by Jackson Kane
After the call, Hendrix examined me once again and decided that my nose needed to be manually reset, which took three adjustments to fix it completely. I squirmed and yelped at the intense pain as he did so in those three tries, the first being the absolute worst. All that grinding and bone-crunching ringing in my ears, deafening me to all other sounds, was worse than fingernails down a chalkboard. Would I be able to breathe through my nose again, as I was an obligate nose breather and couldn’t sleep if I had to breathe through my mouth.
“You’re all right.” Hendrix gently kissed my forehead “You’re almost as pretty as me. Oh… I found this inside.” He handed me my small wallet. I popped it open and quickly perused through it. It was empty except for my license, a photo of Anna, and a library card that I never used. “Your stuff was all over the place. Sorry I didn’t have time to grab more.”
It was a selfish and small thing, but I wished he’d found my phone and maybe one credit card too. It didn’t matter though. It was wonderful that he had even grabbed what he did as it was more than I could have hoped for. Hendrix didn’t have to come to the warehouse at all. Then where would I be?
“This is fine. Thank you.” I managed a weak but genuine smile.
“Are you ready?”
I took a deep breath to steady myself and tell him yes, but something else fell out of my mouth instead. “Why did Miles stay?”
The biker sighed, his strained mirth dissolving, and in a low voice, he answered, “He did it for his ex-wife and kids. If he’s dead, there would be no reason for the Veins to hurt his family. That’s not a health insurance plan most places tended to offer.”
The concept of that level of retaliation was so monstrous to me that my face tingled as I fought back the tears. Never in my life had I hated the Steel Veins more.
“Okay,” I mumbled, slipping behind Hendrix on the bike’s leather seat. I felt a small piece of my heart flitter away for Miles and another piece for Hendrix. In their places, those terrible holes were filled with something darker, something harder. I’d finally begun to understand what brutality really was and what was truly necessary to survive in this world. “I’m ready.”
Chapter Nine
Hendrix
Maya spotted the smoke first. While riding it, I’d noticed something was off with Miles’s bike, but we didn’t have time to check it for damage with the Steel Veins from the casket warehouses on our asses. Fortunately, it was a hot night so I could really stretch the bike’s legs without freezing too much from the wind chill. I had been able to lose Slick’s gang, and we’d just passed the state line into Utah when the heavy, blackish smoke came pouring out of the bottom of the bike’s engine.
It was getting late and there was no one on the highway, so I pushed the bike as far and as fast as it could go as we were only about an hour out from Salt Lake City. If I could get Maya there, then I could get her the rest of the way.
All the dummy lights on the instrument panels flashed urgently then clicked off, taking all the bike’s power with them. We coasted down from just over a hundred and ten miles an hour, but it was a struggle just to keep us up on two wheels without being thrown off. We eventually rolled to a stop just off the dark, dusty highway out in the middle of Fuck-Knows-Where, Utah. I helped Maya off and inspected the bike.
“How bad is it? Is it something we can fix?” Maya asked worriedly.
The bike was completely fucked. The intake valve was cracked, maybe from wear and tear or by a bullet while we fled. Either way, the motor had seized. We were lucky the goddamn engine didn’t buckle or explode at the speeds I was pushing it.
“Fuck...,” I breathed the word, placing both hands on the leather seat for support. This was probably the worst day of my life, and it wasn’t nearly over yet.
“Hendrix?”
I held my hand up for her to wait as I couldn’t answer her with words yet. Anything that came out of my mouth right then would’ve been harsh and strangled with exasperation. Maya didn’t deserve that. I just needed a minute to cool off.
Robbie and Miles were dead. My plans for getting out of the club unscathed were fucking ashes in the breeze. We were stranded in a desolate wasteland of rolling hills. No streetlights and a heavily cloud-covered sky robbed us of all but the faintest of light. The stars even refused to shine for us. Even outside of my cell, I was still in prison.
The frustration I felt burning inside me that I was hoping would subside did the exact opposite. It seeped into my bones, causing anger to swell in my muscles and joints as it radiated throughout my entire body and finally boiled over. Soon, I seethed with aggravation at how little I was able to change the outcome.
I was fit to burst, the pressure I was experiencing was overwhelming. The impotent rage I felt screamed toward a breaking point and finally vented as I violently kicked the bike over and stomped the shit out of it. Shattered mirrors. Kicked-in headlight. Bent-around handlebars. Ripped plexiglass windshield, and many more pieces flung as far away as I could. I staggered a few feet back from the remains of the wrecked Harley, away from Maya, away from everything. My energy completely spent, I sagged down to my knees and hung my head, all the fight fleeing from my physical form. Then tears swelled from my closed eyes and dampened my cheeks.
The leather collar of my vest chafed against the skin on my neck. Funny, but I never was all that bothered by the discomfort before because it reminded me that this brotherhood came with a cost, and sometimes that cost was uncomfortable. Today though, that roughness rubbing on my neck was too much to bear. Today, that cost was far too high.
That cost was paid in blood and tears… and probably part of my soul.
