400 Horsepower of the Apocalypse
Chapter 11
I rode through the day on the back of the Packmaster as the bike tried like hell to kick me off. It shuddered and fishtailed, forcing me to cling to Leo so hard that I had the shoulder seam of his jacket more or less permanently printed into the skin of my cheek. I missed my own motorcycle so badly that I cried a couple of times. Luckily, the warm, swift wind whipped the tears away before Leo could see any of them.
At highway speeds, I couldn’t really talk to Leo, which left Uriel my only company. The constant urgings to leave Leo and seek out the other angels was getting repetitive. Really repetitive. At least Uriel could have mixed in a little epic-sounding scripture or something.
Those are not our words, Uriel said.
What? I asked.
Those… church words in your mind are not our words, the angel told me.
Uh, is an angel seriously telling me that the Bible is bullshit?
No, Uriel said. Our influence is there in your book and in all holy writings. In all things.
Good for you, I thought to the angel. But if you don’t mind, I’d much rather concentrate on grabbing Leo’s abs for a while.
I felt the swirl of Uriel’s confusion at that, and it was nice to return the favor for once. But I kept my eyes on the sky and the highway, watching for Gabriel and Pestilence.
Leo finally pulled over around lunchtime. We didn’t need gas and I was pretty sure never would again. Whatever the Packmaster ran on, it wasn’t gas anymore.
But its riders’ proverbial tanks did get empty — I don’t really recommend trying to eat a bag of potato chips on the back of a moving motorcycle — or in the case of my bladder, full.
So we stopped off at a filling station anyway so I could shake out my sore and aching arms. We crammed some junk food into our mouths as we checked the rack of newspapers for anything strange. We didn’t see much, but printed news was a little slower than television.
I used a restroom that looked like it had been the site of its own apocalyptic battle. When I was done and on my way out of the little station store, I detoured to buy myself a beer and the highest octane energy drink I could find. By the time I emerged from the shop, I had chugged the energy drink and was halfway through the beer.
Outside, Leo stood next to his motorcycle, staring down at it. I groaned out loud as I approached — my ass was two patties of hamburger meat after a day of riding that thing.
“Is it talking to you?” I asked.
Leo looked up from the motorcycle. “What? Oh, no. Nothing like that. Just wondering about this whole fucked-up thing. How can any of this shit be happening?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I guess that’s the point of going to see your uncle.”
I upended the rest of the beer into my mouth and swallowed. I didn’t even like beer that much, but anything to shut Uriel the hell up tasted like ambrosia.
Leo eyed me as I crumpled the can and dropped it into the trash. He frowned.
“Yeah, I know. we make a pit stop and I promptly fill up my bladder again,” I said. “I’m a big girl. I can hold it until the next stop. Promise.”
Leo just nodded and held the Packmaster steady until I had climbed on. The motorcycle immediately began jerking like a mechanical bull and I threw my arms around Leo. When I was as situated as I was going to get, he drove back out onto the highway and we raced west.
And I do mean raced. There was an angel and a horseman out there with our names on them, but we also needed to avoid getting our asses handed to us by the cops. Leo pulled back on the handlebars of his motorcycle like the reins of a horse to keep it under a hundred miles per hour and barely managed it. Sweat ran down the back of his neck.
I could still feel Uriel in my head, but they didn’t seem to be grabbing for my reins. Maybe the angel was watching for Pestilence, too, or trying to locate Gabriel again. Or maybe it was the beer… I had guzzled it pretty fast and I wasn’t a large girl, so I was already a bit buzzed. I wondered what a drunk angel would sound like, which prompted Uriel to renew demands that I ditch the horseman and go find myself a nice archangel.
Or three of them, to be precise.
Shut up, shut up, shut up…! I told Uriel in a sing-song voice inside my head. I swear, I’ll brain myself with a wrench if you don’t shut the hell up.
Uriel didn’t shut up.
Leo and I followed Highway 44 through rocky hills that rose steeply into tree-covered peaks labeled with green signs along the roadside as Cibola National Forest. We stopped in a pretty mountain town called Zamora Canyon.
Sunlight fell across the road in horizontal amber lines that danced with motes of dust and pollen. It wasn’t dark yet — and the Packmaster had a perfectly good headlight — but I think Leo was eager to stop and get my cell phone charged. The beer and energy drink had finished their own journeys and I was ready for another pit stop, too.
Zamora Canyon had a Mexican restaurant on the main thoroughfare that was a welcome change of pace from the roadside diner food we had been eating. We sat next to a window where we could watch the sun finish setting behind the mountains and keep an eye on the road outside.
When our waiter dropped off some fresh chips and several kinds of salsa, I ordered a plate of enchiladas dripping in cheese and a pitcher of margaritas.
“Skip the drinks,” Leo said.
I frowned and the waiter looked back and forth between us, but Leo’s voice was hard. The waiter didn’t make any cute jokes — he just scratched the pitcher off his order pad and left. Quickly.
“Um… what the hell?” I asked. “It’s not like I’m driving. I can’t drive anymore, remember? My Bonnie’s probably been smashed into a paperweight at some scrapyard by now.”
I choked a little on the last words and Leo crossed his arms on the tabletop. The thick muscles were tensed under his colorfully tattooed skin.
“Drinking isn’t going to make this shit go away, Jaz,” he said.
“Yeah? Look, you’re not the one with a chatty angel in your head,” I snapped.
“My friends are all dead!” Leo hissed right back.
“Then why aren’t you drinking?”
“Because it doesn’t make the problem go away.”
