Rust
The muzzle flare of the rifles light up the room, flashing like a strobe light and then pausing as the unpatched reload. As they fire on us, I manage to poke my head up—just an inch, just enough to see—and get a layout of the room. There’s more machinery in the middle than I first thought, the unpatched ducking down behind it, and up at the top of the staircase the unpatched lean over the railing firing wildly. They should’ve killed us by now. We should be lying dead on the floor. So either they’ve never fired these kinds of weapons before or they’re very new. I hear someone grunt, trying to shove their clip into their rifle; they’re new at this, then, I confirm. That’s good. We can use that.
I relate all this to Zeke in a few muttered words.
“Alright,” he says, voice loud over the rat-tat-tat of gunfire against metal.
On the floor with his hand over his ears, Joseph squeaks something too quiet to hear. The kid is scared shitless. Zeke and I are the only veterans in a sea of newbies. It’s ridiculous to think that all this time it’s these bastards—who fire blindly from their positions instead of alternating fire and advancing on us—are the bastards who’ve been running circles around The Damned. For a moment, I think I hear Allison screaming. But just for a moment, and then the gunfire drowns it out, and when they stop to reload, the sound has stopped—if it was ever there.
“You know what we have to do,” Zeke says.
“Yeah,” I grunt. “You drawin’, or me?”
“You’re the better shot,” Zeke says.
“Alright. Be careful.”
Zeke nods. Then he lies flat on the floor and crawls to the edge of the machinery. I do the same, but crawl to the other edge. Joseph stays facedown behind me, squeaking in fear. I can’t blame him. The kid has never been in a gunfight before. The ringing out of bullets and the scent of gun smoke is way different to movies. When I’m at the end of the machinery, I wait for Zeke. I close my eyes and count, as I have done before: five, four, three…Calming myself, getting myself ready. I’ll have to time it perfectly. As soon as Zeke jumps up and fires, drawing their fire, I need to jump up and kill as many as possible. Two, one …
“Motherfuckers!” Zeke roars, leaping to his feet and firing into the air, making ’em think he can’t shoot for shit and turning them to him.
I wait for half a second until the unpatched start firing on Zeke’s position, and then I quietly climb to my feet and aim my rifle over the edge of the metal. I aim carefully, lining up my targets, and then I fire: five controlled bursts, turning the heads of five men into exploding melons. Blood sprays everywhere and they collapse onto their fronts and backs, gurgling and gasping, clawing at their ruined flesh before dying. The remaining men—the ones at the top of the staircase and a couple behind crates at the rear of the floor—begin firing on me, which is when Zeke and I duck down and wait. We crawl to different areas of the machinery, nod at each other, and then I wait for Zeke to jump up.
That’s why you don’t hire rookies for protection. Any man can hold a gun, but it takes a man who has been fired at all his life to stay calm when the bullets are pounding around him. I start counting down again, slowly, calmly. It’s strange, but since the bullets have started smashing all around us, the pain in my face has subsided, and even my overactive mind has subsided. Just calm: just the fight. That is all that I need to worry about. Five, four, three…And I watch Zeke rise to one knee, keeping his head low, two, one…Zeke leaps to his feet, fires, and then ducks.
I lean up and take aim. The men at the top of the staircase are clustered. I take them out with one controlled spray, the bullets thudding into their chests and heads and necks, causing some of them to fall over the railing and land on the floor. The other two, the ones behind the crates, drop their weapons and turn on their heels. Their weapons make metallic resounding clanging sounds, echoing above us, and then I hear them open and slam a door.
“Alright,” I mutter, scanning the room, which stinks of blood and piss and gun smoke and death. “Let’s make our way upstairs. There seems to be something those assholes were guarding up there. Let’s hope it’s Allison.”
I turn to Zeke, waiting for a response, but he’s just slumped on the floor, unmoving. I watch as Joseph peeks between his fingers and glances around, surprised that the shooting has stopped. “Zeke,” I say. “Come on, man.”
I walk over to him. He’s on his front, hands splayed at his sides. His ponytail has come loose and his hair is matted with blood. I feel a lump in my throat as I lean down and take his shoulder in my hand. I turn him over, and his mouth falls open. For long second I just stare at him, the fear in my chest pure and red, and then his lips twitch, and his tongue comes out of his mouth to lick slowly at his lips. “Oh…fuck,” he groans. “Mother fuck.”
I breathe a sigh of relief, and kneel down next to him. “Where’d they get you?”
“In the fucking shoulder.” He nods, and then winces. “And in the fucking bicep. Think I bashed my head, too”
Joseph grimaces, maybe remembering his own bicep injury.
“I can’t wait here,” I tell Zeke.
Zeke nods grimly, and tries to stand up. He gets no further than half-leaning before he slumps back down, gasping. “Fuck.”
“Kid,” I say, turning to Joseph. “You need to get Zeke out of here and call The Damned doctor. Screw that—get him outside and call the whole Damned. Bring more than one doctor; maybe Allison is hurt somewhere in here. Call the fuckin’ cavalry in.”
Joseph hesitates, and I snap at him: “Do as I fuckin’ say!”
