by Tarah Benner
“Well, he couldn’t just abandon his kids.”
“Who said anything about abandoning them? I’m just talking about a quickie divorce. But no. I’d bet you anything she threatened to take him to court and squeeze so much money out of him that he couldn’t afford to keep the restaurant. My brother’s too much of a pussy to air all of her dirty laundry in court. Not like it matters now . . .”
Thompson raised an eyebrow, intrigued despite her best efforts to remain neutral. “Dirty laundry?”
“Mommy liked her happy pills.”
“Mitch owned a restaurant?” Lark asked.
“Yeah,” said Katrina. “It was this awesome little gastropub on Pearl Street. But once Boulder went to shit, he had to shut it down. He packed up Karen and the kids and moved back home.”
Lark turned that over in her head for a moment. It was tough to imagine that things like gastropubs had still existed even a few years ago. Hip bars and restaurants were from an era and a place that seemed a lifetime away.
“What about you?” she asked, suddenly curious about the rest of the Baileys’ lives before the end of the world.
“I was playing in this all-girl punk-rock band in New York,” said Katrina.
“Not just New York.” Thompson grinned. “She was practically famous in Berlin.”
“We had one tour,” said Katrina with an uncharacteristic flush of humility.
“They were about to blow up.”
“I was still moonlighting as a waitress in this little shit diner.”
“Stop being modest,” said Thompson. “They had just gotten a record deal, and Kat had given her two weeks’ notice.”
“So what happened?”
“Some gnarly floods hit the East Coast, and I got the hell out of there,” said Katrina. “Mitch let me stay with him and Karen for a while.” She rolled her eyes. “That was interesting. But if I hadn’t moved to Boulder, I never would have reconnected with Starlight. She was teaching at Rainbow Mountain where Jack went, and we just . . . hit it off.”
Lark sat back in her seat, shocked to learn that the owner of a hip restaurant and a punk rocker had grown up on a farm in middle-of-nowhere New Mexico and had somehow found their way back.
They talked very little after that. Lark could tell that they were both avoiding asking about her past out of politeness. Surely by now they knew what she’d been sent away for, and neither of them wanted to broach the topic.
They arrived in Eunice more quickly than Lark had expected, but as soon as they reached the outskirts of town, a sick feeling bubbled up in the pit of her stomach.
Eunice looked remarkably like Loving. All the trailers and bungalows they passed looked as though their inhabitants had left them in a hurry. Trash was blowing everywhere, loose clothing and stray pieces of furniture littered the street, and every business seemed to have shuttered its doors.
It took them less than five minutes to reach Saint Peter Church. It was a tiny little building with a single gable and a tall steeple rising up toward the sky. Gothic-style windows wrapped around the building, and a bright-orange foreclosure notice was tacked to the double doors. On the north side stood a rectory, which was connected to the church by a long covered walkway.
“This is it,” said Katrina, pulling around the back of the church and throwing the truck into park.
They hadn’t seen a single living soul in Eunice, but on the off chance that there was still someone holed up in one of the houses across the street, Lark thought it was probably best that they didn’t see them breaking down the front doors.
The three of them got out and walked over to join Soren and Simjay, who were hovering near the crumbling steps. Mitch already had a crowbar in hand and was using it to pry the set of two-by-fours off the battered back door.
From the looks of things, the church was long forgotten, but Lark still felt a faint prickle of paranoia as she watched Axel aim a hard kick at the door. Maybe it was the transgressive act of breaking into a church, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being watched.
The guys kicked at the door and hammered the handle, and finally the door swung open. She followed Mitch and Soren inside, and the stench of old books and candle wax almost bowled her over. Katrina sneezed loudly from the cloud of dust they’d disturbed, and one of the guys flipped on a flashlight.
They were standing in some sort of annex filled with sagging bookshelves and several cracked leather chairs. To their left was an office crowded with ancient filing cabinets, a lounge, and what looked like a supply closet. A large crack in the plaster spiderwebbed from one corner of the ceiling down the center of the wall, where an overlarge portrait of Saint Peter stared down at them.
