Biker

by Baron, Mike;

  Fuck.

  CHAPTER 27

  Pratt’s head slammed into the wall as he jerked back. He pulled his Buck knife from his pocket and opened the four-inch blade.

  The sinewy tan creature dropped like a load of laundry, landing unerringly on four wide-spread paws, using the impact to spring at Pratt as it was born to do. Shrieking slightly through his teeth Pratt lashed out with a right front kick that caught the cat square in the chest with a jarring thump. The cat dropped to the ground, turned around and sprang. It was a perpetual-motion machine, a foaming buzz saw.

  Pratt threw up an arm. The cat’s hind claws scrabbled at the duct tape, cleaved through skin and muscle leaving furrows, its yellow eyes inches from Pratt’s, its breath a hot charnel wind. Pratt grabbed it by the scruff of the neck with his left hand, pulled it tight and hacked down with the knife. Each of its clawed extremities tentacled from his grip and found purchase in his skin. Pratt yanked its neck back, stopping the inch-and-a-half incisors from reaching his face. He fought a tornado of razor blades at his belly, slash after slash on his forearms and chest, the intimate shocking parting of the flesh, furiously lashing out with the knife. Over and over and over, his arm flinging blood every time he drew it back. The lion’s spittle struck his face.

  Would his tiny blade even penetrate to the cat’s vital organs through the matrix of bone and sinew? The mountain lion dropped back snarling and spitting, limping from a slash across its forepaw and sucking holes in its side. Pratt reversed his grip so that the blade protruded from the thumb side. He grabbed the carpet segment and wrapped it around his bleeding left arm. The cat circled and pounced, jaws clamping on the carpeted forearm as he thrust it forward, nearly crushing his ulna. Pratt brought the blade up with all his force, driving it through the soft underbelly beneath the breastplate, working it back and forth like a recalcitrant cork.

  The cat mewled piteously and collapsed, panting. Its torn side bellowed quickly in and out. It looked at him with an odd mix of defiance and regret, as if it knew it had burned through its nine lives in one fell swoop. A pool of blood spread across the hard-packed earth. The light in its eyes dimmed. It lay on its side, fat pink tongue protruding at an odd angle.

  Pratt slumped on his ass, panting. He waited for the giant fist that had seized his heart to unclench. He practiced his square breathing. He thanked God. He examined his wounds. The gouges on his left arm had penetrated to the bone and ached in pulses with his heartbeat. His clothes were drenched with sweat and blood. The cat had ripped off his shirt and bandages.

  Pratt wiped the buck knife off on the cat’s fur and used it to cut his shirt into strips, which he used to bandage the wounds on his arms, the claw scrape across his hairline that sent tendrils of blood into his eyes.

  Thirst scorched him to the bone. He thought about drinking his urine. He’d read a book about Marines on a prisoner-of-war ship during WWII drinking their own urine. They just puked it back up. He couldn’t stop sweating despite the cool air. He looked at his buck knife, tufts of fur projecting from the serrated part of the blade.

  He looked at the mountain lion. Had to weigh one hundred and fifty pounds. Cat muscle wasn’t like human muscle. It was stronger and faster. The cougar was a threshing machine and somehow he’d killed it. Could you eat the meat? It didn’t matter. He’d be dead of thirst long before he’d be hungry enough to eat a mountain lion.

  Pratt got to his knees and straightened the big cat’s body. Seven feet from tip to tail. It was beginning to stink already. Pratt must have pierced the abdomen. All that fur. What a trophy.

  Pratt looked up at the disc of deep blue sky. If only he could reverse gravity.

  All that fur.

  Using the buck knife Pratt field-dressed the carcass as he would a deer, splitting open the thorax from neck to anus. The reeking innards plopped out, a plate of purple sausage. The skin was extremely slippery and difficult to separate from bone and sinew. Pratt had to stand on the carcass to hold it in place while he drew the blade longitudinally, carefully slicing the skin into two-inch strips. It was difficult to get a grip against the slippery skin, and he slipped several times, landing hard and sending furious bolts of pain ricocheting throughout his body.

