by Paula Cox
I walk over to him. He’s on his front, hands splayed at his sides. His ponytail has come loose and his hair is matted with blood. I feel a lump in my throat as I lean down and take his shoulder in my hand. I turn him over, and his mouth falls open. For long second I just stare at him, the fear in my chest pure and red, and then his lips twitch, and his tongue comes out of his mouth to lick slowly at his lips. “Oh…fuck,” he groans. “Mother fuck.”
I breathe a sigh of relief, and kneel down next to him. “Where’d they get you?”
“In the fucking shoulder.” He nods, and then winces. “And in the fucking bicep. Think I bashed my head, too”
Joseph grimaces, maybe remembering his own bicep injury.
“I can’t wait here,” I tell Zeke.
Zeke nods grimly, and tries to stand up. He gets no further than half-leaning before he slumps back down, gasping. “Fuck.”
“Kid,” I say, turning to Joseph. “You need to get Zeke out of here and call The Damned doctor. Screw that—get him outside and call the whole Damned. Bring more than one doctor; maybe Allison is hurt somewhere in here. Call the fuckin’ cavalry in.”
Joseph hesitates, and I snap at him: “Do as I fuckin’ say!”
Then, without waiting, I get to my feet and head toward the staircase. Doctors, bikers, soldiers; soon this place will be swarming with Damned. But what if Allison is not here? My doubts are pushed aside when I reach the hallway, stepping over the corpses of some of the unpatched. I head down the hallway, rifle aimed in front of me, listening to the sounds around me. Nothing, at first, but then I hear it: Trent’s voice, raised in panic, and then hushing as I get closer. I follow the voice, gripping the rifle so hard I feel the metal biting into my sweaty palms. I listen for Allison, but I don’t hear a thing. What if she’s—
No, I can’t think on that. I can’t even entertain that as an idea. I have a job to do. I just need to get it done.
I round a corner and end up in a long, narrow corridor with only one door in front of me. The hallways have been dark so far, difficult to see by, but this corridor is brighter because of the light which shines from the bottom of the door, a horizontal slice of yellow. I keep my rifle aimed and creep forward, telling myself to take this slow, to stay calm; I just need to go into this room, take care of Trent, and then get Allison out of here. I heard her screaming before, but now she’s silent; I tell myself this is because he gagged her. Of course he did. It’s nothing else.
When I get to the door, I’m about to try the handle when Trent calls from the other side. “You better stay out there. Or I’m going to gut your slut from slit to neck.”
I swallow, and an odd sense of fear and relief comes over me. At least I know she’s in there now, even if she is in mortal danger.
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” I say.
“Yeah—why’s that?”
“’Cause that’s a surefire way to get yourself killed.”
He laughs harshly, more of a vicious cough. From the sounds of it, he’s away from the door, at the other side of the room. I could barge though, but what if he has a knife to Allison’s neck, ready to kill her? What if he panics and slits her throat? I’d kill him, but killing him won’t do much good when the love of my life and the mother of my child is dead, would it?
“You’re going to kill me anyway,” he says. His voice is hoarse, the voice of a scared kid, not the voice of a MC President. “I’ve got cameras, you asshole. I can see that big rifle you’re holding. What is that for, huh? Why would you be holding that if you weren’t going to shoot me? And what did you do to my men out there, huh? I saw that.”
“That was self-defense,” I say, making sure to keep my rage out of my voice. My woman is in there: through a thin sheet of wood, across a room, somewhere in there. I swallow, and the dried blood on my face tugs at my skin, but the pain is almost laughable. Pain doesn’t mean shit right now. “I wouldn’t shoot a man when he surrenders.” I would. I fuckin’ would. Make no mistake, Trent, you’re a fuckin’ dead man. “Open the door, hold your hands up, and you can leave.”
He doesn’t say anything for almost half a minute, and then he mutters: “Throw your gun away. Then I’ll come out.”
“Alright.”
I turn around and toss my rifle to the end of the hallway, and then turn back to the door and hold my hands up. “You see?” I’m aware that he could simply fire through the door right now and end me. He knows where I am. He most likely has a weapon. But if he has CCTV he also knows that Zeke and Joseph are outside. And he saw what we did to his men. He must be scared shitless. For all his heroin-dealing and for all his bullshit, he has never been a true MC man. Never. He’s always just been some mad fuck with dreams of making it in a real club.
I’m sure I hear him swallow, even though that’s unlikely through the door. Then his footsteps click across the floor, and he pulls the door open. I squint against the light, for a moment not seeing anything but bright yellow, and then my eyes adjust and the room comes into focus: Allison, tied to a chair, her shirt covered in vomit and her legs pooling with blood; her head rising and falling as she falls in and out of consciousness; and Trent, a panicked look in his white-blue eyes, pistol aimed at me. I grit my teeth when I see Allison, and the blood: the blood…our child. Jesus Christ, what did this man do to her?
“I thought you were gonna play fair,” I say, forcing myself to look at Trent and not Allison. “This isn’t fair, is it?”
