Whoa, you're still here! Sit down, have a cookie, and enjoy chapter 1! PART 1
Viking
"You."
Slam.
"Fucking."
Slam.
"Fucker."
Slam.
"Fucking."
Crack.
"Knocked."
Crack.
"My."
Crunch-slop.
A solid spray of blood hit me in the eyes. I wiped them with the back of my left wrist. Couldn't even see what I was hitting any more.
Turned out, the aforementioned Nazi was pretty much unrecognizable as a human being already. Where his decidedly non-Aryan face had been was now a fist-size crater filled with bits of bones, teeth and cartilage that were swimming in blood.
Huh. They don't make 'em like they used to.
"Fucking tooth out," I finished my sentence, got up and added my own gob of blood into the puddle that used to be some white supremacist's face. The asshole had got in a lucky punch with his elbow when I went round a corner without checking first, knocking me on my ass and robbing me of my upper left eyetooth. Fuck me! With all the punches in the mouth I was regularly getting from my MC brothers for imparting my wisdom on them, it was a nasty surprise that some no-name neo-Nazi fucker would be the one to finally knock out one of my teeth.
"Jesus, Vike. Did he try to fuck you in the ass without asking first?" AK, my assigned partner for this ambush, eyed the messy pile of human leftovers – and then me – with some distaste, then got back to scouting the area, ever the professional sniper. AK had no problem with gore. He just didn't approve of being messy, and I looked like Carrie White, post-prom.
"Fucker ruined the greatest smile the Hangmen ever had. The club sluts are gonna cry so much y'all are gonna have to use my cock as a snorkel to stay alive during the flooding," I grumbled, sucking more blood out of the jagged hole my gums had recently acquired and spitting it out.
"That makes zero fucking sense, man," AK remarked. I wasn't even gonna dignify that with a response.
"Gonna have to ask Prez for a fucking dental plan." I felt around the fresh wound with the tip of my tongue and winced. Bits of the root were still stuck in there. Figured. Weak-assed Nazis couldn't even finish a job like that properly. "Mighty looking forward to that conversation."
AK snorted a laugh, then fell silent when a salvo of gunfire rang out nearby, followed by several answering salvos. "Sounds like Hush and Cowboy found the rest of the party."
Salvos. Screams and yells, none of which sounded even remotely like a Hangman. Fewer salvos.
I huffed. "Well, that'll keep those two lovebirds busy for a while." I picked organic bits of Nazi out of my heavy-duty brass knuckles, checked and re-checked my own guns and knives that had become dislodged during the scuffle and relieved the corpse of everything potentially useful, such as a ridiculous-looking and small but serviceable Luger handgun, ammo, and a heavy ring of keys that winked at me. "And afterwards they'll take each other's clothes off and oil each other up, and there'll be the Careless Whisper-saxophone solo and all that shit. What I'm saying is," I turned to AK, hefting my rifle, "I say we leave them to it and go in through the back. And by that I don't mean buttsex, but literally, going in through the back. Of the camp. Cover me."
AK shook his head at me and rolled his eyes with a snort – I counted that as a fucking victory – and followed anyway.
We made our way across the gloomy, deserted camp, keeping to the building's shadows when possible and moving fast across open spaces that were dimly lit by low wattage floodlights. There wasn't anyone left for AK to cover me from, though. Nothing but dead bodies were out and about in Naziville, Bumfuck, Hudspeth County, Texas.
Behind the northernmost shed, we ran into Samson and Smiler. Samson, a navy SEAL-looking hulk of a guy, was a newer brother, a defector from The Order, a long-gone doomsday cult based near Austin. Smiler, on the other hand, was a lifer and had practically already been patched in before his balls had dropped. He was pretty much the coldest-blooded motherfucker I had ever known, and thus the most fun to annoy.
Just as we met up, the last burst of gunfire cut off, and then there was silence for a few long minutes.
"Those were the last few," Smiler declared. "Seems like Texas is officially Nazi-free."
"Man, is that a smile I spy around your mouth?" I asked the brother, shoving his massive shoulder and getting in his face. I couldn't help it. It was my mission to make my brothers crack up every once in a while, and he and his frowny fucking mug always been a challenge. "That what it takes? Killing the last Nazis? You should've told us, Smiles! We would've saved the last few for you personally. Kidnapped some, kept them alive in a storage shed, given them to you on your birthday and shit like that."
