Through a Glass, Darkly (Assassins of Youth MC #1) (2 page)

But Breakiron didn’t follow my bike back down the highway to the abandoned diner where I was supposed to turn.
Good God in an evil world
, as I liked to say. The saying was especially apropos at the moment. That asshat Breakiron was enough to test the patience of Job. I missed my gal Chelsea with a passion so heavy it tore my chest in two, and I couldn’t even text her.
Or could I?

I relaxed a little as I rode. Apparently this enclave of Cornucopia was nestled in a bunch of valleys surrounded by the same vermilion cliffs I’d seen earlier. The shale and sandstone were so multilayered it looked like a bunch of cakes that had uplifted and eroded over millions of years, cakes made of cinnamon, custard, red velvet. The Assassins went on runs up to Salt Lake sometimes, but I’d never been able to detour off toward Zion. We were always in too big of a hurry to wreak some havoc.

I’d always had an interest in geology, and I soaked up the views on the way to the stone wall that separated Cornucopia from the outside. The stands of cottonwood, still rangy and dull green this time of summer, would be brilliant yellow soon. Some ratty pinon pines had been planted to show the way to a mine—maybe an open pit copper mine—over the next rise. I started thinking once I completed this hardware run I could maybe take a day or two to explore the area. I’d seen a battered building back in Avalanche claiming it was a rock shop, but of course no lights could be seen through the dusty windows. It seemed like the booming suburb of Avalanche had died of natural causes—or been strangled to death—twenty years ago when Cornucopia had flourished.

I was soon to find out why everyone had bailed from the scene.

There was the rock wall Chiles had talked of. When I stopped to speak into the intercom, I noted another scoot coming like a bat out of hell behind me. Guy must’ve been doing a hundred, a hundred and ten on his ’71 Super Glide. How the hell did Breakiron know the gate would open when it did? But it did, and Breakiron was ripping it up so heavily
he
got through the gate before
me
. Flipping me off gleefully, of course.

Naturally, the guy on the intercom didn’t like that one bit. “Who the fuck was that?” The religious zealot got all sweary. “Who’s that fucking asshole who just blazed through the gate?”

“Sorry about that, sorry!” I was frantic in my apologies. “That’s my associate. I swear to God I didn’t know he was back there! Can I come in now?”

The gate started to close. The guy was saying, “Now this wasn’t part of the deal you made with Allred—” but I was already inside the compound.

The weird, freaky, bizarre as-seen-on-TV compound.

The place that would change my life irreversibly.

Riding slower now, I gave up all hope of finding Breakiron. I figured someone would pop out to stop me, so I just tooled along. About a mile from the gate the buildings started. Strange, Cape Cod-style saltboxes, the main difference being these things sprawled like barracks, room after room added on past the front door. A couple of Humvees patrolled the streets like there was a curfew in place, but no one stopped me. There were businesses that any citizen would need, like a plumber, hairdresser, and bookstore. Only, I had the feeling the bookstore only sold one genre, and the hairdresser only did one style.

A few ordinary vehicles drove sedately around, and I passed a temple, a sign for what looked like a coal mine, and a school. This was where I started seeing the women in prairie garb and sun bonnets. The plain ankle-length dresses with puffy sleeves gave the women the look of old-timey prison inmates. The women without bonnets displayed, contrary to all expectations, elaborate hairdos. Waist-length hair was rolled, coiled, and beaten into submission like penitent crowns.

The tide was turning, and it would take a life jacket and ten horses to pull me back now.

MAHALIA

I
didn’t want
to be born.

Our Prophet teaches that we pre-exist, that we are old souls waiting to be born into new bodies. We eat, drink, and wear energy that used to be pure matter, perfect brilliance and flame. We wait for the perfect challenging life to be reborn into, the most heart-rending of existences, and give it meaning.

