Creed
“You look better. Find someone to take your frustrations out on?” Bax teased, turning to face me as he took a long sip of his beer.
Frowning, grabbing my own beer from his six-pack and didn’t answer. But I sat down next to him. I didn’t want to talk about Ivy. I didn’t even want to think about her, but I wanted to see Bax. He had been my best friend for years; perhaps it was odd to think of big, tough biker in a gang to have a best friend, but Bax was that. He’s gotten me out of more than one scruff. I’d trust him at my back through anything. I’d never had a brother, but if I had, I’d want him to be just like Bax. Perhaps I wouldn’t have ended up in this shit hole if I’d had someone like him on the outside growing up.
Then I thought of the day my father died and wasn’t so sure.
Sensing I didn’t want to talk about Ivy, Bax changed the subject. “How was our friend Carlos?”
“Batshit insane, as usual.” That guy with his cold, dead eyes even gave me the shivers when I was being honest with myself. Which I was doing an awful lot of today. Something about Ivy and--
No, don’t think about Ivy. I don’t need her shit. I don’t how long I can afford to keep her around. Why did I try so hard to save her life? Why had it been so important? I thought back to the amazing sex we’d just had; she literally let me do anything I wanted to her, and she liked it just as rough as I did. Just thinking about her blushing, her legs spread to me, her eyes hooded with mischievous pleasure-filled--
Nope, don’t think of Ivy. But it wasn’t just the crazy, hard sex. The kind of sex that tore sheets and put holes in walls. No, it was something more than that. The kind of soft spot that made men do stupid things. What am I going to do?
I had to push those thoughts away, though. Ivy would be Ivy’s problem and no one else’s soon. For her own sake and the sake of my sanity, I had to get rid of her. Fast.
I glanced over at Bax, then around the room to see if anyone was close by. “Carlos wants to meet. Says either I come to terms with them or the Carrion Club is going to team up with some of the other boys and invade, coming after Kelly.”
“He said that?” Bax whispered back, his hands clutched too tight around his bottle. I knew what he was feeling; an all-out battle between the Edge and Carrion would be a bloodbath. It would put everything we’d built and loved in jeopardy, including our people, my child, and the club itself. Carrion might not survive it either. “Shit.”
I nodded, sipping on the beer. It was disgusting; some cheap American thing, but it was cold. And beggars couldn’t be choosers, so I swallowed it down without complaint.
“What should we do?”
“The way I see it,” I said, staring into the dark, brown glass of my beer bottle, “we have three choices. We can tell Kelly.”
“That will bring the cartel in force into our turf to defend it, most likely. They’ll send an army.” We were both silent for a long moment. We both knew what that meant too; once the army was here, none of them would ever leave. They would most likely take over the Edge without anyone lifting a finger against them.
“We can not tell Kelly,” I said, bile rising in my stomach. Those words felt like betrayal in my mouth. It would lead to all of our deaths, most likely.
Every choice seemed to end in the death of the Devil’s Edge. Except one.
“Or, we work with Carlos and get Kelly overturned, running the cartel out of town and putting a new leader in his place.” I was gripping my beer so hard I expected it to shatter under my fingers.
Bax stared at me, his mouth gaping and his eyes incredulous. “Creed, those are some dangerous words.”
“Just words, Bax.”
“Still dangerous! I’ve been a fan of opposing this whole cartel thing from the beginning, but what you’re talking about, getting rid of Kelly...” He shook his head. “You’ll end up like your pa.”
I nodded, my head suddenly feeling heavy. “I know, Bax. I just don’t know what the best thing to do is anymore. Every choice feels like a bad one, and it’s Kelly that got us here. Kelly and that Christine woman.” She was still probably wrapped around his leg like a serpent, dripping poison into his ear as Bax and I spoke.
I wanted to ring her neck, that conniving bitch. Where had she gotten hold of Kelly in the first place?
Bax was silent for a long time. He finished his beer, then drank another. He seemed to be considering my words carefully, weighing out all of the possible futures. And from his expressions, all of them looked really bleak.
“How is the club recovering?” I asked, unable to stand the silence anymore. I wanted to stop the rush of images inside of my mind. I pictured Josh, hiding behind some bikes in the corner of the clubhouse, his tiny chocolate eyes going dark and empty as he watched Kelly rip my throat out. Just as I had watched my father die. What would become of him? But worse, what if I did nothing, and the cartel came for us all? Was that a kinder end? I didn’t think it was.
