Stolen: Hell's Overlords MC (42 page)

Boulder isn’t, though. The whining drone of a sniper bullet fills my ears before it slams into the Diablo’s chest. A cloud of blood puffs outwards as his torso is pulverized by the high powered ammunition. I look up and spy Boulder, still up on top of the crates, swiveling his sniper to take out his next victim.

But I have only one victim in mind: Carlos.

I whip my head around in search of the bastard who started this all. Where the fuck has he gone? Then I notice a flash of color disappear behind a container. “Found you, motherfucker,” I growl. I take off after him.

The sounds of the fighting recede as I give chase through the labyrinth of boxes. I hear his footsteps ahead, pounding on steel as he sprints to the far end of the ship. Still clutching the automatic rifle, I sprint hard. Stitches of pain are lancing through my sides as my lungs beg for air, but I don’t stop. I want to end this shit right now. The bastard needs to die. And who better to fight with the White Devil than an Angel himself?

I round corner after corner, when suddenly, his footsteps stop. I come to a halt and perk up my ears, listening for any sign of him. “Where are you, you son of a bitch?” I’m answered by the whirr of an engine at my rear. Whipping around, I have just enough time to dive to my left before Carlos drives a forklift into the crate behind me. It collides violently, the sharp industrial tines piercing a yard deep into the corrugated steel. One tine catches the skin along my thigh, tearing open my flesh in a deep bloody smear. I bellow into the night as pain rips across my body. My finger squeezes the trigger of the gun, unleashing a storm of bullets against the windshield of the machine. I fire until the clip is empty and choking. When there is nothing left of the ammo, I struggle to my feet. There’s no motion in the cab of the vehicle. I lurch carefully towards it. Reaching the door, I pause for a moment before yanking it open.

As it opens, Carlos bursts forward, snarling like a wild animal, hands outstretched towards my face. He crunches into me and we both fly backwards. His knee lands on my chest, knocking the air from my lungs. I wheeze and try to shield myself from his blows. He delivers strike after strike, pummeling my forearms and face with tight, bony fists. I feel my wrist give way below successive punches.

Roaring, I throw my weight as hard as I can, flipping him off of me. I roll on top and my hands find his throat. I start to throttle him. He scrabbles at my face as his eyes swell and turn red. I try to stay away, but when he finds my eye sockets and shoves a finger into each eye, I bark and fall off of him. Pain clouds my vision. I have no time to recover as he growls and launches straight back into me. This time it’s him doing the choking. Between the smoke and his hands around my neck, the edges of my eyesight begin to grow black.

No. It can’t end like this. The distant din of the fire and my brothers fighting for their lives starts to fade away, along with the rest of my senses. It’s like everything is being sucked down a drain. My muscles are losing their strength. I can’t peel his hands away, can’t buck him from his position on top of me. Maybe Carlos was right. This is how it ends. Not with a bang, but with a…

Rose

Clang.
The crunch of metal on bone rings out.

Carlos stumbles backwards. He finds a handhold on a nearby container and leans heavy against it. Blood drips from a crater in the side of his head. Vince looks up, blinking hard, sees me holding a steel pipe with a crimson smear along the side. My fists are white-knuckled and my face is wild with adrenaline.

I’d run around the corner and had no more than a half second to think. Vince was pinned beneath Carlos, the lights dimming in his eyes, life rushing from his body. I’d looked around and grabbed the first thing I could find, the pipe in my hand. Reared back, my entire form one coiled spring. Unleashed. Made contact. Brutal, devastating contact.

The pipe in my hands is still ringing from the impact against the side of Carlos’s head.

Vince staggers to his feet. “Rose…” he says, trailing off.

“Are you okay?” I ask him. Carlos has fallen to a groaning slump on the floor, blood thickening on his scalp. I walk past him, over to Vince, and take his face in my hands. He stares back at me. “I didn’t lie, Vince.”

He blinks. “I know.”

“I never would.”

“I know that, too.”

For the briefest of seconds, everything drops away. The smoke, the blood, the groaning steel surrounding us on all sides—all of it disappears in a flash and there’s nothing left but Vince and me.

For a single, beautiful instant, everything is whole. Nothing is broken.

A guttural roar punctures our little bubble. Vince looks over my shoulder. His eyes bulge and he surges to the side, tackling me to the ground with him. We collapse in a heap as a bullet tears through the space where we’d been just moments before. It tears through the container behind us, leaving a neat hole in the side of the box. I look over and see Carlos pushing himself unsteadily to his feet. He holds a gun pointed straight at us. Blood continues to leak from his smashed-in skull, but it doesn’t stop him as he limps in our direction.

In spite of the raging inferno around us, he looks as calm as ever. Gore and explosions can’t even rattle him from his psychopathic serenity. “You almost did it, Vince,” he says as he keeps picking his way towards us, swaying side to side. “You almost got away.” He lines up the shot, preparing to fire again. I notice a hissing sound ripping through the container where the bullet entered. It sounds like gas. But if there’s a container leaking gas, and fires burning all around us.