That’s true for most of us. I, however, was an accident. I don’t know how I slipped on by God’s watchful eye to be sent down into this horror. Like everyone, I once belonged to something greater. Pre-existence was a heavenly womb where we were all cradled in the safe, secure arms of God. For most people, mortality is an ascension, not a fall, like it was with me. Supposedly, we take limitless potential into a world of sin and tragedy. Me? I just fell here, crashed like some clumsy loser, destined to be stubborn, unwilling to take the winning ticket of God’s plan.

Supposedly, no one will be left out. Life isn’t a lottery where only a lucky few will continue into the blissful afterlife, surrounded by the loving people we know now. We should try to imitate God, brimming with love and devotion. But to try to actually
be
God is the most heinous sin of all.

My lot was to be thrown in with Allred Lee Chiles, Prophet of the Cornucopia Clan, pretender to the throne. In my distant pre-memory, I belonged to a world before language where I was at one with everything. This forgotten memory is imprinted in my being at a cellular level. I don’t need a god to explain the beauty of Canadian honkers flying in formation, or the awe-inducing artistry in the luminous halos of Alaska’s northern lights. Why do I need faith in things eternal? I recall the bliss of floating in spiritual arms, the paradise where I lived before I was wrenched forth and brought down here. Yes, most call birth an ascension. I term it the worst fall imaginable.

My haven turned to hell when I was ordered to be sealed to Allred Lee Chiles five years ago. I was a miserable wretch, a zombified servant to people I despised, long before Gideon Fortunati walked in those doors.

Gideon Fortunati.
What an omen of a name. I first heard Allred blathering his beautiful name when I served him coffee and red velvet cake in his office. Yes, we can drink caffeine, and liquor too. Fundamentalists split from the mainstream Latter Day Saints before those Saints enforced strict health codes. Alcohol probably hasn’t helped reign in some of the more “whacked” ideas Allred came up with, either. He sure did love his scotch whiskey. Booze and smoking were allowed, but food and gluttony were still numbing to one’s spirit.

“Mr. Fortunati…blah blah blah…Mr. Fortunati…blah blah blah,” was basically all I heard because I had developed a habit of not “eavesdropping” on his conversations. I used to listen to everything that went on, thinking that somehow it would assist me some day in my escape. But as the years went on and my sentence appeared eternal—and I was chastised over and over by Allred for listening to his business—it all became a dull drone. I figured it gave me time for my own thoughts this way. My own thoughts were sometimes of a forbidden nature. It was just something in my character, a base, hormonal inclination of my senses that could be as easily stopped as a tidal wave.

As we used to say in the outside world. A woman can dream, can’t she?

But that day, the name of Gideon Fortunati rang in the stale air. Allred and the Stake President, Parley Pipkin, were both smoking cigars. The open window that let onto the schoolyard didn’t dispel all of the smoke. I hated being in there, but suddenly I was intent on setting their paper doilies exactly so on their side tables, in making sure the fans cleared the air but didn’t muss their hair.

“Military weapons, M16s, AK47s, MP5 submachine guns, lots of assault rifles,” Allred was telling Parley.

I had to dally until they brought up this Gideon Fortunati guy again. I didn’t care if he was an arms dealer. People had to resort to some low, amoral things in this life of travails. While, of course, I advocated peace—I had constantly received inspirations that I needed to stay in Cornucopia, remain placid, and protect what remained of the bosom of my family—I wasn’t one to deny a man the right to make a living. And, I suppose, the fact that he was an outsider piqued my interest too. I needed constant reminders of the life outside, reminders that there were other ways of doing things.

“Where’s he getting them from, the Mexicans?”

Allred spewed a thin stream of cigar smoke. “I don’t know and I don’t care, Brother Parley. He’s the middleman so we’ve got no connection to them beaners.”

“Or those pinkos, whichever the case may be.”

“Russkies, pinkos, my point is, I don’t care the origin. Mr. Fortunati’s made sure they’re all clean.”

“No serial numbers on any of the irons?”

“None. Leastways, there’d best not be.”

Parley asked, “If there are so many, why don’t we sell some?”

Allred drew his head back like a lizard. I’d seen that look many a time before, right before he struck. His eyes narrowed, his nostrils flared, and his head even seemed to take on a reptilian shape. “Sell? And risk being connected to an arms shipment?”

