Page 73 of Freak
“Okay. Thanks, doc. When can I get out of here?”
Dr. Doogie laughed like a sixty-year-old high school science teacher who’d just heard the star jock ask how he could pass the class. “You’ve got some healing to do before you’re ready for that. You’ll be our guest for at least five more days, if everything goes well. Then you’ll have several weeks of recovery at home, too. Right now, though, our job is to guard against infection and get your levels where they belong. You lost a lot of blood, Mr. Lind. About as much as youcanlose and still be talking to me now.”
Again, Abigail squeezed his hand. Mel squeezed back.
He met her eyes. She was fucking gorgeous, but she looked like she hadn’t slept in days—and she hadn’t. If he was counting right, she’d spent a night in a waiting room, and then two nights in that recliner thing she was sitting in now. She’d insisted she wouldn’t leave him. Apparently the Horde were taking turns keeping her animals and gardens cared for so she could stay with him.
Mel liked that a lot. It meant the club saw her as one of their own. Not simply a Signal Bend resident, but a member of the family. She was his, so she was theirs.
Yeah, he felt damn lucky.
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~oOo~
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“For now, it’s settledenough,” Badger said wearily, staring at his boots. “There’s still damage control to do in town—not least with our own women, who are collectively mad as fuck at the mess we made of the festival—but for the club, everybody’s where they belong, back home, licking their wounds. We parted ways in some kind of peace. But I’d be a liar to say there’s no trouble down deep, and a fool to think it.”
Their president looked like shit. The gash on his face was long and had gone down to bone, forehead to left cheek, and the sutured wound looked like something out of one of those old black-and-white horror movies. A few more injuries like that, and his face would be in Gravy Grayson territory. He was pale and gaunt, too. Mel didn’t think he’d slept since the day Montana had rolled into town.
He wasn’t exactly sure how long ago that had been. Seemed like years, but it couldn’t have been more than a few days. Right?
“Rot,” Showdown muttered. “That’s what’s down deep. Rot.”
“And it’s not settled enough, Badge,” Isaac said, “Saxondiedin that mess. And Montana lost Maniac. They’re not gonna set that aside anymore than we are. It’s not settled at all.”
The mention that Saxon was gone, a reminder no one in the room needed, turned the air to stone. No one spoke or moved, or even made eye contact with anybody else.
The surviving Missouri Horde, including their wounded, were arrayed in a sloppy circle in the hospital chapel, finally gathered for a debrief of the Harvest Festival mess. Mel still couldn’t walk much—getting shot in the gut and then opened wide so the doctor could find the bullet and repair its damage turned out to pretty much fuck your whole bottom half—so Thumper had wheeled him down and parked him in the aisle between the oaken pews.
They’d waited this meeting for Mel, the most injured of the surviving Missouri patches. Aside from losing Saxon, Badger’s burgeoning scar and Kellen’s dislocated shoulder were the other serious injuries for Missouri, but almost everyone else was sporting a bruise or a sprain or a healing cut. Most of them had a collection of such injuries.
“Sax didn’t even fucking start it,” Cox finally said, his voice a rumble of quiet fury. He turned to Kellen. “That wasyou, you piece of shit.”
Mel still had no memory of the fight. The last thing he remembered was settling on the blanket with Abigail. But he’d heard the story, now, from the perspective of almost all the patches. From those, he’d put together a pretty solid version of events, he thought, but it still felt halfway unreal. Even losing Saxon didn’t yet sit in his mind like a truth. The whole thing was more like a news story he’d read than something he’d lived.
There had been a few actual news stories as well.
The version he’d assembled was that Maniac had said something to Kellen—he didn’t know what, exactly, nobody did but Kellen, who wasn’t sharing, but Mel knew the shit that drove Kell nuts, so it was probably something about his toughness (or lack thereof) or his increasing outsider status in the club. Kellen answered with a punch to Maniac’s gut, and a scuffle ensued. The patches closest by, Cox and Darwin, were at first inclined to let them fight, fisticuffs were practically part of the official program at a Horde party, but then a civilian in the area called out to be careful of the fire.
After that, stories vary. Cox and Darwin, who’d moved in to break it up, said it looked like Kellen had intentionally movedtowardthe fire then and shoved Maniac into it on purpose. Kellen categorically, steadfastly denied this. He insisted it was an accident, and he was the only one in Missouri who spoke with certainty about it.
Whichever version was true, a brawl had exploded, during which a lot of patches had been hurt and two had died. Saxon, stabbed fourteen times, died the first night in the hospital. Maniac had died on Monday, after almost three excruciating days in the burn unit.
Mel had apparently been hit by something like an AR-15. Most of the patches and quite a few civilians had reported hearing semi-automatic gunfire. But nobody yet knew who had that gun. Montana insisted they hadn’t brought that kind of heat with them, and nobody in Missouri had seen anything to refute it, not even during the brawl. Neither had SoCal. It was supposed to have been a friendly club reunion; you didn’t bring war weapons to a party unless you were planning to start a war.
For exactly that reason, Mel felt sure a Montana patch had shot him. Double A agreed. They’d both been in that weird sit-down with Rhett and Gravy. They’d heard their contempt for Missouri, and they both wondered if Montana didn’t have an unfriendly plan in the works. But Badger didn’t want to go there. Not yet, at least.
Nobody was sure who’d stabbed Saxon; he’d never regained consciousness. Missouri didn’t know where to turn for justice for him, either. Not yet, at least.
Thwarted justice was becoming a habit in Missouri.
Montana, on the other hand, was demanding Kellen’s head.
Without any clear truth about that night, Badger had grabbed Kellen’s version as the official one. Montana refused to entertain that possibility. The only thing that kept all-out civil war from happening in the middle of Signal Bend was that no other Montana patch—or, for that matter, SoCal, who were thus far playing Switzerland in the Horde war story—had seen the trouble start. And whatever Rhett might be planning, if he was planning anything, he wasn’t ready to press start yet.
Officially, Missouri considered Maniac’s death an accident, as Kellen continued to insist. Internally, however, Cox and Darwin hadwaymore cred than Kell, so that dude was on borrowed time. Sitting in the middle of this grim meeting of the walking (and rolling) wounded, Mel could see what he was sure everybody else saw, too: to try to avert a civil war, to keep the Night Horde MC whole, Missouri might well have to serve Kellen to Montana on a plate.