They felt their way through the room toward the sanctuary, where rows of pews loomed like gravestones in the large deserted space. Statues of the Virgin Mary and Saint Francis flanked the aisles, and their eyes seemed to follow Lark across the chancel.
She walked down the right-hand aisle past an ancient wooden confessional and heard a bizarre crunch that sent her body into overdrive.
She looked down. She’d stepped on what looked like a half-empty bag of pork rinds. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light filtering through the dusty stained-glass windows, she realized that the front of the church was littered with all kinds of trash: empty soup cans, crinkly noodle wrappers, and an empty tub of Kool-Aid.
Her stomach gave a funny lurch. She hadn’t noticed at first, but now she saw that someone — or, rather, several someones — had been sleeping in the church. Half of the back pews were lined with blankets and old comforters, with sweatshirts and backpacks bunched up like pillows.
Lark shivered. Who’d been sleeping there, and where had they come from? According to Thompson, the church had catered to the homeless in its day, but now that millions of people had been killed or displaced, was it possible that the church was still taking in those who’d lost everything?
The thought gave her a sharp twinge of despair. All over the country, people had been going about their lives — working, cleaning, cooking, and fighting as the drought dragged on and on.
When crops started to fail and farmers went bankrupt, the markets must have gone crazy. Investors who went long on corn and grain would have made a fortune, while others went hungry because they couldn’t afford to eat. The middle class would have worried as prices began to skyrocket — their anxiety morphing into panic as shortages swept the country.
Lark wondered how many people had been caught unaware and how many had seen the disaster coming. She’d been alive long enough to notice the weather growing more and more erratic. But with each wave of natural disasters, the problems they created just grew more and more distant. She’d watched them unfold on the news like scenes in a movie, but now they were all too real.
The sound of her name drew Lark out of her dark thoughts. Soren was still standing near the altar, looking at her with a puzzled expression.
“Someone’s been staying here,” she said, wiping her sweaty palms on her jeans.
“What?”
“People have been sleeping here,” she repeated. “Look.”
Soren followed her down the aisle, taking in the trash and the sad little pallets with the same confusion she’d felt.
“You think they’re still living here?”
Lark shrugged.
“Ya’ll comin’ or what?” called Axel.
Lark looked up. Axel was still milling around the annex, beckoning them back the way they’d come. Lark and Soren followed him to the back of the church.
In the annex, Thompson was jimmying the lock to the supply room, which had to be the food pantry. Simjay and Mitch were arranging empty crates on the floor to collect what they found, and Katrina was pacing tight circles in front of Saint Peter.
A second later, the pantry door swung open. Katrina went over to stand beside Thompson and let out a colorful stream of swearwords.
“What is it?” asked Mitch, dropping one of the em
pty milk crates.
Katrina shook her head, staring through the door in disbelief.
At first Lark didn’t understand what could have prompted her reaction, but when she stepped around Simjay to peer over Kat’s shoulder, she understood at once.
The pantry was not bursting with canned goods and toiletries. There were no pallets of tuna or shrink-wrapped boxes of ramen. The shelves looked as though they’d been ruthlessly scavenged — empty except for a few cases of Kool-Aid and a six-pack of flavored water.
“What the hell?” said Thompson.
Their moment of confusion was interrupted by the low rumble of a motorcycle outside. The sound seemed to swell as the biker drew closer, and Lark realized that there were actually several motorcycles humming in the parking lot.
“Shit,” Mitch breathed.
“What do we —”
But Lark never had a chance to finish her thought. Just then, a heavy door flew open with a bang, and a gravelly voice sounded from the sanctuary.
They all froze. Several more voices joined the first, and soon the church was buzzing with conversation. Kat’s eyes grew wide, and she fumbled on the ground for her gun. Mitch, Thompson, and Soren were instantly on high alert, and Lark’s mouth went very dry.
