Justice (2 page)

We had been killing biters for the last four hours. I was dressed in leather, for easy clean-up, but I was still covered in gore. The biters leaked, it was nasty. When you stabbed them, black blood burst out of them and sprayed you. They also had this bizarre tendency to liquify which also tended to splatter. Good thing I was single, I could barely stand myself.
 

Four hours of biter killing was a new record. We had a technique. Bear had found an old boom box, the kind that didn’t need a phone or Mp3 player to work, and we had found a CD of AC/DC. We cranked that music up and it was like calling pigs to be slaughtered. It was my idea of course, and I have to say, it was a great one. I was tired of getting surprised by the biters every time I went on patrol. They would pop up and be all
grrr
in your face and if you weren’t paying attention, you were pushing up daisies.
 

About two weeks ago I shared my idea with Senior, the president of the Southern Clan Motorcycle Club and dictator of our newly formed Apocalypse Party; he waved me off and told me to do whatever the hell I wanted. That was the best thing he had ever told me. If it wasn’t about drugs or women, he couldn’t care less. It’s why I liked being out here, away from them, away from my “brothers” and the drugs, the women, and the stink of excess. It was real out here. In there, it was akin to a bomb ready to explode and I didn’t want to be around when the timer went to zero.

“Where’s your head at, dick sucker?” Bear strode over to me. His nickname was true to form, he was fat, big and hairy, a monster of a man.
 
He had been that way for as long as I could remember.

“He wasn’t going to get me. I was looking at him. They’re falling apart, in a year they might be skeletons. You think they’ll decompose until they’re nothing?”

“Now, that’ll be fucked up, a skeleton running after you. Is that possible?”

“I didn’t think a walking, biting corpse was possible,” I shrugged.
 

“No, you know what I mean, the bones, they need shit to hold them together, right? Like muscle and fat and stuff. You’re the college kid, you study that shit? Would they be able to walk around as just bones?”

College to the Southern Clan bikers meant you knew about everything. If there was a question, call in Rebel, he went to college. When I told them I didn't study that particular topic, they looked at me stupidly, like what did that matter? I went to college, I should know stuff about stuff.

“Yeah, you need muscle to keep the bones together.” I closed my eyes and clenched my fists, only opening them when I had taken a few deep breaths. I had learned this trick a long time ago, long enough to make it not so obvious that I was pissed or annoyed. I was a legacy Southern Clan member, meaning my father was a NOLA SCMC, his father before him was a founding NOLA SCMC. When I was thirteen, my dad gave me my first tattoo. It was the Southern Clan’s Confederate Flag, I had no choice. I was a man and I had to show my manliness with a tattoo, the rest of the ink would come when I got full membership and my colors. Afterwards, he got one of the club girls to take my virginity. She thought it was cute when I told her she didn’t have to, that she could lie and I would tell everyone we had sex, So she gave me head, insisted on “popping my cherry," her words, not mine, and told everyone I was the best lay she’d had in a long time. This didn't go over well with the club, though. Everyone knew she had screwed the president’s son a few days earlier, who had also just turned thirteen, her words put a target on my back and it’s never been removed. She didn’t realize what she was doing. Or at least I hoped she didn’t. It was another day in the life of a Southern Clan member.

The citizen was done with his biter stack. The dead made a neat pile of decomposed flesh that stood five feet tall. He doused the pile of corpses in lighter fluid and then threw a match on top of it. The biters went up in smoke. They burned easily for some reason and usually only left a pile of dust and a few scattered bones in their wake.
 

“I’m gonna bring the citizens back. I’ll relieve you in six hours,” Bear said. We were at the lookout location on one of the main drags in the neighborhood we had taken over. We had three lookout locations and Bear and I rotated shifts with one other brother for the location on Canal Boulevard. It was boring work, but we had to stay alert, you never knew what could happen in this world.
 

I nodded and made for the big house we used for watch. It was a raised two-story monstrosity that had housed some lawyer and his family before the biters took over. I climbed the stairs and set up shop in a second floor bedroom, the big window at the front had a good view of the street. It was going to be another long night.
 

I hated the monotony of being on lookout, but I hated being back at home base even more. I wanted to be out there doing something. Not sitting here waiting for that something to happen.
 

My mind drifted to thoughts of escape. I wanted to get on my hog and get the hell out of the area. They wouldn’t chase me down. My dad probably couldn’t care less if I lived or died. I would be on my own though and this world wasn’t a place to be on your own. Someone always had to have an eye open. There were biters everywhere and if it wasn’t biters, it was other humans. The humans were worse.

This had been my routine lately. I was stuck in a perpetual loop of thinking to leave and then talking myself into staying. I hated it here, but I was as good as dead if I went off on my own. No matter where my macabre thoughts led me earlier, I didn’t want to die. Living meant staying with the club until something better came along. Hopefully I would last until that better showed up.