Smiler looked at me, all resting murder-bitch-face. I grinned back at him. I knew I was close, this close to cracking him.
"Fuck is happening in your mouth, Vike?" Samson asked, laughing. After six years with us, he finally almost sounded like a proper brother when he talked.
I turned to him, taking a step toward him while making sure to keep the grin in place so he could get a load of the nasty war wound I had earned. I felt blood seep into my beard. "Come closer, hon. I'll tell you the whole story."
"Girls, when you're done with the catfighting, we split up and sweep the buildings. Tanner just messaged me, says Satellite pics say we got all the hostiles. No heat signatures left." AK put his phone into his breast pocket. "Remember, kids: Pillage first, then burn. And then we fucking go home."
The four of us scattered, randomly choosing a building to loot and eventually set alight if it proved uninteresting and was made of flammable material.
Some years ago, the Hades Hangmen MC had collectively resolved to purge the state of Texas of the plague that was Meister and his neo-Nazi operation. It had taken much longer than anyone had hoped for – fascists were fucking everywhere, including, apparently, the oval office. There were so many fucking layers to the Nazi onion – Old-skoolers, Neos, American Front, the KKK, the National Renaissance Party, couple of all-white church groups, massive parts of the fucking NRA… everyone and their gramps seemed to have a big ol' boner for the good ol' days when white men could fuck up non-white people and get a clap on the shoulder for it. Couple of years ago, Meister's neos in particular had even teamed up with the fucking Mexican cartels – another far-reaching organization that was completely unfamiliar with the concept of motherfucking irony – because they really, really wanted us meddling Hangmen dead and out of Texas.
But right here, so close to the border of Mexico that the people in Chihuahua could probably smell our farts on the wind if they lifted their noses, the mission was finally accomplished. Only a few more buildings to blow up, a few bodies to burn, and every trace of the gang of bastards who had crossed the biggest, meanest MC in the entire US of A would be gone. History. Finito.
Life is fucking good, I thought to myself as I entered one of the few concrete constructions in the encampment, a dilapidated-looking one-storey, flat-roofed bungalow-looking hovel that sat up north-west on what might graciously be called the 'main road'.
Somewhere in the distance, I heard the back-up roll in, no doubt right through the front door and along that main road because who the fuck was left to stop us? The thunder of American-made motorcycles was unmistakable. A handful of brothers from the Roswell chapter would help with the dirty work. Bass and Hook, two former combat engineers and EODs, would bring in heavy duty C4 and create a beautiful new crater, right here.
And then we would all go home and fucking party. There would be booze and boobs galore. Naturally, all my pussy-whipped brothers would take their old ladies and their kids to their cabins before the moon was even up, leaving all the good stuff and the cock-hungry bitches for me.
Bikes, brawls, booze, and bitches. Shade had been a major prick during his reign but his advertising pitch had proved to be true on all counts.
Buying what Shade had been selling? Best decision of my life.
/
I looked through the rooms of the house that turned out to be an actual residence, complete with living room, bathroom and kitchen, even though all of them were run-down and straight-up nasty, like something out of an early episode of Hoarders. I swore out loud when I opened another door, finding a storage closet that was inhabited by several decent-sized rats which promptly fled all over my boots.
"Found myself the jackpot," I groused and threw the door shut to keep the reek of rodent scat in. Not that it made much of a difference. "Fucking Nazi scum, living in their own filth. Look at the ceiling crumbling down around your fucking ears. Jesus fucking H Christ. Y'all really let standards slide. Adolf would be so disappointed. What happened to shining your fucking combat boots until you can see yourself in them and keeping your fucking rooms tidy? Man, your ceiling mold is more evolved than your average foot soldier. No wonder a mere dozen biker assholes can come along and fuck you all up within a single night."
