by Sara Crest
There it was, Frederick’s office, if anyone could shed light on this situation it would be the son of a bitch managing it all.
With the alarm blaring in our ears and red lights flashing everywhere I saw the office door begin to open, I let go of Hannah’s hand so I could run faster as I charged straight for the door.
The man opened the door and immediately his eyes went wide as he saw me closing the distance between the two of us.
He scrambled to draw his gun but by the time he got it in his hands I tackled him hard in the gut had him on the ground.
I held him down and gave him a strong hit to his face, leaving a cut just underneath his eye.
Hannah rushed in behind me and shut the door, locking the 3 of us inside to make sure that Frederick couldn’t escape.
I dragged him up by his collar and threw him into his desk chair, hitting him hard in the face one more time just for good measure.
I ripped his shoe laces out and quickly used them to tie his arms behind him and his ankles to the legs of the chair. It wasn’t strong but it would be enough to hold him for now.
“Look I’ve done everything I was told to do I don’t fucking deserve this” he immediately spat out. It looked like he was about to shit his pants.”Let me go right fucking now!”
“Look here buddy” I said putting my hand on his shoulder and my finger in his face. “You got some info that I came a long way just to get. You’re gonna tell me everything I need to know.”
“Fuck you! I ain’t telling you shit! If I tell you anything those fucks are gonna find me and they’re gonna kill me.”
Sounded just like Edgar, that was exactly what I wanted to hear, he had info and I could get him it out of him.
“You think you aren’t already fucked? Why do you think your alarm is going off? It’s because I set free just about every girl you’re keeping hostage in this sick scheme you have running. Whether or not you tell me doesn’t matter, whoever you’re afraid of is gonna find you and is gonna fuck you over. Maybe if you tell me something I can actually help you.”
Hannah walked up beside me and pleaded. “Axel please, you can’t help this man he’s caused the suffering of who knows how many innocent women like me.”
I looked up at Hannah, trying to reassure her with my gaze. “Just trust me” I said. “Frederick and I are gonna sort this all out.”
I looked down at Fred who refused to look at me in the eye, he was staring at the flashing red light in the room as we heard the alarm blaring in the hallway.
“Fred, my offer doesn’t stand forever. You either help me and I help you, or I walk out of here and let whoever you’re afraid of deal with you.”
“Fuck fuck FUCK” he yelled out as he rocked back and forth in his chair, still contemplating what to do.
Just then I heard my cell phone ring, I took it out of my pocket and recognized Wyatt’s number so I answered it immediately.
“Wyatt this better be important” I said as I grabbed Frederick by his hair and tugged it hard to the side.
“You better fucking believe it’s important, our scouts called me and said that the Scorched Satans just killed a dozen of our brothers who were riding out of Phoenix, it was a shootout but they got the best of them. Now we apparently have cops coming back to Los Aves to try and finish what the Satans started.”
“Have you made any decisions yet?” I asked him.
“I told the club to get out of Los Aves, I’m taking them to Edgar’s old house to lay low. We barely escaped the last fight with our lives, if we fought back against the cops this time who knows what they’d do.”
I took the phone from my ear for a second and took a deep breath. I looked at Hannah who stared at me worriedly, more and more this promise seemed impossible.
“You’re right, take them where they’ll be safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can and then we’ll sort this shit out.”
I hung up my phone and slammed it hard on Frederick’s desk.
I grabbed Frederick’s throat and slammed his head into the back of his chair.
“Alright, you better start answering my questions right now.”
He grit his teeth hard for a few seconds, looking up at me before giving me his response.
“Ok, I’ll tell you what you want to know but only on the condition you said earlier, that you’ll help me.”
I let go of his throat and took a step back, staring him down to make sure that everything he was about to tell me was the absolute truth.
“You see this girl right here?” I said pointing to Hannah. “This girl was sold off by you two years ago-”
“Hey buddy we don’t accept returns” he said with a smile.
I wiped that smile off of his face real quick with a solid left hook to the jaw.
“Don’t fucking play games with me Frederick!” I barked as he spat out some blood onto the floor. “How the fuck are you able to operate all of this with the police knowing? How are you able to get the police to look the other way? Her buyer told me that he bought her from you and he was killed two days ago and I assume his killers were police. So you better give me some fucking dirt on those pigs that I can use to get them to stop defending those Scorched Satan fucks who are gunning down my brothers in the fucking streets!”
He looked at the floor for a few seconds, taking long and deep breaths that were almost drowned out by the alarms in the hallway, I was going to hit him again but it looked like he was actually going to tell me something.
“You couldn’t put this shit together?” he asked. “Yeah the cops probably killed the guy you’re talking about, why wouldn’t they? If this shit got out it would be the end of them, the end of all the fucking state police departments in the south west…”
“If what got out?” Hannah asked. “What did Edgar know that would make the police want to kill him? Why do the police look the other way through all of this?”
