400 Horsepower of the Apocalypse

Chapter 6

Oklahoma City vanished into the distance. I was sorry to see it go, and not just because it was my first real city. It would have been a great place to stop and buy some new shocks, but Leo had made it pretty clear that he had no intention of slowing down or turning back. He wanted to catch up with his friends, and he wanted to do it today.

And that’s why I found myself clenching my teeth so hard that my jaw ached. Not because of the rattling ride, but up until now, it had been just me and Leo… which was a lot like being stranded on a desert island with a hot rich guy. But Leo’s friends were a criminal biker gang.

Last night, I overheard Leo telling someone that he had a mechanic — me. Okay, they had some warning that Leo would be bringing an outsider. That was good… But that rattlesnake patch meant armed robbery, drugs and often prostitution. Some biker gangs ended up with murders attached to them, too, and serious vehicular manslaughter charges.

Was that something I really wanted to get involved with? Leo seemed nice enough — as far as I could tell — but what about the Knights of Hell? The name certainly didn’t sound very inviting. No matter how much I tightened my grip, my hands shook on the Bonnie’s handlebars and it wasn’t because of the shitty old suspension.

Leo had blown into Crayhill to change my whole life with a sexy smile and a heap of cash. Was I about to pay the price for that? Did I still have a choice? Maybe not, but I wasn’t about to show up for what might be a tire-iron bludgeoning with­out at least asking a few questions.

We left Oklahoma behind and crossed into Texas as the sun began to set, painting the sky in brilliant red and purple. Traffic on Highway 44 was sparse this far outside of the cities, and only a handful of tail lights lit up the darkening evening in intermittent red embers like demonic eyes. The Packmaster had more or less behaved all afternoon and we rode side by side, so I raised my arm and pointed off with one finger, gesturing Leo to pull over again.

There wasn’t a filling station out here, so we pulled off onto the shoulder. This stretch of Highway 44 was little more than a few miles of cracked asphalt, and my tires crunched over gravel as I stopped beside Leo. A pickup truck drove past and honked once at us, then vanished into the deepening evening and left me alone on the highway with Leo.

He removed his helmet and ran his fingers through his hair. That had quickly become a highlight of my day since taking this job, but right now my heart was jackhammering too hard to enjoy it. I left my own helmet on — not because I didn’t feel like dealing with my wild collection of natural curls in the rising evening wind, but in case this conversation went south. I had to be ready to run.

“What’s the problem?” Leo asked.

“Look, Leo…”

I had spent all afternoon silently rehearsing what I wanted to say, telling Leo that I knew what the rattlesnake patch meant, that I knew his money was all stolen and I needed some guarantee of safety once we caught up with the Knights of Hell.

But now I choked. My mouth was dry and I couldn’t seem to suck enough air down into my lungs.

Leo’s brow furrowed while he waited for an answer, but then his eyes went wide and the biker held up a hand as he snatched his cell phone out of his pocket. Damn that phone… But it wasn’t a call. I craned my head to look at the screen. Leo wasn’t reading a text message, either — it was some kind of map, and a red dot blinked in the center.

“What’s that? One of your friends?” I asked.

“It’s a location ping.” Leo’s voice was bright with excitement. “That’s Audrey and she’s close!”

“Wait, Leo…!” I said.

We still needed to talk, but Leo was already on the move. He jammed his helmet back on and kicked his motorcycle to life. Gravel sprayed through the air as he roared off in the direction indicated by his phone. I swore a few times and then raced after Leo.

It was a damned good thing that the cops didn’t seem interested in this lonely stretch of highway — Leo had to be pushing a hundred miles an hour. I struggled to keep his taillight in view as he shot down the highway and then out along a narrow off-ramp. There was no name printed on the green metal sign — just a number — and the ramp dumped us out onto an empty single-lane country road. It was little more than a streak of darkness, without streetlights or even traffic markings on the asphalt.

Something smelled awful. I recognized the scents of burnt rubber and gas, but there was something else, something worse. The smell was sharp and rancid, making my stomach churn. It reeked like an infected wound. I gagged and slammed on my brakes as the stench hit me full-force.

What the hell was that?

Up ahead of me, Leo’s motorcycle skidded to a sudden stop in the darkness, too. His headlight shone over something scattered across the road.

Bikes… and bodies.

Holy shit. There had to be twenty people laying there in the road, all unmoving. Blood sprayed the pavement around the dead bikers like dark wings where several of them appeared to have been thrown from their crashing motorcycles. Others were slumped over their bikes or crumpled right in the middle of the road.

Leo leapt off his motorcycle so fast that there was no way he could have set his kickstand, but the Packmaster remained up­right as he ran down the road toward the carnage.

“Audrey?” Leo shouted in a voice loud enough to hear even over my Bonneville’s engine. “Danny? Sam?”

But no one answered. Leo reached into his jacket and drew something that shone in the light of our headlamps. Was that a gun? Shit, yeah… Leo held a snub-nosed revolver pointed down at the ground with his finger on the trigger. He moved through the battlefield of bodies.

What the fuck was going on here? I wasn’t sure, but I knew it was bad. Really, really bad.

“Leo!” I called out. “Don’t!”

He either didn’t hear me or just didn’t give a shit. I yanked the bandage off my uninjured hand and clapped the rubberized cloth over my mouth. It wasn’t exactly a respirator, but it helped a little with the eye-watering smell.

“Audrey!” Leo shouted.

I chased after him, but then stumbled to a stop next to the nearest body. It was a big, bearded white guy lying dead under a torn and twisted Harley. He wore full leathers, including a jacket with the same flaming helmet and rattlesnake patches on the shoulders as Leo’s. Shit, so these were the Knights of Hell… But it wasn’t the gang patches that brought me to a halt.