Stomping out Nazis was always fun, sure, but it was also a bit like Whac-a-mole. Fuckers kept cropping up because some asshole or another kept financing them. I just wanted to know why Texas, of all places. Was it the fucking landscape? The weather? Were Nazis secretly into authentic fajitas, or into spic bitches, like the Hangmen's resident ex-Nazi, Tanner? Or didn't they come here at all, were they all born here in the first place? Was every Nazi once a Confederate flag waving retard at heart?
In any case, the weakening of the Texan Nazi bloodline had been duly noted during the last few years. Their strongholds got progressively more like weakholds, their equipment less and less impressive, their numbers smaller and smaller overall and the individuals that constituted their ranks… well, none of them had been voted Most Likely to Find the Cure for Cancer in their high school yearbook, that was for fucking sure. Tanner's intel said that they were hoarding the last few considerable stocks of guns and dirty explosives in this particular encampment, but I'd be surprised if anyone up the Nazi food chain had trusted the limp dicks who lived here with anything more valuable than crates full of packing peanuts.
I looked around some more, pointing my gun at rotting furniture and kicking closet doors open –and quickly shut again – with the tip of my boot. Man, this was a definite, pathetic low. Another indication that we had indeed reached the end of this particular road. Fucking finally. I was going to make sure that the upcoming party would be the mother of all parties.
Finally, we could go back to fucking up Russians, Irish or Asians, like in the good old days. Honest-to-goodness, old-fashioned club runs, in and out, one and done, maybe half a day's ride away from the compound so that we could ride out by first light, fuck some assholes up in the afternoon, take their money and their guns, and be home and in some club slut's pussy in the evening. I was actually looking forward to that. I was sick to death of lying around three nights in a row scouting boring Nazi encampment movements through night vision binoculars while Texas dirt slowly accumulated in my ass crack.
The last door to the left was padlocked shut. I considered shooting it open – close range, high powered gun, that would work, no problemo – but then I remember the keys I had taken off the asswipe who had ruined my pearly whites. Might was well give it a try.
There were eight keys on the chain, but only two that might fit into a run-of-the-mill steel padlock. The second one actually fit and turned, much to my surprise. Fuck me. Did I accidentally kill the fuckin' Führer? Pathetic as it was, this house was clearly some sort of personal living quarter for a more important asshole within the Nazi ranks. It stood to reason that the guy with the keys would be the guy who lived here. I made a mental note to look through the house more thoroughly again before it was blown up. Chances were an Ober-Nazi was hiding important or valuable shit in safes hidden behind framed pictures of Eva fucking Braun or some crap like that.
God, I hated Nazis. Even and especially pathetic ones.
I jiggled the padlock open and slid the door latch aside. Before I even stepped into the dark room, the smell hit me in the nose and registered immediately in the more primitive parts of my brain.
Sex and death. That's what went through my head.
Not just any sex. Bad sex, not the fun kind. The kind that drew blood and tears and made one participant sweat with anger, and the other piss themselves in defense and fear, and ended with one of them retching up bile because of what had happened.
Not just any death. The creeping, slow, agonizing kind that came from sickness and infection, from bacteria in human excrement and from rot spreading through body parts.
I yanked the collar of my T-shirt up and over my nose to stave off some of the stench, and my gun from my holster, just in case. My weaker left hand needed several long seconds to find the light switch on the wall and flip it.
/
I squinted against the light. There was a fucking authentic-looking chandelier dangling from the ceiling, brighter than a whole Christmas tree. The whole room looked like a hyper-stylized time capsule of upper class Germany in the 1930s, complete with shiny wine red-and-gold wallpaper and polished oak wood, a creepy ass Carl Spitzweg painting mounted above an obviously fake ass fireplace next to a fake ass window hung with gold-thread curtains, and a gramophone on a small table in the corner.
And on the bed, there was a human being.
I thought it was a corpse, not only because Tanner had confirmed no other heat signatures. It was a pasty-white bag of bones, lying face-down, arms and legs spread-eagled wide because all four extremities had been tied to the four bedposts with what looked like electrical cords. Someone had put a bag or a hood over their head, but not given them clothes to cover up. The bed, and the person on it, was clearly the source of the smell. The sheets were stained with all sorts of bodily fluids (and semi-solids), and so was the body itself.
"God, I hate Nazis," I quietly reiterated, then yelled "FUCK!" and reflexively pointed my gun when, at my words, the corpse flinched.