“The police look the other way because they’re running this whole thing sweetheart” Frederick replied. “From the ground up the Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico state police are all running this shit.”
“Why the hell would they do that?” I asked. “What do they gain by risking it all? Risking their livelihoods? Their freedom? Their good names? And for what, money? Are they working with the Scorched Satans to do all of this? Even the chief of fucking police in Arizona had a Scorched tattoo.”
“They aren’t risking anything! At least as long as the info doesn’t get out. You wanna know why the Scorched Satans doesn’t have any known leaders? Why the cops let them do what they want? Why else would nearly every cop in the desert has a tattoo of horns on them? It’s because they’re the Scorched Satans! They are the fucking club! When they want to get shit done in the seedy underbelly that I help them run they just put on their little outfits and do whatever they want. The south west state governments have been cutting their wages for fucking years, finally they snapped and decided to take matters into their own hands. You know how much fucking money this single building brings in every year? Your girl right there probably sold for at least 8 grand and we got nearly a hundred more in this building all with willing buyers. The cops all get their pockets fattened, they get to do what they want as long as they’re wearing those Scorched Satan threads and showing off the tattoos, and they get away with it because there’s nobody else to arrest them!”
It was starting to make sense, the tattoo on the chief, the reason why they said the Satans were just a friendly MC, why the cops looked the other way this whole time. I couldn’t fucking believe it...
“Then why muscle in on my territory? Why start a gang war with my club?”
“Because they’re fucking greedy that’s why! You think Vegas and Albuquerque is enough for them? They want to spread this shit to Phoenix and all the other small towns around it, that means they have to get rid of the clubs in control so they can operate. If a bunch of young girls in your town were snatched up wouldn’t you eventually investigate? They gotta drive you out before the
y set up shop. It’s the same shit they did in greater Vegas, greater Albuquerque , and now they’re doing it in greater Phoenix. It was nothing personal against you, it was all just business for them.”
I leaned against his desk and held my head, it felt like I could fall over. All these corrupt police... they killed Zeke, they killed Clay, they fucking sold the woman I love, they made us think they had some deal going with the Satans when they were the Satans this whole time.
Those fucking bastards, words couldn’t describe what I wanted to do to them.
“What do we do now?” Hannah asked, walking up to me to make sure I was alright. She grabbed my fisted hand and held it with both of hers, unintentionally standing in between me and Frederick. She was the only thing stopping me from beating him to within inches of his life.
“They ruined so much, they took my friends from me and weakened my club, they sold you off and ruined the lives of god knows how many girls…”
I turned to her and squeezed her hand in mine.
“I’m gonna make them pay Hannah. The police, Donnelly, anyone wearing that fucking tattoo… I’m gonna hit them so hard that nobody will ever even think about doing something like this ever again.”
Just then the locked door behind us burst open. I drew my pistol and pointed it at the doorway, expecting some guards to be there but instead there was a girl.
She flinched for a moment when she saw my gun but immediately calmed down when I put it away. She looked like she was in her early 20s, she was wearing nothing but a pair of panties and a ripped t-shirt that exposed most of her left breast. She had put on a guard’s jacket over the t-shirt but it was far too big for her and draped over her like a bathrobe.
She had a look in her eyes like she had been stuck here for years.
“I figured you would be here Fred” she said, looking straight past both me and Hannah. “Did you think you could get away with all the bullshit you’ve done all these years? Not just to me personally, but to all these girls?”
I looked down to see she was holding a red plastic gasoline can, on the floor behind her I could make out that she had left a trail of gas all the way up to this room. It even looked like she got a good amount on the hallway walls.
She slowly started pouring gas in the room, continuing her trail from the hallway into Frederick’s office.
“Oh good you’re tied up” she said. “That’ll make this so much easier.”
She continued the gas trail up to his chair and before we could say anything she started dumping it all over him, starting from his head and moving onto his clothes.
“Whoa wait a second! I had a deal with this guy I get to walk out of here!” he sputtered out as he tried to stop the gas from going in his mouth.
I opened my mouth to respond but the girl turned and cut me off.
“FUCK your deal! This mother fucker has sold off hundreds if not thousands of innocent women! He did unmentionable things to me... I’m not letting him walk out of here alive!”
“You fucking promised!” Frederick screamed at me. “Get this bitch out of here I told you everything you wanted to know!”
“Hannah… remember when I said that I always keep my promises? Sometimes there are exceptions to the rule.”
She looked at Frederick in disgust. “Sometimes some promises have to be broken, although I don’t think he deserves to go out like this… It’s just far too brutal.”
“Fuck you! Fuck all of you! You’re fucking crazy if you think that you can take down that many cops! I gave you everything you wanted to know you can’t fucking do this to me!”
I motioned for the girl to move aside as I drew my gun again, aiming it straight for Frederick’s head.
“Sometimes karma catches up to you Fred” I told him as I steadied my aim.
Hannah covered her ears and buried her face into my chest as I pulled the trigger. Yet instead of a loud bang all we got was a soft ‘click.’
