Edge of Chaos

by Brynn O'Connor

  “Thanks, Doctor Lawson; thanks, guys, but he left, so I’m fine. It was just some biker looking for another one. No big deal.”

  “Alright, but keep your eyes open,” one of the officers says. “We may not have seen the last of it.”

  As they turn to leave, Kayla notices a Polaroid photo lying face down on the ground. She picks it up. It’s the picture of Luke that his father was carrying. Without knowing quite why, she pockets it. She’s just about to go back in the ER when the ambulance they’ve been expecting pulls up to the landing. For some reason, it doesn’t even have its lights flashing or its siren on. When it comes to a stop, a very harried-looking young EMT gets out of the back of the vehicle. Kayla peers into the back, but surprisingly there’s no patient.

  “Aren’t you the guys who were turned away from Summit?” she asks.

  “Yeah, funny thing… the guy just got up and jumped out. We ran into some traffic in town and got stopped for a few seconds. He got up from the gurney and bolted. He didn’t even bother to disconnect his IV. He just ripped it out of him, spraying blood all over the back.”

  “Really? Was he a biker? Like from the Suicide Kings?” Kayla asks.

  “Yeah, I think he was a biker, but I didn’t notice which club.”

  Kayla pulls the photo out of her pocket. It’s a long shot but… She shows it to the EMT.

  “This looks like him?” she asks.

  The EMT takes a good look at the photograph. “Yeah, I think so. His hair was a little longer and he had more of a beard but yeah, I think so. You get that from the police or something?”

  “No, but some really evil-looking guy came by looking for him. I turned him away and he apparently dropped this.”

  “What’s up with all the cops out front?” he asks.

  “Oh man…” Kayla looks at her watch. It’s 3:45 am. “It’s been a long three hours or so. We lost two nurses tonight, three bikers I think, and I nearly got my head blown off. I’m going to be stuck here until my shift tomorrow, just filling out all the reports and answering police questions.”

  “Holy shit! You guys always get the crazies. But I heard that Summit had two fatalities; all bikers from the same club, so something really strange is going on around here. Did you know the…the uh, nurses that got a…killed?” The EMT asks.

  “Not really. The real bitch of it is the one girl was really new. This was her first nursing job out of school. She is a floor nurse but was filling in because we were so slammed. The other one, a male nurse normally worked days, so I just knew him by sight.”

  “Wow…still that’s really awful.”

  “Yeah, I can’t believe it happened. I was upstairs getting ready when the first code alert came out over the intercom. Apparently, some guys came and dropped off a biker with a gunshot wound, but then they ran into another group of bikers and a fight broke out. Weird thing was that they were all from the same club.”

  “Shit, that is weird...”

  “Well, I’d better get back in. Be safe out there,” Kayla says.

  “Yeah…you too.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Aftermath

  Kayla glances up at the clock; it’s almost two in the afternoon and she’s just finished with the last of her reports. She should have been in bed sleeping hours ago and she hasn’t even had a chance to call Luke to make sure he’s alright. She knows that he can’t be that seriously injured; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been able to leap out of the ambulance the way he did. But she is still worried.

  After the EMT had left, the biker chaos ended. However, this is the emergency room, so she still had to deal with all their usual cases. Yet, the whole time she was thinking about Luke. And now she really wants to hear his voice. Rather than stay in the ER, where she could get roped into helping out at any time, she goes up to the third floor balcony and sits down to a steaming cup of hot coffee. She takes a deep breath and calls Luke’s cell phone.

  When he doesn’t answer the third time she calls, she begins to get really worried. She tries texting him, but there’s no reply. She wants to find out if he’s alright and warn him that his father is looking for him. Of course, he may already know, but she has to make sure herself. She leaves the hospital at once and drives to his house. No luck there, either.

  Kayla finally concludes that she’s not going to be able to talk to him until he seeks her out and returns to her home. She will soon be due back to work, so she has a hasty meal before taking a well-earned rest.