Maya’s touch was so light that I barely felt it at first. Her soft hand lingered on my shoulder as if asking permission. When I didn’t push her away, she sidled around in front of me. I opened my eyes enough to see the outline of her lost-and-found jeans and her worn tennis shoes. I couldn’t bear to look up at her. Not yet.
She gently guided my head into her arms and slipped her fingers between my vest collar and the back of my neck. I could feel her warmth all around me… like I was wrapped in a sunbeam. I closed my eyes and embraced that soothing warmth.
“My brother, Hayton, was put into a coma by a drunk driver when I was twelve. Every day on my way home from school, I’d walk to the hospital to visit him. On the way there, I’d steal the funny pages out of a newspaper on someone’s porch. Once I was in his hospital room, I’d describe the visuals in the comic to him as best I could and then read him the captions,” I reminisced slowly and deliberately. The memory was so hard to put into words.
“Did your brother have a favorite comic?” she asked patiently.
“No,” I replied, coughing at the innocent question, which then turned into a dark chuckle. “Hayton was a few years older than me and hated those comics, especially Family Circus. When I got there, I would always begin by telling him, ‘All you gotta do is wake up and tell me to stop, and I promise I will.’ My parents would beg and plead for him to wake up, but that, of course, would never work, so I figured if I could piss him off enough, he’d have to wake up and yell at me to quit it. I did that for six months… but he never did. The night of December 22, 1990, around 7:00 p.m., his heart stopped and... Hayton died. That was my first meaningful experience with death, and it feels like death’s been chasing me around ever since… ‘Just tell me to stop.’” Those words I told Hayton floated from my lips like the whisper of a ghost.
That night of my brother’s death was the last time I was physically consoled by anyone.
Mercifully, Maya was silent, but she just pulled me in tighter. Her arms wrapped around me were enough to soothe the sharpest burrs of my long-suppressed sorrow, enough to part the storm clouds of a heavy rain.
I never told anyone that story, and I’d probably never tell it ever again. I wasn’t really sure why I did this time as it left me feeling exposed and vulnerable, but maybe it was necessary. There was a small degree of relie
f in letting something like that off my chest. It must be that absolution Catholics feel when they are truly repentant of their sins and are forgiven of them.
But maybe it was just budding trust. Maya outpaced everyone in the circuits she ran in my mind. I already liked the girl. Originally, she was just a breath of fresh air and a symbol of what life could be outside of my MC. After that, she was an obligation to a friend and now... she was something else entirely to me.
I didn’t know fully what yet, but I was starting to actually care for her.
Beneath all my bullshit, I didn’t think I would’ve gone after her when Robbie died if she didn’t mean something important to me. I’d like to think that I did it for my friend, but I was too selfish for that. I needed to rescue Maya because I needed her to be safe.
I sat there in silence with her along the side of that endless, dark highway for a long time. It took a while, but in her arms, I found the strength to stand up and fulfill one last obligation to the club.
“Where are you going?”
“Stay here.” I touched her cheek to ward off her worry then wandered off into the flat, starless landscape. It was hard to see, but I found my way. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I knew I’d find it.
Before long, I came across a patch of semi-loose earth and went to work. A shovel would have made everything much easier, but all I had with me was my knife, and it would have to do. I stabbed the packed soil to loosen it up then dug the hole with my bare hands. It would take a little while and the going would be tough, but fortunately for me, this grave I had to dig would be a shallow one.
All this time I was trying to get out, to leave the club. I thought about Robbie, Tex, Miles, all the guys we lost to the Wild Boys, and all the portraits of fallen members that hung on the gray wall back in the war room at our clubhouse... I was all that was left, a lost rider that just wanted to hang it all up but instead was dragged into a desperate plan and a losing fight.
In the end, it was the Coffin Eaters that left me.
“You boys remember why we started this drinking club on wheels?” I let my mind drift back to the four of us around the table in the clubhouse when both it and we were still shiny and new. “We were drunk and directionless, looking for new ways to stir up a little trouble on Saturday nights. Turns out others were like-minded, and before we knew it, the Coffin Eaters was born.”
I stripped off my cut, folded the vest neatly, then held it in my arms, just feeling the weight. I dragged my hand across the leather one last time. There was so much history in each scratch and hole of that vest. Finally, I laid it in the hole and buried it.
Standing back up, I clapped my hands free of most of the dirt and spoke a few words in memoriam. “To every man worth his salt, to each brother come and gone, to the reaper that rides for us all. May each man eat the coffin of the last so that the club may live on. Rest easy, you ugly bastards, and save me a beer in hell.”
It wasn’t much of a eulogy, but it would have to do.
Gravel shifted on the ridge above me, startling me into reaching for my gun. I quickly relaxed my hand when I registered that it was Maya.
“That was really nice,” she ventured.
“I thought I told you to wait for me.”
“I did, but you were gone so long, I was worried you had been eaten by wolves. I’m a city girl. There’s a shelf life on how long I can be left by the side of a highway in the middle of nowhere before I start to freak. You’re lucky I let you out of my sight for as long as I did,” she berated with feigned indignation.
It was damn near impossible to be mad at her. The little biker-hating princess was genuinely concerned about me. It was a hell of a feeling.
