Bones by the Wood (18 page)

“The Los Perdidos are a swarm, a blight.  Tonight we cut the head off the snake.  Below us is the home of their leader, Juan Alberto.  He is at home with many of his lieutenants tonight.  We will destroy the head of their power structure in one swoop.  It will take some time to mop up the dregs, but we are prepared to handle that.  We do not have long before his patrols come looking for us, we must move quickly.”

And with that they left the relative safety of the summit for an uncharted circle of hell.

~o0o~

Several chaotic hours later, Dizzy, covered in blood that wasn’t his own
, and half deaf from the resounding rattle of automatic gunfire and the whoosh and boom of the rocket launchers, dragged his sorry carcass back into the van.  He wasn’t sure how they were going to make it back through the tunnel, let alone how they were going to ride their bikes back to Ravensbridge.  They’d have to dig deep into reserves that had been emptied by intense, close combat fighting.

Fitz’s sword had been put to good use.  The scarred man had cut an impressive figure, firing his AK with one hand and swinging the massive knife at anyone lucky, or stupid, enough to get within his reach.

Scooby and Shaggy had been the very visions of violence.  As they had waded into the firefight after the initial assault from the slope, their stature, coupled with their battle roars and their enthusiasm for the fight, had made them appear to be the stuff of legends.  Sinatra had proven himself to be an intelligent and capable combatant.  Chiz had shown his usual enthusiasm for aggression.  Cage, Ferret and Easy had all upheld the pride of the Texan charter, and Dizzy was more proud than ever before, and more confident, in the attitudes and abilities of the men that sat at his table.

Dizzy, Samuel, Fitz, Terry and Eduardo had been witness when Shark had gotten his hands on the cornered leader of the Los Perdidos.  For threatening their family, for killing his old friend and mentor, for his role in the death of Samuel’s son, Shark had perpetrated agonizing horrors upon Juan Alberto’s screaming form, and then on his mangled corpse.

On their way back up to the vans, Dizzy had asked Carlos about Juan Alberto’s family.  If this was his home, it had been inhabited tonight only by himself and members of his organization.  Dizzy had been beyond relieved that they hadn’t had to make a decision about what to do with a wife and children, but he was no less curious for that relief.  Carlos had replied that the dead man’s family was vacationing in another family home, further south.  Dizzy considered that it might well have been a lie, but chose to believe it anyway.  If the Rojas had ordered and perpetrated the death of women and children, he preferred to live in blissful ignorance of the fact.

The night had not been without its casualties for the Priests.  Tag had failed to take effective cover during a particularly intense exchange of bullets and had been killed by a shot to the thigh.  He’d bled out before anyone could reach him to drag him to safety.

Crash was injured.  The boy’s head seemed to have a magnetic pull to shit that could kill him.  Now he had a mild concussion and a scalp wound that wouldn’t stop bleeding into his eyes and which would leave another impressive scar.  The rest of their band had a catalogue of cuts, bruises and scrapes, but nothing that would tax Alex’s nursing skills too severely.

Eduardo traveled back with them, but took his leave when they reached the trailer park.  He was limping a little and favoring his left arm, having caught some of the flying debris from an explosion.  He and Samuel embraced, and Eduardo voiced his thanks to the rest of the Priests before he melted into the shadows between the trailers.  The colored lanterns had been switched off and were no longer providing their gaudy glow.

The slog through the tunnel was even more arduous than before.  They were exhausted and had had to improvise a rough sled from materials they had scavenged from the trailer park to enable them to drag Tag’s body along with them.  Dizzy and Samuel had taken the ropes, made from torn strips of sheeting, to haul their fallen brother back to his native soil.  More than once in his life in the MC, Dizzy had been exasperated with Tag’s naiveté or carelessness, but when all was said and done, they were brothers, and Dizzy mourned the loss.

There was no cursing on the return through the tunnel.  Dizzy heard the bumps and scuffs as Shark, Shaggy, Scooby and Crash cannoned off the dirt walls, but everyone was too tired to vent their frustration vocally.

Before the last man had pulled himself up into the farmhouse that hid the entrance to the tunnel in Texas, Samuel was making a call to Little Mark at the Green Pastures Funeral Home in Absolution to ask him to bring the refrigerated van to Texas to collect Tag’s body.  He called Fletch next to instruct him to follow Little Mark with transport for Tag’s and Crash’s bikes.  Carlos himself had volunteered to follow them back to Ravensbridge in one of the vans.

