Chapter Two
Savage
T here’s so much noise when I wake up that my initial thought is I wish I’d died. My entire body throbs and my head feels like it’s two sizes bigger than usual.
My father’s voice filters through the din. My entire being has been cultivated to be attuned to him. His every mood and desire. Every shift in the wind. The cells of my body have always pointed toward him, like grass growing toward the sun.
But the Oklahoma sun. The kind that burns so fiercely in summer that the grass wilts and withers under its glare. It’s no surprise my addled brain hears his bellow before I even open my eyes or make a conclusive deduction on whether I’m truly alive.
“If they want a war, we’ll show those dumb Nazi fucks what a real war looks like.” His voice drips with vitriol and rage.
There’s murmuring, like the sound of someone standing close and trying to calm him down.
Good luck.
“They. Shot. Tadhg,” he spits. “He could have been killed. Look at him! He’s still halfway to being a corpse.”
Father calling me by my real name makes it clear how grave this is. He hasn’t called me anything but Savage in years. I was already feeling shaky, gripped by pain and nausea, but the intensity of his reaction is unsettling me more deeply than anything else.
“Exactly,” a quiet voice says. It’s tense but rational. Maybe Colm, if he didn’t die back at the courthouse. “He can’t stay here. Look at him. It’ll take weeks or even months for him to recover from this. If we stay here, he’s leaving us vulnerable.”
My eyes are open, I think. I recognize the vaulted ceiling of one of our safe houses, although I’m too dopey to figure out which one right now. Maybe one of the industrial storage facilities outside of the city. Then the world shimmers for a moment, and when it comes back into focus, Father’s clammy hands are on my face.
It’s such a shock. My gut reaction is to jerk away from his touch. I wouldn’t usually lose control in front of him like this, but right now my brain feels like pain soup with nothing but raw animal instincts swimming around in it, desperately trying to keep my body operating.
I’m weak, so I don’t make it far. Father frowns, which sets off warning bells in my head.
God, everything hurts so much. I should never have stayed with him. I should have run away the second I turned eighteen.
Maybe I could have found wherever Micah and his mom ended up when they fled my father’s influence. They might have taken me in, and then I’d be a normal person instead of a sweaty, bullet-ridden criminal about to die on a warehouse floor, cradled in the arms of the person I hate the most in this world.
My world has always been painful, but when I had Micah, I also had a purpose. Protecting him from Father kept me focused. It made me feel useful, and I think it was the thing that let me cling to my humanity for much longer than Father probably wanted.
If he’d had total control, I would have come out of the womb with a gun in each hand and no moral compass to drag me down.
Father’s disappointment was my fault, but protecting Micah from his wrath was my responsibility. It’s not like his mother was ever going to do it. She shocked us all by eventually sobering up, coming to her senses, and sneaking out of our lives in the middle of the night.
I can understand why she needed to get away from him . But the childish part of me will never not be angry about the fact that she took Micah with her. Without him, my life was suddenly meaningless. The only thing I had left was keeping Father happy.
Which I devoted myself to, and look how well that worked out for me.
I think I moan. I want to roll over on my side because the pain is climbing up my ribs like a monster trying to reach my throat. The floor is cold. Concrete. It feels like pure relief on my overheated skin, but Father keeps pushing me back whenever I roll over.
“Stay still, Tadhg. You’ll tear the wound worse. Those fuckers really got you.” He’s muttering to me, and I don’t think he knows if I can hear him or not. At some point, my eyes closed again. “Don’t worry, though. I’m going to tear their fucking world apart. I’ll show them what happens when you fuck with the Banna.”
I try to summon some kind of gratitude or fondness in response to his rage, but nothing happens. There’s nothing but hollowness.
I genuinely don’t give a fuck about the Aryan Brotherhood. I just want the pain to stop.
I just want to go back in time and slip out of my bedroom window so I can escape with Micah and his mom. I want to know what it’s like to be a normal twenty-five-year-old who has girlfriends and goes to college or has a job and plays flag football on the weekend.
Someone who doesn’t know the texture of a person’s insides. And who hasn’t missed their stepbrother like an amputated limb for twelve years.
Someone who isn’t dying on a warehouse floor.
I hope they ended up somewhere nice. At least someone in this world escaped my father’s reach.
My vision seems to thin and fray at the edges like worn-out film. Memories of my childhood superimpose themselves on top. I know it’s probably a sign that I have a fever, which is bad, but I don’t care. If I’m going to die, I’d rather die thinking about the past.
“Tadhg. Can you hear me, son?”
There’s something hot and tight around my hand. I thought my eyes were open, but I must have closed them at some point, because when I try to blink, they open and the light is offensively bright.
“How do you feel?”
“Da?” I try to put his face in focus, but everything is blurry. My head hurts too much, and I close my eyes again.
“I told you.” Colm’s calm voice pierces the veil of my semi-consciousness again. “He’s fucked up. He needs medical attention, and then we all need to get out of town until we can settle down this situation. Out of Oklahoma, if we can. You can’t stay here either. Not with all the other…”
I’m not sure if he trails off or if I stop caring. Whatever.
Let the Aryan Brotherhood show up and finish me off. I can go back to my dreams of being a kid again. This is the shit that seems like a nightmare.
When I wake up the next time, I feel more conscious. But that also means the pain is sharper. My shoulder throbs, along with my side and one hip, and no part of my body wants to move. Which is why it sucks that a lot of hands are pulling at me.