  It was grueling, backbreaking work. When he was done he’d turned the cat’s skin into sixteen strips varying in length from two feet to six. He looked up. The quality of blue had deepened. The sun had begun its long slide into the mountains. Weak from loss of blood and hunger, Pratt worked feverishly, fearing if he waited until morning he wouldn’t make it.

  The skin was already stiff as he forced it end to end, tying knots with his whole body. Blades assailed him from without, his own bones from within. The skin was as flexible as a wire coat hanger. He worked it. He bent it back in on itself like an accordion, over and over. He wrapped it tightly around a brick and smacked all sides against the hard-packed ground. When he finished he estimated he had about thirty feet.

  He went to work on the gallon tin, flattening it with the brick, hacking through it with the buck knife. The well stank like an abattoir. Flies descended en masse. Flies swarmed his face and arms and settled on the bloodied carcass. It was a fly buffet. It was a fly Sturgis.

  Light was fading as Pratt cut, bent and hammered the tin into a crude hook with a puncture at one end for the rope. He tied a brick fragment to the hook for weight. His fingers were torn from the lion’s claws and gouged by the ragged tin edge. Slick with blood, they refused to obey him. He couldn’t grip the metal. He caught himself whining, stopped, breathed, slumped. He flexed his fingers, wiped them off on his jeans and went back to work. At last he had a rope and a grappling hook. Did he have the energy to throw it and after that make the climb?

  Pratt pissed again at the wall, his urine chrome yellow. He picked up his stiff, reeking lariat and stood in the center of the floor. He looked up. Using his best fast-pitch softball underhand, he heaved the hook at the sky. It clacked against the bricks several feet from the top and tumbled back to earth. Pratt stepped back to avoid getting smacked. The buzzing of the flies filled his prison with an eerie drone.

  Hungrily he eyed the fly-specked carcass.

  What are you, crazy?

  He looked up. Second throw. Get that Zen thing going. You don’t need to look—you know which way is up. Bending at the knees, he used the same technique as a kettlebell hoist, swinging straight up with his thighs, hips, whole body. The weighted hook sailed toward the blue sky, brushing the bricks just below the rim. It fell to the ground and lay in a pool of congealing blood. Pratt was at the limit of his range like a good place kicker on the fifty-yard line. He had to dig down deep and find that extra six inches.

  Pratt was exhausted, weak from loss of blood and anxiety. He didn’t have that many throws in him before he reached diminishing returns. Breathing deeply he centered himself and threw again. The hook cleared the rim—barely—but failed to catch. Pratt prayed for strength.

  Nine tosses later his prayer was answered.

  CHAPTER 28

  Pratt tested the cat-skin rope with his weight. The skin stretched with a slight squeaking noise but held. Dried puma blood provided an adhesive grip. Wrapping the reeking rope around his forearm, Pratt began pulling himself up, cat rope clamped between his shoes, glad that he’d been practicing chin-ups religiously. Eight feet off the floor the chamber narrowed to a four-foot tube. The diameter was too great for him to brace himself but bricks protruded from the wall, allowing him to place some of his weight. Fifteen feet up he paused to catch his breath, each foot resting on a slight protrusion while he gripped the rope and tried to ease the screaming pain in his upper back and ribs.

  Pratt craned his neck. The blue sky had darkened and deepened. A star twinkled. It was almost eight. Rationing his breath, he heaved himself up, foot by foot, brick by brick. A cramp seized his right calf, threatening to twist it into a pretzel. Pratt struggled to stretch his leg but the cramp pushed back like a steel vise. He overpowered his own alien f
lesh, willing the leg to relax while the rest of his body tensed and coiled like a steel spring. Cramping came from dehydration. His fingers cramped. His jaw cramped.

  The cramps went away slowly, leaving him scared of extending those muscles. He needed water. He looked up. Disc was closer now. With eyes on the deep blue disc he inched upward. Four heaves. Then three. He got his hands over the rim and hung there panting for five minutes, feet braced against a couple of protrusions, gathering strength to heave himself up and out.

  He raised himself on protesting arms. For the first time in hours he saw the horizon. The little valley was deserted. The silence was immense. Even the omnipresent crickets and katydids had ceased their constant sawing. Pratt grasped for the outer edge and got it. With both hands gripping the outer edge, he got his right leg up and over until finally, gratefully, he tumbled from the low rim to the matted brown grass and lay there panting.