When they reached the diner, Dizzy was struck by the feeling of the distortion of time.  The night had been so long that it seemed as though a week had passed since they’d left their bikes in the care of the diner’s owner.  But now he was back, standing next to his Softail Fat Boy, it felt as though only minutes had passed.

It took the efforts of nearly every man still standing to haul the two heavy bikes into the van.  It was awful in its unceremonious necessity that they had to wedge Tag’s stiffening body to one side between his bike and the van wall.  Crash took the passenger seat, and Carlos waited until Samuel and Dizzy had led the convoy of bikes out onto the road before pulling out after them.

Dawn had finished breaking by the time they pulled up in front of the clubhouse.  Dizzy barely wanted to park his bike, he was happy to let it drop. The adrenaline had long since faded, leaving only a bone deep weariness.  Little Mark was still several hours away, so they pulled Tag’s now fully stiff and horribly mottled body out of the van and carried it into the clubhouse and into the Chapel where they could lay it out on the table. 

The girls were all in the main room, but only Thea and Lyla were standing as they passed with their morbid cargo.  They had to negotiate a path through the mattresses that had been inflated and made up into beds.   All the tables and chairs had been moved to the sides of the room and stacked out of the way.  No one spoke as they laid Tag reverently down.  The brothers from both charters ringed the table with heads bowed as they said their own silent prayers for the soul of their fallen brother.

Still no words were spoken as they went back out to the van to unload the bikes.  On their way back through the clubhouse, Dizzy barely noted that the other girls were all asleep.  He caught Thea’s eyes, but didn’t have the energy to make his lips twist into a smile or to even force his neck to bend his head in a nod.  All he could do was keep her concerned gaze as he passed. 

Before he left, Carlos sought out Samuel.  Dizzy was standing with him, looking without seeing as the blue of the sky increased in its vibrancy, coming fully into the day.

“Sorry for your loss,
amigos
.”

Samuel’s voice was hoarse with the dust of the road when he replied.  “Thank you.  And thank you for your help.”

“The least we could do,
ese
.  You have my condolences.”

With that, Carlos shook hands with them both and then climbed back into the van and pulled away, heading back to the border.

Dizzy had been awake for more than twenty-four hours.  First, he wanted, needed, to reassure himself that Thea and Josh were okay, and then he planned to collapse onto the nearest horizontal surface and sleep forever.

Thea stood at the door of the clubhouse long after the swirling cloud of dust thrown up by the departing bikes had dissipated and fallen back to earth.  The bright autumnal afternoon wasn’t particularly cold, but Thea hugged her arms around herself to ward off a chill that had little to do with the weather.  She jerked when she felt a hand on her shoulder, but it was only Nut, reminding her that she had to come back into the real world, rather than waiting in limbo until Dizzy and the others returned.

The clubhouse was quiet, too quiet, now that the men had left.  Thea had become used to the constant hum of conversation punctuated by occasional bursts of peals of laughter or shouts for attention.  Now only the women and Nut were left.  The quiet was so pervasive that it seemed that people were reluctant to talk, as if for fear that a whisper might be heard as a shout.  Thea paused just inside the closed door and listened to the lack of noise.  She felt the urge to scream, yell, to tear her hair, anything to break the somber blanket that was smothering the room.  She needed to do something, anything, before the normalcy drove her crazy.

She saw Annelle crossing the room to her, but couldn’t make her brain switch into a gear that cared.

“You look like a woman in need of somethin’ to do.  Come on, hon.  We’ve got a whole pile of mattresses to blow up and make up.  Those boys are gonna need ‘em when they get back.”

“They’re gonna come back, Nell.”  Thea knew that Annelle didn’t have a crystal ball.  She just needed to hear someone else support the positivity she was desperately trying to cling to.

“They’re gonna do their best to, hon. You can’t ask for more than that.”

Thea allowed Annelle to lead her over to the kitchen to collect the boxes of inflatable mattresses and the electric pump.  She began to shake off the incipient morbidity as she threw herself into the logistics of clearing space for her and Annelle to work, and, once they were finished, of reorganizing the space so that the mattresses could be laid out.  Alex and Lyla joined them in their efforts and they worked solidly without exchanging many words.

By the time they had finished and were turning their attention to feeding the people that had been left behind, Thea was beginning to feel a little like herself again, enough at least to ensure that Britney and Lucy didn’t take advantage of her brief period of inversion to shirk the need to make any efforts beyond ensuring that their nail varnish was applied perfectly.  She was glad that Dizzy hadn’t seen how affected she’d been by the heavy weight of the reality they were facing.  She’d tried to be casual, almost blasé in front of him.  It wasn’t in her makeup to sit around weeping and wailing.  She picked herself up, dusted herself off, and got on with what needed doing, but that didn’t mean that she didn’t have moments of weakness.

