Hell Bent

by Heather Killough-Walden

  He led the way out of the apartment and down the several flights of stairs to the lower level.

  Annabelle was well aware of the multitude of things they had to discuss. The under-the-sheets play of the night before only complicated matters, which had already been pretty damned complicated, as it was. For one, he was married. Two, he wasn’t telling her everything. That much was obvious by the fact that he’d been a Hell’s Angel “for a while” and had never come clean about it. What else was he hiding from her?

  What jobs had he taken six years ago?

  Then there was the issue, which she still hadn’t forgotten about, of the clothes he’d had made for her. He’d gotten the size and fit right by having someone in Cuba model them off of clothes she’d given to Goodwill. How had he come about possession of those donated articles of clothing? It was just too strange, and too personal to explain away with a shrug.

  They needed to talk.

  Something was eating at Jack. She could see it in his every action, hear it in his voice, and read it in his eyes. There was yet another thing that he was keeping from her. And this one was important. What was it? Whatever it was, the fact that it made Jack nervous down-right made her afraid.

  Annabelle fully planned on putting an end to the uncomfortable guessing game she was playing with herself, once they were alone.

  But as soon as they exited the side doors of the complex and entered the lamp-lit alley, all thought of deep heart-to-heart discussion flew from her head.

  Her bike was parked there. Right beside his.

  Her bike – meaning, the Night Rod. It looked exactly like the one that he’d given to her for her upcoming birthday. Could it possibly be the same one?

  She took a step forward and looked at it more closely. No. No lightning strike across the tank, but black as night, just the same. Beautiful. Gorgeous. And since Jack was standing next to the Fat Boy, that meant that the V-Rod was all hers.

  It didn’t matter one whit to her at that moment what she needed to discuss with the British bad boy she’d bedded the night before. As long as he let her ride the Harley – rental or not – she could take everything else up with him later.

  She glanced back up at him and he tossed her the key. She caught it easily and looked back down at the bike.

  Come to mama…

  Jack led the way through the streets of Manhattan, trying to ignore the fact that Annabelle didn’t have a helmet in one of the most dangerous cities in the country. He trusted her. He really did. He didn’t trust anyone else on the road worth a “god damn”, as Sam would put it, but he knew he needed to bury that fear like a hatchet and show her that he felt she could keep herself safe. As hard as it was, it would be a feather in his cap when it came to dealing with all of the shit that would no doubt soon hit the fan spinning wildly between them.

  He had to admit that he was already cheating on that front. Annabelle had a few weaknesses that, as an all around general rogue, he was fairly shameless in exploiting. Most likely her strongest was motorcycles. To her, a motorcycle was like a giant Wonka chocolate bar being slowly unwrapped in front of Charlie Bucket after ten straight meals of cabbage soup. It was distracting, to say the least, and tonight, that was the point.

  He could tell she was about ready go head to head with him on a few very important issues. He wasn’t at all certain he wanted to open all of those cans of worms right before having to also get her on a plane to England.

  So, stalling was fine with him.

  She had other weaknesses – pleasant ones – too, and knowing what some of them were, he’d searched most of the afternoon for the perfect peace offering for her. He was pretty sure he’d found it, and it was waiting in a rented condo a few miles away from here. He hoped it brought her enough comfort and happiness that she would be able to forgive him.

  For everything.

  Because, after she met the other thing waiting in that condo, he was going to need all the help, on the forgiveness front, that he could get.

  These were the things he sorted through his mind as he simultaneously followed the route that Virginia had mapped out for them. He had been memorizing the drawing as she was making it, and he’d grown more uneasy with every scratch of the pen.

  They were headed right back to Columbia University, and this time, in a rather cruel and ironic twist, straight into it’s rather infamous underground.

  It would be the second time in the past few hours that he’d been plunged into the damp, dark depths of New York’s subterranean world. It was not at all a landscape he was comfortable with, even if it was becoming rather familiar.

  But, that was where the vial had been hidden, because that was where Craig Brandt and a close-knit band of friends had been tunneling late one night and discovered a secret passageway, thus far undetected by the University’s officials. Brandt was a member of what he called the Reticent Academia Tunneling Society, or RATS. In his spare time, he and about two dozen other members, nation wide, would venture into the lost, forgotten or forbidden undergrounds of America’s various universities. Brandt was its founder and leader. He’d introduced Virginia to the faction during their second year at Columbia and she represented RATS’s eleventh official member.

  By that time, a very tiny network had been established across a few of the more notorious underground-possessing universities, but word spread. Via underground, more or less.

  On the night of February fourteenth, seven years ago, Craig Brandt asked his girlfriend, Virginia Meredith, to meet him and a friend at what had become the RATS secret entrance to Columbia’s tunnels.

  She met up with him and, for Valentine’s Day, he showed her his tunneling trophy – an accolade more esteemed to him and his compatriots than a Golden Globe was to an actor. A secret passageway, right under Buell Hall, untouched by another human hand in nearly one hundred years.

  Jack glanced in his rear-view mirror. Annabelle rode dead center of the mirror, clear to his sight at all times. She stayed a good ten seconds behind him, and her control of the bike was superb. For a rider who’d only been on a V-Rod once before in her entire life, she was doing remarkably well.