  The impatient North Star had already emerged in the sapphire sky. Pratt felt the cramps gathering in his limbs, massing for attack. He relaxed his gut, willing his overheated body to calm down. He had to relax it in stages. It wouldn’t all go at once. He started with the toes, an old yoga trick. The cramps retreated.

  Water. He needed water.

  Pratt sat up and looked around. There was no sign of other living creatures save a lone turkey buzzard.

  Is that you, my friend?

  “Thank you for saving my life once again,” Pratt said. He arched his back looking up at the heavens. Pratt staggered to his feet. He felt lightheaded, fresh off the boat and hadn’t got his ground legs yet. Darkness flowed through the hills into the little valley. The Quonset hut was a black silhouette.

  “Eric!” Pratt yelled once. His voice cracked. The place felt empty.

  Pratt stumbled for the hut, automatically glancing to his right and left. The tepee glowed pale ivory in the starlight. Pratt gripped the Quonset door frame and stared into the darkness of the interior. A slow river of reek invaded his sinuses.

  “Eric,” he said. Nothing. Pratt stood in the door frame, listening. The crickets and katydids were back at it.

  Pratt needed water badly. He had never felt such a thirst. He found a light switch next to the door but it clicked uselessly. Some light filtered in through ivy-covered windows and the lone skylight, revealing a Coleman lantern resting on some cardboard boxes inside the door. Pratt took the lantern and looked for matches.

  He found them on the workbench, crowded with Bunsen burners, chemicals and latex gloves. The matchbook said, Vern’s Place, 421 Main St., Hog Tail, WY. Pratt lit the lantern. It cast a yellow glow into the jumbled hermit hoarder’s lair, boxes everywhere, an old sofa shoved up against the side beneath one occluded window. American Pickers would have a field day. There was a sink in the worktable surface and beneath that several picnic coolers. Next to the sink was a small glass vial labeled “ketamine” with a warning and what looked like a pharmaceutical bottle labeled “Ciclosporin.” Several spent hypodermic needles lay in the bottom of a ten-gallon tub used for trash. Another ten-gallon tub served as an umbrella stand. It held a pump-action air rifle and a nine iron.

  Pratt pried the lid off one of the coolers. A flesh-eroding stench latched onto his skin and he slammed it shut without looking. Breathing now through his mouth he pried up the lid of the second cooler and found three quart bottles of lime-flavored sports drink, still cool from the water in the bottom of the chest.

  “Thank you Jesus,” he muttered, twisting the cap off one and upending it. He chugged it down and opened another. Half of that and he was finally sated. Holding the lantern before him Pratt began a careful search of the interior. A stained coffee table in front of the sofa was virtually invisible beneath piles of old magazines, empty take-out food wrappers and bottles. An old compound bow poked up from behind the sprung sofa.

  The fumes made Pratt’s eyes water. He made his way toward the rear of the hut. A scurrying sound froze him in place. Mice. In the back beneath an open window he found the nest. Piles of old rags and blankets formed into a crude hollow, like a dog might make, covered with fur. There was so much fur, the pattern of the fabric was invisible. Pratt reached down, pinched a wad and stuck it in an open envelope he found in the trash. The envelope was addressed to Arnold Daggett, Spearfish, SD. The postage marking was three years old.

  Next to the pile of rags was an aluminum water bowl. An iron ring had been sunk into the floor of the hut. The nest smelled like feces. Taped to the wall about four feet off the floor was a picture cut from a Sunday magazine: the Simpson family all together smiling for the camera. Pratt stared at it a long time thinking the same thoughts Eric had.

  The combination of assaultive smells pushed him inexorably back to the door.

  On the way out he paused to take inventory of the work surface. Unbelievably, his wallet and cell phone lay on the bench half-covered with a BUDK catalog. Pratt flipped the cell phone open. No signal. He checked his wallet. His money and credit cards were intact. Pratt stuffed them back in his pockets. He grabbed a roll of gray duct tape. He saw cotton peeking from a cardboard box, peeled back the lid. Dozens of pale green shirts with a wild flame-colored logo depicting a fierce Sioux warrior in war bonnet and the legend, “STURGIS—THE ONE, THE ONLY, THE ORIGINAL.”

