400 Horsepower of the Apocalypse
Chapter 3
I rode down Highway 44 beside Leo and finally lost sight of Crayhill over my shoulder. Which was actually kind of a feat in Kansas. Despite its name, there wasn’t a single hill in Crayhill, so it took pure distance to swallow up my hometown.
I couldn’t stop checking every few seconds. Some part of me was still screaming that this was a terrible idea, and I had to convince myself over and over again that I wasn’t dreaming the whole thing, that I had finally left. But when I could no longer see Crayhill, I cheered into the dry summer wind. Leo glanced over at me, but I couldn’t read his expression under the helmet.
We rode past wide, flat fields in alternating green and gold. I smelled hot asphalt and warm earth, the sharp stink of exhaust and the sweet scent of sun-baked cornfields. Engines and the wind roared in my ears, even under the protective padding of my helmet. They were the sounds of the open road, and it was the most beautiful music in the world.
Shut up. I was allowed to be a little poetic — I was actually leaving home and it felt amazing.
Well, mostly. My Bonneville’s shitty shocks hadn’t suddenly gotten better and I didn’t own a pair of good motorcycle gloves. It was only the middle of the afternoon — less than two hours after leaving Crayhill — and my hands already ached. I felt the hard vibration of the road in my lungs and guts. It just added to the exhilaration for now, but I was pretty sure that I would be over the sensation long before dinner time.
I gave Leo a sidelong glance. He wasn’t watching the landscape streak by, but gripped the handles of his Packmaster with tension that I could see even through his leathers and helmet. Leo caught my eye and held up his hand, first finger raised.
I frowned. That was the signal to ride single-file. The highway wasn’t empty — there were trucks hauling crops and tankers full of gasoline, all mixed in with smaller cars driving through my shitty little corner of Kansas without stopping — but there was plenty of room for two motorcycles to drive abreast.
Was this some kind of macho bullshit? Maybe Leo felt some alpha-wolf need to lead the way… I didn’t know, but the man was paying me a lot of money, so I dutifully throttled back and fell in behind his Packmaster.
We crossed the southwest border of Kansas and into Oklahoma. I rode behind Leo until the sun began to set, turning the blue sky dark and purple. Our headlights cast bright blades of illumination out in front of us. Leo gestured again, this time pointing in the direction of the next highway off-ramp.
I didn’t catch the name printed on the green sign beside the road, but I didn’t care. The town we drove into couldn’t have been any larger than Crayhill. It wasn’t much more than an overgrown truck stop, but it was a new place, a not-Crayhill place. I called that a win.
Leo rolled into a shopping center parking lot and stopped under one of the streetlamps. I parked next to him, kicked out the Bonneville’s stand and rubbed my aching hands. Time to start earning Leo’s suspicious money.
“How did your bike do?” I asked.
Leo pulled off his helmet. He shook out the sweaty brown waves of his hair and frowned down at the Packmaster.
“Steering was a bear,” Leo grunted. “It fought me the whole way.”
Was that what had been going on? I didn’t see the motorcycle swerve all afternoon, so I guess that Leo had been able to keep it under control. Must be those big arms…
“That’s why I asked you to ride behind me before,” Leo said. “My bike kept pulling toward yours, and I didn’t want to hit you if I lost control.”
“Oh,” I answered. “Um… thanks.”
So not some kind of stupid alpha-male shit. Well, that was something of a relief, at least. But what the hell was wrong with Leo’s motorcycle? I pulled out my toolkit to check his tire pressure and alignment. Still fine.
I sat back on my heels. Too bad I couldn’t have brought a lift table and some better lights. I settled for spreading my jacket on the ground and turning on my cell phone flashlight.
“Let’s look at your head bearings,” I said. “Give me a hand.”
I directed Leo to hold his motorcycle level and steady while I found my jack. It was just a little one — small enough to fit into my toolbox — but we lifted up the front of the Packmaster. Reluctantly, I grabbed the handlebars. No electric zap this time, which was an improvement… Not that I had ever figured out why it happened in the first place.
Leo held his motorcycle while I rotated the front wheel to feel the movement of the bearing inside. Something felt wrong. The bike’s steering grated and groaned in protest, and the effort of yanking the handlebars a few degrees made sweat prickle along my hairline.
But a tight bearing wasn’t the only thing wrong. The sweat running down the back of my neck was ice cold and I had the sudden overwhelming urge to shove the motorcycle off the jack, over onto Leo. What the hell? I’m not really a violent girl and don’t let Maisie Perkins tell you otherwise. She started that fight — I just ended it.