  He smiled grimly to himself as he thought of how lucky he was and how very much he stood to lose – not just over the next few days, but over the remainder of his life. Hopefully, the latter was exclusive of the former.

  Jack caught Annabelle flashing her lights at him in his mirrors and he shot her a glance. She signaled to him. He looked up. They’d arrived on campus and he hadn’t even noticed it. He’d taken them there on auto-pilot. They’d already passed the garage once.

  She was probably laughing at him back there.

  He shook his head, mentally kicking himself in an already tender spot. Then he signed an apology and signaled that they would circle back around.

  She followed him around the block and then into the garage. He paid for the space they would share and they shut the bikes down and dismounted.

  “You okay with this?” Annabelle asked him as they joined up and exited the garage together. It wasn’t like Jack to make the kind of mistake he’d just made, and she was a little worried. She knew he didn’t like dark, enclosed spaces. And she knew him well enough that he hadn’t been able to hide his growing unease from her as Virginia Meredith had told them all where the vial and note were hidden. No one else would notice his fear. But she would. And she had.

  Jack smiled at her reassuringly and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, drawing her beside him. “No worries, luv.”

  “Right.” She said softly.

  He led them down the sidewalk, staying close to the building walls and taking the opportunity to scan their surroundings for danger. As melodramatic as it sounded, he had the distinct feeling that they were being watched. But, logically, he knew that was highly improbable. Anyone posing a threat would have had to either obtain their destination in between the time that Virginia Meredith had made the map and now – or they would have had to follow Jack and Annabelle fro
m the apartment to the University.

  He couldn’t imagine how the former would be accomplished, given the flat they’d been in at the time belonged to Sam, and he doubted that the latter was even possible, with the route and methods he and Annabelle had used on their bikes.

  So, with that thought, Jack forced himself to relax. Concentrate.

  Breathe.

  Virginia and Craig had given them first-rate directions to the secret opening formerly recognized as the RATS entrance. Throughout Columbia University’s campus were small wooded areas with paths winding through them. However, the largest wooded area anywhere near Columbia’s campus was most certainly Morningside Park – and it was not part of the campus, itself.

  Morningside abutted Harlem, and Harlem’s residents had always maintained a strong hold on the park. In 1968, Columbia leased a plot of the park’s land from the city to begin building a gymnasium on the property. It was a mistake. A protest and rioting erupted, closing down the University and strengthening the sounds of discord between Columbia’s faculty, staff and students, and Harlem’s inhabitants.

  Morningside became “the bad park”, “the dangerous park”, and “no-man’s land” to all attending Columbia University. At night, its vine-covered cliff faces would light up as if by fireflies due to the flames of individual lighters warming spoons of heroine. Muggers, rapists, murderers, addicts, and prostitutes ran a virtual park-wide city of corruption that stretched across thirty notorious acres.

  Then, in the late nineties, something changed. People began banding together – “us and them” more or less became “just us,” and plans for cleaning up the park were formed. In the past decade, families and students had very slowly pushed out the addicts, bums and criminals. Gardeners and landscape architects had been called in. People began volunteering their time to weed and pick up trash.

  So, it wasn’t with as much apprehension as Jack would otherwise feel that the RATS access shaft into the tunnels beneath Columbia was to be found in Morningside Park. However, he did find himself drawing Annabelle even nearer to him than usual. She didn’t seem to mind.

  As they walked, his eyes continued to scan. He noticed that Annabelle’s eyes seemed to be doing the same thing. Though she wouldn’t know as much about what kinds of things to look for as he would, the thought occurred to him that he could teach her… Something to consider for the future.

  “This is it,” he said as they entered a particularly wooded area of the park. They separated as Jack took out the map and handed it to Annabelle. Once they were well hidden by the brush and trees, he drew his gun and held it at the ready, pointing it at the ground.

  Annabelle unfolded the map and attempted to read it. It was difficult this far away from any overhead light source. Beside her, Jack clicked a pen light to life and shined it down on the paper for her.

  “Thanks,” she whispered, and then studied the map carefully. “It’s a good thing they put some of the more permanent markers on this thing,” she said, stealing a glance around them. “Because all of the plant life is completely different at this point.”

  “Landscapers. A lot has happened in seven years,” Jack agreed.

  “Okay,” Annabelle took a deep breath. “Looks like we go this way.” She pointed in a direction and they began making their way through the underbrush, careful to make as little noise as possible.

  Jack had darkened the pen light before they set off, so they moved in relative darkness. From somewhere unseen, the smell of cigarette smoke filtered through the bushes and tree branches. Along with that smell came the scent of fresh cut grass and fertilizer. The very faint undercurrent of fish and river could be detected, as well as something like… Chinese food? Some students nearby, perhaps. Having a late dinner picnic, despite the early May, nighttime chill. Some people were more stubborn than others.

  They came to a place below the rugged cliff faces that the park was known for and looked up. Annabelle compared the structures to the drawings on the map. “It’s somewhere in that second cliff face,” she pointed.