“The rebuilding is going well enough. It won’t go anywhere if we’re trying to hold off an army, though.” Bax pressed his head against the wall, staring up at the ceiling. He seemed to be deep in thought, still, his mind not really on the current conversation.
Not that I can blame him; I did just drop some bad news in his lap. News none of us want to hear.
Rubbing his face with his hands, Bax turned and looked at me, his eyes searching my face in a way that made me uncomfortable. “Maybe you’re right, Creed,” he said unwillingly, his face a tangle of emotions. “Those things you’re saying, don’t let anyone else hear them. Not even Pearl. Not your son. Keep them to yourself; you probably shouldn’t have even told me.”
I nodded. “You might be right.” We drank in silence again for a long time. But before I could think of something else to say, some kind of reassurance that I was going to think it all the way through before making a decision, Bax stood up from his seat and walked away. I didn’t watch him leave; I didn’t have to. I knew his shoulders would have been slightly slumped in defeat.
No matter what we did next, we would lose.
I swallowed down the beer, though it was suddenly deeply bitter in my mouth. Without Bax to keep the memories at bay, I found myself drowning in them.
# # #
“I need to do what’s best for my son,” my father said, holding out his hands imploring. “And the Edge isn’t a safe place for him.”
Kelly frowned, looking like he was ready to bite a piece off of my father. “Finding out you have a child has made you soft, Charles.”
I know my father asked me to leave the Edge, to walk away from the possible violence and get to the bus stop. I was ordered to leave without him if Kelly refused to release him. But I knew where my loyalties were. I belonged at the Edge, just like my father belonged at the Edge.
I watched him impassively as he begged for my release from a life I’d never been intended for. My father looked small and weak in my young eyes. But he continued to beg for me. Not himself, just me. He wanted my freedom and must have known he was putting himself at risk for it. But none of that crossed my mind at the time. I just remember thinking about how old and tired and weak he looked.
“So you would go against the Devil’s Edge and me just to save your precious son from what? A future he wants?”
My father swallowed hard and looked down at the ground. “A future he thinks he wants.”
“Is it really so bad here, Charles?”
There wasn’t a safe reply to that, so my father kept his mouth shut. He’d made his case. I stood behind the stairs, my eyes watching to see what Kelly would do. I’d worked hard to land my position in the Edge; I was furious to think that my dad was going to throw away all of it.
To my surprise, Kelly didn’t yell or scream. He very calmly went over to the wall, grabbed something off one of the shelves. His whole body was relaxed as he turned, swinging the golf club with an efficiency and emotionlessness that only came from true psychotic tendencies. When the club connected with my father’s skull, I gasped, but the sound wasn’t loud enough to cover the wet crunching noise as my father’s skull crumpled under Kelly’s swing.
Kelly stood over my father, lying on the ground. He was bloody, broken, his breath wheezing between broken teeth out of a punctured lung. Blood spilled from his mouth, his ears, his nose. The slowly growing puddle of red was too big. There would be no coming back from it. I watched with wide eyes. I was barely tall enough to see over the half-wall of the stairs from where I watched.
My father wheezed again, his face so swollen I couldn’t recognize him. He tried to speak, but instead of words, blood spilled out.
“There now, Charlie. Still want to leave the Devil’s Edge, you lying sack of shit?” Kelly asked, pulling my father’s head back by his bloodied blonde hair. “I didn’t think so.” With a sickening, wet crunch of bones shattering, Kelly slammed my father’s face against the pavement one final time.
At the time, I was shaken, but I knew that my father had gotten the punishment he deserved. By as I’d grown older, I knew that to be wrong. Kelly had sucker punched my father; it was the only way he could have won against my dad in a physical fight. I knew now what Kelly was; I wish I could have seen it when I was still young enough to flee. Before Josh was born, before I became so tangled up in the whole life.
Kelly was a psycho and a coward. If I did end up going to Carlos, it would be only what he deserved. Sighing, I glanced around the broken building slowly being put back together. But in my mind’s eye, the whole place was filled with already dead bodies, Christine and Carlos standing over our dead bodies, getting ready to battle one another.
And the Devil’s Edge was turned to dust.