2 - Shep
W hen I was discharged from CORE, the releasing officer handed me a booklet called Do’s and Don’ts: An Easy Transition into the New Life of You .
It was a fictional scenario in the vein of a second-person narrative of a man who I was supposed to identify with, getting discharged and what he experienced in his first two weeks of life on the outside.
The story revolves around a character called ‘You’.
And this is where the BS starts because second-person point of view is a trick. It’s a whole bunch of ‘you did this’ and ‘you did that’. Like it was really me in that story.
It’s a PSYOP mind fuck. Because everything about CORE is a PSYOP mind fuck.
But they made me read it before they let me go and I have to say, it did end up being pretty accurate.
You go to the store, hungry for food you’ve never eaten.
You choose many things, eager for a taste of what you’ve been missing, and then realize you don’t have any money and must make a choice:
Do you, a) Rob the store and take the food?
Or, b) Put it all back?
This was a literal multiple-choice question. I chose to put it all back, of course, because it’s the textbook answer.
There were about twenty of these questions that needed to be answered before I was allowed to leave and I ticked all the right boxes.
But it’s one thing to be fictional ‘You’ in your first two weeks on the outside and quite another to be literal ‘Me’.
Most of the time when I went into the store, I did pay for it. I worked a few jobs to make ends meet, as they say. I played the game. But it’s all so rigged. I don’t understand how these people on the outside do it. I really, really don’t. It’s so obvious that all the rules and laws are enacted for one reason only: to keep a man down.
Or a woman. Or hell, even a child.
It’s all rigged .
So fuck it. I stopped paying.
Of course, ‘You’ predicted this. There was a whole chapter in that booklet about the court system and what to expect when ‘You’ go to prison.
Also very helpful, actually. Because I did go to prison.
For five years.
And I’m only out now because Charlie Beaufort made it happen.
Take a day for yourself . You look like you need one.
I’m not sure if I should be flattered that he’s taken notice or if Collin Creed telling me to fuck off my first full day at Edge Security as a new recruit is a bad omen of dark things to come, but either way, it doesn’t matter because I need this day off.
I’m sure his directive has more to do with the fact that he wasn’t expecting me to show up at nine o’clock last night, which means he doesn’t know what to do with me this morning, and less to do with my lack of sleep and disheveled appearance after getting a surprise early release from prison three days ago and my subsequent multi-day motorcycle ride across the country to the outskirts of Disciple, West Virginia.
Either way, it’s not good. But none of this is in my control, so I chant the words of wisdom passed on to me by ‘You’ in Do’s and Don’ts: Control the chaos, control yourself .
Of course, it didn’t help me before and that’s why I was in prison. But I’ve grown over the years. I’ve matured. I’ve learned how to live with these outside people, even if it was mostly from the inside of one of their prisons. And I figure, what the fuck? It can’t hurt. Maybe ‘You’ was on to something?
Controlling the chaos inside my head is pretty much the only superpower I have at the moment, so I blow out a breath as I ride into Revenant, slowing down so I can look at the storefronts, and try to absorb the hopeful energy of a fresh start.
Revenant is supposed to be the seedy part of Trinity County, but after prison, the idea that this small town is anything but quaint is ridiculous.
Still, my contract with Edge explicitly states that I agree to stay inside Trinity County and… well, if Creed is gonna kick me out, it won’t be over something as stupid as a beer in the wrong shit-stain small town.
It’s Monday morning right now, and while I do see that the diner is open as I slowly cruise through the bike-lined streets, the rest of the town looks abandoned. I’ve only ever been down here at night-time when things were rowdy enough to give off the impression of happenings, but now, in the morning sunshine, all I see is disappointment.
Still, my only other choice is Bishop, which is all the way over on the other side of the county, and while they do have pubs and I do like a wench in a peasant dress, I highly doubt that’s a better choice than my current location. So I ease the bike into a space in front of the diner, kick the stand, get off, and blow out a breath as I take my helmet off.
This is when I notice my own reflection in the diner window and even though it’s not a proper mirror, I have to agree with Collin Creed.
I look like shit.
All the overthinking that I kinda talked myself out of doing while riding down here comes flooding back.
It’s not real.
Men who get kicked out of CORE, rob stores, and get sentenced to ten years don’t just get out of prison one day and end up at Collin Creed’s Edge Security with a second chance.
