Break Me Open (3 page)

"Listen, babe," said the one called Twist. "You gonna come for a little ride with us. We'll keep you safe, alright?"

I shook my head, the only protest left to me.

"Alright then, let me say it again. Either we leave your body here. Or you come work for us."

I went still.

"That's what I thought. Don't worry, you're a pretty little critter. We'll find a nice use for you."

They tossed all their bags into one big trashbag. One slung it over his shoulder. The other carried the dead guy and we walked back through the cargo maze, me in between them. We came out on the parking lot. Two shiny dark Harleys stood waiting.

They tossed the bag in the industrial waste bin. The one guy strapped the dead guys arms to him with tape and sat with him on one of the bikes. Twist stuffed me onto the other bike and then sat down in front.

"Hold on tight. You let go, you die."

I nodded and wrapped my arms around his thick waist.

We roared out of the lot, and for a second I dreamed we would turn back towards the bar. I could tumble off and go screaming to those other bikers for help. But we turned right. The engines thrummed and we shot off past the industrial district and out into the desert.

I didn't understand anything about where I was headed. My death, likely. I imagined those twin orbs of blue coming at me with a knife. They just studied me, wide and revealing nothing.

Twist had said they’d find a guy for me. That sounded even worse.

A motorcycle had led my parents to their grave.

Looked like I was headed to join them.

The club bar parted as I went through - like water for a shark. Most of the lower guys knew better than to look my way. Some gave me a glance and a nod. A few - always the newly initiated - tried to meet my eyes, see if the rumors told true. It was the simplest thing to to tighten my lips and go glassy. They would snap right back to whatever they were doing so fast you could hear their neck crack.

That's what you do when you saw a ghost. Close your eyes and hope it had somewhere else to haunt.

I pounded through the back door into the club room. A long wooden table filled up much of it. Too much, but the Wraiths weren’t exactly a military operation. The bottles of whiskey and half emptied beer on top jittered as I walked around. Some of the men sitting round did too.

"Jeez, Ghost. Could you try floating in for a change?" Dyno asked. He was tall and lean, with a fuse of red hair which he exterminated with extreme prejudice. Sergeant at arms, supposed to keep the troops in line. Like an MP, not that MPs had ever managed to keep me in line.

"Ain't that kind of ghost," I said, pulling up the seat next to him.

"There's one that makes noise right," Canyon said from across the table. He snapped his fingers. "Shit it's on the tip of my tongue."

"Poltergeist," I said. "And I’m not that kind either. I'm the worst of both in one nice little package."

One of the newer officers started to snicker at the 'little package,' but I looked his way and the grin melted off.

Fists pounded into the table on my other side. I traced em up to the club president, a plain-faced somber-eyed Latino guy that simply went by Nico. You couldn't tell just by looking, but this squat hunk of muscle led one of the most vicious biker clubs this side of the border. Both of us knew the need to stay low-key. His take drew men in about as well as mine made people stay away.

He never went dramatic unless he got worked up.

I met his copper eyes and nodded. "It's done."

"Twist and Stick?"

"Cleaning up."

"And you just left them?"

I shrugged, though inside it kind of hurt to go against the leader. “They can clean up just fine."

The warm gaze stared into my own. Another thing I admired about him. He didn’t fear my army augmentations. I could spike, amp my reflection and he would keep staring. He was the only one who could. Part of the reason I’d joined up with the Wraiths to begin with.

"Alright, Good." He made to turn away, then thought better. "No issues, right?"

I thought of the girl again. I shook my head.

Nico clapped his hands and actually blew a smile. "Hot damn. It'll be weeks before the Sand Shits get another supplier. Their customers are gonna be mighty open to new deals till then."

"The Scorpions aren't going to just standby and let us take their business,"Canyon said.

"It's our business," Nico said. " They held it for a bit, but now we're taking it back."

"I know
jefe
, but I'm saying they ain't just gonna let us off. We gotta be ready is all."

"It's true," Dyno said. "If we move too quick, it's a pretty hard tell we knew about their guy. They might not have hard proof we took him out, but who else would do it?"

"Maybe he just skipped town." Nico said. " Maybe one of the relatives or some cop found out he was the guy supplying the shit that's been getting people to shred their lungs. Guy who'd poison a bunch of paying customers is bound to make a ton of enemies."

They took turns spitting on the memory of Shane Tyrell. He went by Shiny, but near the end, we’d come up with the clever nickname Shitty. Still too nice for scum like him. Guy had been paid up by the Sand Scorpions motorcycle club to approach us with a deal. Only thing was, the stuff he was slinging held 20 ppm HCl among the crystals. Burned right through our customer's lungs when they sucked in their daily poison. A couple of our own had bit it. I'd seen men die a 100 different ways back in Afghanistan, but none so bad as this, screaming out flecks of lungs until we goosed em with morphine.

"Hey, Ghost, how'd he bite it?" someone asked.

"Knife in the throat."

Nico nodded. "Poetic."

A murmur of approval washed over me, from men who had never even watched death happen. If I felt anything, it would have been pity. One death was the same as another to me, so long as it didn't drag out. Half those 100 deaths I’d seen as a soldier had been at my hands.

I hadn’t doubted them at the time, but losing your job has a way of reconnecting you with your past.