The noise of the electric pump working to inflate the mattresses had rent through the oppressive peace, and as if the noise had given everyone permission to raise the volume levels again, conversations had risen and someone had put some music on to fill the empty air.  It still felt to Thea, though, that it was a strained joviality.  The complete absence of the patches, enhanced even more by the dissolving haze of stale cigarette smoke, brought into stark focus the brotherhood, the family, that she had been drawn into in the past couple of days.  She was determined to do whatever she could to protect and support it, but she felt helpless.  She was stuck at the clubhouse without the talents or the skills to realistically assist them.  They were riding out into a situation that they might not come back from, and she was helping Annelle fry chicken.

They served the food.  It was a much more controlled feeding than when the men were present, and without their joking and arguments, the near silence fell again as people busied themselves with eating.  Thea had set Josh up at a table with some food, but she paused before she left the kitchen with her own plate, just watching him for the moment.  He was sitting on his own.  Since she’d brought him to this place, Thea thought she could count on two hands the number of waking minutes he’d been left alone.  Usually one of the guys was paying attention to him in some way, challenging him on the Xbox or just talking to him.  Now they were gone, and he had no one except her.

“I feel so useless.”  Thea almost didn’t realize that she’d spoken aloud.  The words scraped out of her throat since she’d hardly spoken for hours.

Annelle was the only other person in the kitchen.  She came to Thea’s side.  “You’re doin’ exactly what you should be, making sure the thing they’re fightin’ for is here when they come back, givin’ them somethin’ worth protectin’, worth comin’ back to, in the first place.”

“Is that what this is?”   She looked up at the older woman.  “Nell, I got no idea what I’m doin’ here and I’m so scared of fuckin’ things up for
him
.”  Thea looked back out at her boy tucking into his food.

“You’re doin’ your best.  And that’s all any mama can do.  What’s goin’ on between you and Dizzy,” Annelle chuckled at Thea’s visible shock, “or not goin’ on, whatever, that’s for the two of you to sort out.  You’ll find a way to do that and keep your boy at the center.  You don’t know how to do it any other way.”

“I wish I had your confidence in me, Nell.”  Thea sighed. 

She saw Josh looking for her and pushed herself to move, out of the kitchen and into crowd, such as it was.  Annelle followed her and they both dropped into seats at Josh’s table.  They ate in silence for a while.  Thea couldn’t find the energy to come up with a neutral topic of conversation and that fed the disappointment she felt with herself for ignoring Josh while she turned inward on herself.  He didn’t know what was going on and she couldn’t explain it to him.  She wouldn’t tell him of the horrors of the threat that had brought them to this time and place, and he couldn’t and shouldn’t have to grasp the concept of the threat that was hanging over them.  She could only hope that Dizzy and the others were successful and that the black cloud would pass before it intruded too far into their lives.

“Mama, are they gonna be okay?”

Thea blinked while the words registered in her brain and arranged themselves into sense.  “What do you mean, bud?”

“Everyone’s so serious, and everyone else has gone.  They’ve gone somewhere dangerous or everyone wouldn’t be so quiet.  But they’re gonna be okay aren’t they?”

Her boy was a lot sharper and more observant than she was giving him credit for.  “I’ll be honest, bud, I can’t promise.  But I hope they will be.”

“Will they be gone long?”

“I think they’ll be back tomorrow.”

Josh ate some more, but he was obviously lost in thought.  Thea’s appetite had completely deserted her, but she forced herself to chew and swallow a couple more bites, if only for appearances’ sake.

“Is Mr. Diz....Dizzy... Is he, like, your boyfriend?”

Thea actually choked on her mouthful of chicken and had to cough until her eyes watered to dislodge the piece that had stuck in her windpipe.

“What makes you ask that?”  Thea coughed, flicking her eyes to Annelle.  Annelle seemed to be holding back laughter, which edged Thea’s shock towards the realm of anger.

“’Cause we’re here.  ‘Cause you both watch each other when he’s not busy bein’ busy.”

“You’ve... erm....you’ve been pretty observant there, bud.”

Josh only shrugged in response.  Thea looked to Annelle, begging silently for help.  Annelle only shrugged.  Oh fucking brilliant, she was on her own with an unpinned hand grenade of a question that she had no idea how to begin to answer. 