Compassion settled into her voice as she asked, “Are you all right?”
I gazed at her slender outline on the hill above me, her presence alone already making me feel better. Robbie, where the hell did you find this girl? “Starting to be.”
“You did a number on that bike, but I managed to find a blanket in one of his side boxes.” She held it up triumphantly.
“Now we just need a basket and some ants, and we can have ourselves a proper picnic.”
“I was thinking more of a campout, especially being that I haven’t seen so much as a headlight in the past hour.”
“Yeah, we’re really out there. C’mon down. Let’s set that up.” I climbed toward her as she carefully navigated the hill in almost complete blackness.
The gravel beneath her shifted, and Maya lost her footing. She let out a surprised squeak as her foot abruptly skidded forward and threatened to betray her. It wasn’t too steep of a grade, and the soil was soft enough that she wouldn’t have been hurt much if she fell, but I launched myself to grab her anyway. It was now an automatic reflex for me. An impulse. It would have taken longer for me to realize that she’d be fine than it would have been to actually catch her. So I snatched her out of the air right as she pitched forward and really started to panic.
Unfortunately, the momentum shift of her in my arms toppled me over too, so we tumbled the last few feet together, rolling out at the bottom in a jumbled mess. I managed to take the brunt of the fall, positioning myself to have her land on top of me rather than me crushing her. Strange how the blanket she brought managed to have woven itself around us like a tight cocoon.
There I lay for a second, slowly easing into a smile. My life was a maelstrom. It was a roller coaster of horror, sex, violence, and drugs. This... whatever this was... was completely alien to me. Never had I been wrapped in a blanket at the bottom of a hill with a beautiful lawyer after our only ride out of nowhere had been destroyed. This was a first for me, and firsts were hard to come by nowadays.
“I take it there aren’t many sandy hills in downtown St. Louis?”
“I think we paved over most of them.” Maya wriggled and eventually poked her head out from the swaths of fabric.
I didn’t know if she was just a welcome distraction from the pain, or if she was the staples and duct tape that my heart needed in order to mend. It was hard to let that grief go, at least enough to enjoy anything good, especially when that hurt was so raw, so fresh in my mind. My vest—the bleeding, open wound of my recently buried past—was only a few feet away.
How was I supposed to set something like that aside and look beyond it? My club and my closest friends were dead. I liked Maya a lot, but how the hell could I justify enjoying myself with her?
I had asked Robbie that once after a friend of ours was killed. He’d lost a lot of friends in the service and a few more after that. He had a girl in each arm when he replied to my question, saying that we feel an obligation to the dead. We grieve because we feel that they deserve our full attention, that they’d somehow want us to keep them on our minds. But really they’re just gone. They don’t want anything from us. And if they did and were worth grieving over in the first place, then they’d want us to not be in pain when we thought of them. Let the memory of the dead enrich our lives, not make them shittier than we already make them ourselves.
That’s how, I thought. I wasn’t trying to find a way to distract myself with Maya and forget about my pain. No, I would honor those I’d lost by not letting that loss destroy me by embracing the good things in life rather than pushing them away.
Maya, in this moment, was the best thing in my life. Despite everything—no, because of everything, I couldn’t push her away. Not tonight.
Maya approached with a hint of shyness, her hot breath brushing against my lips, her face being only a few inches away. I let the rest of the world melt away. We might as well have been floating in space where there was only her and me.
Her slender body draped over me, robbing me of my grief and pain. I was tangled in her and she in me. Either of us could have easily escaped if we wanted to, and although she stirred, she eventually sank back down and pressed herself all the more tightly against me. She matched her breathing with mine. I could faintly make out the whites of her dark, alm
ond eyes. We were one form.
I shifted enough to get an arm free and swept her silky hair over an ear. Maybe I imagined it, but even now I could just barely pick up the faintest notes of lilacs on her skin, which was quickly becoming my favorite scent. I wanted to live in that moment with her forever. I wanted to steal it and tattoo it across my flesh so I could never forget her.
“I think I need to tell you something I overheard,” Maya started, appearing a bit embarrassed. “I meant to tell it to you earlier, but with all the deadly excitement, I just kinda forgot.”
“What’s up?” I asked, pulling my head back a little further to read as much of her expression as the dark night would allow.
“It’s about my fath—” She cleared her throat, not able to get the word out. “It’s about Slick and his chapter. I think they’re going rogue from the Steel Veins now that the new guy’s in charge. They’re apparently really pissed about how all that went down.”
“Forming their own MC?” I asked, the old adage the enemy of my enemy is my friend stirring in my head. It also reminded me of just how over his head Tex had really been. He had no idea what was going on, the selfish prick.
“I think so. He told his guys to reach out to support clubs and bikers that were pissed off about the new policy changes. He wants to build an army.” Maya’s face went deadly serious. “And if there’s anyone that can do it, it’s him.”
“He seems like quite the cult of personality type,” I replied cynically, remembering the way he mercilessly tried to kill his own daughter. Then something clicked in me. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I, uh, I just didn’t want there to be any more secrets between us.” Her face screwed up to one side as her beautiful eyes appealed to me.