manner Daniels expected. It turned its antlered head in their direction and reared up on its hind legs. It seemed to unfurl itself, doubling its height. Daniels blinked. He was so stunned, it took him a full second to realize in the shaky beams of their headlights that it wasn’t a deer at all, but a large man dressed in a stag’s hide, and another second to notice the stag was carrying an ax. The stag swung it in a flash and Big Billy’s head sailed off out of his headlight’s beam and into the darkness.
Billy’s bike continued in a straight line, the body still astride it like the Headless Horseman, a fount of blood arcing high into the air and backward. The spray hit Daniels full in the face as he banked left, passing outside the stag’s reach. His brain was still a second or two behind, trying to process what he had just seen, but the shock and spatter of his president’s blood brought him immediately up to speed. Still, there was the matter of maintaining his bike on the rutted road. His swerving around the stag caused him to lose his balance on a sandy patch. In the moment before he went down, he saw Jakes disappear from his cone of light—he’d gone down in the sand too. Ahead he heard the terrible sound of Big Billy’s bike colliding with a tree at speed.
Daniels managed to bleed off much of his own speed before going down. Still, his contact with the ground was jarring—for all the sand, there was hard, packed earth beneath it—but he managed to bring his arm up before his head smacked. The landing rang his bell instead of knocking him out cold. He felt a sharp pain in his ankle. Fortunately, he wasn’t pinned under the bike. He sat up, coughing, in the center of a cloud of dust. His first thought as he shook his head was that it was as deft a bail as he could manage under the circumstances. Then he remembered the circumstances.
He peered through the cloud of dust and saw the stag marching toward Jakes.
Down the road, even through the haze of dust and illuminated only by the red glow of Jakes’s taillight, the SAA’s crash seemed worse. Jakes was on his stomach, crawling away from his bike. Before Daniels could get to his feet or even scream, the stag was on Jakes. He lifted the ax high overhead and brought it down in a brutal chop between Jakes’s shoulder blades.
He heard a terrible, high-pitched scream. The stag man raised the ax again, but the head of it was buried so deeply in Jakes that the man rose with it, lifted completely off the ground. That’s impossible, thought Daniels. The stag man slammed Jakes into the ground again, driving the ax head into him even farther. The screaming wavered in volume and urgency, revealing someone shrieking, “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!” and Daniels realized it was coming from him. He couldn’t stop himself.
The stag continued to batter Jakes into the ground and Daniels felt every impact. The screams had long since stopped, and in the sudden silence, Daniels found his senses and his legs. He ignored the pain in his ankle and hobbled back to his bike as fast as he could. The stag man ignored him, instead releasing the ax and walking down the road toward Välkommen. With his shattered ankle, each attempt at kick-starting the bike resulted in sharp, explosive pain and nauseating wooziness, but he kept kicking. He looked back and in the red glow saw the stag reach down to retrieve something. He swore to God, country, his family, and even his brothers that if he could start the bike, he would leave the life behind. He chanced another look back and saw the stag approaching then, carrying Big Billy’s bald head, its fingers in his mouth and nose, like it was nothing more than a bowling ball.
“Please,” said Daniels through gritted teeth.
He would ride until he got home, back to his hardass preacher father, and he would fall onto his knees on the man’s front porch, beg his forgiveness for his every infraction since his birth, and accept Jesus Christ on the spot as his Lord and Savior.
Daniels looked again. The stag had walked back to Jakes, the ax handle protruding from his back like a planted flag. Daniels watched the stag’s other hand curl slowly around it.
Please, I will never ride again.
Daniels heard a rumble like thunder and his heart soared. He planted his feet on the bike and revved it, spraying a jet of dust behind him. He glanced back one final time, at his old life, but the road was empty. Just the fallen bikes and dark pools in the ruts that, in the red glow of his taillight, looked black. He blasted off into the night, the roar of the bike drowning out his screams.
Chapter 25
Ben lay next to Lindsay in the tent. It felt hot in the small space, feverish. Lindsay must have sensed his restlessness. She put a hand on his forehead and whispered, “Are you okay?”
Ben grunted, “Long night. Sorry.”
She massaged his scalp for a moment, and it eased the throbbing headache that the moonshine gave him, which had temporarily masked the throbbing headache the biker’s kick had given him. At some point during the night, the shine and the kick decided to team up to royally pound his head. At Lindsay’s touch, he felt his muscles relax, first in his jaw, then his neck, then his back. Despite himself, the only thing that remained throbbing after a moment was below his waist. Lindsay must have sensed it in the dark and propped herself on her elbow. She slid her other hand into his jeans and gripped him. It took him a moment to realize what was happening, another moment to protest.
“What are you…”
“Shh,” she cooed. She pulled closer to him and threw a leg over his waist, then climbed astride him and ground herself into him. The pressure was unbearable.
“We have to make this look real,” she said.
“No,” mumbled Ben. “Stop.”
He forced himself to roll to one side, gasping for breath. He looked over
his shoulder toward her, but she was gone. He was alone.
Just another dream.
“McKelvie, you asshole,” he whispered. Suddenly awake again, he couldn’t get out of the dank tent fast enough. His head instantly resumed its throbbing and he had to piss urgently. Worse, this place was getting under his skin. Working on his head. Associating with these people, every word out of his mouth a lie, the fake tattoos, the strain of keeping himself in check, now the dream and the guilt of it all…he felt wrong every second of the day. Dirty. He told himself it wouldn’t be for much longer.
He unzipped the flap on the tent and escaped, sucking in deep breaths of the cold air. He recounted the events of the night. The “party” broke up pretty quickly after Breaux turned on the bikers. Felix and his crew scattered back to wherever they bedded down. Ben followed Anson back to the garage for a while to make sure he wasn’t going to double back on Lindsay. He stood behind a tree, his eyes fixed on the outbuilding where Anson slept. When the lights went out and stayed out, he went back to the barn and found Lindsay stroking the muzzle of the horse, who was also sleeping. He leaned on the gate.
“Where the fuck are the guards?” he asked.
“Jesus!” she said when she saw his face. “What happened?”
“You should see the other guy.”
She leaned on the gate and touched two fingers to his cheek. “I’m guessing he looks fine?”
“Not a scratch on him.” Ben laughed, then winced. He filled her in on the campfire camaraderie that had exploded into sudden violence. She listened, her eyes wide. “Anyway, I watched Anson and the crew split up and fell asleep. I think you’re in the clear. Even so, move aside. I’ll bed down in the corner.”
She placed her hand over the latch to the gate. “Ben, go back to the tent. You need rest.”
“I’m not leaving you alone in a barn in the middle of…of…all this,” he whispered urgently.
“Ben,” she said. When he was being stubborn or childish or chauvinistic, sometimes all it took was one word.
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