Running On Empty: Crows MC

by Bloom, Cassandra

  No, it wasn’t death that I was smelling. Moreover, it wouldn’t make sense if it was. Death clung and cloyed; it grew and spread. Death, as an odor, was a stain that assaulted the nostrils instead of the eyes. And, like a stain, it was either dealt with or it got worse. It didn’t come and go; didn’t arrive for an unexpected visit like an annoying relative. But this smell—this stink—did just that. It came and it went, always just the same—no stronger or weaker, no variation or accompanying smell. If it was death we were smelling on occasions like these, if that apartment was being used as a momentary placeholder for the corpse between being where it was and where it was meant to go—a “rest stop,” I thought and nearly threw myself into a fit of hysterical laughter while Candy wrestled to find her keys to our own door—then it stood to reason the smell would change at least a little each time. One corpse had every right to smell a little different than another, didn’t it? Betty, who wore Chanel #5 in life, shouldn’t be condemned to stink the same as Bobby and his beloved Axe body spray, right?

  But this…

  There was no death, and there was no variation. Not on the other side of that door, at least.

  As these thoughts boiled away in my skull, the smell of artificial shrimp flavoring started a cautious waft from the door where the other prostitutes had obviously come to some agreement on their supper. It was a salty smell, undeniably food-born—or at least in the realm of food-like—in its origin, but there was something synthetic to it, as well. And this, I shuddered with realization, wasn’t unlike the other smell. I knew with absolute certainty that whatever the other smell was it was not food—not even remotely in the realm of it, either—but, in the world of smells, it was being carried on the same serving tray of “man-made” in its origin.

  And yet…

  Pictures of hospital beds, cat boxes, dirty refrigerators, and janitors’ closets sprang to mind all at once. All random places and things that, at some time or another, had assaulted me with their own bizarre-yet-identifiable stinks. And yet it was none of these. And, worse yet, there was a strange heat behind it. This, however, I more sensed than smelled. I couldn’t even be sure how one could smell a temperature without slipping into the void of saying that something was burning. Granted, “burning” seemed a close enough concept. If anything, this seemed to be a sort of precursor to “burning,” but still hovered in a strange and lonely place that earned it only remarks of concerned confusion instead of panicked exclamations.

  “Forget it,” Candy said as she yanked her keys from the bottom of her purse as though she’d been wrestling them from the grips of something hiding down there. She hadn’t even had to look back to know what I was thinking.

  Torn from my thoughts, I found myself curious how long I’d even been thinking it. It felt like a lot more time had passed since we’d ascended the steps and closed the distance to our door than I imagined possibly could have. Something about the night—about me almost literally working my ass off, having a full-scale breakdown at the bus stop, and then walking into a cloud of that mysterious smell—seemed to be doing something to my head. Everything felt airy. For a moment, I was certain that I was dreaming; that I might have drifted off and was still on the bus or maybe even the bench. I was about to check my eyes, thinking I might gauge how much time had actually passed based on how dry they were since my crying fit, but then Candy grabbed my shoulder and pulled me inside.

  “This won’t come as any surprise to you, Mia,” she said to me as she closed the door, her voice hushed despite us being alone in our home, “but we are not living the good life here. We are not working a cushy job and nobody’s about to confuse this place as the Ritz anytime soon. This is, pardon my bluntness, a bad life. We are living a bad life. And while we can do what we can to keep our spirits up despite that it is foolish to think that there won’t be bad things—bad ongoings—taking place around us at all times. You see something bad, hear something bad, or, yes, even smell something bad, and you’d do well to pretend you didn’t see, hear, or smell a goddam thing, got it? You got it? ‘Cause, bad as this life is—bad as things are—they can get a whole lot badder if you go peeking, listening, or even sniffing around where you got no place peeking, listening, or sniffing. This is our home,” she announced matter-of-factly, stomping her fuck-me boot heel on the floor beneath her. “This!” she repeated, “This apartment and nothing else! Outside that door,” she pointed over my shoulder towards the outside hall, “we are not home, and anything that happens out there is somebody else’s business—T-Built’s business—and the way that we stay alive is to keep our eyes, ears, and noses out of other peoples’ business, especially T-Built’s. You got me?”