Sure, Leo was mysterious and his glitchy motorcycle was frustrating, but neither of them was trying to steal my favorite doll. So even if I could lay them both out on their asses there in the parking lot, it seemed like overkill. It had been a weird afternoon, so I just shook the sensation off and gave the Packmaster’s handlebars another twist.
They barely moved. The bearings were way too tight, that was all. That didn’t explain the swerving and pulling that Leo had described, exactly, but maybe forcing the over-tight steering had damaged the bearing further. Wrestling with it might have carved a notch into the metal… Well, I wouldn’t know until I got in there to ease up the bearings and take a look. I let go of the Packmaster and rubbed my hands.
“I have a drift and hammer set in my kit,” I told Leo. “I can loosen up that head bearing for you. It’s not a complicated fix, but I’m tired and you’re paying me too much money to do shit work on your ride.”
“What do you need?” Leo asked. “A garage?”
“No, just dinner and maybe some sleep,” I said. “You weren’t planning to ride through the night, were you?”
Leo hesitated and drummed his fingers on the back of his motorcycle, then finally sighed.
“No, I guess not,” he answered with obvious reluctance. “My friends have to stop for the night, too. We’ll catch up to them tomorrow.”
“Great. Then I’ll take care of your bearings first thing in the morning.”
Leo nodded and we lowered his bike back to the ground. Without getting on the road again, our meal options were fast food or a country-style diner, so we chose the diner. It was just at the end of the parking lot and we left our motorcycles under the streetlight — after Leo double-checked the buckles on his saddlebags, I noticed — then walked over to the diner.
It was getting late on a Tuesday night, so there were only a few truckers in the diner, loading up on grease and caffeine for the road. Most of the tables were empty and a server looked up from her coffee long enough to tell us we could take any seat.
Leo selected a nearby booth and slid into the far side, where he could keep an eye on the front door. I sat down across from him with a wince and waited for some menus.
“Are you okay?” Leo asked, frowning.
“Your motorcycle isn’t the only one with problems,” I said. “My shocks aren’t great. The Bonnie’s a rough ride and I’ve never taken it on the road for this long. My hands are kind of numb, and so is my ass.”
“I don’t think any of my gloves will fit you, but you’re welcome to a pair if you want to try,” Leo offered.
I shook my head. “Thanks, but your hands are like twice the size of mine.”
Leo nodded and then stripped out of his jacket, laying it over the green vinyl booth seat. He smiled a little self-consciously as he peeled off his fingerless riding gloves, too, and tucked them into one of the pockets. Leo folded his tattooed forearms across the tabletop. Red and orange ink flames curled around his left wrist, up to the wheels of a bike of a similar make and model to his own. An armored figure rode astride the motorcycle on his bicep, with a few gleaming details picked out in white ink. The helmet had a flaming plume on top that disappeared up under the sleeve of Leo’s black t-shirt.
“You’ve been working on bikes for a while, right?” he asked.
“Yeah, pretty much since I could lift a wrench,” I answered. “Just for fun when I was little, a way to spend time with my mom and dad. But it wasn’t like I could go to college, so guess what I ended up doing for a living?”
“And you seem good at it,” Leo said.
I arched an eyebrow. “Uh, you’ve barely seen me work. And I have no idea what’s causing your engine surges yet.”
“I’ve been to see a lot of mechanics over the years,” Leo said. “Most of them would have made something up by now.”
“Ever had to bring one on the road with you before?” I asked.
A bit nervously, I have to admit. Leo was a criminal, after all, and I had nightmare visions of some other mechanic duct-taped to a chair somewhere back in Chicago. Leo smiled, though.
“Nope. This is a first for me, too,” he said. “My uncle always told me that a buck spent on maintenance was worth a hundred in repairs.”
I nodded. “Smart guy. Your uncle’s right.”
“He usually is.”
Our server finally strolled over with a couple of menus, then brought us some drinks — coffee for me, cola for Leo — and took our orders. The diner did breakfast all day, so I asked for a skillet full of eggs, bacon and potatoes. My lunch was only half a candy bar and now I was starving.
“So why are your shocks so bad?” Leo asked when the server left again. “Seems like a good place for a little bit of that preventative maintenance.”
“Money,” I answered with a shrug. “Up until this afternoon, I couldn’t afford new shocks. I only have the Bonneville at all because the owner skipped out on the bill and Craig let me work a bunch of unpaid weekends to buy it.”
Leo nodded his understanding. He obviously had plenty of money now, but it was just as clear that wasn’t always the case. Leo’s money was stolen, and I doubted he was about to start investing it in prudent stock portfolios. His bank account probably spent as much time in the red as mine… If Leo even had a bank account. I didn’t want to ask him about that, though.
