Iron Jaws Motorcycle Club Read online

  Iron Jaws Motorcycle Club

  Lucas Domme

  Iron Jaws Motorcycle Club

  Lucas Domme

  Copyright © 2014 by William L. Domme. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Portions of this tale were based on a blog by Ryan Desch.

  First Edition published 2014

  Domme, William L., (1979- )

  More stories and information available here: atypeofwriter.com

  10% of the proceeds from the Iron Jaws Motorcycle Club series of books will be donated to National Multiple Sclerosis Society Mid America Chapter

  “Dad, is America too big to fail?”

  “No, son. The cliche is the bigger they are the harder they fall.”

  His old man kept a hand on his shoulder as Scales, then Mason Hoil, drifted to sleep broken by seizures.

  He remembered the night clearly. His father laid the lantern on the ground, a bit wet from morning rain, and stopped the clocks with warnings that someday everything will meet its end. “One day you will need to know how to make a fire from what little you may find lying around. We’ll work on it in the morning.”

  Scales, née Mason Hoil, said, “Okay, Dad.”

  “What you have to remember, always, is that when dealing with any other human you are not dealing with a creature like yourself. Our manners, our hungers, our delusions are independent and unique. What looks sane is a mask for that person’s true nature. Don’t be fooled by anyone,” his dad told him.

  And Scales never looked at his father the same way again.

  *

  The guy’s knuckles came up from the floor to catch Scales under the chin—fisty thunk. It knocked his head back on his shoulders and his neck bones cracked. He blinked: Rose—her slender fingers, both hands holding the bundle of fettuccine at each end, his hands on the stove as he leaned in over her, the thick crack of the dry pasta over the boiling water. Steam condensing on her hands and making them rain slick. He snuck in and kissed her under the ear. Her eyes closed above a smile. He opened his eyes. The blink—for how long?

  Another boney fist cracked his collarbone. Tap out. Fight over.

  There was a horrendous wrench of metal. Thick, rusted, beaten by weather. Then silence.

  The man on his feet stood over, forcing his shadow on the unconscious sack of shit he’d made of Scales, held him down with just a look. Sweat fell over Scales’ eyes and the scene blurred. A blow to the ear disoriented him further. He was hearing in mono. He remembered how he got there; to that big, empty store; chased off the highway by the monster. He hadn’t seen one up close and ugly before. The foot came up, and it would have broken Scales’ knee if he hadn’t somehow pulled the bone-handled switchblade out of his boot and stuck the blade in the man’s other calf. Dropped him like a bomb. He slid it out screaming from the force on his collarbone and stabbed the man quick and clean under his right ear, behind the jaw.

  They lay atop their own shadows with the only sign of life the small, quick bloodfog spitting out of his mouth. Scales tried to figure out how he’d get his shoulder fixed, if his neck was broken. A motorcycle approached across the dark. He knew it wouldn’t be just one. Knew they’d all come looking for their brother. “Fuck with one, fuck with all,” the dead son of a bitch said as he looked down on him in his fleeting moment of power, just before the blade severed his calf.

  *

  “That was the first time I saw an Iron Jaw.” His fever was growing in this place. Scales drooped on the stool in the food stand.

  His mind was split by the fumes of a refueling*: materials – empty tank, rubber hose, full tank, lips, lungs, and desperation.

  Step one – uncap both tanks.

  Step two – insert rubber hose into full tank.

  Step three – insert rubber hose into stupid asshole’s mouth.

  Step four – suck it like a dick.

  Step five – insert wet, sucked end into empty tank, wait for complete transfer.

  Step six – if you’re not puking yet, put two fingers in throat and induce vomiting.

  Warning: smell of gasoline will never, under any circumstances, leave your nose.

  *Smoking is strongly discouraged while employing this refueling technique.

  Side effects: convulsions, depression, dizziness, drowsiness, feeling of being drunk (euphoria), headache, loss of alertness, staggering, seizures, weakness.

  *

  “…,you know?” Scales heard and found himself sideways to the world. A yellow Formica counter rimmed with ribbed chrome ran out from his cheek. “…, you know?” he heard. He righted himself of his stool again.

  “Talk like that makes me wonder if I’ve got more past than future,” Scales said. He sucked back a shot of pinot; found bottle picked up scavenging on the highway, swished it over his gums and swallowed. The wind blew debris all around outside the diner, hotter than an old virgin loosening his collar as the devil climbs onto the bed. The wasteland breathed in and out. The diner walls and plate glass windows shook and warped but Scales sat still, cracked and boarded up. He sucked down another slug of wine straight from the bottle.

  “Got to make a call,” he heard.

  Numb footsteps carried him across the desert that reclaimed the parking lot. “Real estate was a fucking illusion, huh,” he spat. The last intact panel of glass had blistered and, so, stood upright magnifying the scene outside of the phone booth in which Scales was standing. His veins were vines stuck to tree trunks; they burned all up and down his arms. His temples were fixed in flex because his teeth were clenched to stop himself from grinding them to powder. His jaw jerked, lips reverberated—shockwave spreading and collapsing. His left eyelid sunk behind his eyeball so that for a moment his eye seemed to float in the air. And then an immediate return to his default clutch. Sweat hardened on his face in leprous salt craters. He pulled the phone from the hook and pushed some coins into the slot.

  His jaw jerked.

  It pulled the cramp in his neck.

  A storm on the horizon behind him in a crimson sky scratched through with charcoal lines like some terrible mistake—unable to be erased, blotted out, or forgotten—made him the anonymous silhouette.

  He mumbled into the receiver, into the silence.

  Scales was tired of it; ultimately exhausted by his survival. Cyclones pogoed into the line of fire toward the back of the rubescent dome. The atmosphere was alive with lightning. “You told me not to bother. I have to tell you, to get this off my mind,” he said. Debris clattered against the metal frame of the phone booth. “But I know I’m not getting through.”