TWO | Tiny Bullshit

 
After four boring hours of staring at the street and hoping for a random biter to give me something to do, Tiny, one of the enforcers, came tearing down the street on his hog. We had taken to only using the bikes in an emergency since they were so loud and tended to draw the biters to us in droves. We didn’t want to lead them to our base, so bikes were on lockdown. Ironic, since we were a motorcycle club. I spotted him as soon as he turned onto Canal. I could tell it was Tiny because he was the only one that wore a bright red dome, what the MC called their helmets.
 

I went outside to meet him. If he was driving by, he would wave me off. He didn’t drive by. He pulled up onto the lawn, but didn’t cut the engine. The big bike rumbled and the sound was reassuring, even though Tiny looked panicked.
 

“Senior’s bitch killed him tonight, gutted him like a pig. She took out Fatz and Parrish on the way out. You gotta return to church, man, the whole place is a shitstorm. I’m rounding everyone up.”
 

“Wait, what? Senior’s dead?” I asked.

“You ain’t listening, man. He’s a total rotter. We found him bled out on the floor, she didn’t even have the decency to put one through his brain. She probably wanted to take more of us out if he would have turned, the cunt, get your shit and head back. It’s crazy town over there.”

“Well, damn,” I grumbled.
 

If I was processing this correctly, Senior had been taken out by the girl he had recently claimed as property. From what I remembered she was new, a recent acquisition from some rednecks out of Slidell, a city to the east of New Orleans. I wasn’t allowed to hang out in the main area of the base that much, what we called church, since I wasn’t the most popular of the brothers, but I had seen her a few times, sitting next to Senior, or dancing for the men. She was striking, I remembered that much, enough to make me do a double take. She was also young, early twenties at the most. It had made me sick to see the bruises on her face and body, most likely from Senior. If she took out Senior, things were going to get interesting, real fast. I had no love for the man. Being gutted by the girl he kept as property was almost poetic justice. But I wasn’t excited to see Junior, his son, step up to the plate as president.
 

Senior was a sadistic and cold man, but his son was pure evil. There was no better way to describe it. I had grown up with Junior and I was well-versed in his darkness. My father was Senior’s Sergeant at Arms, had been since I was a kid. Brandon Junior and I were the same age so we were always together, along with two other legacy kids, Jazz and Eagle. Junior and I never liked each other. Tolerated was a better way to describe our relationship. I wasn’t looking forward to Junior’s rule. I might have to put more thought into disappearing on lookout one night. I had been toying with it for a long time. There was nothing holding me back now. In fact, I might have no other choice. Death loomed before me if I went at it alone, but death was pretty much a guarantee if Junior was in charge. Tolerance as kids had led to hatred as adults. He kept himself in check because of our fathers, but there was no one to keep him in check now.
 

Tiny tore off into the night, rounding up the other lookouts, telling them the news, I assumed. I grabbed the mountain bike that I had stashed in the back of the house and rode the ten blocks to Robert E. Lee Boulevard where our base was located. My club had taken over the strip mall that ran along Robert. E. Lee Boulevard and West End Boulevard in Lakeview.
 
It had started as a refugee camp run by the National Guard, but Senior, the now former president, didn’t like their rules, so he had taken over the place.
 

My father told me Senior ran the soldiers off, but I didn’t believe him. The National Guard wouldn’t run off, but knowing Senior and his ways, he would have killed them. Their bodies were probably a burn pile now. The same fate that awaited me. The handle bars wobbled in my hands.
 

Should I go now? Make a break for it?
 

The streets were dark.
 
It was probably the best time to do it. I heard the unmistakable moan of a biter in the distance. I had nothing on me, I was out of ammo and I didn’t have any of my stored food. I kept the bike headed toward base. I could always leave another day.
 

THREE | Drill Sergeant Baby

I never wanted to be a fucking drill instructor.
Never had the patience. Never had the fortitude. You break the worms down, then you’ve got to bring them back up and put them back together in working order. I was good at breaking people down. The bringing them back up part was what stumped me.
 

That sounds terrible, even in my own fucking head.

I never claimed to be a nice person, but I did try–
sometimes
. I was good at tearing people down, but I wasn’t some bitch that enjoyed sadistic mind games. I didn’t enjoy making people cry like babies, I had a knack for it. There was something about me that really pissed people off. It was something about the way I talked. Something about the way I held myself.
Shit, it was mostly about how I looked.
 
And that really pissed me off.
 

The way I looked was a curse.

I didn’t like being self-conscious about my looks. That was for sorority girls and aging housewives, not for girls like me. But I realized real fast in life that cuteness would be the bane of my existence.
 

It wasn’t my fault that I was barely five feet. It wasn’t my fault that my voice was a bit squeaky or that I was a natural blonde and I was sporting a bigger rack than most chicks twice my size. It wasn’t my fault that people consistently underestimated me. They treated me like a dumb child and then got pissed when I showed them their ass.