The motorcycle was smashed as though it had run full speed into a concrete wall — though there wasn’t anything like that here on the open, empty country road — and the bearded biker’s helmet had shattered. Beneath, his face was bloodlessly pale, but his veins bulged black under waxy white skin. His eyes were open and bright red with ruptured blood vessels.

I stared. Something dark flecked the corners of the dead man’s mouth. More blood? But no, it gleamed with a blue-green shine… There were flies on the body, but they didn’t move when I leaned in to get a closer look.

Even the insects were dead.

Suddenly, a bandage over my mouth didn’t seem like nearly enough. I held my breath and backed away as quickly as I could, not stopping until I bumped into my motorcycle.

“Leo, get out of there!” I cried, but the bandage muffled my voice. “These guys didn’t just crash. They’ve got Ebola or some­thing!”

It didn’t really look like Ebola. It didn’t look like anything I had ever heard of before — but I knew cars and motorcycles, not diseases. Whatever it was, though, it sure as hell wasn’t healthy and I didn’t want to breathe any of it.

But Leo still wasn’t listening to me. He ran from one body to the next, searching and calling out names with a rising edge in his voice.

“Jett? Shit… Shit!” Leo shouted. “Mason? What the fuck…? Audrey!”

He staggered across the shadowed road and fell to his knees next to one of the bodies, a woman with short red hair and a snake tattooed up the side of her neck. Leo threw his head back in a wordless howl of anguish and slammed his fists down into the pavement.

“We… we have to call someone,” I stammered. I fumbled my phone out of my pocket and stared at the screen. “The police? What’s the number for the CDC?”

Leo jumped to his feet and crossed the distance between us inside a single stuttering heartbeat. He still held the gun and I flinched violently. Leo slapped his free hand over mine, covering the cell phone.

“No, Jaz–!” he began.

But as soon as Leo’s hand touched mine, I was suddenly plunged into my dream again. A demon charged at me down the dark country road, riding a black horse whose mane and tail were plumes of pale green smoke. Sparks flew with every strike of its hooves against the asphalt. The horseman sitting astride the galloping mount was tall and indistinct, but its eyes oozed sickly emerald light. Something inside me recognized the mon­ster and roared.

Pestilence!

Leo and I both gasped, staggering away from one another. I stared at him and he stared right back, brown eyes wide. Dreams are only supposed to happen when you’re asleep — that’s what makes them dreams. When you start seeing shit while you’re awake, those are hallucinations.

“What the hell was that?” I asked in a shaky voice. “Did you see… whatever that was?”

“The guy in a suit,” Leo said. “With a racing bike and flies in his mouth.”

“What? No, I saw some kind of demon on a horse… thing.”

“I don’t know,” Leo told me. “I have no fucking idea what’s going on!”

“Maybe whatever’s in the air is making us see things,” I said. “We need to–”

But Leo moved in close again and placed his hand over my cell phone screen once more, careful not to touch me this time. His dark eyes burned with an emotion that I couldn’t quite identify. And wasn’t sure I wanted to.

“No police,” he said. “Please, Jaz. Don’t call the cops.”

“We can’t just do nothing!” I protested.

Leo’s hand tightened around my cell phone. He didn’t yank it out of my grasp, but the case creaked ominously in his grip. The phone was shaking, and I suddenly realized that I wasn’t the one trembling.

“These were my friends,” Leo said. “Let me… Just wait to call the cops, okay? Phone in an anonymous tip when we’re gone.”

“Gone? Leo, what if we’re sick?” I asked.

But even as I said it, I doubted that we had contracted whatever fatal demon-flu had killed the Knights of Hell. Their bodies were scattered across the ground among the wreckage of motorcycles. Some of them clutched weapons in their hands — switchblades, concealable revolvers like Leo’s, and a few bigger auto­matic guns. These people had died fighting, not trying to get to a hospital.

This disease or biological weapon or whatever it was had clearly hit the bikers fast. And violently. I stared down at my hand. There was no sign of blackened or bulging veins under my skin. Leo was still wearing his fingerless gloves, but while his face was pale, it didn’t seem dangerously so.

If this thing was going to kill us, it would likely have started already. But other than being scared right out of my mind and nauseous from the smell, I felt fine.

“Just don’t touch any of the bodies,” I told Leo. “Or… or any of the blood.”

He nodded once and ran back into the road. He counted the corpses scattered there in a choked voice. Did he hope that one of his friends had made it out of this open-air charnel house? But it didn’t take Leo long to give up that hope. I could see it in the slump of his shoulders.

Instead, Leo began sifting quickly through the other bikers’ saddlebags. He came up with handfuls of cash. Was he really worried about the money? But Leo was also carefully collecting weapons and wallets, too.

Cleaning up evidence, I suddenly realized. When the cops or fire department or whoever arrived, Leo didn’t want his friends getting into trouble with the law, even post­humously.

He closed each of the switchblades and removed the bullets from the guns, then dumped it all into an empty backpack. After a final circuit of the scene, Leo came jogging back. His eyes were red and the bottom dropped out of my stomach. But that wasn’t blood running down Leo’s cheeks — he was crying.

“That’s everything… I think,” Leo said, and then took a deep, shuddering breath. “Alright, let’s go. You can call the cops from Arrow and… and we’ll deal with the rest later.”

The rest…? Did Leo mean dealing with me, or was I being paranoid? Did anything count as paranoid in the middle of all this? My dream of running away from Crayhill to see the world with a pocket full of cash had just turned into a nightmare.

But I couldn’t worry about that right now. All I could do was nod to Leo and climb back onto my motorcycle. We had to get out of this plague pit.

I would deal with the rest later, too.

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