Break Me Open
Break Me Open
Amy Kiss
©2015
Amy Kiss
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or copied without permission. This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people or events is purely coincidental.
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Tonight’s just another night.
I studied myself in the bathroom mirror. The lights were off and the moonlight made me look like one of those old Victorian portraits. Young women, unsmiling and now long dead. My face was framed with dark blonde hair that made my pale skin look downright ghostly. Guys didn’t like it when a girl looked newly awakened from the dead right? I hoped not.
I thought of my friend Sandy and managed a smile. That made me look decent. A solid B+. Not that I was going to let myself be graded tonight.
I walked back through the warm, still townhouse, breathing in these last moments of silence. I could hear my heart pounding in my ear though, at just the thought of going out on the town for the first time in months.
Just another night, I told myself again.
It wasn't though. If it was, I'd be nestled into the couch cushions with something bright and funny on the TV. Maybe Sandy would be lounging on the far end. The only commotion would be us laughing our butts off.
Sandy
was
on her way over, but tonight she'd convinced me to leave my cave. For nothing less than a bar on the outskirts of town, just blocks from the desert where things got rough. A little bit of danger before sinking into the routine of a new semester of classes. That was her pitch, and after the hundredth time hearing it, I'd surrendered. I owed her.
Blast some music on the way there. Grab a couple drinks. Ogle some cute guys from a safe distance - if I felt especially frisky - and be back safe and sound by midnight.
My phone gave me five more minutes. I went to the dining room, and looked up to the picture of my parents. They were folded into each other as if they were fighting for the center. Their smiles said they were just trying to be as close as possible. They beamed out at me, and for a flash I could see them in front of me; the best kind of haunting.
Their ghosts didn't linger like they used to. Another beat and there was just the picture, still as the wall around it.
A long screech ripped through the house, and I nearly jumped out of my high heels. It went off again and I recognized the sound of the car horn.
Sandy was early. She was never early. This was an unsettling start to the night. What the hell did she have planned?
I smiled at my parents, grabbed my purse and went out my porch door. Sandy was leaning across the passenger seat, waving madly. Like I had just stumbled out here by accident.
I took a deep breath, and glanced back at the house. I’d be back to all this soon enough.
It was just another night.
Tonight was the night.
The desert air washed hot over me. I revved my faithful steed and cut through it even faster. Sand skittered across the road, a ghostly veil over my path. It didn't matter. I knew exactly where I was headed. This desert was home now. Hell, I'd spent all my life in some desert or another. Here in Arizona or in Afghanistan, North Africa - all one and the same.
I checked my mirror and saw my club brothers perched on their own choppers. Thick maned faces, stern and ready. One after the other.
I saw myself, too. My hard edged face. My blond fuzz of hair, shorn every other week, by habit. And my eyes. Predator's eyes which had come into this world blue, but now went beyond that. They caught the reflections of the moon and glowed like unearthly blue flames.
I was something that went beyond nature. At night, the whole world could see what the army had turned me into.
Specters - we'd called each other back in my unit. The bikers in the Desert Wraiths motorcycle club preferred simpler words.
Here, I was Ghost.
Tonight, I was a vengeful spirit. Ever since I'd left the service and come back home, I'd told myself nothing mattered. There was no good, no evil. Just the rules you kept and the ones you broke. The sort of thing you tell yourself to let go of years of discipline and run with a 1% biker gang. Selling drugs. Sleeping with girls who just wanted a discount on product. Dishing violence in the name of profit.
Not this night though. Tonight, all my training, all my service, all my hard-won practice would go into dealing with a man whose rules I could not abide. Whose rules should not be abided. They dealt pain and suffering to those who had already given up everything. After months of aimless days, drunken evenings and haunted nights, I finally had a chance for redemption. I remembered that I needed redeeming at all.
This night, I had purpose.
We turned a hill, and the city of Gilsner emerged, another twinkling galaxy below the star speckled sky.
Tonight was the night I would find myself again.
I revved once more and we roared on toward the lights below.
I sipped at an empty glass, trying to decide what I regretted more - letting Sandy drag me out here, or letting her leave with that so-called Hollywood stuntman. Why would a stuntman live here in Gilsner, four hours from LA? I might not be thinking straight, but I didn't buy that story. But I wasn't Sandy. That poser had taken my best friend and left me alone in this rat's nest of a bar.
Thank god she had left her keys. I didn’t have a license, technically, but I’d rather risk cops than the people here.
I swept the room with a massive pair of beer goggles on. ‘Rough’ was too smooth a word for this place. I saw a women with spiky purple hair swirl her tongue down a guy's throat. I saw two men nod and pass a fistful of something between their jackets. I saw other faces, grizzled and hungry doing their own scan and meeting mine. I quickly looked down at the suds left of my drink.