Shiny, though, had been rightly delivered to the gates of hell.

Now our people could return to killing themselves in slow motion. But hell, who was I to judge.

The crowd dissolved into useless drunken bravado and I sank into an altogether more pleasant memory. I saw again the woman peeking out through the car, the gentle swell of her dark hair. The hazel eyes burst wide as she saw the dead man stumble towards her. How would she judge me, if she knew the whole of it?

She’d haunted my thoughts the whole ride back. Even with the night crawling under my spiked and amplified senses, my engine purring under me and the contentment of a job well done, my thoughts kept turning to that face.

I blinked her out. No reason she should be in there to begin with. Club business would be going up, and I needed to have a say in the security factor. That was my purpose here. Or anywhere really. Protect the organization at all costs. What was my life without that of the unit?

Nico was laying out expansion plans, people we were to approach. Canyon, that dumbass, suggested sneaking up on them in the dark, making them feel unsafe. I didn't know much about business, but I knew plenty about pleasing customers, and fear wouldn't buy you much loyalty. Not to mention these other guys weren't exactly trained in night ops.

I put up formal, public, daylight meets and Nico agreed, though a tinge of disappointment went through the grown men around me. I think they wanted us attacked. They wanted to see me earn my reputation.

I played with an empty shot glass, and watched it tremble in my massive fist. Everything had its costs - double for what the army had added to my body. I had only spiked a little tonight. The residuals were getting worse. If I'd actually had to let it rip, I'd be a jittering mess on the floor by now. The fearsome Ghost reduced to a baby's rattle.

I filled the glass with something hard and downed it.

The timbre of the meeting softened, the plans all laid and just needing time before they could be hatched.

"You think we can just move on them?" Canyon was asking.

"Move on who?" Nico asked, leaned back, legs propped high on the table.

"The Sand Scorpions."

"They outnumber us 3 to 2," Dyno said.

"So we take out that clown, Gyro. No leader, they all fall apart."

"Jeez, Canyon. Do you just say this shit cause you don't got a brain to process your own words?" Nico shook his head. "They got a VP. They got a sergeant, same as us. Imagine if a guy like Ghost took over. You think he'll just run off screaming at the sight of blood?

"Oh, yeah," Canyon said, but he wasn't done being stupid. "We got Ghost. Ghost can take out half their crew on his own."

"Yeah, I could. But I won't. " I shoved in my chair and walked out.

The desert glowed under the moon. I spiked a drop and watched every inch come alive. Scorpions stalked lesser insects. A couple snakes coasted behind waiting to strike in turn. A coyote loped along the horizon sorta aimless, its belly likely full for the night. The sand swarmed at my feet, grains catching a ride with the wind only to go tumble into cousins not far away.

I had my own bunkhouse, out back. It had been an outhouse once, but it had been modded since. Now even my augmented sense of smell picked up only smoke and pine. I stripped down on the way to the bathroom. I left the lights off, but my eyes still glowed in the mirror. The spike had already faded, but not enough for my face to look fearsome to me. I could see the bleary red around my eyes. The dark bags in the skin beneath them. The little creases on my skin that even the army's best surgeons couldn't fix. I looked like a cracked vase glued together.

All in all, much better than when I'd joined half a year ago.

I hopped in the shower, enjoying the warmth and the slightly salty taste of water. I gargled it and spit it out. I lathered my hands with it, cleaning out any caked blood in the nails. Killing was one thing, but I never felt truly clean after a spike. The shower had a window and I stood for a long time, watching the moon creep.

We had a fence out back. I'd never really noticed before, but now my brain used it as pretext to think about her face again. That gentle round of pale skin outside the iron bars. Shining like another moon. That little glance holding my thoughts, my mind.

I'd learned not to question the things I did. That was the first lesson in Basic: you get an order, you follow that order. Letting her go was an order I’d given to myself, though. I hadn’t even asked how much she'd seen or what, just that her phone hadn’t been recording. She had just been watching and so I had decided to let her go. But her memory still had value.

I may have been drifting since I got back, but that hadn’t kept me from riding any bar girl or junkie who didn’t fight me off too much. So what was it about the sight of this one girl that left me transfixed?

Her cowering behind that car? No, plenty of women had cowered at the sight of me outside of Kabul, hiding their kids where they could. Some, even for good reason. The special ops training had beaten the protection instinct out of me. The world was just split into acceptable targets, and no-kill ones. Nico had never spelled things out so clear, but this girl was definitely a witness. There was no doubt about that.

Her hazel eyes. The soft flat of her forehead. That was all I had seen of her and it was enough to keep from telling the guys to take care of her too. What was in that face that left me spellbound?

I finished my dark shower, and checked how I looked again. My grip felt less firm on the counter, but my face also had dissolved, appearing closer to perfection as the effects of my spike faded. I looked as young and untarnished as my birth certificate claimed.

That was it.

Nothing. She had shown nothing. She had gazed at me while I was in full fury, and she had been not scared...but curious? And then, she hadn't stayed hidden, but continued to watch.

She wanted answers. And now I wanted them too. What did she see when she saw me?

I lay on my bed, but sleep didn't come. My hands trembled across the sheets, like they had their own plans. I shouldn't have spiked again tonight. That had been idiotic.