Ridge Creek

by C L Green

  It is then that I feel a soft touch on the side of my face below my good eye. Startled, I snap my eye open again to see Jake is standing right in front of me, his hand resting on my cheek. To my shock he is smiling. Cutting my rant off, I freeze solid.

  Stroking my face softly he murmurs, “We’ll get you a big dog. And we’ll get you a gun. But sweetheart, you’re never gunna get to shove that gun up his arse because he’ll never get that close to you ever again. I’ll fuckin’ kill him before he does.”

  All the air leaves my lungs in a whoosh and I feel my mouth dropping open as I gape at Jake.

  Did he just say that? Why would he say that?

  He doesn’t even know me.

  “And then I’ll kill him again,” I hear a soft, lilting voice coming from the doorway and turn to see Ellen standing with tears shimmering in her eyes.

  Jake’s hand drops from my face and he softly takes my hand in his. “Let’s get you back to bed sweetheart. I’m coming with you this time, I’m fuckin’ tired.”

  “I’m safe here? I can stay? You’ll be close.” I mumble softly, the questions echoing through my head as I realize I kinda like the idea of a hulking great biker being close by. A hulking great biker who could probably do as good a job as a Hooch dog, if not better.

  “You are, you can,” he murmurs as he leads me back to the bed, stripping his shirt off as we go.

  “Okay, but you need to do some serious housework man. This joints a sty.”

  “Sure sweetheart, I’ll get right on that,” he murmurs again as he stops by the bed to drop his pants to the floor. Staring openly, I take in the site of him standing only in his boxers. Tattoos snaking up both arms and up his neck, he has muscles on his muscles, all over his body.

  Hot damn.

  It looks like my self-appointed bodyguard is the hottest guy I have ever laid eyes.

  Pointing to the bed, he watches as I climb in gingerly and settle to one side. Then, being careful not to bump me as he climbs in, he rolls over onto his face, wraps his arms around his pillow and settles with a sigh.

  “Sleep woman, I’m wiped,” his voice muffles from his pillow.

  “Okay,” I say as I roll to my side, facing him. Leaving my back and ass well out of range of any unwanted physical contact, I drift off to sleep within minutes.

  *****

  Jake…

  I hear her breathing level out next to my shoulder and know she is asleep. Turning my head slightly, I look to see her facing me. She is resting on her left side, the only side of her body not ravaged by that mother fucking asshole.

  From the small piece of her face that is not swollen beyond recognition, I can see with clarity the clear beauty that she normally is. Even with her long golden blonde hair currently all matted with blood and plastered against her head, I can see that she is normally a woman who takes care of herself. I can also see that any man who manages to gaze into those eyes is going to struggle not to lose themselves in them.

  As sheer exhaustion from over twenty four hours spent without sleep slides in, I vow to hunt that mother fucker down. I vow to make him regret every mark, bruise and scar he left on her tiny little body.

  *****

  Arianna…

  The next time I wake up it is late afternoon. My entire body is aflame with pain and I find myself groaning as I float to consciousness.

  Somebody please kill me.

  Opening my good eye, I find that my bad one makes the slightest attempt at movement. An improvement. Focusing my eye, I find myself staring straight into the wide-awake eyes of Jake.

  “You need pills,” he says.

  “I need pills,” I agree.

  “You were groaning in your sleep,” he adds as he rolls away from my face and swings his legs over the edge of the bed. Standing quickly, he strides to the door and disappears through it.

  Returning a short time later, I see he his carrying a glass of water and big handful of pills.

  Holy shit.

  “I see you’ve decided it’s easier to finish me off.”

  He grins slightly at my humor but shakes his head no.

  “Anti-inflammatories, pain killers and antibiotics. I think Ma might have shoved a multivitamin in there too. She made me take one while I was out there as well.”

  Grimacing, I slowly roll to my back and slide to a sitting position.

  Nasty.

  Handing me the glass of water, he holds his hand out flat with the mighty handful of pills. Watching as I slowly put one in my mouth, sip water and then repeat until they are all gone.

  “Twenty minutes. Ma’s coming in to help you clean up. She’s going to wash your hair too.”

  “I need a mirror…” I find my words floating off as I realize I haven’t even seen myself yet. I know I look bad, but…

  “No mirrors.”

  “No mirrors?” I ask confused and a bit high-pitched.

  “You’ve been through enough.”

  I’m not so sure I agree with his theory but looking at the set of his face I don’t think I’ll be getting much choice on the matter. And who cares anyway? I’m still kinda wishing I were dead anyway. I’m sure no one looks good when they’re dead. Feeling like I do, I probably look like a ‘Walker’ off the Walking Dead anyway. Who wants to see that when they look in the mirror?

  Handing the glass back to him, I slide back down the bed, roll to my side, close my eye and zone out. Lost in re-reruns of last night again.

  After a few minutes of my own mental torture, I hear the sound of him pulling his jeans on and then the door opens and closes. Opening my eyes to peek, he is gone.

  *****

  The rest of the afternoon and evening flies by in a blur. Partially because it is busy and partially because the pain killers are good and keep me relaxed and a bit out of it.