  I stared, bewildered by the suddenly stern and serious tone that was coming out of the normally playful and carefree Candy.

  Then she slapped me. Hard.

  “I said ‘you got me?’, Mia!” she hissed.

  “Y-yes. Yes, Candy, I got you. I…” but I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I just nodded. My face stung; felt hot. I forced myself not to touch my cheek, but I couldn’t keep my eyes from watering. Feeling as though the stink that occupied the mystery apartment and crawled about the outside hall had ears, I stifled the second wave of sobs that struck me at that moment.

  “Oh, girl…” Candy’s voice broke and she threw her arms around me. “I’m so sorry.”

  I wanted to tell myself she was apologizing for hitting me, but I was regrettably too smart to believe that.

  I’d been here before.

  I wasn’t sure how or where—I thought I would remember being trapped in a hell like this!—but it was too familiar to not be the first time. Not that it being familiar made it any better. In fact, it made it much, much worse.

  I was trapped. It was dark, uncomfortably warm, and there was a smell. The smell, like me, was trapped. It hung somewhere between sweet and sour; reminding me all at once of thawing meat, fresh mulch under a hot sun, and something earthy, ancient. A deep part of my brain chanted that it was the oldest smell in existence, and another part, deeper still, assured me that I’d one day come to contribute to it.

  I knew that smell. I knew it the same way I knew I was on the first step of a twelve-step staircase that led down into deeper darkness; the same way I knew that the surface my hands pounded against was a door that should lead to freedom. And I knew that that door—that freedom—was closed and that it would never be opened; that freedom had been stolen from me. And my brother, Mack—though he was only Malcolm in that moment—was the thief.

  I knew all of these things with such a startling certainty that I also knew I must have been here before. But, for the life of me, I didn’t know how that was possible.

  Trapped. I was trapped in a dark, horrible, smelly place.

  “This won’t come as any surprise to you, Mia,” a voice seemed to call from a distant place, not in the here-and-now, but somehow prevalent all the same, “but we are not living the good life here.”

  Whimpering, knowing what awaited me down in those warm, smelly depths but also knowing it was all my life amounted to, I turned away from the door and started down the steps.

  One…

  Two…

  Three…

  “We are not working a cushy job and nobody’s about to confuse this place as the Ritz anytime soon,” the voice continued, talking me down the steps like an instructor working me through the motions of some horrible cycle.

  Four…

  Five…

  Six…

  “This is, pardon my bluntness, a bad life.”

  Only halfway down the stairs to my new world and the voice had gone and summed it all up perfectly. A horrible, nearly precognitive fear took hold of me and I had to take hold of the rough, splintery railing to keep from toppling down the rest of the steps.

  Seven…

  Eight…

  “And while we can do what we can to keep our spirits up despite that it is foolish to think that there won’t be bad things—ba
d ongoings—taking place around us at all times.”

  My hand traveled along the railing. As the eighth step became the ninth, it went from rough and splintery to smooth and tacky. It was unnerving, and while my eyes had come to adjust enough for me to investigate the spot where my hand lay I knew not to. Keeping my gaze trained on the darkness ahead, I removed my hand from the surface. I knew it would be better to fall the rest of the way into that black abyss than to let my hand spend one more second on that railing a moment longer.

  I thought of my father’s paint cans. I thought of old Band-Aids. And then I thought I might turn around and try for the door again; thought that maybe Malcolm had let go and I might escape from this (life) place he’d trapped me inside.

  Then something at the bottom of the stairs, something waiting in the darkness, said, “You a whore or not?”

  And suddenly, just like I knew everything else, I knew there was no turning back. There was no escape from this (life) place.

  I cursed Malcolm’s name—curiously calling him “Mack”—and continued down the stairs.