They inched toward the door, and a loud male voice rang out. “Well, I’ll be goddamned.”
The church fell silent, and Lark craned her neck to see over Soren’s shoulder.
They filed silently out into the chancel, and Lark’s heart dropped to her knees.
At least twenty bikers were standing in the nave, which was now flooded with light from the open front doors. They were all sporting black leather vests, wild hair, and an expression that suggested they were not to be fucked with. Several of them were toting automatic weapons, which all seemed to be pointed in their direction.
“Now what in the hell do ya’ll think you’re doin’?”
eight
Lark
Lark froze. Her heart seemed to have shot straight out of her chest, but she could still feel the blood pounding in her temples.
Mitch was standing stiff-necked beside the altar a few feet in front of her, Katrina and Thompson flanking him on either side. Soren was standing to her left with his gun raised, but Lark felt him shift his body slightly to block her from view.
Nobody said a word, but she could tell they were all thinking the same thing: What the hell had they just walked into?
As they all stared across the church, Lark took a hasty inventory of the bikers and their weapons. The men standing closest to the chancel were armed with AKs and M-16s. The bikers near the doors were armed, too, mostly with smaller-caliber handguns, knives, and baseball bats.
“S’cuse me,” said the biker who’d spoken. He was tall and muscular and seemed to be the only one with a barber. He had clean-cut brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard, and he spoke with an unmistakable Texas twang. “I believe I as’t ya’ll a question.”
“We don’t want any trouble,” said Katrina, her voice tighter than it had been when she’d threatened Lark and Soren at the diner.
“Well, that’s too bad,” he said, eyes flashing like the devil’s. “’Cause trouble’s my middle name.”
“We were just leaving,” Mitch added.
The biker raised two bushy black eyebrows in surprise. “Leavin’ you say?”
Nobody spoke.
“Really?” He turned over his shoulder to speak to the biker on his right, whose golden hair and beard trailed down past his biceps. “Taz, does it look like they was just leavin’ to you?”
“Naw,” said the one called Taz, hawking up a loogie and spitting on the marble floor. “Looks like they was just settlin’ in, Memphis.”
“That’s what I thought.” The biker named Memphis snapped his fingers, and bikers fanned out down the aisles. “Search the place.”
Lark’s chest tightened as six ferocious-looking men climbed the steps to the chancel and surrounded the Baileys. Another eight dispersed in pairs to clear the annex. Two men holding assault rifles stormed up to Soren, and a short skeletal-looking man with a lazy eye appeared in front of Lark. She caught a whiff of stale drink and cigarettes that made her stomach turn.
Memphis’s nasty grin widened as the men tore through the church, searching the pews, circling the exterior, and upturning furniture in the annex.
“Nice truck you got out ’der,” said Memphis around a mouthful of chew as the bikers disarmed the Baileys. “Kinda girly, but still . . .”
Lark sucked in a breath of air as the lazy-eyed man raised his gun to head height. Reluctantly, Lark dropped her weapon, and she clenched her jaw to suppress a shudder as he bent to frisk her from ankle to thigh.
A moment later, she heard a small scuffle followed by a stream of desperate pleas. She gritted her teeth and prayed that Axel was giving them hell, but ten seconds later, two beefy bikers emerged hauling Simjay between them.
Simjay was fighting tooth and nail to escape. His shirt was torn, his legs were flailing, and he kept whipping his head around like a cat trying to bite its captors. He was sporting a bloody lip, but judging by the bikers’ unruffled expressions, he could have given it to himself for all the pain he’d managed to inflict upon them.
“Well, it looks like we found one sneak,” said Memphis. “What d’you think, Dead Eye? Time for Stumpy to earn his patch?”
The man feeling up Lark stopped what he was doing and glanced behind him at one of the younger bikers. He gave a gruff nod and seemed to forget all about her.