  Here’s how it played out:

  Shortly after Jake leaves, I hear a small knock on the door and then silence. Unsure if I heard it or not, I call out a small, “Yeah?”

  The door pushes open and Zane pokes his head around. I give him a small grin and he steps through the door. He is carrying two big Target bags.

  Huh?

  “Girl clothes,” he rumbles as he walks across the room and puts them on the chair next to the bed. “I don’t shop. Don’t get excited.”

  He stands looking at me and I watch his blue eyes taking in my swollen face for a few beats before he orders, “Heal.” Then he heads back to the door and leaves.

  The rest of my day is spent with Ellen fussing over me as she helps me out of bed to find the toilet and bathroom. She also feeds me. She is calming and gentle. She also takes great efforts to meet all my requests. Except one. She refuses to let me anywhere near the bathroom mirror. Even insisting I brush my teeth in the bath and not go near the bathroom sink.

  It would appear she and her son are on the same page for that one. With steely grace she steers me away from the mirror each time I try to approach, shaking her head solemnly.

  Back in bed, I get a visit from Pops later in the evening. He arrives quietly and sits in the chair next to the bed. Staring at me thoughtfully for a while, he leaves about ten minutes later. Not a word is spoken the entire time he is there. Lost inside my head, reliving my own torture, I stare blankly at him during his visit and am silently thankful he doesn’t talk. I don’t see Jake again that day.

  When I finally gain the courage to ask about his whereabouts late in the evening, Ellen explains he has gone home for a while. Confused, thinking this was his bedroom and therefore his home, I send her a questioning look but she says no more.

  *****

  I don’t see Jake again until nearly a week later.

  A week of my own living hell that I spend alternating between sleeping knocked out with pain killers, or pacing the room going quietly mad. Ellen comes and goes often, feeding me, nursing me and chatting quietly to me. She tells me stories about her life and tells me about the township of Ridge Creek. A place she has lived all of her life.
A place she clearly loves.

  Unable to talk back, I listen absentmindedly to her chatter but offer nothing back of myself. I don’t see the point. I am a dead person walking. Tony is coming for me. I know it. No matter how many times Ellen assures me I am safe here, I know I am not. He will find me.

  So as my body heals, my mind falls apart.

  Every waking hour I continue to relive the events leading up to the present and I find myself spiraling further into a mental torture chamber where all I can feel is pain and fear. As the days pass, I become obsessed with a fear that Tony isn’t far away and that he will soon come storming into the room, gun pointed at my head to finish what he started.

  All through my spiral downwards, Ellen stays close. Calm, gentle, soothing, she watches me cautiously as I begin to overreact to every sound I hear in the rooms around me. Like an animal caught in a trap, I sense impending doom.

  Over sensitized as I am, I soon become aware that outside this room, life is busy. There are constant sounds of doors banging and Harley pipes roaring their arrival and departure. There are muffled voices both loud and soft at all hours of the day.

  Sometimes my mind decides all the activity is a good thing. There’s a whole world out there and people nearby to help when Tony finds me. Others, it panics as I vision Tony and a band of gun wielding men storming through the building shooting everyone in their way as they search each room methodically to find me.

  It is during one of these latter episodes that I hear a loud bang somewhere in the building and I lose it. With a shriek, I realize he’s here. Launching upright from my position lying on the bed, I fly into action. My eyes quickly scan the now tidied room (compliments of Ellen). Frantically assessing my hiding and defense choices, my eyes settle on a pen on the bedside table. Snatching it up, I haul myself from the bed and without a moment’s hesitation, throw myself under the bed.

  A serious of pains explode through my body but I ignore them as I curl into a tight ball, clutching my pen closely to my body. My mind and heart racing, I listen.

  There are no more bangs. I can hear quiet laughter off in the distance somewhere. I can also hear what are now ingrained as ‘normal’ sounds such as doors opening and closing and people moving about.

  I lay in my tight ball for a few more minutes listening, working my hardest to convince myself it is all okay and that I should crawl out from under the bed. But my mind won’t allow it. I am frozen in fear, unable to move.

  Hearing the bedroom door open, I gasp and hold my breath. No matter how hard I try to convince myself nothing is wrong, I cannot lift the feeling of impending doom as I freeze, breathless. Realizing too late that I have balled myself in the wrong direction to see the door, I listen as soft footfalls enter the room and then leave.

  Shit.

  Who was it and why did they leave? My mind decides that if it was someone I knew they would have called out and started looking for me.

  This is bad.

  As cold shivers of fear start to wrack my tightly curled body, I feel the hot prickling of tears forming in my eyes.

  He’s going to find me.

  Jamming my eyes closed, tears leak from between my eyelids and drip silently to the floor. Why didn’t I just die jumping out of that truck and have done with it? I should have dived straight onto my head and not tried the stunt roll thing. Perhaps I should even have just waited and accepted my bullet to the head. At least it would have been instant.

  Living in constant fear is far worse than dying.

  The sound of heavy boots crossing the room drags me from my thoughts again. Tilting my head back slowly from my protective ball, I open my eyes. My vision is blurred with tears as I try to focus. I can’t see anything.

