HORIZON MC

by Clara Kendrick

  What was different, though, was that I was sitting in a chair, staring at my own feet. Whatever this place was, it felt real. I was in it, seeing it through my eyes, perhaps, feeling the slickness of the pleather lounger beneath me, the way it squeaked when I shifted my sneakers. It was the most mundane thing in the world, but something about it felt genuine.

  There was a buzzing sound to my side, and I looked down to see grizzled, marked-up hands holding a tattoo gun.

  “Not long now,” a man’s voice said. “Nearly there.”

  I looked to the other side and saw a long mirror on the wall, saw myself reflected in it. Turned my head to one side, then the other, and then the reflection misbehaved, twisting out of sync with me.

  I swallowed hard, my heart pounding, as my reflection grinned at me a smile I didn’t share.

  “You are not who you think you are,” it said, and then cackled, the skin peeling back to reveal a scorched, gaping skull beneath. I tried to scramble away, tried to escape this vision, but I was pinned to the lounger, helpless, the stinging in my arm blossoming into something much more intense, everything fading to darkness, to pain.

  Book 5

  Chapter 1

  “Fuck!”

  I was slick with sweat and supremely disturbed as I swam up to alertness from sleep, feeling like I was moving through molasses. My heart thumped impossibly fast inside my chest as I struggled to drag myself from the nightmare that had plagued me. I revisited the images against my will.

  The first portion of the dream was something I’d seen before, though that didn’t make it any less horrifying. I was plagued with nightmares in which I watched myself die. It was never in the exact same way. Sometimes there was an explosion, which hit a little closer to home than I liked. It was an explosion that had scarred up my chest, the concussion of the blast so devastating that it had robbed me of my memories. Other times, it was enemy fire, the high-caliber bullets plowing through my chest and face, or a raging fire on the battlefield that consumed me completely, turning my bones to ash. No matter what the method of death was, though, I was always watching from a cinematic standpoint, as if it were a movie. It was disconcerting, to say the least, to watch myself die night after night.

  That tattoo, portion, though, had been something new.

  I’d been in my bodyor somebody’s body once I’d been transported away from my corpse on the battlefield. I had reclined in a chair, the buzz of a tattoo gun providing white noise, a man who was heavily tattooed himself bent over my shoulder, concentrating on the work he was doing there. It had stung, cutting through the dream, even, the memory of getting that tattoo.

  But was that what it was? An actual memory?

  I’d been having flashes of memories, or preferences, or simply things that didn’t belong. More and more frequently than I told any of the other Horizon guys, I was having moments of my day where I would hear, see, smell, taste, or feel something, stop, and have an emotion about it that I hadn’t anticipated. It had been strange, as well as a little traumatic, at first. Once, at the bar, someone had said something about heroism and I’d had a flash of myself receiving a medal, solemn as everyone around me clapped.

  The flashes were disconcerting. They looked like memories. Felt like memories should feel, even. But it was always me looking at myself, and I didn’t understand what that meant.

  Whenever I didn’t understand what something meant, where it pertained to my own life, I’d do something to reset my brain. Lately, it had been taking a shower. Sometimes, though, it was drinking. Since it was that weird time where it was too late at night to start drinking and too early to get up and start my day, I went with the shower. I had to take tiny steps. Say no to drinking one night or have it consume my entire life. Do something productive once and try to base everything else off that single moment of self-care.

  And maybe I could wash off this feeling of confusion. There was nothing worse than being scared and confused at the same time. If you were scared and scared alone, you could at least try to get away from whatever was scaring you. But if you were scared and confused about what was causing you to be scared, that was a whole different animal.

  The shower needed a good scrubbing. Would that be decent therapy for my bad dreams? Deep cleaning the house? I let the place get dingy on a regular basis to have something to do. Maybe throwing out weeks of empty bottles and giving everything a scrub would make me feel better.

  If only I had a real job.

  I could’ve taken on more responsibilities at the bar, if I wanted to. I owned the place, after all, and after looking at me like I’d grown a second head, the rest of my friends would let me. Brody, who actually ran the bar; Ace, who mixed drinks; Sloan and Chuck, who were regular drinking partners.

  But I’d only want the responsibilities to try and distract myself from my worrying reality that was bending and warping with each nightmare or flashback or whatever it was I was having. Having a real job meant I had to be presentable, show up on time and in control of my faculties, contribute valuable work, be held accountable for my actions.

  At this point of my life, as hard as I was trying to hold it together, I probably wouldn’t have been able to keep a job. That was just a sad fact I had to face. Things had been on the downhill slide for a while, now. I just tried not to let too many people know how worried about it I was. I didn’t want them to worry for me, too. More than they already did, anyway.

  I pushed myself out of bed and into the bathroom, running the shower as hot as the water would go. I hissed as the water spraying from the shower head hit my arm. It stung like a motherfucker. What was the deal with it? Fuck. I’d scratched my shoulder deep enough to bring blood welling to the surface, evidently clawing at the tattoo during my nightmare. What was wrong with me, besides everything? The spray stung on the injury I’d done myself, but it wasn’t as painful as the confusion and borderline terror I was trying to force back down my thickening throat.