“Talk to me again when you’re mentally wrestling a demon,” I said.
“I am,” Leo answered.
Now I froze like a rabbit caught in headlights. “What? Is… is Death talking to you?”
“No,” Leo told me. “But there’s a reason I believe you about what’s happening here, Jaz, and it’s not just because of what happened in Arrow. I can feel Death, I think. That urge to throw you off my bike and drag you behind me down the road until…”
Leo bit off the sentence with obvious difficulty, but a line of cold sweat was already running down the back of my neck. Shit. Shit! Death was really in there, somewhere inside Leo.
I warned you, Uriel said. Leave this place. Leave this man, vessel!
I grabbed the edge of the table, wondering how fast I could sprint for the door. What was I going to do once I got outside? I doubted that the Packmaster would let me steal it… There were no other motorcycles in the parking lot.
Could I steal a car? No, someone would see me and then it would take about five minutes flat before the cops were dragging me out of the driver’s seat by the hair. Could I even hotwire one? It looked easy enough in the movies, but I knew engines better than to believe that shit.
Give me control and I will get away, Uriel urged. I have no need of wheels. I have wings.
One of Leo’s hands came down on top of mine and I nearly screamed. He leaned over the table and fixed me with an intense stare.
“But that’s not what I’m talking about,” Leo said.
“Wait… what?” I asked. I had lost the thread of the conversation entirely. “That’s not what?”
“Death isn’t the demon I’m looking at right now,” Leo told me. “Look, I get what you’re going through.”
“Yeah, I really doubt that.”
Leo’s big hand tightened on top of mine. It felt like there was an electric current running through his skin and into me. I bit my lip.
“My dad was a shitbag,” Leo said. “He was a privileged asshole who went down to San Diego on vacation and knocked up my mother. So he brought her home to Chicago to knock her around. Her life hurt, so she took heroin to make it stop. Eventually, it did — she overdosed when I was in high school.”
“I… I’m sorry,” I stammered.
“Jaz, listen. You know my dad was the same with me. Hit me a lot, threw me through a glass table once, and left a lot of scars. So for my tenth birthday, Mom gave me a needle.”
“Oh, shit.”
“Don’t judge her,” Leo said. “My mom loved me. Heroin was the only good thing in her life and she wanted to share it with me. And you know what? My life sucked, so yeah, I shot up. Dad came home and hammered on me, but it didn’t matter anymore. I missed weeks of school, and that didn’t matter, either.”
“Leo…” I whispered, but then trailed off.
What could I say? The biker’s broad shoulders hunched, but his hand remained firm on top of mine.
“Remember those summer vacations I told you about?” Leo asked. “When Uncle Carlos came to take me out of Chicago for a few weeks?”
“Yeah,” I answered. That trip must have been the best part of young Leo’s life each year, a chance to get away from his father.
“And I told you he saved my life,” Leo said. “When Carlos came that summer and found me, he knew exactly what was going on. He never got my mom — his sister — off the heroin, but I always looked up to Uncle Carlos. I wanted to be Carlos when I grew up. Nothing hurt him. Nothing could. I needed to be strong like that.”
I wanted to point out that of the two of us, Leo was the one not melting down and speaking to voices in their head. But he was still talking.
“I wanted to be a Knight of Hell like him,” Leo said. “But there were rules, Uncle Carlos told me, and one of them was no drugs. If I ever wanted to be a Knight, I had to kick the habit. And then he left me there in Chicago, all summer.”
“What happened?” I asked. “I mean, you’re here, not dead from an overdose. And you obviously joined the Knights of Hell. So what did you do?”
Leo finally sat back, smiling a little. “At first, I was just pissed off. I broke pretty much everything that I could in my bedroom, including my window. Which earned me a few smacks in the mouth from my dad.”
I winced.
“But Carlos was right. If I wanted to join up bad enough, I could do it,” Leo said. “So I made it through the heroin withdrawals. Barely. That fall and spring, I made it through school and my dad’s fists. Barely. When summer came around again, so did Uncle Carlos. He took one look and told me to get on the bike.”
I could imagine that, little ten-year-old Leo — though I guess he would have been eleven by then — jumping onto the back of a big-ass Harley to drive halfway across the country.
“That’s the summer Carlos started teaching me,” Leo said. “How to ride, and how to fight when I had to. He taught me to be strong like him. I just wish I could have taught my mother. She tried to get off the heroin, too, but it would never stick for more than a few weeks. She kept going back. And she did her last pop when I was sixteen.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” I said.
Leo sighed. There were tears in his eyes again, but he didn’t try to wipe them discreetly away before I could see them or claim it was just dust. This was old pain, and Leo wasn’t afraid of it anymore.
“After she died, then it was just me and my dad. He hit me, and my mom wasn’t there begging us to stop anymore. So I hit him right back,” Leo said, then smirked. “Might have been more than once.”
“That’s what got you sent off to prison, right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Leo answered. “I was seventeen, but I got tried as an adult and spent a year in prison. When I was in there, it was hard not to go back to the heroin.”
I blinked. “In… prison?”
“Jaz, you can get anything in prison,” Leo said with a raised eyebrow. “It just costs more than on the outside. But I made it through. I still want the needle sometimes, though, especially when shit like… like this happens. You can’t outrun everything.”
The waiter reappeared, carrying our dinner and some fresh chips. He stared at Leo’s tears as he set everything on the table and the big biker dug into his carne asada without looking up.
The waiter cocked his head at me. Maybe he was giving me the chance to order my margaritas again, but I shook my head. I wasn’t very thirsty anymore.