  Nine…

  “You see something bad—”

  Ten…

  “—hear something bad—”

  Eleven…

  The hot, reeking stench seemed to reach out like a living thing and grab me as my foot fell on the second-to-last step.

  “—or, yes, even smell something bad, and you’d do well to pretend you didn’t see, hear, or smell a goddam thing, got it?”

  Getting it, I took another step—Twelve—and finally dared to take another step into the darkness, away from the stairs.

  “‘Cause, bad as this life is—bad as things are—they can get a whole lot badder if you go peeking, listening, or even sniffing around where you got no place peeking, listening, or sniffing.”

  Here it was dark. Here I had to look with my hands. My mouth was filled with the taste of latex. My vagina and my anus hurt. I was crying. And, all the while, I searched on with my hands, looking for something or somebody that might help me get out of this (life) place.

  “You got me?” the voice called out, seeming to offer itself to me.

  And then my hands fell upon the soft, stinking mass of a long forgotten corpse. Gasping at the fresh wave of rot that assaulted my nostrils, I blinked at a sudden wave of clarity—light!—that illuminated my freshly discovered treasure.

  And there, before me, I saw myself. I stared back, naked and dead and rotting—my legs splayed and my body showing signs of recent use—and I held my arms open as a lover might when awaiting an embrace.

  “You got me,” Dead-Mia moaned up at me, triumphant and elated.

  “You a whore or not?” the other voice called out from an unseen corner.

  Then, seeming ecstatic to answer the question, Dead-Mia leapt at me, grinning wide and exposing a length of latex still occupying the corner of her mouth. “I said ‘you got me?’, Mia!” she bellowed, taking hold of me and pulling me into her.

  As a fresh batch of darkness enveloped me, a strange, alien thought came to me:

  Death didn’t smell so synthetic the first time…

  I woke up screaming. My throat already hurt, and I guessed in an instant that I’d been screaming for quite some time. My suspicion was confirmed when I realized I wasn’t alone; when I realized Candy was already in my room, in my bed, and holding me to her as she had already back at the bus stop. She spoke to me, but I couldn’t hear her words over my own screams. Beyond my shrieks and the pleasant hum of Candy’s words, I was distantly aware that one of our neighbors—another of T-Built’s prostitutes—was banging on the wall and demanding silence.

  I wanted so badly to give it to her…

  But the screams just kept on coming.

  Behind the curtain of terror that fueled them, though, was an ongoing and crystal-clear thought:

  God damn you, Mack. God… fucking… damn you!

  Chapter 5

  ~Jace~

  The heat wave was carrying on, and it didn’t seem to have any intention of letting up. Between it and the scorching metal between my thighs, I couldn’t help but wonder if I truly was in Hell. My eyes took a detour from the road ahead of me to the flame design emblazoned across the gas tank. A sort of ironic dread came across me. It would be like something out of the Bible, a punishment like this, with the all-too-obvious telltale symbol constantly with me like that.

  “This isn’t Hell,” I grumbled to nobody in particular as I turned and started down the road towards “MERCURY’S MOTORS & MECHANICS.” “The Devil’s not that wicked.”

  I caught a glimpse of something in the distance at the end of the road. It could have been a heat mirage, or it could have been a smiling woman holding a pregnant belly and offering me a wave.

  Not now, Anne. Please, I pleaded inwardly, impressed with myself to know not to try saying that aloud.

  The fact that I was seeing her at the end of every street in the same way I’d seen her at the end of the street the night she’d been killed was likely proof enough that I was at least a little crazy. The fact that I could “talk” to her in my head rather than out loud like one of those lunatics on the street, however, was a good sign.

  At least I hoped it was.

  The previous night’s episode with the not-so-bad Amy had, though I had every intention of underselling this fact to Danny, done something for me. It wasn’t the cure-all that Danny had all-but prescribed it as—pussy was nothing to scoff at, but even at its best it wasn’t putting Zoloft out of business—but I couldn’t say that getting laid hadn’t done something to tweak my attitude.