“Well, I have to move fast, and I need you to make sure my Packmaster can do that,” Leo said. “That means we need you to be able to ride fast, too. How do we get your Triumph some new shocks?”
“In this place?” I asked, gesturing to the diner window and the narrow street outside. “We don’t. When we ride through a bigger town, I can pick up new springs. I should be able to swap them in without much trouble. How soon I can do that depends on where we’re meeting your friends. The uh… the Knights of Hell, right?”
I glanced down at Leo’s tattoos. He caught my look and then nodded.
“Yeah. The Knights are heading toward San Diego, too, but they shouldn’t be more than a town or two ahead of us. I’ll give Audrey another call tonight and find out.”
Now it was my turn to nod. I was just Leo’s mechanic for this trip. Where we went and how fast was up to him. Unless Leo actually tried to get me to do anything illegal. I couldn’t imagine any crime that he might involve me in, but what the hell did I know? This morning, my biggest dream was finding some out-of-date motorcycle shocks online.
“My friends will ride as slow as they can to let me catch up,” Leo said. “But they can’t stop to wait for us.”
Yeah, I had kind of figured out that part. Chances were somewhere around a hundred percent that every rider in the Knights of Hell wore that rattlesnake patch, too. The mark wasn’t unlike a diamondback’s rattle, I supposed — it was a warning. Leo was dangerous and no matter how much cash he paid me, I couldn’t forget that.
Literally… it was like something was shouting in the back of my mind to get the hell away from Leo Valdis. I willed that voice to shut up and took another drink of coffee. I was so amped and jittery that I doubted I needed any more caffeine, but it gave me something to do.
I ran my hand over the scarred wooden tabletop of the diner booth. This could have been any table in Crayhill, but it wasn’t. Despite the longest, strangest day of my life — and my sore butt — I was very, very glad that I had accepted Leo’s offer.
Our server appeared at the table like the patron goddess of food and I almost grabbed the skillet right out of her hands. She blinked at my enthusiasm as I began devouring heaping forkfuls of scrambled eggs. She dropped off a little pitcher of creamer for my coffee, too, and I stirred some into the mug.
Leo watched me demolish my dinner with a faintly shocked expression. I guess he had never seen a half-starved mechanic before.
“So… what’s in San Diego?” I asked between mouthfuls. “Or are you just going there because it’s not Chicago?”
Leo grinned. “Like it’s not Crayhill?”
“Hey, I’ve got nothing against Chicago.” I held up my hands. Well, one of them — the other was occupied grabbing a strip of bacon. “I want to go there someday, too.”
“Chicago’s a good city,” Leo said. “I grew up there, but I spent every summer down in San Diego. To get away from things at home.”
A shadow flickered behind Leo’s dark eyes and I guessed I wasn’t the only one at the table who wanted to run away from home. I was curious… but didn’t risk pressing Leo. It didn’t seem smart to poke a rattlesnake and besides, Leo didn’t owe me any answers — he was the one paying me. I just needed to get him to San Diego intact, and then collect the rest of my thirty thousand dollars.
“Yeah, I get it,” I told him.
“And San Diego’s as much my home by now as Chicago,” Leo said. He smiled at me again, but it didn’t look as easy this time. “That’s where my uncle lives. What about you, Jaz? Where are you going?”
“San Diego, apparently,” I answered.
“What about after that?” Leo asked. “How far do you want to go?”
“As far as I can get.”
After dinner, Leo picked up the check and paid in cash. I considered arguing with him, but Leo was the one with buckets of money. Until we got to San Diego, I had only the five hundred dollars in my wallet to see me through. And maybe to buy some shocks for my bike.
Besides, as Leo counted out the money, my cell phone rang and the screen lit up with my dad’s picture. I took a couple of steps back from the register, but Leo was still watching me from the corner of his eye as I answered.
It was both of my parents, in fact, each speaking louder and louder to make their questions heard over the other. I covered my eyes with one hand, but I smiled. They were just worried.
“I told you I’d call when I could,” I pointed out. “But I’m fine. Really. It’s a short job on the road. I’ll be back home as soon as I can, and I’ll phone to let you know where I am. Okay?”
It took a few more rounds of reassurance that I was safe and that the money I left for them was legit, but after Leo had been waiting a few minutes, I was able to hang up and grin sheepishly at him.
“Parents,” I said.
“Did you tell them where we are?” Leo asked.
“Uh… no,” I answered. “Was I supposed to or something?”
Leo shrugged in noncommittal answer and I followed him out into the parking lot. We drove — carefully — down the street to the only motel in town and Leo bought a pair of rooms, also in cash. Finally, I groaned inwardly.
“I… really should pay for my own motel room,” I said.