Parley fluttered his hands. “Never mind, Prophet. We need all the protection we can get here in Cornucopia.”

“You bet your ass,” the lizard said. Then he looked up at me. I was aimlessly polishing a silver sugar bowl with the hem of my apron. “Ain’t you got nothing better to do, woman? Why you want to be listening in on the conversation of men, anyway?”

“I wasn’t listening,” I protested innocently. “As you know, Prophet.” But I put the silver bowl down and made my demure exit.

Parley yelled after me, “Sister Mahalia. We want them little meat popovers. Nice and glazed!”

He meant empañadas. Being a mixed race, part Latina woman myself, it irked me when people couldn’t use the correct name for things.

I was frustrated, too, that I hadn’t heard more about Gideon Fortunati. I shuffled back to the kitchen in my sensible shoes. On the outside, I hadn’t been forced to wear this restrictive, dull garb. After five years of looking exactly like every woman in Cornucopia, I still wasn’t used to it.

“Kimball,” I told my friend, “they want those extra glazed. Here, you keep crimping them. I’ll beat some eggs.”

But I guess I was sighing heavily while beating the whites with a fork, because Kimball soon asked, “They say anything about that Mr. Fortunati guy?”

“
No
,” I said, with more force than was necessary. “And it’s driving me up a wall. I have a feeling he’s handsome.”

“You said he’s in a biker club, right? He probably looks like that Mr. Grillo guy who came last year to sell arms.”

“Oh,
Lord!
” The bowl nearly slipped out of my hands, I was so aghast. “That Mr. Grillo guy was a nasty condom breath! His filthy pants were sagging low, he smelled like motor oil and something worse, and his hair looked like a greasy Medusa. No, thank you! I had to spray the chair with Lysol for days after he left.”

“
Oo
.” Kimball pretended to be shocked at my use of “condom breath.” She’d been born here twenty years ago and had never known any other way of life. But she read widely, as did I, so I knew she wasn’t
really
shocked. She was Allred’s thirty-ninth wife. I was his fortieth. “Yes, he was a nasty customer, all right. But remember that tungsten salesman from near Salt Lake? Now
he
was something to look at.”

It was racy, discussing outside men like this, but we liked to do it. I was President of the Relief Society, organizing donations to the needy, and Kimball was my counselor or Vice President. I loved her like a sister, having left my biological sisters behind on the outside. “Oh, that Mr. Lawler was one giant stud. I’ve never seen a belt buckle that big. Guess everything’s bigger in Texas. Here, let me swipe your fluffy pockets.”

We giggled like idiots as I slashed the empañadas with a pastry brush. I even smiled to myself when I heard the remote buzz of a motorcycle’s tailpipes approaching Allred’s mall. My eyes flickered to Kimball and we grinned wickedly. My husband Field—sorry, my
first
husband—had owned a motorcycle. Not a Harley, more like a rice rocket, but still, we used to enjoy “canyon carving” out in Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon, and all the natural wonderlands of Utah. Things were so much different then, on the outside.

Oddly, a different bike’s engine joined in, creating a stereo roar as they approached.
Two
bikers? This would definitely be the highlight of the month. I hurried my pace with the brush as the two bikes cut their engines out front. There weren’t too many vehicles per capita inside Cornucopia, so it was always easy to get a parking spot anywhere. However, I dropped the brush when the loud barking of two men started down there.

“Shiz!” Not bothering to stick the little pies in the oven, I rushed to the window, Kimball close at my heels.

And saw a sight that had never taken place inside the walls of Cornucopia.

Two rough and tumble bikers were vehemently arguing down there. One was heavily muscled with tattooed sleeves and leather cuffs. His flimsy, thinning brown hair stuck out from under a wool beanie. The other was tall, rugged, and sinewy in his leather chaps. He’d shoved the beanie guy in the chest, so his black “wifebeater” shirt was hiked up to reveal a strip of lean, white flesh.