It doesn’t happen that way, Shep. You know it doesn’t happen like that.
“But it did,” I mutter, still staring at my reflection in the window. “It did happen that way. Because here I am. And this is real.”
A woman appears on the other side of the window, smiling at me as she wipes down a table. “Come on in,” she says. Though I can’t hear her, I can read her lips.
She’s pretty. Cute, really. Looks like a real nice girl.
But I’m not the kind of man who gets the nice girl. I’m the kind of man nice girls need to run from. So I shake my head, turn away, and just start walking down the street towards the bar I was at last night.
To my surprise, the hours on the door say it’s open and the door is not locked when I pull on it, so I actually go inside.
Some old-school song is playing on a jukebox and the entire place is empty, save for a man standing on the other side of the bar polishing a pint glass. He’s looking up at a TV mounted in a corner, but glances over his shoulder at me when I enter.
“Mornin’,” he says, then goes back to watching the TV, which I notice is playing horse races. The mans stops polishing, almost leaning up on his tiptoes to see the race better, then he lets out a sigh. and says, “Fuck.” He chuckles, looks over his shoulder at me, and shrugs. “Well, there’s another hundred bucks gone. Guaranteed Gold, my ass. More like Lucky Loser.” He laughs at his joke. “Do you wanna beer or somethin’? Or are ya just here killin’ time until the fun starts? If so, you’ll be here all day. We’re not technically closed on Mondays—Lasher would shit a brick if we closed down the whole town to have a literal day off—but it’s known that we kinda are. People won’t start showin’ up for any kind of fun until after dark, friend. So if you’re lookin’ for a party, you’re not gonna find it here.”
I take a seat, set my helmet on the bar, and look around. “Well, I’ve been told by no one in particular”—I look back over at the bartender—“that I look like shit and should take a day.”
The guy nearly snorts. “Collin Creed tell you that? Or was it Amon?”
“Creed. And how’d you know I was one of them, anyway?”
“Shit, you Edge guys might as well be wearin’ nametags, that’s how much you all look alike. Killers, huh? That’s what you guys are?”
It’s a bold question if you ask me. But this guy asks it like he’s asking where I went to high school. “Somethin’ like that.” Then I look around, find the sign for the restrooms, and head that direction without another word to the barkeep.
I push the swinging door open, walk over to the sink, brace my hands on it, and stare at myself in the mirror. “This is real.”
My reflection takes a few moments to agree with me. But I force myself to look into my own blue eyes until the panic in my chest subsides and my heart calms down to a reasonable level. I glance over my shoulder in the mirror, noticing the décor. There are vintage metal signs on the walls. Oil signs, and gas station signs, and street signs. They don’t look like fake reproductions either. They look original. I turn around and see a corkboard on the wall near the door with lots of things tacked to it.
I walk over to the board and start reading things. Mostly it’s flyers for local bands, or whatever. Colorful pieces of half sheet paper printed up in sloppy black ink like it was done by hand.
All the other notes have the same nice touch. Boards like this are typically filled with business cards for local people. But aside from the flyers, most of the space on this one is taken up by handwritten notes.
The most prominent one is a piece of notebook paper with the words, For a good time call Sally , scrawled across it in black marker. There’s a phone number underneath with a five-five-five prefix.
Fake, obviously.
I scan the rest of the notes. There are no more sex offers, they are mostly for other businesses in Revenant. Though I do see one for a bowling alley in Disciple and a pub in Bishop, which are the other two towns in Trinity County.
Which has me pausing to reconsider the fakeness of it all.
That’s when I notice the map.
I reach out, give the piece of paper a tug, and pull it off the corkboard. What the hell is this?
It’s handwritten, like all the other notes on the board, and done up in black marker depicting a crudely drawn picture of a woman with big hair, and big eyes, and a speech bubble coming out of her mouth that reads, The Mule Pit Speakeasy is calling your name, soldier .
I scoff, then glance down at the map. It starts at the bar I’m in, leads out of town, down the highway towards Fayetteville, and then veers into a national forest. From there, it leads to a parking lot and a foot trail that takes you into the forest. The trail leads to what appears to be stairs, and the stairs lead to the bar.
“What the fuck?”
When I flip the page over, there’s a black and white photocopy of, presumably, the inside of the bar. But it’s a bad photocopy. Like it was run on a state-of-the-art Xerox machine circa nineteen-seventy-five.