From below, the sound of men charging into the factory sounds, heavy boots stomping into the building. “What the fuck’s that?” Trent snaps, eyes flitting to the floor.
Fuckin’ mistake.
As soon as he takes his eyes from me, I’m on him. He fires—the bullet cuts clean through my shoulder, blood and leather reeking in the air. But I don’t care, not one bit. I don’t give a damn. I feel the bullet punch through me and just keep running, wrapping my arms around his chest and lifting him off his feet.
He fires again, the bullet hitting the ceiling, and then I slam him into the floor so hard one of the floorboards crack. I fall on him, punching him in the face over and over, my shoulder screaming at me to stop, but I don’t listen. I punch, punch, punch, fall into a daze, vision hazed over, everything red, red, red. And this is why I’m called Rust, I think, ’cause all my life has been spent seeing it. I slam his face until it is not recognizable as a human face, and then the rage leaves me, and I slump to the side, chest heaving.
I sit for a split second, and then I run to Allison. Her head lolls, and she whispers: “Blood, the baby…blood.”
“I’m getting you out of here,” I say. “I’m getting you to a hospital; you need more than the club doctors. But Allison?”
“Y-yes?” she whispers, as I untie her and then pick her up as gently as I can, being careful to cradle the back of her head and her legs. “We were in a car accident, alright?” I hate the necessity of telling her to lie at the hospital, but the club will take care of the bodies here, so we have to take care of our end.
“Car accident,” she murmurs. “Fine, just…our baby.”
“I know,” I say, holding my woman close to me, trying to ignore the way her blood drips onto the floorboards.
I step over Trent’s bloodied body and head down the corridor, praying that I wasn’t too late.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Allison
I stare up at Mom and Dad, who for some reason are dressed in long black robes and holding scythes, and they gaze down at me. Their faces are shadowed beneath their heavy, hanging hoods. “We told you,” they say, speaking in complete unison. “We tried to tell you, didn’t we? We tried to tell you to stay at home, be a good girl; get a good job and marry a good man. You could have worked at your father’s accounting company. We are sure he could have secured a position for you there. But no, you wanted a life of adventure, a life spent with dangerous people, trying to help them. Well, this is your reward. Your child is dead. Do you understand? You sweet child i
s dead. So weep, you pathetic girl, because you have killed your child with your irresponsible behavior.”
“No,” I respond, but now I am falling into a pit and Mom and Dad are growing smaller and smaller above me. I fall for what feels like a long time, and then I roll over and look down: I am falling into a valley, a valley filled with skulls, too-small skulls, skulls and death and pain and—
I wake with a gasp, heart pounding like crazy, and then a strong hand rests against my chest. “It’s okay,” he says, stroking my damp skin. I am in a thin, papery gown, on my back in a clinical-smelling bed. The window to my left is night-black, the fluorescent light causing my head to ache terribly. But there’s something inside of me, some chemical, stopping it from aching too bad. In the reflection of the window, I see us: Rust with his arm in a sling, stiches all over his face, and me in bed, a bandage swaddled over my head.
“Rust,” I say, my voice hoarse. “I—water.”
He nods, goes into the hallway, and returns with a plastic cup of water. He helps me drink it down, and the liquid is like magic, cooling my throat, moistening my lips. “The baby,” I mutter, trying to crane my head to look down, to see if Bump is still there. But I cannot crane my head; it is too painful, and I am too tired. “What happened to the baby?”
“We’re waiting on the results of the scan,” Rust mutters, glancing away from me. “I don’t know …”
At his words, tears begin to slide down my cheeks. Rust pulls up a chair next to me and holds my hand. He doesn’t cry, but I can see in his dark eyes that he is as terrified as me. He clutches my hand tightly with his unharmed hand; the other lies limply. His face is a mass of cuts and bruises, but the swelling has begun to go down. His nose is crooked now, but it gives him character. It’s probably not the first time his nose has been broken, anyway.
I continue to cry for the next few minutes, feeling more powerless than I ever have in my life, even more powerless than I felt when I was tied to the chair. At least then, I could tell myself I had a chance of escape; I could tell myself I could trick him to get out alive. I had some agency. Now, all I can do is lie here and cry. I search my body for aches and pains, but whatever the doctors have given me has made me numb but for the pale throbbing in my head.
“What happened?” I ask after a while, my voice twisted with sobs. “With Trent, I mean.”
“Dead,” Rust says, glancing at the closed door to make sure nobody enters. “The place is being swept clean. Zeke caught a couple of bullets, but he’ll be alright. But yeah, Trent is dead.” He nods down at his hands. His knuckles are bloody, swollen and grazed. “Strange as it is, I don’t feel good about it: Trent’s death, I mean. I feel sick. I feel sick at the whole damn thing. Look at you…and our baby. If I was a mechanic or some shit, this never would’ve happened.”
I shrug, or do the best imitation of a shrug my numb body will allow. I don’t know what to say.
After a while, I say: “The doctor’s taking a long time, isn’t he?”