  A coyote with an open wound in its flank strained through the rootless panorama. He counted its steps; noted the silence of the gory struggle to persist. Looking at the cord he had been languorously twisting, he saw it was severed and for the first time felt the handset moving untethered against his ear. He spun round and round in the booth sweating, hyperventilating. The ruddy sky became a lung heaving for air and finding little. Dead satellites pushed out by the swollen atmosphere fell once more into their unknown orbits independent of all control but physics. He saw the wind before he felt it blowing through the booth, wheezing in his ears.

  His little brother again.

  Gasps muffled through the thin attic wall.

  Scales staring at the corroded brass lock slid shut to keep his brother from escaping.

  Just a game, he reminded himself. Just a game. “I didn’t know he could die. I swear, Mom, I swear I didn’t know.”

  Scales jaw jerked. He bashed the handset into the faceplate. The coyote was swallo
wed into the wasteland.

  He came up short when he reached for the door. Confused, he pushed his hand out again grinding his forearm along the shard crowned frame.

  His affect plateaued, “Memory was a name. Name was a game.”

  His boots hit the sand hard, “Game was the same. Same gets the blame, the blame game.”

  Boots kicked up dust flying faster than Judas’ dying prayer. He put a hand on his motorcycle, “Name of the highway,” he put his ass on the seat. “Name of the highway is…” He kicked the starter. Nothing. “Highway is…”

  “Unknown. Shut up and ride,” Scales heard.

  He looked down, braced and watched the road fly beneath the knucklehead. He rode toward the horizon, away from the storm. A cobweb of nerves short circuited around his elbow and he released the handlebar but still the throttle engaged. The cycle rode straight. The engine roared.

  “At least one of us is in control,” he heard.

  “I need to take a car next chance I get,” Scales said. The cycle accelerated and a recriminating thunder pealed atop the highway.

  Scales’ held onto the knucklehead with all his strength. “I’m taking you for a ride,” he heard. He leaned lower; his cheeks pared back, the teeth inside sealed a pernicious sneer for all that lay in waste around him and his motorcycle.

  The paint on everything had boiled; caught the ashes from the wind into mucilaginous blisters, left a gray primer. The world of buildings and design had become its own negative impression—silver halides suspended in gelatin. The image and likeness of the world turned in on itself. Scales looked out from the backside of a mirror.

  The speed of the wind did nothing to cool him.

  He still felt like he was soaring through fire—as though tied to the ass end of a booster rocket at liftoff. “Be grateful you’re still alive, friend.” Scales gripped the handlebars as tight as he had wrung Jickstor Hannah’s neck and felt he’d never really let go, not after eight years in prison, not after three years of this dead planet. Down the highway he went at the whims of his PsychoMotor.

  “Where is she?” Scales heard.

  A heap of jelly bounced in Scales’ skull. Time travel and teleportation; the experience of exoexistence and Scales was with Rose. Rose in bed, Rose in the car. Rose at breakfast eating a kiwi like an apple. Rose laughing. Rose sleeping, alive in the night. Rose hand in hand at the altar. Rose crying goodbye, “I don’t want to die.” And Rose in repose where her coffin lied before the same altar at which he vowed to adore. Rose Rose Rose forever. He, lightheaded and nauseous, was just a ring through whom the wind blew.

  “Where is she?” he heard.

  He reentered his space and time and leaned low over the handlebar. The mountains were in view, in ten minutes he’d be running the foothills and his anxiety grew. Around every corner were new traps. Low on bullets and high on a rumbling bike was no way to sneak through the territories of broken states and mutant settlements in the afterglow of the apocalypse.

  Looking over the crust of the rising land where boulders stood he had a time trying to recall the blond grasses of an autumn ride he’d once taken through these plains-side hills. The landscape wouldn’t recover without an eon or massive, concerted intervention. And hadn’t we done enough, he thought. He slowed, approaching a frozen procession of cars once filled with refugees. Their monuments stuck in place, headstones that read Ford, Kia, BMW, Daewoo, testified to their anonymity. Survivors lose in this place. Now was the time for Scales to go shopping.

  He looked over the windows of the first cars he rode by and saw they’d not been picked over or, if they had, not thoroughly looted of useable provisions. He might even be able to get some gas out these tombs.

  A feeling surfaced in the palms resting on the handlebar. Electricity shivered up his arms and the light in his mind burst like prison floods in an escape. He continued on as quickly as he could. Past the tombs, his bike propelled, compelled, informing his instincts, negotiating his survival.

  “Never look back,” he heard. He would not know the fight his knucklehead led him from. He didn’t question. The machine, he feared, could become his worst enemy if betrayed.

  Forty miles back, they rode. They ran fast across the level plain. The roads were not so badly broken up out in the middle of what might forever be nowhere. A few miles here, a few miles there a busted heap of a car laid its permanent shadow beside or across the road. The double line of motorcycles hardly slowed as they went by the wreckage. The leader caught a scent. He hoisted his monstrous head to the wind. Two pupils just pinholes in eyeballs busted and bloody, painted aslant above the crooked nose, puffy as a catcher’s mitt. From ear to ear were his jaws. Cut with a torch from the bowels of a century old bomber put to rest in an airplane graveyard and heated and hammered and abused into a sick resemblance of a human jaw by The Dentist, the surgeon and hobbyist blacksmith who was riding in formation two rows back. The jaw weighed mightily and forced the posture of a rhino on the riders already fixed with the prosthetics. His dirty colors read, Iron Jaws Motorcycle Club. The patch on his right breast read, “Fuck with One, Fuck with All.” And he smelled a trail.

 

 

  Domme, Lucas, Iron Jaws Motorcycle Club

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