  Blinking rapidly to clear my tears I receive the shock of my life as suddenly with a loud scraping noise, I am no longer under the bed. It has been dragged sideways with force, leaving me open and exposed.

  “I don’t crawl under beds.” I hear the deep, gravelly sound of Jake’s voice behind me.

  Uncurling my body from its protective ball, I let out a huge slow breath as relief floods through me that it is Jake. Sitting up, I throw most of my weight to my good ass cheek.

  A huge hand appears in front of me and I take it. Rising to stand gingerly, I find myself staring directly at a huge, wide muscly chest. Tipping my head back to look up the long distance to his face, I see bright green eyes watching me with interest.

  “You look better,” he tells me.

  “Do I?” I wouldn’t know. No one will let me look in a fucking mirror. The one in the bathroom was covered over with a piece of board by day two that had been screwed to the wall either side.

  Who does that?

  He nods.

  Taking my hand, he gently turns and pulls me towards the door. Feeling safe and secure with my hand in his huge hulking one, I follow without a word. If Jake’s here, I’m okay.

  Leading me down a long hallway past the bathroom and toilet (the only other two rooms I know), we turn at the end. Zig zagging through a maze of smaller rooms, we enter a huge, open plan type room with three timber dining settings in it. There is also a pool table to one side and a bar on the other. Looking around the room, I baulk.

  I baulk because the room also has three strange men standing at the pool table.

  Biker men.

  One is a tall, scrawny guy with long, curly red hair and a long red goatee hanging down his chest. One is short and fat with messy shoulder length brown hair and a long scruffy beard. The third has shoulder length blonde hair that looks style cut and he is clean shaven. Even though he has no facial hair like the other two, I can tell he is still a biker because he is wearing jeans, a Harley t-shirt and a pair of kick ass old biker boots. Lean and fit looking with great hair, he wears his biker outfit well.

  Tugging me gently to encourage me to keep following him, I gawk at the three bikers and watch as all eyes flick to me. Wordlessly, I watch as their eyes scan my entire body and lift back to my face.

  All of their faces harden.

  I suddenly feel self-conscious.

  Good god, what do I look like?

  I’m not too worried about what I am wearing because, contrary to his own statement, Zane is a good shopper. I am wearing a stretchy pair of yoga pants that don’t irritate my ass cheek or back. Above this I have a hot pink, soft cotton t-shirt with a huge black scull on the front. The shirt is cool. I like it. The only regret I have is that I am barefoot and I haven’t had a chance to paint any of my nails.

  The issue must be my face.

  My hair is brushed out long because I find it too hard to get a hair tie in with my sore shoulder and I have been brushing my teeth but apart from that, I have no idea.

  Shit.

  Shooting them a small wave, I follow along just behind Jake as he exits a door to the side of the room and we find ourselves in the garage that we entered through the night I arrived.

  Things are a bit busier out here and there are four more bikers, plus Pops, crowded around a motorcycle on a stand. I smile and wave to Pops. He smiles and nods back. The three new bikers all look at me and their faces harden too.

  Fuck I must be hideous. They won’t even smile at me.

  I’m used to men smiling at me. I’ve often wondered why they do. But the truth of the matter is that usually, whether I am meeting a guy for the first time or even if I’m just passing a random in the street, he smiles at me. Only Pops is smiling at me today. Am I so hideous that only an old man will smile at me?

  Jake tows me over to a workbench and drops my hand. I watch as he picks up a cordless drill. He then does one of those ‘man moves’ on the drill. The one where they grab the nose of the drill, power it up, pull something out its nose, put something back in and then power it up again for a brief spurt. He looks like he knows what he is doing.

  Taking my hand again, we do a reverse trip through the garage, through the open room and down the hallway to the bathroom. I of course wave to the bike
rs on my reverse trip. I am even pleased to notice that the nice looking blonde biker raises an eyebrow at me and the corners of his lips hint at a smile as we pass.

  I decide my hideousness must become more bearable with each viewing.

  In the bathroom, with body pressure only and no words, Jake makes me stand in the doorway. Before I have time to register what he is doing, he powers up his drill and pulls the two screws holding the board over the mirror away. Dropping the board to the floor next the sink, he turns to me and gives me a chin lift.

  With my eyes now pinned on the mirror and what I am sure is his permission, I walk straight up and look.

  I gasp as my hands fly to my face.

  Holy shit.

  One entire side of my face is a patchy combination of green and yellow bruises. There are smatterings of small left over scabs from my facial gravel rash as well as one long thicker scab on my right cheekbone. There is however, no swelling.

  Taking a few minutes to examine my face I run my fingers over each bruise and marvel that my face still looks normal – ish. It may have scabs and it may be green and yellow but it’s not distorted out of shape or anything. I breathe a sigh of relief and turn to see Jake watching me intently.

  “This is going to take a truckload of make-up to paint over. Can I use your phone?”

  I watch as his eyes crinkle and the green sparkles a little brighter. Grinning, he nods. Reaching into his back pocket he pulls out his mobile phone and hands it to me. Quickly dialing my hacker friend’s number, the phone nearly rings out before she picks up.