  Exhausted beyond measure, Kayla collapses on her bed. She barely gets her eyes closed before there’s a pounding on her door. She jumps up and dashes out of her room and down the hall that separates her room from the dining room. As she skids across the slick dining room floor in her sock feet, the person knocking begins yelling as well.

  “Kayla, it’s me….Kayla, you in there? Open up, Kayla!”

  She finally reaches the door in record time and unlocks it. She stops for a second, takes a deep breath and forces herself to calm down. If he is in a bad way, it won’t do to have two panicking people. She takes another deep breath and lets it out before opening the door.

  She’s right; Luke is in a bad way. The second the door is open, he collapses in her hallway. At first, she’s not even sure he’s alive. She manages to turn him over on his back and checks his carotid pulse; 98 beats per minute. It’s too fast, but not horribly fast. She checks for a pulse on his wrist but cannot feel one in either arm; that means his blood pressure is dangerously low. She does a quick examination while monitoring his breathing. At first, she thinks he’s just passed out from exhaustion when she finds a small bullet hole in the left upper leg of his jeans. In a near panic, she unbuckles his belt, unzips his pants and begins tearing them off. She stops when she gets them down to his knees. She locates the bullet hole but a subsequent search does not yield an exit wound; that means the bullet is still inside. It also means it has probably done extensive damage as it ricocheted around in his body. To make matters worse, she finds that his abdominal cavity, all four quadrants are rigid; a sure indication of blood pooling in the cavity. This would account for his low blood pressure. The remainder of her exam fails to find any other wounds, so she focuses on the only one she can find; the leg wound.

  She checks his carotid pulse once more.

  “Shit!”

  She tries the other side of his neck and then his wrists; nothing.

  “Holy crap…holy crap, holy freaking crap…”

  Panic is creeping up on her and she has to fight to keep it at bay. She checks for breathing. Luke Donald Madsen is pulseless and apneic. He is dying. In fact, he seems already there.

  Panic explodes over Kayla like a giant ocean wave breaking over her. When it comes crashing down on her head, it knocks her head over heels and into the sandy floor below, leaving her breathless and disoriented! It takes her a few seconds to get a grip on her mind and do what’s best for Luke. She takes out her cell phone and dials 911. She sets it on the floor and gives Luke two breaths of air. When she begins the chest compressions, an operator answers her call.

  “911, what is the nature of your emergency?”

  “I’m at 342 Pierce Street, Berkeley and I’m doing CPR on a gunshot victim in my house.”

  “Ma’am, is the shooter present?”

  Kayla gives Luke two breaths of air.

  “Ma’am?”

  “Shooter’s not here. I’m a PA at Highland Hospital ER and patient has a probable ruptured femoral artery and extensive bleeding into the upper leg and abdominal cavity.”

  She gives two more breaths.

  When Luke doesn’t immediately respond, Kayla’s last desperate hope begins to fail. She thinks about his father and how he robbed Luke of his childhood and now he has managed to cheat Luke of his adulthood as well. It starts small at first. It’s just the seed of hatred, but with every breath she breathes into Luke’s lifeless body that seed grows into a sapling. Every chest compression causes that sapling to flouris
h and grow until it becomes a tree with roots deeply burrowed into her soul. It’ll take an act of God to remove the tree now. By the time the ambulance gets to her house, that little seed of anger has turned into a dark forest of blind fury!

  Rage this deep doesn’t just dissipate after a few sessions with a therapist and there are not enough magazines and books in the world for you to tear up; you’re still left with your feelings. No, this kind of deep, raw intensity requires direct physical action to satisfy the anger. Kayla zones out as rescue personnel work on Luke at a feverish pace. She will finish what Luke started and kill his father.

  “He’s gone,” a paramedic tells her.

  “What?” she asks.