After all, I hadn’t actually fixed Leo’s motorcycle yet and a motel room — even a crappy one — was way more expensive than highway diner food. But lodging was going to eat through my remaining money fast. Maybe Leo could deduct the cost from my pay once the job was done…
“Call it traveling expenses,” Leo said. “Don’t worry about it. Trust me, Jaz, you’re the one doing me a favor.”
I didn’t feel great about it, but I shrugged and wondered if Leo was feeling a bit guilty for stealing me away from my home and family — even though I had jumped at the chance. I didn’t want to take advantage of his generosity, but neither did I want to screw up this one opportunity to actually earn some good money.
We walked our motorcycles down the single row of motel rooms. We stopped in front of two of the doors and Leo handed me one of the keys. I thanked him — hey, just because this whole adventure was weird as hell didn’t mean I couldn’t be polite — grabbed my toolbox and shouldered my backpack.
I let myself into the room that matched my key number and threw my things down onto the narrow bed. My hands were still pretty numb, but maybe a nice hot shower would help increase the blood flow. With any luck, the motel water heater was a slightly more robust model than the one at my parents’ house.
The faded sky-blue window curtains were already closed, but they were only about as thick as Bible pages, so I grabbed the felt-lined blackout drapes on top to pull them shut. But Leo was still outside, straddling his big, problematic motorcycle with a thoughtful expression on his face. He ran a hand through his hair, let out a long breath and then pulled the cell phone from his pocket. Leo swiped the screen a few times, then held it up to his ear. The motel room walls were nearly as thin as the curtains and I could hear every word.
“Hey, Audrey,” Leo said. “Are you still clear? Good. Yeah, I got some help. I don’t know what’s wrong with the Packmaster, exactly, but I hired a mechanic. She’s riding with me. Where is everybody now?”
I couldn’t hear the response, but Leo shook his head.
“No. No, don’t come back,” he said into the phone. “I’ll catch up to you soon. And if I don’t, you take the Knights and keep going west.”
Leo glanced toward my window and I jumped. Could he see me through the drapes, too? I grabbed the blackout curtains and yanked them shut, heart pounding. What would Leo do if he caught me eavesdropping? He had been nice enough so far, but I hadn’t for one second forgotten about that rattlesnake patch. Maybe Leo just wore it because it looked badass and didn’t know the snake’s significance.
Yeah, right. And the saddlebags full of bank-banded money were a birthday present from his uncle in San Diego.
But after a few minutes passed, Leo hadn’t busted down my door and I couldn’t hear his voice outside anymore. There was a thump — not very loud, but enough to make a framed map of the town bump on my wall — so I guessed that Leo had finished his phone call and gone to his room for some rest.
The same as I was supposed to be doing. I still felt like something was watching me, though, so I went into the bathroom and closed the door before stripping out of my clothes for a shower. Once the water was nice and hot, I climbed in and got to work scrubbing off the day’s sweat and grease with the motel’s bar soap. I washed my hair, too, but used my own shampoo for that. The cheap miniature bottle provided by the motel just wasn’t up to the challenge of dense curls like mine.
I lingered in the warm water for a little longer than I should have. Okay, a lot longer. But hey, I brushed my teeth while I was in there, so at least I was still accomplishing something. The shower began to cool down, though, so I turned off the water and wrapped myself in a towel. It was scratchy but clean, so I called that a win and climbed into bed.
It was finally the end of the longest, weirdest, and best day of my entire life. Tomorrow morning, I would loosen up the head bearings on Leo’s bike. If that did the trick and fixed his motorcycle, then it would be time to get paid. I had a whole new life outside Crayhill to consider and plan. No way was I just going to sleep tonight.
But within seconds, I was fast asleep… and dreaming.
The eternal forces of existence were fighting their endless, repetitive war all over again. They clashed, circled and clashed again in the infinite void. No, not the void. Not anymore. There was a battlefield now. Wait, was it a cornfield? There were acres of wheat on the other side of the highway, rippling and golden in a blazing wind.
I was in the middle of Highway 44. Blue sky stretched overhead and flashed white with every blast of light. Something fought back and forth across the highway — four huge man-shapes riding astride even bigger stallions that seemed to have been forged out of nightmares and living chrome. Manes and tails of smoke snapped in the wind and sent glowing red embers up into the air.
The four horsemen rode out against three tall winged figures of blinding radiance. From on high, the trio of archangels flung lances of light and crackling lightning, and the demons tore their burning shots down from the sky with coils of shadow. The whole planet shuddered and quaked beneath my feet.
I threw my hands up over my face, trying to block out the sight of angels and demons fighting, of my world tearing apart at the seams. But my hands were glowing, too, and I held a blade of pure white light.
There weren’t three angels — there were four.
