The Brotherhood of the Wheel

by R. S. Belcher

  Jimmie climbed into the truck, groaning with the effort. His back and knee were acting up again in this cold. “And that is exactly why we contacted you tonight. Keep up the good work, Cecil. Thanks for coming out so quick, and for trusting us.”

  Jimmie’s rig pulled away from the federal agent and headed back toward the interstate and his dwindling deadline.

  “I never said I trusted you,” Dann said to the retreating brake lights.

  * * *

  Jimmie got back on the highway, taking I-55 across the powerful, lazy Mississippi River into Illinois and onto I-64 headed for Chicago. With a little luck and a decent tailwind, he might not be too late. That was good, because this was his third load with this company, and the last two had been late because of business like tonight. He doubted they would contract him for a fourth one if he screwed this job up. With the baby on the way, and Layla not working at Walmart right now, they needed the money pretty bad.

  The road drifted beneath him, white bullet lines flashing by, acceleration making them an endless thread. Green road signs with white lettering announced his progress, as did his GPS. He was making good time now, humming with the rhythm of the road. He switched the CD player back on and clicked to change the disc. “Far from Home,” by Five Finger Death Punch, kept him company. Jimmie sighed. He was ready to go home for a spell. He missed his wife, missed his family. After tonight, he felt that he deserved a little break, a little peace. He needed home.

  That was when he saw her. He slowed instinctively, even though part of his mind was screaming to ignore her, pass on by. The deadline, peace and quiet. Home. So far from home.

  He drove past her. She was pale, almost washed out in the glare of his lights. She looked about fifteen, maybe younger, and was dressed in a dirty white lace sundress. A jean jacket, too big for her and covered with buttons declaring the logos of various bands, was her only protection from the cold and the rain. She wore simple leather flats over dirty feet. Her straight brown hair fell to her shoulders but didn’t appear to be wet in the freezing drizzle; none of her looked wet, but she shivered all the same. Her face pleaded with him silently in his headlights.

  “Damn … it,” Jimmie muttered and slowed down more. He pulled over to the shoulder of the highway about fifty yards past her, putting on his emergency blinkers. He shut off the music.

  His passenger-cab door clicked open almost immediately, far too quickly for the girl to have even sprinted up to meet him from where she had been standing. The hitchhiker climbed into the cab. She seemed to bring some of the bone-aching cold from outside with her. The cab suddenly got very cold, and Jimmy could see his breath swirl before him. He looked at the girl’s emotionless face. He knew what she was going to say before the words formed on her pale, almost blue, lips.

  “I’m trying to get home,” she said. “Can you please give me a ride home?”

  Jimmie knew what she was. He felt his blood freezing in his veins just looking at her. He wanted to run, to scream and jump out of the cab—a natural reaction, a survival instinct as old as the little lizard brain part of his mind. He thought how this little girl had been close to Peyton’s age when she … He took the instinctual fear below, locked it back up in its antediluvian vault. He nodded slowly to the girl.

  “Sure, darling,’” he said softly. “I’ll get you home. Do you remember your address?”

  She gave it to him. It was in Granite City, Illinois. In his head he calculated the detour. Not that far, but any delay could cost him the contract. They drove in silence, the girl staring straight ahead.

  “What’s your name?” Jimmie finally asked as the silence and the cold settled in the cab.

  “Karen,” she said. “Karen Collie.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Jimmie said. “Jimmie Aussapile.”

  “I know,” Karen said. “You have a reputation.” Jimmie felt as if someone had stepped on his grave.

  They drove in silence. Occasionally, the GPS would announce a course correction in a pleasant voice, but otherwise the cab was as still and cold as a tomb. They made their way back onto I-55, and eventually they came off the ramp in Granite City. It was a small industrial town, full of steel mills and small neat rows of working-class houses in blue-collar neighborhoods. Jimmie’s rig glided down the empty street and came to a stop in front of a small, neatly trimmed lawn and a modest but well-kept whitewashed house. The mailbox in front had a wooden carving of a robin on it, and the name on the side of the box was Collie.

  Jimmie had done this many times before, and it was always terrifying, always sad. He turned to the passenger seat. “Well,” he said. “You’re home now, darlin’.”