  She has been so consumed with rage she has completely forgotten the drama still going on around her, and that people are still trying to save Luke’s life. She looks around. They have stopped their work and are printing a strip on the defibrillator to mark when they called the code. There’s blood, bandages, and sterile wrappings littering the floor around Luke’s body.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am…I’m sorry, ma’am…I’m sorry, ma’am…”

  Kayla wakes up with a start. At first, she’s not sure what has woken her up. She looks at her alarm clock on the bedside table. It’s 9pm. She has to be at work in three hours. But what woke her up so suddenly? She’s about to roll over and go back to sleep when there’s a pounding on her door. This time she jumps up and charges out of her bedroom. She grabs her shotgun from the hall closet and chambers a round before she looks out the peephole in her door.

  It’s Luke! He appears to be bent over and breathing hard. Kayla fumbles with the lock and he starts another round of knocking before she finally gets the door open. He stumbles in and falls face first on her hall floor. A black handgun falls from his fingers and goes clattering across her floor.

  “What the hell?” she gapes.

  Though she suspects he always had a gun on him, seeing him actually holding one now is a little too much for her. She steps around him and shuts the door. No point in having prying neighbors all up in her business. She kneels at Luke’s side and automatically begins checking him for fresh wounds.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay!” he pants. “Just… have run a long way.”

  “Huh? What are you running from?” she asks, confused.

  “My father,” Luke pants, “and a couple of his guys.”

  “And you came here? Luke, I can’t have people shooting at each other here; my neighbors will call the police…not to mention the fact that I don’t want to get shot.”

  “That’s what this is for,” he says, pointing to the gun still on the floor. “That’s yours. I have another one,” he says, as he pulls a black Glock 19 out of his shoulder holster.

  Kayla taps the barrel of her Mossberg. “Yeah, I don’t think I need your pea shooters. But what am I talking about, anyway? There’s not going to be any shooting here now or ever. I’m a respected member of the community. My neighbors all know me and they like me. You can’t—"

  “They’re probably already here, Kayla,” Luke says.

  Kayla goes over to the living room window and looking out, she sees three bikes pull up. No doubt one of them is Luke’s father.

  “Oh my god, this can’t be happening…this can’t be happening. What are we gonna do, Luke?”

  “Stay away from the windows and for god’s sake, turn off all the lights.”

  As Kayla scrambles around doing just that, she hears her phone ringing from the kitchen. She sprints from her back bedroom to the kitchen in two seconds flat.

  “Hello?” she pants into the phone.

  “Hey, take it easy there, tiger. Catch your breath first, and then we can talk,” the man on the other end of the line says.

  “Who is…this?” she pants.

  “Oh, I think you know who this is, Kayla,” the voice replies.

  As Kayla’s breathing slows and her heart settles down in her chest, she begins to go from terrified victim to angry homeowner.

  “Yeah, I think I do know who this is. You’re the asshole nut job who does not deserve to have a son like Luke, so why don’t you take your stinking carcass out of here before you bite off more than you can chew!”

  Kayla totally shocks herself. She has never spoken like that to anyone, especially not to the president of an outlaw biker gang that is surrounding her house. When the man replies back angrily, she is not surprised.

  “You listen here, Doc! You got no idea how hard it was to raise a kid like Luke and—"

  That’s all Kayla can stand. She hangs up on him mid-sentence. When he calls back, he’s sputtering with fury.

  “Don’t you ever hang—"

  And Kayla does it again. She pockets her phone.

  “What are you doing?” Luke asks. “You can’t piss him off like that. He’s gonna kill you.”

  “Yeah, I think he’s gonna kill me whether I try and charm him or not and it’s much more fun to piss him off.”

  Now Luke’s cell phone starts ringing. He answers it immediately. “Hello?”

  “Luke,” his father begins. “She’s a wonderful girl. Don’t involve her in club or family business. Just put down your guns and come out here unarmed and nobody has to get hurt.”

  “Nobody except me of course, right?”

  “We’re a little beyond talking Luke, don’t you think? If you really care for that girl, then you need to turn yourself in and the club will decide what comes next. I promise if you turn yourself in, the girl will not be harmed. You fail to do so and I cannot guarantee her safety when the bullets begin to fly.”