Not that the situation had ever seemed likely to arise, but Thea had always planned that if she was going to enter into a relationship, she would carefully introduce any man that was going to share their life to Josh.  She’d been so adamant about that, that in ten years she’d never met anyone that she qualified as worthy of such attention.  This weekend so far had been entirely the polar opposite of that plan.  It couldn’t have been more different from that plan if she’d tried.  Unless maybe if Josh had woken up and found Dizzy in bed with them the previous night.  Oh Jesus God, Thea hoped that wasn’t the case.

Thea pushed her plate away.  There was no way she was going to be able to eat now.  She might actually be on the verge of throwing up everything she already had eaten.  “I don’t know what to tell you, bud.  We’re not, but we might be, maybe.  How would you feel about that?”

The microcosm of the lockdown, the reason for it and the effort required to end it, was pushing her and Dizzy down a track at a faster pace than Thea had ever imagined moving.  She needed to step back and get her priorities in order.  If Josh didn’t like Dizzy, in any way, she needed to put the brakes on.

Josh gave a little one-shouldered shrug.  “He’s alright I guess.  Kinda cool.  I like his friends.  Shaggy an’ Scooby’re way sick.”

“That means they’re good, right?”

Josh rolled his eyes at her.  “Yeah, Mama.  That means they’re good.  They’re a lot of fun.  They make me laugh and they show me cool stuff and they don’t treat me like a kid.”

Thea had to physically bite her lip to suppress the urge to remind Josh that at ten years old he was indeed still a kid.

“Would you mind if we got to know him a little better?”

Josh gave that quick, one-shouldered shrug again, his eyes cast down at his food.  “I guess not.  Do I have to call him ‘Dad’?”

“No, he’s not your dad.  You don’t have to call him that.”

Josh looked up, and his expression was heartbreakingly hopeful.  “Can we come back here so I can hang out with Shaggy and Scooby?”

“Maybe.  I think we might get invited back.  But we can’t be here all the time.  This is their place.”

“What about Crash and Sint...Sant...Sinatra?  Can we go visit them sometime?  They’re fun, too.”

Thea didn’t want to lay the possibility of a visit out to Louisiana before Josh just yet, not until they men had come back safe and whole.  “Maybe.  I think they’ll be comin’ back here sometimes, too.”

“Will Dizzy be comin’ to live with us?”

“No, it’ll still be the two of us in our place.”

Josh looked down at his food and pushed what was left of it around the plate a few times.  Thea was beginning to think that she’d handled this in the worst way possible and didn’t even dare look at Annelle.  She sat and waited and watched the top of Josh’s head and waited for him to speak.  Eventually he looked up, straight into her eyes.  “I think I’d like you hangin’ out with Dizzy some more.  He makes you smile.  You don’t smile much.”

Thea was stunned.  “I... I.... I do smile.”  She stuttered, made breathless by the horror that her son thought she wasn’t happy with their life.

“Not like you smile at him.”

Okay, that was a little better, maybe. She could probably deal with that.  “Anytime you don’t like what’s goin’ on, bud, you just say so and it’ll stop, okay?”  Making that promise scared Thea half to death.  There was potential for a lot of pain for her in that promise, but she was fully prepared to commit to it for the sake of her son’s happiness.

“Okay.  Hey, can you teach me to play pool like you promised?”

She almost had whiplash from the change in the gravity of the topic.  “Sure, er... I just need to make sure everything’s cleaned up...”

“I’ll do that, hon.  You go spend the time with your boy,” Annelle interrupted.  Thea fought the urge to scowl, not that she wasn’t grateful to be given a reprieve from organizing everyone, but she could have used Annelle’s input a little sooner in the conversation.

Thea’s appetite didn’t want to recover, so she took her plate back into the kitchen and scraped the food she hadn’t eaten into the trash.  When she came out she crossed paths with Annelle, who was coming in with hers and Josh’s dishes.  Thea gave in to the urge to scowl a little, but didn’t say anything.  It wasn’t the time or the place, and quite frankly it wasn’t any sort of discussion that she wanted the other girls listening on.

She spent a couple of hours guiding Josh through the way to hold a pool cue and line up a shot and the rules of some of the different variations of the games.  It was an effective distraction for both of them.  It was such a strange atmosphere that was hanging over the clubhouse, and it got worse as the hours ticked by, that Thea gave up completely on effective parenting and eventually let Josh fall asleep in front of the TV.