“It’s only been around forty-five minutes since you were scanned,” Rust says softly. “I know it seems longer.”
“Rust, what if—”
He takes his hand from my hand and places his forefinger against my lips. “Don’t,” he says. “Don’t think on it. Don’t borrow pain from what might happen. It ain’t worth it.”
“You saved me,” I say, kissing his finger.
“Of course I saved you,” Rust replies. “I love you.”
I gasp at the words, and for about ten minutes they just hang there. I look at this man, with his messy hair and his tangled beard, his bloodied knuckles and his black eyes. I remember who he was when we met: a cocky, arrogant, nonchalant biker who stuffed his hands in his pockets and swaggered away from me like I meant nothing. And who he is now…how did this happen? I wonder at the question for a long time, and then it comes to me. Love, family: they are the only things that can turn a man like Rust into a man who gives a damn. I stare at his face, a face that will be scarred once the cuts have healed, and I know that I love him, too. I love him more than I thought I could love.
I tell him as much, and he offers me his old cocky smile, only now it’s hidden within a tangle of beard.
“Oh, I know,” he says.
We share a smile, and then a knock comes at the door. “Doctor,” a man says.
“Come in!” Rust calls.
The doctor is a stern, professional-looking man wearing horn-rimmed glasses with a pinkie ring on the hand which holds the clipboard. His lips are pursed, his eyebrows furrowed. I tell myself he is just a doctor. That is why he looks so stern. I tell myself it has nothing to do with my baby. He comes and stands beside the bed, asking me a few mundane questions, which I answer with mundane responses. And then he says: “The results.”
I hear Rust sit up beside me, and I feel my insides tense.
“I won’t keep you in suspense,” he says, but that seems to me to be exactly what he is doing. He lets out a sigh, and then flicks to another page in the clipboard. I want to scream at him to hurry up, convinced that he is delaying because he has bad news to give me. I once again try and look down at my belly, by my head is in too much pain. I grit my teeth.
Finally, Rust says: “Doctor.”
The doctor shakes his head. “Sorry, sorry,” he murmurs. “I’ve been working for eighteen hours straight. It has nothing to do with you…no, no, on the contrary, the test results are very positive.”
Rust and I both deflate, as though all the pain and anger leaves through our mouths at the same instant. At once, I feel tired.
“Your placenta did detach slightly from the heavy blow sustained in the …” The doctor clears his throat, and then goes on: “… in the car accident, but you were very lucky, and with ample bedrest, I have every belief that you will make a full recovery. Of course, you will have to remain here for observation. But the outlook is positive. When you do finally return home, I would suggest that you have your partner wait on you hand and foot .”
“Oh, I think he can manage that,” I say.
Rust grunts playfully.
The doctor lingers, and then glances at Rust, and then down at me. “It is not my place, but you seem like people who care a great deal about that child. If you want my advice, try and avoid any car accidents from now on.”
With that, he turns and leaves, closing the door behind him.
I watch Rust’s face, and he watches mine. We stay like this for a long time, until Rust brings his face to mine and kisses me on cheek, his lips warm, his beard tickling me. “Our child is safe,” he says, and his voice is wrought with more emotion than I have ever heard in him. “Our child is safe,” he repeats. “I want to promise you somethin’, Allison. I’m never going to put you in this position again. I’m done with the club; I’m done with the life.”
“No,” I whisper in response. “You don’t need to be done with the club. Don’t you have mechanics in The Damned?”
Rust grunts out a laugh. “Yeah, we have some garages.”
“Maybe that…but it’s your choice, Rust. I just want my family. Nothing else matters.”
“That,” Rust says, stroking my cheek with his rough hand, “is something we can agree on.”
I let my head fall back, my eyelids feeling heavy. “I am afraid to sleep,” I admit after a minute or so of silence.
“Why?” Rust says from the chair, his hand laid over mine. “You don’t need to be afraid.”
“What if I go to sleep, and when I wake up this was a dream—what if Bump is really gone and I am dreaming all of this?”
“This ain’t a dream,” Rust says. “We’re in too much pain for this to be a dream. This isn’t one of your romances, Allison. This is life, with agony and fear and love and all that confusing shit.”
I smile, and despite my fear of sleep, my eyelids begin to fall closed. “I thought you were a brute,” I whisper. “It seems so long ago now.”
“I’m still a brute,” Rust says, his voice
drifting away from me. “I’m just a brute with a woman and a kid, now. A brute with a heart, I’d guess you could say.”
I giggle. “A brute with a heart,” I repeat, and then sleep takes me.
Epilogue
Rust
I sit at the head of the circle, the convicts ranged all around me. When Allison first suggested I do this, I thought it was funny, but now I’m starting to get a taste for it. It’s been a year, after all, a year since I sat in that hospital not knowing if Carmine was going to be safe—if Carmine was alive. A year, and now I’m a greasy-monkey in one of The Damned’ garages. That’s pretty goddamn absurd, too: me, a mechanic. But still, I can’t live the fightin’ life anymore. Ever since the factory and the possibility of losing my family, the thought makes me sick.