  The pale hitchhiker, dressed in white, looked at him with wide, sad eyes. For the first time since she entered the cab, he saw emotion cross her features. It was fear.

  “It ate my friends,” she said. “Gobbled them up—Mark, Steph, Aaron, Kristie—ate their souls.… It didn’t get me.… I was lucky.” She pulled back her hair and showed Jimmie her neck. A looping dark scar extended from behind her ear across her carotid. “I didn’t give it a chance to eat the bright part. I escaped.”

  Jimmie had never had this happen before. “What … what are you talking about, Karen?”

  “Sometimes your dreams are haunted houses,” Karen said. “I dreamed this. Please stop it, Jimmie.” Her voice was almost fading out, like a cold, dying breeze. “It’s hunting now … growing stronger … an fiach fiái…” She fought for each audible word. “You can’t escape it once you’ve seen it. It will devour everyone if you don’t stop it. It’s using him to get out. He’s … terrible. He’s like … crib death, like terminal cancer with a will. He’s been killing for it for so long … feeding it for so long.”

  The pale little girl looked at Jimmie and her eyes were wet, but no tears came. “Is this a dream? When you die do you live in your dreams? Please, Jimmie the Trucker…” She wiped her eyes and tried to smile at Jimmie. It was a sweet smile, but the sadness remained like a shadow. “Please. Tell my parents I love them … and that I’m okay now. I’m okay.”

  In the span of a single blink, the hitchhiker was gone, vanished. Jimmie rubbed his face. He looked at the little white house, its windows all dark, but the porch light burning, still burning, for Karen. Jimmie climbed out of the truck and made his way, groaning a little, to the front door. He rang the bell. He only had to ring once; the lights in the living room snapped on quickly. The door opened. A man and a woman in hastily donned robes looked at him with eyes that were weary, weary from years of sleepless nights, years of jumping every time the phone or the doorbell rang. Years of guilt and fear, and unanswered questions had gnawed at their guts, their hearts. The couple looked old, older than they should.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Collie,” Jimmie began, taking off his baseball cap and holding it tight in his hands, “My name is James Aussapile, and I’m here about your daughter, Karen.…”

  TWO

  “10-1”

  Hector Sinclair awoke on the cold concrete floor of the holding cell, his head stuffed thick with cotton balls soaked in pain. His face was about six inches from the filthy, seatless, stainless-steel toilet bowl in the cell, and his mouth tasted as if he had spent quite a bit of time last night bent over it. He blinked and rolled over onto his back. Looking up, he got a splendid view of another resident of the drunk tank, a four-hundred-pound bald black man who was using the toilet to take a piss.

  “Good morning, Sunshine,” the Pisser said, smiling. He was missing his two front teeth. “Did I wake you?” He chuckled, zipped up his pants, and navigated his way through the pile of still sleeping drunks back to the bunk he had claimed when the cops threw him in at three-thirty that morning.

  Hector groaned and struggled to his feet. Several of the bodies around him moaned and cussed, having to move a bit on the floor to avoid being stepped on. There were only four bunks and about a dozen men in the cell. Most were curled up on the floor, as Hector had been, or propped in a corner of t
he cell, sleeping it off sitting up. Hector’s face was numb, and his side and hands hurt from the dull ache of bruises.

  He made his way to the small steel sink mounted on the wall beside the toilet. There was no hot water. He turned on the faucet and a feeble trickle of water drooled out. He gathered as much of the freezing water in the cup of his hands as he could and then bent over and splashed it in his face. He did it again and again, running his wet hands through his now dripping hair.

  Hector had the face of a young man in his twenties with green fire burning in the eyes of an old man. He had tried hard not to look himself in the eyes since he had come back to the world from over there. His face, like his body, was angular and taut. He had a spiky mane of bright red hair that on its best days had been likened to something a Japanese anime superhero might sport, and he wore long mutton-chop sideburns. Hector’s build was slender, slight but muscular. He splashed more water in his face and checked his teeth to make sure none were loose from the fight last night. The pain in his head was bright and sharp now, and his guts were churning bile.

  “Hey, princess?” the Pisser said from his bunk, where he had been watching Hector. Without looking away from the sink, Hector flipped off the smiling man and went back to splashing water on his face and head and drinking big cold gulps of the water.