“Hmm, that’s been happening to me a little too often lately. Guess I gotta learn to count my bullets better” I said as I put my empty gun back in my pocket. “Looks like I was right, karma really catches up to you.”
“You can’t be fucking serious, this is all some kind of cruel and sick joke isn’t it?”
I didn’t bother to respond as the girl finished dumping the last of the gasoline on Fred. She then took the empty container and hit him hard a few times with it for good measure. I don’t know what the man did to her personally, but he probably deserved it.
The girl tore off the front of Frederick’s shirt, revealing a key attached to a necklace he was wearing. She grabbed the necklace and ripped it off of him, taking the key and using it to unlock a drawer in his desk.
She reached into his desk and took out three large folders, holding them tight to her chest before grabbing a laptop that he had kept hidden underneath a bunch of scattered papers.
“These should have information on absolutely everyone involved; girls sold, the men who bought them, it might even have a few cop names. It should be everything we need in order to go above the state police’s head, this will be real evidence.”
“They’ll find all of you, you should know that” Frederick said as he tried to spit out the gas taste in his mouth. “You’ll never be able to run from them, not you, the girls, or your shit motorcycle club.”
“My club won’t be running from anything, now that I know these cops are nothing more than Scorched Satan thugs I’m not holding my men back anymore. We’re fighting this from the ground up, shame you won’t be around to see it.”
I took Hannah’s hand and led her out of the room as the girl followed us. The hallways used to smell like tobacco, blood, sweat, and alcohol. Now it just smelled like gasoline.
As we ran towards the exit we were relieved to see that there were no unconscious or dead girls in the hallway, seemed like everyone had made it out.
We exited through the alleyway and out to the front of the building where there must have been a group of nearly 100 women. Two women burst out of the front door with their own gas containers, pouring their trail to the sidewalk before dousing the whole front of the building. A few women followed behind them, coming out of the building dragging along two hogtied guards. From the looks of it they had used their bedsheets as ropes to tie them up.
The whole crowd was silent, almost as if they couldn’t actually believe what had happened, that they were actually free.
They all looked at me, some of them smiled in recognition of what Hannah and I did, some of them looked exhausted, but all of them had hope in their eyes.
A woman walked in front of the crowd holding a piece of rolled up newspaper in her hands. Another woman took out a lighter and together they lit the tip of the newspaper, waiting a few seconds for the fire to spread along the top.
The woman put the flaming newspaper to the gasoline trail and it immediately caught fire, spreading to the front and inside of the building as the whole auction house began to go up in flames.
I almost felt bad for Frederick, being left inside like that, but with the amount of gas on him it would probably be a quick death.
Any pain he would get from the fire would be nothing in comparison to the pain he caused.
In that flame justice was being served.
40
(Hannah)
I looked out onto the crowd and I saw myself, women who had all experienced what I had experienced, and now they were free.
“I was once in the same situation as all of you, I was sold off like an object and forced to entertain a man for two years. When I freed myself I thought I could never trust anyone ever again, and I know that It’ll be a long road for all of us before we ever become normal people again… If that’s even possible…”
I looked at Axel and smiled, I could feel his love through his gaze.
“But I want you to know that you should never give up hope, that there are people out there with open hearts willing to help. This place brought us n
othing but pain, but that doesn’t mean that the whole world is that way. If you open up your heart the way I opened up mine you might meet someone who will help lift you up and make you feel like you can do anything, because I know you can do anything.”
One of the women from the crowd walked towards me, I recognized her as the first woman Axel and I freed from her room.
She came up and hugged me, crying softly into my shoulder as she pulled me tight.
Axel walked up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder as I comforted the crying girl.
“So what happens now?” I asked him. “With your promise? The police coming for your club? These women?”
I felt his hand tense on my shoulder as he looked at me with his crystal blue eyes.
“I’m calling my brothers and telling them that we’re going to fight back, I’m not letting us getting bullied around by those corrupt bastards anymore. We’ve already freed these girls and taken out their coordinator, if we take those cops out then their whole system will fall apart. We’re riding back right now, I’m gonna put a bullet in Donnelly for Zeke, Clay, and every woman here. Then, when all of this is through, I’m gonna give you the best damn life I possibly can.”
The woman let go of me so that I could embrace Axel, he pulled me in and kissed me deep as we held each other in the soft light of the burning building behind us.
When he first made the promise to me I wanted him to succeed but I thought it would be impossible, now I could feel joy building inside of me as I began to realize that we might actually be able to make this work.
“I love you Axel, I love you more than I ever thought I could ever love someone.”
“I love you too, and I’ll always love you and fight for you. What we’re about to do will be dangerous, but at the end of it all I know that both of us will walk out of it ok, I’m going to do everything in my power to fulfill my promise and make this all right.”
He broke away from me and walked to the crowd of woman, spotting the girl that doused Frederick’s room in gasoline and waving her over.