I try to bat them away, but moving my arms only makes the pain worse, and someone quickly pins my arms to my sides.
Or maybe it’s a blanket? I’m rocking from side to side like I’m being carried. Which is making me nauseous. There’s no warning before I turn my head and vomit onto the floor, and someone near me shouts.
It’s dark wherever we are, but I can smell rain. That intense petrichor smell that comes with hot summer storms and means that water is probably falling from the sky right now in thick sheets. If I concentrate, maybe I can hear it.
When the sound starts to pull me back into a dream-memory, I’m more than happy to go.
The rain is coming down in sheets that are so thick, you can hardly see through them. I’m soaked to the bone and shivering because the air conditioning is blasting, making my wet t-shirt feel like an icy cage. The air is still thick with summer heat despite the storm, which is why the A/C is on. It wasn’t accounting for the trash cans to get blown halfway down the block and for me to get soaked running after them.
Micah throws another blanket around my shoulders and rubs my arms while I shiver. He’s twelve, only a year younger than me, but he’s a full head shorter and his hands are small and delicate. Rubbing my arms isn’t warming me up at all, but it is making me feel better.
Da would probably make fun of him if he saw Micah playing nursemaid like this, but luckily, he and Cheryl are asleep. Or passed out. I don’t really care.
I rescued the cans so I don’t get a hiding when he wakes up, and Micah can take care of me like he wants, with no one else around to tease him.
“You’re an idiot,” he says in the same long-suffering tone he almost always uses with me. “Trash cans are not worth getting pneumonia over.”
“Yeah, but you know how mad he’d be. I’ll be fine.”
Micah watches me for a long time before he goes to grab another cheap fleece blanket. I keep shivering.
I’m shivering. I think I’m in the back of an SUV. I can tell that it’s daytime, but I’m not sure how much time has passed since the shooting.
The sun is streaming in, and it’s August, so it’s probably hot as Satan’s ball sack outside. But whoever’s driving has the A/C going, and it’s making the car seem like a walk-in freezer. I’m stretched across the back seat with a canvas jacket thrown over me, but it’s useless. My skin is covered in cold sweat, making me stick to the tan leather seats so much there’s a wet sucking sound when I try to shift position.
I want to ask them to turn it down, but my tongue feels too thick, and my throat is too dry.
Even swallowing takes so much effort, I’m ready to go back to sleep.
I touch my side where it hurts, and my fingers come away covered in dark, tacky blood. That’s my confirmation it’s time to go back to sleep.
Fuck consciousness.
I don’t know how much time passes after that. It could be days. I get jostled and poked and prodded, but the pain gets worse and so does the shivering. I’m still bleeding, and it’s getting harder to tell the difference between my dreams and when I’m awake.
The dreams about Micah are coming more frequently. He was the only one who ever took care of me, so it makes sense. I don’t normally let myself think about him, but if I’m going to die, who cares?
Dream-Micah cleans up my wounds and wraps me in a warm blanket, and it’s the first time I’ve felt relief since I found out I survived.
The next time I open my eyes, I know I’m really awake because everything hurts again. We’ve stopped moving at last. Thank fuck.
I feel more clearheaded than I have in days. My vision is almost normal. Except for the fact that dream-Micah is standing in front of me, in the middle of what might be the real world.
Also, he doesn’t look like dream-Micah anymore. He looks like an adult version of the child that lives in my memories.
He still has the same concerned wrinkle between his eyes that he always used to, but his face is different. It’s a man’s face, with sharp cheekbones under those big doe eyes. His dark hair isn’t long and messy anymore. Instead, it’s shorter at the sides and longer on top, just long enough to fall into his face and curl into his eyes.
Nothing feels right. Nothing feels real. I reach out for him on instinct, and he frowns, but leans down and tangles his hand in mine. Exactly how we used to in the closet. His hand is warm, but much larger than it used to be. It’s a man’s hand, with a square palm and long fingers.
I still can’t decide if he’s real or if I’m dreaming, but I cling to him, anyway.
Micah comes closer until his face is hovering just over mine. His mouth tugs up on one side in an approximation of a smile, although he looks drawn and tired, with dark shadows under his eyes.
His eyes are the same as they always were, though. No matter if the rest of him is different. They’re dark blue, like the color of river water when it’s been raining, and the banks are about to burst.
“Hey, Tadhg,” he says in a quiet voice. “Fancy seeing you here.”
I try to smile at him, but my face isn’t cooperating. Instead, I’m hit by a sudden wave of weakness. My chest feels concave, and that weakness is pulling the rest of me down with it. My eyes fill, and all the thoughts and feelings that I’m so careful to keep stuffed beneath the surface threaten to spill out.
What’s happening to me?
Micah frowns, because he was always good at reading how I felt, even when I tried to hide it. I can see him do a million lightning-quick calculations before his eyes flick to the side with a nervous glance. To the side where Father is probably standing, my brain realizes as it slowly comes back to reality.
“I’m sure it hurts like a bitch, brother,” he says. He’s giving me an out for the single tear that’s already slipped out of my eye and the others that are threatening to follow. His voice also sounds kind of fake. Not only like it’s the adult version of his voice that I’ve never heard before, but like it’s artificially deep, or something. “I’m going to get you fixed up. Promise. Close your eyes and try to stay still.”
I do as he says because that makes everything seem so much simpler in that moment. I also don’t want to risk catching a glimpse of my father’s face.
But I don’t let go of his hand, and he doesn’t let go of mine. If this is a dream, it’s a weird one, but I’ll take it.