  Pratt used his buck knife to slice the shirts into strips, which he used to stanch his blood.

  Pratt pulled one out. It was a large. He struggled painfully into it, a spastic ballet. The fumes gave him a headache. Grabbing the two remaining bottles of sports drink, he went outside and inhaled deeply of the sweet night air.

  He looked around.

  Where had the boy gone?

  Maybe he was watching from the surrounding hills. Maybe Pratt was the first human being other than Moon the boy had ever seen, other than his mother. What was he doing? What must he think, his home invaded, forced to participate in savagery? Eric’s anxiety level had to be over the moon.

  Don’t think about the boy.

  Don’t think about the elephant in the room.

  Pratt needed to alert Cass and Ginger that Moon was coming for them. He had to tell the police. He had to get his ass back to Wisconsin pronto. He dismissed going back the way he’d come. There had to be an easier way in and out. A dirt road ran from the yard up a rocky ridge and southwest, doubtless connected to some road somewhere. Pratt hadn’t heard a vehicle last night when Moon had grabbed him but that meant nothing. Moon might have stashed the vehicle over the ridge to creep in. Why would he creep in unless he suspected there might be an intruder? How had he known?

  When Grundy didn’t show, Moon must have smelled a rat.

  Pratt walked outside the copse, up the sandpapered rock to a slight promontory and did a 360. Shadows flickered across a ridge in moonlight. Coyotes barked weird yipping ululations. There—in the creosote. A pair of red eyes.

  Pratt stared until his vision blurred. Wolves had red eyes in the moonlight. Men did not.

  An icicle entered his heart. A sense of hopelessness seized Pratt in iron jaws like the first time he’d been thrown in jail, age sixteen, car theft. They got him when he ran the new Chevy Tahoe he’d hot-wired in a mall parking lot into the ditch. A cop with a face like a bulldog took one sneering look at him, pumped and inked in his wife beater, and tuned him up by the side of the road with swift, brutal little punches to his kidneys that left him pissing blood for days.

  The bull had cranked the cuffs behind his back and tossed him in the back of his cruiser. The back seat smelled like vomit. The jail stank of urine. There was no mattress on the hard iron cot.

  Pratt remembered sitting in the stinking cell by himself Saturday night thinking of ways to commit suicide, thinking, Of course people kill themselves in jail. All the fucking time.

  They did it when the future looked worse than the past. They made that calculation in their minds—is it worth going on? Are things ever going to get better or is it all downhill from here?

  Duane weighed in. “You ain�
��t worth a glass of warm piss, boy. I don’t know how you’re gonna make it.”

  Fuck you Duane, I’m gonna make it.

  Pratt shivered uncontrollably, sat right there and did the breathing thing. The desolation, the smell, the awful things he’d seen—he had to get out of there.

  The pale white tepee decorated with Sioux pictographs beckoned like a beacon.

  Pratt stiff-walked over and looked inside.

  An ivory and rust colored tank gleamed dully in the moonlight, the word “Indian” painted on its side in elegant script with a gold outline. Ape hangers stuck straight up like a praying mantis’ antennae. Indians had been around since 1901. The original manufacturer was in Springfield, Massachusetts. It went bankrupt in 1953 but ever since, venture groups had been buying up the name and introducing new “Indians,” capitalizing on the full-skirted fender look. This Indian was from 1999, with an 1800-cc chunk of iron in the cradle frame.

  The key was in the ignition.

  CHAPTER 29

  The Indian was one of those legacy jobs based on the original tooling but with a modern engine. Art deco fenders covered most of the wheels. It had fishtail pipes and floorboards. It was long and low and weighed seven hundred and fifty pounds.

  Pratt laughed when he saw it. Who would have thought the day would come when he would prefer four wheels to two? His cracked rib was incendiary and the rest of him looked like it had gone through a wood chipper. He’d bandaged himself as well as he could with rags and duct tape. There were bungee cords on the pillion. He used these to strap in his sports drink, gingerly sat on the saddle and unscrewed the gas cap. Good to go. He was seeping.

  It occurred to him that with Moon gone there was no reason for Pratt to flee. He could stay the night, start fresh in the morning.

  Maybe the boy would come back.