  “We’ll have to dig our way past some vegetation, it seems,” Jack muttered. While much of the park had been successfully manicured, the cliff faces, yet untended, were still very jungle-esque.

  “You up for a climb, luv?”

  Annabelle smiled over at him. She was wearing good shoes and kept her nails short. She wasn’t the kind of woman to shy away from physical activity. But, the fact of the matter was, it wouldn’t really be much of a climb. The cliffs weren’t that tall, and if she was reading the map right, the opening was only two-thirds of the way up. The difficult aspect wasn’t the cliff – it was what lay in between the cliff and Jack and Annabelle.

  “More like a swim,” she muttered, gesturing toward the large, deep-looking pond that separated the cliff’s base from where they stood.

  “We’ll skirt the edge as far as we can go and take it from there,” Jack said.

  They carefully and slowly moved around the pond’s outer border, ducking beneath overhead branches and stepping wide over low bushes and roots. Eventually, they came to a place where they had to crawl through a rock formation that jutted out from the first cliff face. They moved through this, finding cigarette butts and used condoms on the other side. They stood quickly, brushing off their hands and feet.

  Annabelle was very grateful that she hadn’t accidentally touched down on any of the human-created refuse hidden behind the formation. “Give me a sec,” she said, pulling out the map once more. Again, his pen light provided illumination.

  “Okay,” she said, looking up at the cliff. “It’s either start climbing now and crab-walk it to the crevasse Craig talked about, or we go for a swim. Choice is yours.”

  “Really?” he asked, one brow shooting up as he smiled.

  “No,” she admitted, shaking her head. “Not really. I vote we start climbing, and my vote’s the only one I care about at this very moment.” She shot him an apologetic look and re-folded the map. He chuckled as she slipped the map back into her jeans pocket and started searching the cliff for hand and foot holds.

  It wasn’t a hard climb. The cliff was steep and narrow, but not overly tall, and there were excellent natural grips. She pulled herself up and shimmied in a diagonal line, toward the place Craig and Virginia had marked on the map.

  Jack was right behind her.

  She realized, as she ascended, that she and her companion were sitting ducks, splayed out as they were on the rock’s face. The stone was light in color, and they both wore black. As she realized this, she wondered whether Jack had put back his gun. She imagined that he had, though she couldn’t really look just then. It would be impossible to climb the rocks without both hands.

  She began holding her breath and attempting to move a little faster. Jack hadn’t appeared worried about their temporary vulnerability, and she reminded herself of this. But there was an agoraphobic uneasiness about being so virtually visible at such a dangerous juncture. She was defenseless. She didn’t like being defenseless.

  “Here it is,” she said then, as she came to a strange dip in the rock’s face. It curved inward and split, forming a gap in the stone as if they were two tectonic plates. They appeared almost glacier-like in their smoothness.

  To the average passer-by on any of the walkways below the cliffs, the opening would only appear a foot wide, at its widest. But up here, on the cliff, Annabelle could see, first-hand, that the cliffs had been fooling people for more than a century.

  She smiled as she looked over the rim of the opening, to the much larger space beyond. It was like that scene in The Labyrinth, where the single rock suddenly splits apart and becomes two very far apart rocks, with a simple switch of the camera’s angle. What people would see from below was an optical illusion. A smooth rock face.

  Here, right up against it, the face split, allowing more than enough room for a human body to fit through.

  Annabelle leaned into the stone, putting her weight into her legs, and turn
ed her head to glance back at Jack.

  He was closer than she’d expected, but he wasn’t looking back at her. He was staring at the opening in the cliff. It wasn’t the smallest hole a spelunker had ever crawled through, but it was, nonetheless, a tight, dark space, by Jack Thane’s measure.

  “I can go it alone,” she said to him, softly.

  Jack’s eyes met hers. He shook his head, once, and gestured, with a nod of his head, that she should move on.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  “You a’ri’?” Clara stepped into the kitchen, where Dylan had been leaning against the counter, a mostly-full bottle of soft drink in one hand, his other hand tucked into his front pocket.

  He looked up when she walked in, her softly-spoken query jarring him from his troubled thoughts. He’d been thinking about his mother. There were times that he couldn’t remember her quite right. He couldn’t recall her scent or the exact features of her face. But he always remembered her voice. It played in his mind at times, telling him to slow down when he was driving too crazy, or to cool it with the beer. It had become his conscience.

  He wondered what would happen with his father’s voice now.

  How would he remember his dad?

  “I’m fine,” he said, his voice scratchy from recent neglect. He shuffled his feet a little and stood up straighter, glancing down at his drink. Nervously, he took another sip. Some of the fizzle had gone out of it. How long had he been standing alone in there?

  Clara glanced around the kitchen. He watched her as she shoved her own hands into the front pockets of her jeans. It was a minute before she spoke again, and Dylan could appreciate that. She was taking the time to carefully choose the words she wanted.

  But, for some reason, he wanted to spare her the uncomfortable silence. So, he said, “Where do you think your dad will cart us off to next?” He tried hard not to make it sound as resentful as it felt.

  She looked back at him and smiled. “I reckon ‘e’ll most likely want us all to ‘ead back to England.”