  One of the drunks on the floor near the sink started. “Fuck, asshole!” the guy said. “Getting me fucking wet, mutherfucker! That shit’s cold!”

  Without missing a beat, Hector kicked the guy hard in the balls. They had taken his boots away, but the barefoot kick still had plenty of force behind it. The drunk on the floor made a sound like a golf ball getting stuck in a pool intake filter and curled and shuddered as he puked on himself.

  “That warm you up, shithead?” Hector said, slicking back his now soaking-wet hair. His accent held a touch of North Carolina by way of Glasgow. He turned and looked at the Pisser sitting on his bunk like a gap-toothed Buddha, a broken smile on his broad face.

  “Yeah?” Hector said. “What?”

  “You one of them biker boys, right?” the Pisser said. “Took four of them to bring you in last night. I heard them talking about you when they dragged my ass in.”

  “How many it take to get you in here, cupcake?” Hector asked. His torn, bloody, green military T-shirt was soaked.

  The Pisser laughed. “Six,” he said, “but then I ain’t no badass biker boy.” The Pisser nodded to Hector. “Tru.”

  “That short for Truman, or is that your badass gangsta name?” Hector said. “I’m Heck.”

  “Truman,” Tru said after a slight pause. “And Heck is—?”

  “—short for raising all kinds of heck,” Hector said. “You got a smoke, man?”

  “Shit,” Tru said, laughing. “I respect my mutherfucking body, man.”

  Heck looked the huge man up and down, and pulled his wet T-shirt off. “So did you eat a few of them deputies before they threw you in the drunk tank, ’cause it looks like they’re kind of slow digesting.”

  Tru laughed. “You are one hi-larious mutherfucker,” he said. “I’m serious, you are a card.” Tru held up two hand-rolled cigarettes. Heck used the few dry spots on the T-shirt to dab off his face, hair, and chest, and then navigated shakily over to the bunk.

  Tru grunted and slid over. “What,” he said, pointing with one of the rolled joints at Heck’s chest, “the fuck is that shit?”

  Heck had a black-ink tattoo that covered most of his upper chest. It was two rows of letters with a single line of numbers beneath it, the words “yes” and “no” near each collarbone, and the words “good bye” on his flat stomach just above his navel.

  “Ouija board.” Heck plucked one of the blunts out of Tru’s hand as he sat down. “It’s for talking to the dead. Not that they have much to say that’s very interesting.”

  “So you one of those satanic, ‘bite the heads offa bats’ biker boys?” Tru said, looking around and then striking a match. “Doing all that creepy, Ghost Adventures kinda shit? ’Cause I am all about the love of Black Jesus, my freaky friend, and Black Jesus, he rebukes that shit, hard.”

  “I guess I dabbled some when I was younger,” Heck said. “My family was into that shit. I got this when I was sixteen, along with my MC ink. I’ve kinda grown out of it. Lot scarier shit in this world than some dead asshole playing with the light switch and the thermostat.”

  Tru held the match, and Heck lit his joint, puffing on it a few times until the tip was cherry. Then Tru lit his own.

  “Thanks,” Heck said, and took a long drag on the cigarette.

  “So you been in a biker gang,” Tru started.

  “Club,” Heck said. “Motorcycle club. MC.”

  “Whatever,” Tru continued. “Since you were sixteen, man?”

  Heck showed Tru the tattoo on his left biceps. It was a circle of Celtic knotwork with a large sword crossing it horizontally. On the blade of the sword was a slogan: “Braithreachas.” To the right of the circle and the sword were the letters “MC,” and above it was a crescent bar that held the words “Blue Jocks” in highly stylized Gothic letters. Below the circle was another crescent, upturned, and bearing the words “North Carolina.”

  “All I’ve known was MC my whole life,” Heck said. “Even as a baby. My grandfather founded the Jocks back in the early seventies. I was riding dirt bikes at ten, I was a prospect at fifteen, member at sixteen.”

  “The Blue Jocks,” Tru said. “You’re one of those bounty-hunter assholes outta Cape Fear, right? Scottish outlaw bikers? You guys ain’t no better than the fuckers you turn out for bail money.”

  “One-percenters,” Heck said. “‘Outlaw bikers’ sounds all Marlon Brando, man. Chasing bail jumpers pays the bills. Beats cooking crank.”