“Not quite though,” says Carlos. He cocks back the hammer of the gun, pointing it at Vince’s head. The gas keeps hissing. “You fell just a little bit short.”

Boom.
The container detonates, whatever gas it held having been ignited by the flames cast everywhere from the first explosion. A tidal wave of heat sends Carlos flying backwards. I can’t see or hear anything, not even my own voice screaming from the base of my throat. Everything I can sense is one sheet of blankness, one dull roar.

As things begin to clear, I look around. Now this really is hell. The million rivets of the ship are groaning in distress as the explosion ripples out across it. I can hear the buckling of massive steel plates in its side. On the ground, bullet casings begin to roll across a suddenly slanted floor.

The ship is sinking.

Vince is nowhere to be seen. I scream his name again and again, but I can’t find him. The light of the fires is blinding and the heat sears my skin painfully. I’m staggering as the ship continues to lilt in sudden lurches, nearly tossing me from my feet.

“Vince! Vince!” I shout until I am too hoarse to continue. I see a silhouette rising blackly on the other side of a wall of flame. I squint. It moves towards me. Thank God, it must be him. He’s alive. My heart swells with relief…until I see that it’s not Vince. It’s Carlos.

Half his face is burned away. He looks like a zombie, something burnt to a crisp and then cruelly resurrected. He shouldn’t be alive. The wound in his head is ugly and gaping. But he walks towards me, one injured leg dragging behind him, with the steady inexorability of a demon who can’t be killed. I turn to run, but it only takes me a moment to realize I’m trapped. Fire blocks me in on three sides. The only way to go is towards Carlos.

I try to make a break for it. I almost make it, too. Ducking as I approach him, I manage to squiggle beneath his grasping arms. “Fuck you, Carlos,” I want to scream. I just need to find Vince. Let this motherfucker burn. I’m almost gone.

Then I feel him grab hold of my hair. My motion comes to a sickening halt and a blazing pain erupts in my scalp as he twists me to the ground. “Oh no, Rose,” he says grimly. “You’re coming with me.”

Vince

The explosion caused by Carlos’s shot sent me soaring away from Rose. I stand up, struggling to draw in a full breath amidst the firestorm around me. I can’t see a damn thing. “Rose!” I bellow at the top of my lungs. No reply.

The skin of my right leg where the forklift hit me is badly injured. I press a hand to the wound and pull it away to reveal a shimmering red palm, dense with blood. Grimacing, I try to push the pain aside.
Focus. Find Rose. Then get the hell of this ship before the whole thing goes down.

I see shapes moving in the distance, back where I was before the explosion tossed me aside, and I force myself to run towards them as fast as I can. I keep screaming Rose’s name. Still no answer. I can’t make out any detail through the hazy smoke.

But when I get close enough to see what’s happening, I freeze.

Carlos holds Rose by the roots of her hair, a gun pointed down towards her face. It’s the same nightmarish scene as the night in the motel: a man dragging her away by her scalp, leaving me behind, helpless to intervene.

He looks up and sees me. He doesn’t smile. “We’ll be going now, Vince,” he says, pointing at Rose to indicate that she’s coming with him. “I don’t think either of us will ever see you again.” He is so at home in the middle of this hellish scene. The fire suits him. It reflects off the blank glow in his eyes, giving them an eerie red sheen. His skin, so pale, shines in the flickering blaze.

“Don’t you fucking move,” I order.

“No, don’t
you
move,” he shoots back, moving the gun from Rose’s head to me. She’s struggling in his grip, but he’s too strong to let her get away. “You don’t seem to recognize when I am the one with the upper hand.” He looks behind him, sees an avenue of escape, and starts to retreat, stepping backwards without breaking eye contact.

“Rose,” I say loudly over the shrieking metal, “I’m coming for you.”

She nods fearfully. Then Carlos disappears around a corner.

I know he’ll be waiting for me to chase after him. Going directly behind them would earn me nothing but a bullet in the face. I need a better route. I look around me, desperate for a way to see where they’re going. I see a ladder hooked to the door of an untouched shipping container. As quickly as I can with my useless leg, I clamber up to the top.

From here, I can see the entire top deck. Pillars of smoke pour upwards every few yards, fragmented from the explosions. The silhouettes of Diablos grappling with Inked Angels are dotted across the ship. I hope they’re winning. This affair has already gone too far.

I peer closer, looking for Carlos and Rose. I can’t see anything, until suddenly his limping figure slides into view. He’s heading for the winding staircase, the one that leads back down to the gangway and the port. If he gets far enough, he’ll get away. I have to stop him.

I don’t have time to climb down and chase them through the winding aisles between the containers. That leaves one option: over the top. I look down, size up the gap, and before I can convince myself not to, I leap.