  I looked down at my tattoo, wondering if I’d done it damage. If I had, I could always go get it touched up somewhere, even if I didn’t have a strong connection to it. It was patriotic, and that was fine. I’d been an Army Ranger, so it made sense, the eagle unfurling across my shoulder, talons extended as it made to grab something, feathers ruffled in the middle of the dive. I didn’t feel particularly patriotic, but maybe that was a trait I’d had from before.

  Before I lost all my memories, my sense of who I was.

  I worked my hand over the ink and was suddenly transported back. I knew it was back, knew it was real, felt it in my bones, heard the buzz of the tattoo gun just as clearly as I’d heard it in my dreams. The shop was well-worn, the neon “open” sign reflected in the mirrors where I watched the expression of my own face before studying the tattoo artist the back of his bald head, at least. He was more ink than he was man, right down to his knuckles where they grasped the gun. I watched the needle move across my skin, the blood welling up. It hurt, but the pain made me happy. The pain was progress. Something I was getting done. A checkmark on a list.

  The water from the shower washed the blood away quicker than it could fill the divots my fingernails had dug in the skin, and I watched the eagle in its frozen flight, taking deep, steadying breaths.

  That was a memory, then. The first real one I could be certain of.

  The dream I’d had warped it a little at the end, making my reflection morph and shift, talking to me, but it had been rooted in a real memory. I didn’t know if that was comforting or if it painted all my other horrific nightmares with a new, terrifying light.

  My brain was trying to tell me something, and it was up to me to figure it out. At least, that’s what I was hoping for. It would’ve been more disheartening if the synapses in there were firing at random, letting loose memories with no rhyme or reason. But what in the world did a memory of me getting my tattoo have to do with anything?

  The shower went cold and I shut it off, shuddering. How long had I been in the
re? How much water had I wasted just standing there, freaking out?

  I stepped out, dried myself off, and tried not to look at my reflection in the mirror. The last thing I needed right now was for my brain to play tricks on me, to make the reflection do things that didn’t quite match up to what I was actually doing. I got dressed and started cleaning. Gathered up the trash, took it outside. Put away clothes, started some laundry. Did the dishes, wiped down the kitchen. Scrubbed the bathroom, then swept and mopped and dusted the rest of the house. It was enough work that it should’ve exhausted me, but it didn’t. I was just sweaty, in need of another shower, and just as troubled as I was before.

  I just wasn’t going to get any more sleep tonight. The sooner I accepted that sad fact, the sooner I could get on with distracting myself with something else.

  It was too lateor too early to go to the bar. It would be dark and shuttered, and Brody had been using it as a crash pad away from Nadine. I knew they were working on repairing their relationship, but I hated the fact that he knew I sometimes slept in the club booth if the nightmares got too bad. It felt like the more my friends learned about my various struggles, the more I resented them. Why should they know things about me when I didn’t know everything about myself? It was something that had been coming to a head for a long time, and it made me cringe with discomfort.

  If I couldn’t justify going to the bar and couldn’t stand staying at home, the road was the only other option. Maybe taking the motorcycle out would be just the thing I needed. The night wasn’t too cold. Okay, it was freezing. I stepped back inside the house, shivering. That just meant more layers. Maybe the darkness and the wind in my face and the roar of the engine would help soothe my nerves.

  I’d fully intended to go on a ride a long one. I’d go down a road I hadn’t ventured down before, as unknown as my own mind, and find somewhere to watch the sunrise. It would be something to try and get my mind off the dream, or the new memory I had to contend with, or any number of things plaguing me.

  I didn’t intend to end up in the parking lot of the storage facility where my own personal unit was. It made some sense, though. I’d had a clear memory of getting my tattoo. My subconscious was probably just pushing me to see if any of the items I had stored in the unit would make sense now. I secretly viewed my amnesia as an elaborate dominos setup. If the right one fell, it would lead to all of the other dominos falling, spreading out until an entire picturemy past was revealed.

  At least I could dream about it.

  The doctors told me I might never remember who I was, but that didn’t stop me from hoarding all my past possessionsthings my father had saved for me while I was serving with the Army Rangers in this unit. I didn’t even use any of the dust-covered furniture or framed photos in my own house. It just wouldn’t feel right having mementos around from a life I didn’t remember.

  There wasn’t an inch of the storage facility I hadn’t gone over, not a box unopened, an item unexamined, but I kept returning. I’d moved everything in here from another unit closer to my father’s home, and visited at least once or twice a week.

  I was so sure there was an item in here that I could use to unravel my past. I just didn’t know which one. Even if they did belong to me, and to my father, I often felt like an archaeologist. The disconnect I felt between the person I was now and the person who had owned these things was vast.

  As with most visits here, I found myself drawn to the boxes of photos, each encased in its own frame. These had, at one time, probably been lovingly displayed on walls and mantles and tables for everyone to enjoy, harkening to happier days. It sometimes didn’t feel right to have them cooped up in the storage unit, but I wanted them here, together with the other stuff, so I could continue the investigation into my own dim past.