  “No deal, father.”

  “I’ll give you thirty minutes to do the right thing, Luke, and after that we’re coming in, guns blazing.”

  “Do what you have to do, father,” Luke replies. He turns off the speaker button and ends the call.

  “What does he mean the club will decide?”

  “The officers and senior members will decide my fate. It’ll be an easy decision. I’ll be found guilty of sedition for trying to kill my father. The penalty will be death.”

  Kayla can’t believe it. He is the vice president. How can they treat him as a traitor? She needs some time to think. She decides to go make some coffee and then they can sit down and think of a plan. She is so lost in the monotony of making coffee when she hears the metallic click of the deadbolt being drawn back on her door. She doesn’t immediately realize what is happening. It’s not until she hears that sucking sound of the door opening and the air pressure in the room equalizing that she knows Luke is walking out of the house.

  “No!” Kayla screams from the kitchen.

  She charges out of the kitchen, shotgun in hand, determined to keep Luke from throwing away his life. She has a sudden flash of herself lying spread eagle on the grass on her front lawn. She is firing the pistol Luke had given her. The Mossberg is lying empty next to her. Bodies pile up in front of her as she lays down a deadly hail of bullets. But she is too late. Lying sprawled out on the grass just out of reach from her is Luke’s lifeless body. While still firing, she glances over at his face. Even in death he looks so much happier, so much more at peace that it seems all this effort to keep him alive almost seems cruel.

  Kayla shakes her head until the vision dissipates and she sprints down the hallway towards her front door. It’s wide open. It’s a little hard to see with the lights in her eyes, but she can just make out Luke’s form and she can certainly hear his father yelling at him.

  “Drop your weapon!”

  Kayla watches in horror as Luke bends at the waist and sets his Glock on the grass. Suddenly there are bodies everywhere and hands are grabbing him, pulling him to the ground. Then they’re on top of him tying him up, and a few people begin to strike him as he lies there helpless.

  “Stop!” Kayla screams from just a few feet away.

  She points her shotgun at the crowd. In the heat of the moment, it doesn’t occur to her that she can’t fire her weapon from wh
ere she is without inflicting as much damage on Luke as she might do on her intended victims. The beating stops and they all look up at her.

  “Boys,” Luke’s father begins. “No need to rough him up any further, we’ve won. Let’s just take him back with us and leave the lady in peace.”

  They get off Luke and pull him to his feet. They start to march him across the lawn towards a waiting van.

  “Wait!” Kayla calls out to them. “I’d…I want to s-say goodbye.”

  “Oh, come on, haven’t you already had a chance?” Luke’s father calls out.

  “It’s non- negotiable. I get to say goodbye or I open fire. I’m pretty sure I can take out at least one person before I die.”

  “Fine! But you leave your weapon in the house. That is non-negotiable,” he replies.

  “Deal,” Kayla calls back.

  She tosses her gun to the floor. This is going to be one hell of a goodbye. Since they already said goodbye inside, just in case one of them ate a bullet, she’s not sure what she’s going to say or why she demanded the chance to say another goodbye. As she’s walking out to meet him, she realizes there are some things she left out of the other goodbye. She stops in front of him and surprises herself by not just throwing herself at him and hugging and pleading with him. She just stands there and talks.

  Suddenly the world around her fades away and it’s just her and Luke standing in a green grassy meadow. The air is cool like in the springtime. Butterflies dance around them as she takes his hands in hers. She can feel his life’s blood coursing through his fingers and gradually her hands become warm. But the heat doesn’t stop there. It travels up her arms, into her shoulders, and then to her heart. And when she feels it there, she realizes it’s not just warmth, it’s his love that has finally reached her heart from his. It’s everything they ever wanted to say to one another but were too shy, too damaged, and not eloquent enough to just say it. With that love comes a complete understanding of each other and the need to fit into the other’s world is no longer so important; they already fit inside and that is where it counts.