The weight of my body crashes into the top of the adjacent box onto which I’d jumped. Agony tears through my leg, but I can’t afford to lose time. I ignore the pain.
Keep moving. Don’t ever stop.
I look over, gauge the next distance, and jump again.

I ping from box to box in a beeline for the staircase. I see Carlos and Rose disappear down it. Every time I land, an involuntary guttural scream tears its way out of my throat. My body wants to lie still, but I just can’t. Not if he has Rose. I fucked up once, and I swore to myself it wouldn’t happen again.

Finally, I reach the last box. It’s a ten-foot drop to the surface of the deck. I grit my teeth and throw myself over the edge. My leg is soaked with blood. I can see ragged, torn muscle beneath the flaps of my broken skin. My head is dizzy. Shit, I’m losing fluids too quickly. If I want to stay alive, I need to stem the bleeding.

Thinking quickly, I rip my shirt over my head and tear it into one long strip. I cinch a knot tightly around my upper thigh, using the fabric as a makeshift tourniquet. The tight cloth cuts off the blood flow to my leg, but it’s only temporary. I won’t have long before I pass out.

The staircase yawns before me. I put all my weight into the handrails and leap down three steps at a time. I hear Carlos’s scrabbling footsteps and Rose’s screaming below me. I get to the bottom and pause to readjust my tourniquet. My lower calf is coated in bright crimson. Not much longer.

I totter to the planks that hook the ship to shore. It hangs at a skewed angle, twisting farther away from the dock as the vessel continues to tilt dangerously. I seize the hand railing and propel myself down, trying my best to combat the slipping and sliding of the metal frame. It takes a few more agonizing steps before I reach the concrete ground on the far side.

Steady land under my feet, I whirl around, looking for any sign of Carlos and Rose. I can’t see anything, but the dull whine of an engine in the distance catches my ear. I look up to see a small motorboat burst out from the canal in the port, headed out into the open ocean. Carlos is at the wheel, while Rose lies limp and prostrate on the bow of the craft.

I don’t even have time to curse. I need a boat, fast. When I see the tiny motorboat that Boulder used to sneak onto the ship tied up against the dock below me, I practically fall to my knees in thanks. Maybe God is looking out for me after all.

I stumble towards it, hop over the edge, and find the keys in the ignition. Boulder must have left them here on his way to plant the explosives on the deck above. The engine comes coughing into action as I quickly untie the mooring and push away from the deck.

Carlos’s boat is five hundred yards ahead. I yank the wheel and open the throttle as wide as it goes. The motor squeals, but slowly I start to pick up speed. Every bounce of the boat on the waves is excruciating. I bite my tongue hard enough to draw blood in an effort not to cry out. Just a little bit faster, a little bit farther.

Somehow, I’m catching up. Three hundred more yards. We’re out into the open harbor now. The waves are tall and choppy, tossing about both of our crafts carelessly. I don’t know where he’s trying to go. All I know is that I have to reach him. Rose hasn’t moved on the front of the boat. I pray she’s not dead.

We zip out across the surface of the water. Deep, sloshing wakes trail us in spreading tails. I’m so fucking close. Only a few dozen yards separate us. I push harder on the accelerator, desperate for any ounce of speed left in the engine.

Almost there. The nose of my boat is just a couple yards behind and to the right of the back of his. With one hand on the wheel, Carlos raises the gun towards me.

Time slows down. Just ahead of us, a massive swell is rolling straight in our direction. I can see directly down the barrel of his gun. He pulls back the hammer. I take the wheel of my boat in two hands and yank as hard as I can to the left.

Our crafts smash together just as the wave hits. Both flip. I am thrown into the face of the wave, debris bubbling on all sides of me.

It’s dark underwater. The sting of the ocean salt pierces my yawning leg wound agonizingly. I can’t see, can’t hear. I just need Rose. Where the hell is she? I’m being tossed back and forth, tumbled head over heel, unable to find any bearing or any sight of her.

I kick to the top of the water and suck in a huge breath. There—a tiny, tan body, seizing onto a piece of floating hull, bobbing at the crest of the next set of waves. Her dark hair is pressed in long, drenched tangles against her face. Even now, she looks beautiful.

I start to stroke towards her. I get only a few feet before a hand wraps around my ankle from below and pulls, plunging me back beneath the water. The light from the moon pierces the first layer of the ocean, illuminating Carlos’s face. He looks horrific, a man straight out of a nightmare, with black flesh peeling away from his scalp in long, gruesome strips. The hand holding mine is burnt down to the bone, but he doesn’t seem to notice or care.

The devil himself is dragging me down.

I flail my foot, but he won’t let go. Flipping down towards him, I squeeze my fist. The blade on my forearm projects out, glinting in the refracted moonbeams. With the last of my strength, I plunge it straight into his melted eyeball.

The life drains from his face instantly. A cloud of blood bursts out around his face. His hand on my ankle slips. I watch as Carlos starts to sink down, deeper and deeper into the freezing blackness.

Right where the motherfucker belongs.