  I looked to be turning eight years old in one, a photo I studied so often that it almost felt like I knew it. It was a birthday party, and I was grinning over the lit candles on my cake, icing already smeared on my fingers where I’d apparently been imbibing tiny, illicit tastes of the sweetness to come. In the corner of the picture, my cousin, James, looked on. I knew it was my cousin James because it said so on the back of the photographJack and Jameswhen I popped it out of the frame, written in neat cursive in blue ink. We’d looked a lot alike as kids, even if James seemed to be a little more sullen. It probably had a lot to do with his uncle, who I’d met a couple of times after returning from the Army hospital, where I’d recovered from the wounds I’d suffered. My father had already been dead when I returned, but my uncle was still there grieving, but still there.

  I slipped another frame out of the box to study James and me in our dress uniforms. It couldn’t have been too long before shipping out, our buzzed hair still freshly short, looking like twins. I knew from the brief interactions I’d endured with my uncle that James had served in the same unit as me. And I’d inferred myself, just from what little information had been provided to me about the attack that had robbed me of my past, that I was the only survivor of my unit.

  My cousin had perished, along with everyone else, and I had somehow come through to the other side. There were times when I wished I could talk with my uncle about things, since he was my last living relative, but I knew he couldn’t see past the physical similarities between James and me. I was afraid that when he saw me, he saw the son he had lost. That he might’ve hated me for surviving what his son hadn’t. And I certainly didn’t want to be selfish and try to get him to help me piece my memories back together. He’d lost so much. He didn’t need a fixer-upper project like me.

  I reminded him too much of his sadness.

  I was about to put the frame back where it came from, but stopped.

  The dreams. I’d been staring into what I’d thought was my own face, dying in multiple ways on the battlefield, or twisting and morphing into something nightmarish in mirror reflections. But what if it wasn’t my face at all? What if it was my cousin’s? We looked alike. It was a possibility.

  I was only a little troubled that I hadn’t thought of it before.

  The bigger trouble came from wondering what it meant that, night after night, I had been taking a front-row seat to my cousin’s violent death.

  Chapter 2

  Time moved forward, as it had to, but I stayed rooted in the same place, wondering about the connection between my revelation and my dreams. Had I really been witnessing my cousin’s death over and over again? It would make more sense than watching myself die. I’d been close to it, sure, but I was still here. It was troubling on a different level to be afraid of watching myself die each night. It seemed to make a little more sense that it was my cousin. We looked so alike, after all.

  I just didn’t know what that meant. Had we been particularly close? There were certainly enough framed photos of us – not an overwhelming number, but enough. We’d had a close enough relationship to both go into the same unit in the Army Rangers. Was there something else there? Some other reason I might have been dreaming about his death?

  I didn’t know how I was supposed to get those questions answered without bothering my uncle. How badly did I want my own past revealed? Would it require troubling a grieving old man, still sick with the loss of his boy?

  “You’re awfully quiet today,” Ace observed, working on a bucket of beers across the booth from me at the bar. I’d come here almost automatically, just a destination for me to exist in instead of other ones. I was still thinking about the ramifications of my dreams, about finding the answers I needed to try to make sense of everything. If sense could apply to anything I was experiencing.

  “A lot on my mind,” I said. The anniversary of my father’s death was coming up. I felt like I should leave to pay my respects – visit the cemetery where he was buried, at least – even if I hadn’t made a point of it up until now. Now, though, it just felt right. I had to trust my subconscious on this. Maybe it was leaving breadcrumbs for me to follow.

  “Well, I
’m here if you want to unload some of it,” Ace told me. “It’s my day off and everything.”

  “You think you could hold down the fort for a while if I bounced out of town for a couple days?” I asked as casually as I could muster the words.

  Ace had been lifting a bottle of beer to his lips, but now he stopped, and set it back down on the table. “What? Where are you going?”

  “Don’t worry about that. Just tell me you’ll keep everything running here while I’m gone.”

  Ace huffed out an incredulous laugh. “I mean, don’t you think Brody would be the better one to ask about that? He’s your general manager, after all.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  “You know you don’t have to ask. I’ll make sure everything goes smoothly.” Ace tucked a stray strand of hair behind his ear. “I just don’t know what the secrecy is all about.”

  “It’s not…there’s no secret.” Only that I felt like I was losing my mind – what mind I had left to lose. “I’m just getting out of town for a few days.”

  “If you’ve done something illegal and you’re looking to lay low, you should tell me.”

  “Hell no. I see what kind of company you’re keeping these days.”

  Ace huffed a sigh. “This isn’t about Katie. It’s about you. The more I know, the better I can help you. You need cash? A place to crash out?”

  “The less you know, the better. Plausible deniability.”

  “You have done something.”

  “I haven’t.” I rolled my eyes so hard I thought they were going to fall out of my skull. “It’s the anniversary of my father’s death. I thought I would go pay my respects.”

  Ace blanched. “I’m sorry, Jack. I wouldn’t have gone on and on if I’d known. You should’ve said something.”