A short stocky guy with frizzy red hair stepped forward to await instruction. He was wearing the same black leather vest as all the other men, but the patch on the back just said “Prospect.”
“Looks like Dead Eye has given his blessing,” said Memphis with an air of festivity. “Show us whatcha got, son.”
Stumpy gave a solemn nod and clambered up into the chancel toward Simjay. The two men holding him looked almost bored, but that changed the second Stumpy laid into Simjay with a vicious liver shot.
Soren lunged toward Simjay, but one of the older bikers stopped him with a punch to the gut.
Simjay stifled a cry of pain, which only seemed to agitate the crowd.
“Give it to him, Stumpy!”
“One, two!”
“Little bitch!”
“Get ’im in the body again!”
Soren was still trying to get to Simjay, but a second biker had materialized to help the first subdue him.
Hot acidic bile burned in the back of Lark’s throat. She longed to tackle Stumpy to the ground and beat him within an inch of his life, but she’d learned in prison that it was best to shut up and take the beating when one was hopelessly outnumbered.
After the first few strikes, Lark allowed herself to drift somewhere else. It was the same place she’d gone when she’d been tied to the whipping post back in San Judas. There, she was able to watch the scene unfold with a certain amount of detachment, even if her body was still thrumming with hateful energy.
Stumpy’s movements were stiff and awkward, but at one point he caught Simjay with a sharp right hook. Lark saw Simjay’s eyes go haywire, and he seemed to deflate in his captors’ arms.
“Stop it!” yelled Katrina.
As Simjay went limp, Mitch’s whole body stiffened. The two bikers were wrestling Soren into a headlock, and Lark was frozen with rage. Only Thompson seemed to have kept her cool.
“We didn’t realize the church was occupied,” she said, speaking up to draw the prospect’s attention away from Simjay. “But you’ve laid claim to it, and it’s yours. You let us go, and we won’t bother you again.”
Memphis whistled, and Stumpy paused long enough for Lark to see that Simjay was still conscious. A line of blood was dribbling down his face, and his eyes had a slightly glazed look to them, but he was still there.
Memphis’s smile widened. Clearly he’d just gotten a good look at Thompson, and the lust in his eyes was enough to mak
e Lark’s stomach churn.
“Oh, you ain’t botherin’ me, darlin’,” said Memphis in a repulsively sweet voice. “Quite the contrary.”
There was a long tense moment as the bikers’ chuckles rumbled through the church.
“What’s your name, beautiful?”
Thompson didn’t answer.
“She’s shy,” Memphis said to his men, waggling his eyebrows as if this made her that much more appealing.
Another wave of laughter floated through the church, and a cold vise seemed to clamp around Lark’s insides.
Memphis turned back to Thompson. “I’m gonna call you . . . Sugar.”
A fierce jolt of fury shook Lark’s body, and she had to clench her fists together to release some of the tension building inside her.
“See, Sugar, we been on the road a long time,” said Memphis. “Now, by the grace of God we was able to find this wonderful place. Now we got a roof o’r our heads and some food in our bellies, but we was just sayin’ how much we miss the true comforts of home.”
He glanced to his right and his left, and the sick feeling in Lark’s stomach intensified. “A warm bed at night . . . a beautiful woman . . .”
The bikers let out another rumble of depraved laughter.
“Last night I prayed that the good Lord would send me a buxom blonde with a bit of an attitude problem, and low and behold . . .” Memphis’s grin widened to reveal a row of rotten teeth. “Well, you know what they say . . . Ask and you shall receive.”
The bikers’ disgusting laughter echoed through the church, bouncing off the high arched ceiling. It rang in Lark’s ears like an alarm bell, charging her entire body with an uncontrollable, furious energy.
“What do ya say, Sugar?” asked Memphis, cocking his head in what he probably thought was an inviting expression. “How’s about you put on a smile and slide your pretty ass on down here to do the good Lord’s work?”