  Then again, as Danny might put it, “an oil change won’t mean diddly-cock if what’cha need’s a new engine.”

  “He’ll just have to deal with the fact that I got my fluids topped off,” I muttered, and then immediately wondered what it meant that I’d been speaking aloud to nobody but think-pleading to the not-really-a-ghost of my dead wife.

  Means you’re batshit crazy, Jace, I thought to myself.

  And the questions just kept coming in.

  I revved the engine and rocketed around a Taurus, actually getting the chopper up on its back tire in a sloppy wheelie as the acceleration proved too much for the front wheel to handle. The tight-ass in the Taurus shot me a look, and I shot him the bird. He was late to return the gesture, and I started laughing as I swerved to get in front of him. Screeching brakes and a car horn sang behind me and, an instant later, I was swerving in front of oncoming traffic from the other lane to pull into Danny’s shop. I was about to steer the bike around back when I heard a second chorus of angry honking and, turning my head, I saw the Taurus pull into the parking lot—the driver’s face pulled into a look of fury and determination.

  “Well this should be good,” I thought.

  In front of me, the doors to the shop chimed as a few Crows stepped out. I didn’t need to look to know there was more than one. There were always a few boys stationed at the front of the shop to keep an eye out and to maintain a semblance of the business that the shop presented itself as. Should somebody come in wanting a tune-up or hoping to score a new bike, they wouldn’t be left waiting for service and wondering if all the people they saw coming and going were, perhaps, up to something other than acting as a mechanic and motorcycle shop. It was rare that anybody actually come through there looking to do any sort of legitimate business, but it did happen. Moreover, it helped to have records of employees and jobs to prove that—“No, officer”—so-and-so couldn’t have been doing such-and-such on when-and-when, because they were here doing this-and-that. Then again, what good was paying off the police commissioner if it didn’t give the Crow Gang a bit of breathing room when the law was involved. Especially when, in the long run, the Crows’ activities were, though certainly not wholeheartedly legal and wholesome, certainly geared towards maintaining the city rather than throwing it into a nosedive like the Carrion Crew seemed hellbent on doing.

  All the same, “MERCURY’S MOTORS
& MECHANICS” had men stationed out front, and the sight of an obviously irate man tailing their leader into the shop’s parking lot was enough to bring them out.

  I kept my eyes on the Taurus, craning my neck to do so. The man’s face only shifted marginally at the sight of the others as they stepped out to greet us. I guessed that what he saw was an intrigued audience. He had no reason to suspect that I worked there, even less reason to suspect that I ran the place, and practically no reason to suspect that the men who’d stepped out were, in fact, members of a gang and not just greasy mechanics looking for a parking lot fight to distract them. This was why it came as no surprise to me when his face took on all the properties of “am I sure I want to do this” and not “I’m quite sure I don’t want to do this.” Then, perhaps deciding it might even earn him a bit of street cred to be seen pummeling a douchebag biker on his own turf, he threw his door open and stepped out.

  “Can I help you, sir?” I asked, throwing him my “I am the manager”-grin.

  “Help you into a hospital gurney, you road hog; you fucking asshole road hog!” he snarled.

  My laughter didn’t help matters. “Do people still say ‘road hog?’” I asked, finally glancing back at the other Crows.

  My initial guess had been off. There weren’t just two; there were three. They all joined in my laughter. As the backing vocals came to join my own song, the Taurus driver finally paused. I could almost see the moment of realization dawning on him. Though he still had no reason to suspect my role with them or the true nature of our business, the fact that the three were more than just curious onlookers but, in fact, at the very least close buddies of mine represented a sizable deterrent in his decision to move forward with his road rage.

  However, let it never be said of the nature of man that he’s willing to admit fault and commit to an unprovoked retreat.

  He took another step towards me.

  I snapped my fingers, and three similar steps brought the other Crows that much closer to him.