Not a corpse, then.
Not yet, anyway.
Several seconds ticked by before a reasonable thought filtered through the adrenaline spike.
Not a corpse, Viking, but also clearly not a threat. Put your gun down, you moron. That's clearly a victim. Take your fucking KA-BAR and cut them loose. And how about calling AK or someone so they can get some fucking help?
My inner voice confused me sometimes. Too many clever ideas at once, and also, it sounded an awful lot like AK – not that I would ever tell the real AK that – who talked about himself in third person. Very weird.
"Found something interesting?" The real AK had answered his phone on the first ring.
"Someone, at the brick bungalow shithole," I replied. "Still alive, though you wouldn't know it by the stink."
I looked to the person on the bed again. They had jerkily moved around some more, as much as the cables allowed, and now that the first surprise had subsided, I had time to process what I was fucking looking at.
With all the blood and filth and dramatic shadows from the chandelier, there was no telling what was going on between their spread legs, genitalia-wise – and I really didn't want to look too closely anyway – but their general shape was delicate, there was a definite swell of a tit smooshed into the dirty sheet underneath, and the way their ass and hips were shaped was another giveaway.
Apart from the grip and trigger of my favorite M24E6, the handlebars of my bike, and my own cock, a female ass was pretty much the most familiar shape in this world to me.
"It's a woman." One with a potentially nice ass, too. If she survived.
There was a silence, then AK replied from between clenched teeth, "Be right there", and hung up.
I knew that AK was thinking about Phebe and Sapphira, because I was, too. The Meister-sponsored horror brothels for the Nazi goons that we had pulled them out of were not something any Hangman would ever forget as long as he lived. Talk about real fucked up shit.
But for AK, the memory had burnt in deep, into the core of his soul. Probably because both Phebe and Saff still had nightmares about it from time to time and there was nothing he could really do to help them.
That was reason why, over the past six years, AK – reasonable, strategizing AK who came up with plans A to F for every tiny club run, but would rather stay home with his old lady and his adopted daughter – had been the most vocal about immediately hammering every last trace of Nazi into the ground. Someone caught a whiff of a White Power gathering somewhere in Texas? AK wanted to be there, with all the guns and all the backup, ready to nuke the place and everyone in it. Someone whispered about a new Meister on the rise? AK was the one standing by the aspirant's bed in the middle of the night, waking him up with a shower of gasoline and a lit cigarette. When it came to obliterating Meister's legacy and dissuading anyone from recreating his enterprise, AK had been like a rabid dog with a bone.
I could only guess what seeing this girl in this state would do to the brother. Especially now that there was literally no one left in the entire state of Texas on whom he could wreak vengeance, on her behalf, and on Phebe's, and on Sapphira's. I didn't really want him to see her.
And I wanted to get out of this shit museum, yesterday, before the smell of bloody diarrhea lodged in my nose permanently.
So I holstered my gun, pulled out the knife and started cutting the cables that bound the half-dead girl's right wrist to the bed frame.
"Stay still. Don't move," I told her, just in case she could hear or understand me at all. "I'm cutting these off, but you gotta stay still for me. Alright? I don't want to hurt you. I'll start with your right hand."
The plastic-wrapped copper wires gave way easily enough. Once the cut was made, the loops around her wrist loosened and fell away.
"That's one down, three to go. You're doing fine. Just these three left, and then we're fucking outta here."
I worked my way clockwise around the bed, carefully breathing only through my mouth the whole time. Once her left wrist was free, she was finally untied. I needn't have bothered with the 'don't move' thing, because she was not even giving me so much as a wriggle. I watched her torso intently for a second to see if she was even still breathing. She was. Putting firm hands on her – adding some bloody hand prints to the filthy canvas of her skin, too – I rolled her onto her back and towards me. She didn't seem to register anything that was happening. Her limbs were limp like noodles, tangling in the sheets and with each other when she flopped onto her back.
I tried not to look too closely at her, but I saw it anyway. I saw it all and I would remember it whether I wanted to or not.