Then, without waiting, I get to my feet and head toward the staircase. Doctors, bikers, soldiers; soon this place will be swarming with Damned. But what if Allison is not here? My doubts are pushed aside when I reach the hallway, stepping over the corpses of some of the unpatched. I head down the hallway, rifle aimed in front of me, listening to the sounds around me. Nothing, at first, but then I hear it: Trent’s voice, raised in panic, and then hushing as I get closer. I follow the voice, gripping the rifle so hard I feel the metal biting into my sweaty palms. I listen for Allison, but I don’t hear a thing. What if she’s—
No, I can’t think on that. I can’t even entertain that as an idea. I have a job to do. I just need to get it done.
I round a corner and end up in a long, narrow corridor with only one door in front of me. The hallways have been dark so far, difficult to see by, but this corridor is brighter because of the light which shines from the bottom of the door, a horizontal slice of yellow. I keep my rifle aimed and creep forward, telling myself to take this slow, to stay calm; I just need to go into this room, take care of Trent, and then get Allison out of here. I heard her screaming before, but now she’s silent; I tell myself this is because he gagged her. Of course he did. It’s nothing else.
When I get to the door, I’m about to try the handle when Trent calls from the other side. “You better stay out there. Or I’m going to gut your slut from slit to neck.”
I swallow, and an odd sense of fear and relief comes over me. At least I know she’s in there now, even if she is in mortal danger.
“You wouldn’t want to do that,” I say.
“Yeah—why’s that?”
“’Cause that’s a surefire way to get yourself killed.”
He laughs harshly, more of a vicious cough. From the sounds of it, he’s away from the door, at the other side of the room. I could barge though, but what if he has a knife to Allison’s neck, ready to kill her? What if he panics and slits her throat? I’d kill him, but killing him won’t do much good when the love of my life and the mother of my child is dead, would it?
“You’re going to kill me anyway,” he says. His voice is hoarse, the voice of a scared kid, not the voice of a MC President. “I’ve got cameras, you asshole. I can see that big rifle you’re holding. What is that for, huh? Why would you be holding that if you weren’t going to shoot me? And what did you do to my men out there, huh? I saw that.”
“That was self-defense,” I say, making sure to keep my rage out of my voice. My woman is in there: through a thin sheet of wood, across a room, somewhere in there. I swallow, and the dried blood on my face tugs at my skin, but the pain is almost laughable. Pain doesn’t mean shit right now. “I wouldn’t shoot a man when he surrenders.” I would. I fuckin’ would. Make no mistake, Trent, you’re a fuckin’ dead man. “Open the door, hold your hands up, and you can leave.”
He doesn’t say anything for almost half a minute, and then he mutters: “Throw your gun away. Then I’ll come out.”
“Alright.”
I turn around and toss my rifle to the end of the hallway, and then turn back to the door and hold my hands up. “You see?” I’m aware that he could simply fire through the door right now and end me. He knows where I am. He most likely has a weapon. But if he has CCTV he also knows that Zeke and Joseph are outside. And he saw what we did to his men. He must be scared shitless. For all his heroin-dealing and for all his bullshit, he has never been a true MC man. Never. He’s always just been some mad fuck with dreams of making it in a real club.
I’m sure I hear him swallow, even though that’s unlikely through the door. Then his footsteps click across the floor, and he pulls the door open. I squint against the light, for a moment not seeing anything but bright yellow, and then my eyes adjust and the room comes into focus: Allison, tied to a chair, her shirt covered in vomit and her legs pooling with blood; her head rising and falling as she falls in and out of consciousness; and Trent, a panicked look in his white-blue eyes, pistol aimed at me. I grit my teeth when I see Allison, and the blood: the blood…our child. Jesus Christ, what did this man do to her?
“I thought you were gonna play fair,” I say, forcing myself to look at Trent and not Allison. “This isn’t fair, is it?”
From below, the sound of men charging into the factory sounds, heavy boots stomping into the building. “What the fuck’s that?” Trent snaps, eyes flitting to the floor.
Fuckin’ mistake.
As soon as he takes his eyes from me, I’m on him. He fires—the bullet cuts clean through my shoulder, blood and leather reeking in the air. But I don’t care, not one bit. I don’t give a damn. I feel the bullet punch through me and just keep running, wrapping my arms around his chest and lifting him off his feet.
He fires again, the bullet hitting the ceiling, and then I slam him into the floor so hard one of the floorboards crack. I fall on him, punching him in the face over and over, my shoulder screaming at me to stop, but I don’t listen. I punch, punch, punch, fall into a daze, vision hazed over, everything red, red, red. And this is why I’m called Rust, I think, ’cause all my life has been spent seeing it. I slam his face until it is not recognizable as a human face, and then the rage leaves me, and I slump to the side, chest heaving.
I sit for a split second, and then I run to Allison. Her head lolls, and she whispers: “Blood, the baby…blood.”
“I’m getting you out of here,” I say. “I’m getting you to a hospital; you need more than the club doctors. But Allison?”
“Y-yes?” she whispers, as I untie her and then pick her up as gently as I can, being careful to cradle the back of her head and her legs. “We were in a car accident, alright?” I hate the necessity of telling her to lie at the hospital, but the club will take care of the bodies here, so we have to take care of our end.
“Car accident,” she murmurs. “Fine, just…our baby.”
“I know,” I say, holding my woman close to me, trying to ignore the way her blood drips onto the floorboards.
I step over Trent’s bloodied body and head down the corridor, praying that I wasn’t too late.