  “Well, you are one pale blue, Braveheart-looking Scottish mutherfucker,” Tru said, laughing, a cloud of smoke preceding the chuckle. “So where were your boys when four cops were dragging your narrow ass to jail?”

  Heck held the smoke tight in his lungs; the pain in his skull was diminishing. Finally, he exhaled. “Riding solo. I don’t remember much. Been fucking up a lot lately. I’m an asshole. No need to get anyone else dragged into my shit.”

  Tru nodded. “Fair enough, man. I can respect that.”

  The heavy steel door at the end of the hall clanked open with a boom. Heck pinched out the burning tip of his joint and then did the same to Tru’s. He dropped both cigarettes into Tru’s palm, and they vanished as if he were a stage magician. There were footsteps and voices echoing down the cinder-block hall of cells. Several of the bodies on the floor of the cell began to stir at the sounds of activity approaching. A Harnett County sheriff’s deputy, dressed in gray and blue, with a baseball cap on, escorted another man to the door of the cells. The man was in his twenties, short and skinny. His face was almost comic in its proportions, with a pronounced nose, big ears, and large deep-brown, almost black, eyes. His skin was riddled with acne scars, and he had long, oily brown hair that fell down to the collar of his flannel shirt. Under the flannel was a T-shirt with the logo of the band Tool on it. He wore ripped-up jeans and heavy, steel-toed work boots.

  Heck offered up a fist to Tru. “I think my ride is here,” he said.

  Tru returned the fist bump and nodded. “Later, easy rider. See you on the other side,” Tru said.

  “That’s the man, Officer,” the big-nosed man said, pointing at Heck, mock outrage on his face. “He’s the one who stole my skin-care products!”

  “Shut the hell up, Jethro,” the deputy said to Big Nose. “Your stupid ass shouldn’t even be back here. Is that pot I smell?”

  “Is it?” Heck asked, stepping over the bodies slowly stirring on the floor to the door of the cell. “It’s hard to smell anything over all the funk in here.”

  “Okay, Sinclair,” the deputy said. “You’re free to go. This here bounty hunter just paid your bail; I wouldn’t recommend jumping it.”

  Heck looked at the big-nosed m
an and smiled. “You bailed me out, Roadkill? That’s so sweet.… Um, where the hell were you about eight hours ago, when I was napping next to Lake Piss?”

  “You’re welcome,” Roadkill said. “Your gratitude is touching, Heck.” Roadkill nodded toward Tru, who was watching all this from his bunk, amused. “That the missus?” he asked.

  The deputy unlocked the cell door. “C’mon, move it, Sinclair.”

  “I owe you a solid, Terry,” Roadkill said to the deputy. “Thanks, Cuz.”

  “Yeah, yeah, just don’t make it a habit, Jethro,” the deputy replied.

  Roadkill sniffed Heck, who was pulling his wet T-shirt back on. “Damn, son, you smell like you took a dip in Lake Piss. Let’s get you cleaned up. We’re riding for your old man today, and your mom will have my hide if you show up looking as sorry as you do now.”

  Outside the Harnett County Sheriff’s Department detention center, it was late morning. It was bright. Birds chirped. The blue skies and the sunshine might fool you into thinking spring had arrived on schedule, but the wind was cold and cutting. Heck groaned a little as the sunlight flashed into his eyes. He fished his sunglasses, cigarettes, and Zippo out of the pockets of his leather jacket. He had recovered it from the property counter when he was released, along with his boots and his cut—the sleeveless black leather vest that bore the colors of the Blue Jocks. The patches on the back of the cut matched the markings of Heck’s tattoo. Heck put on his shades, lit a Lucky Strike, and slipped the cut on over his leather riding jacket.

  “Damn,” he said, zipping up the jacket. “This wet shirt is killing me. It’s cold as balls out here, man.”

  “Serves you fucking right, asshole,” Roadkill said as he opened the door to his beat-up old Ford pickup. He pulled his own MC cut off the driver’s seat and slid it on over his flannel. Cops frowned on sporting colors in their house. Above the right breast of Roadkill’s cut was a patch that said SERGEANT AT ARMS. “Lucky they didn’t throw your drunken ass into the Custer County stir. Fucking hellhole, that is.”