Look. When it came to bitches, I was all for using them well and fucking them hard, and vice versa. I didn't see much of a problem with a hard slap across the face or a good spanking with a belt when they got mouthy and needed their software rebooted real quick – when a good dicking didn't do the job, which it usually did. And good dickings, as well as slaps and spankings, left marks here and there. I had left marks on women before, I knew, very few of them permanent. What could I say? I was a big, strong guy who was frequently real fucking drunk – more often than not, so were the sluts I was fucking at the time I was fucking them. Several of my brothers, whom I frequently shared sluts with, were considerably rougher with them than me, and MC life in general wasn't exactly treating anyone with kid gloves. Not to mention that most sluts didn't come to an MC party to have sweet, tame vanilla sex with a bunch of pansy-assed sensitive types.
I had seen plenty women who were worse for wear.
But there were lines. They were crystal clear to every fucking person with half a brain and a beating heart. They just couldn't be crossed, ever.
Unless, apparently, if you were a fucking Nazi, then you had the fucking audacity to trample all over those lines, over and over again, as if that was your fucking birthright and a bitch owed it to you.
Goddamn it. This was part of the reason why I was fucking glad to go on proper old-school club runs again and fuck up some grown-ass men over half a kilo of coke and a nasty word. I had seen too much shit like this in the last couple of years. Too many Nazi brothels. Too many underage pussies strapped to beds, drugged to the gills, with a For Sale-sign saying '4000 bucks per fuck' dangling from the ceiling. Fucking Mexicans. Fucking slave traders. Fucking Nazis.
I really, really fucking hate Nazis.
I inhaled and exhaled deeply to tamp down the rage. This wasn't the time to let that shit show. I was about to have her look in my face, too, and I didn't want the first thing she saw to be a bloodthirsty grimace. My mug was bad enough in neutral, especially with all the blood around my mouth.
"Alright. So far, so good, sugarbun. I'm going to take this thing off now." I gathered one seam of the burlap-like material in my fingers and pulled it off as carefully as possible so I wouldn't rip off her hair along with it, and to not frighten her with the sudden light.
The face that appeared before me was as bad as the rest of her body, if not worse – which was probably why Mr Obernazi had put a bag on it in the first place. I barely bit back a rather vicious curse at the sight of it.
As gently as possible, I wiped dirty, sweaty hair to the side. I fished some ash blond strands out of her blood-and-bile-caked mouth and untangled them from her crusty eyelashes to make her a little bit more comfortable and have a better look at her. See if there was anything left to salvage here, or if those twitches were merely death throes.
Her eyes were rolling around in their sockets, bloodshot and empty of consciousness, her scabbed, lash-less eyelids fluttering shut at random and independently from one another, like one of those creepy, old-fashioned lifelike baby dolls that 'went to sleep' when you laid them down on their backs.
There was a half-mended cut in the middle of a chicken egg-sized bruise on her right cheek that looked exactly like someone had repeatedly backhanded her while wearing one of those heavy signet rings on their finger. A hundred bucks said that I would find a ring just like that on the hand of one very dead Nazi lying outside.
The worst bit was whatever the hell was happening with her nose. It looked like an oversized septum piercing that had started turn necrotic, but I couldn't be sure with all the swollen tissue and the blood crusted around it. Her upper lip and the skin between it and her nostrils was an angry, swollen, oozing bulge, her nose blown up as if repeatedly stung by a very pissed-off hornet.
All that shit still couldn't hide the fact that the bitch was a stunner. Just the proportions and shape of her face, the structure of her cheek bones and the bow of mouth gave it away. Get her back on her feet, clean her up, put some meat on her bones and she would end up looking nearly as stunning as the VP's old lady.
Something about her face tickled my memory. I was not usually good with names, but I hardly ever forgot a face, and the longer I looked at it, the more certain I was that I had seen this face before. But where? When?
Lilah. Bella. Maddie. Mae. This bitch – some connection clicked into place. I frowned down at her. They belonged together, somehow –
I had seen her before, just several years younger, together with the other former cult bitches— wearing that same gray bag-dress and that ugly fucking hair thing that Lilah had worn for ages—She had lived with Lilah and Ky, who had never bought her act-
"Motherfuck!"
My memory rolled over and spat out a name from far, far back.
Sarai.
/TBC