And there’s a woman. This time, a real woman. She’s wearing a dress that gives off speakeasy vibes and is making a kissy face at the camera. Off to the side there’s another speech balloon that says, Come find me, soldier. I’m waiting here just for YOU .
The word ‘you’ is capitalized and underlined.
A creepy chill runs up my spine and makes the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
You .
Is that a sign? It this map for me? Like, specifically?
“For fuck’s sake, Shep. You’re insane.”
Which might be true. But that doesn’t cancel out the fact that I just found a map to some secret speakeasy in the woods.
I leave the bar and go back to my bike, feeling very much out of sorts. But when I get on, and grab the handle bars, ready to kick it over, I realize I’m still holding the map in my right hand. It’s clutched in my fist.
I look around, once again wondering if any of this is real.
Outside the diner, there’s a little crowd of people. Talking and holding coffee cups or takeout containers like this is just a normal day.
But it’s not a normal day.
Because ‘You’ is talking to me.
I shove the map into my pocket, kick the bike, and pull away.
Heading down the highway towards Fayetteville.
I find the turn-out into the national forest easy enough since it’s just outside of town on the Loop Highway, so I’m literally idling the bike in the parking lot, staring at the trail less than ten minutes after I left the bar.
It’s not that muddy, which means I don’t have to leave the bike here and walk in. If this map is correct, I can ride all the way to the stairs before I have to get off. After that, it’s just going down those stairs and the bar should be right at the bottom.
Once again, I pause. Because this is kinda crazy. A secret bar in the woods? A flyer with a map tacked up to a corkboard in a bathroom?
Hell, being in this part of the country again is a trip in and of itself. Looking back on my recent history, is this map really that out of place?
I rev the bike and ease forward. The trail is narrow and the trees along each side are old and tall, so the boughs sort of form a tunnel as I slowly ease the bike down the path. After about ten minutes of gently sloping descent, I come to the stairs. They are on the edge of a very deep gorge and when I lean over the side, there’s a river down below. Over the entrance to the stairs is a rusted beam with the words ‘Your Family Wants You To Work Safely’ painted along the length of it in neat, block letters.
Despite the massive sign, the stairs themselves are rather narrow and small. But what they lack in grandeur, they make up for in steepness and the only thing I’m thinking about is what a bitch it’s gonna be walking back up. It takes nearly ten minutes to reach the bottom, but I am not rewarded with a secret drinking hole, just a long brick ruin of crumbling coke ovens.
I pause, looking around, then start wondering if I should go back up. But off to the left of the coke ovens, there’s a small deer path and when I bend down to take a closer look at the dried mud, I see boot prints that appear recent.
I think this is it.
I’m already here. It doesn’t cost me anything to look around before giving up, so I head into the trail and push through a thick copse of trees. When I look to the left, there it is. A secret bar in the middle of the forest.
The building is made of brick—maybe even the same brick as the coke ovens back at the stairs. They kinda look like cinderblocks, but they are easily a hundred years old. Most of them are covered in vines and all of them are stained with bright green moss.
It’s kinda quaint, actually. Especially with the sign, which is almost exactly like the one at the top of the stairs, only along the length are painted the words ‘Mule Pit’ instead of ‘Your Family Wants You To Work Safely.’
All the windows of the establishment are just holes in the brick, like they haven’t had glass in them in decades. But the sounds from within are muffled, which doesn’t make a lot of sense until I go inside and realize the brick building is just a shell when I’m presented with a set of actual doors made out of steel.
There’s no bouncer to stop anyone from entering, so I just pull the door open. Music blasts out at me—something bluesy and local that I don’t recognize—and when I enter, I find myself on a high balcony looking down into a large room filled with people. Probably hundreds of people.
The stairway leading down from the balcony I’m standing on appears to be two or three stories high. It reminds me of a fire escape in a big city. Industrial, and metal, and rusted. It looks sketchy and old, like it’s been here as long as this old mine, but when I grab the railing, it feels solid. So I start my descent, all the while taking in the room.
It’s not really a room, though. It’s more like a cave. About every eight feet or so there are thick, old, dark brown beams along the walls. Probably railroad ties. Whether they actually hold the place up or are just there for decoration is anyone’s guess. There are old dirty rugs covering the hard-packed earthen floor, but they don’t look shabby or out of place because they are those antique-lookin’ things. Persian or something. People are walking all over them, some dancing on them—which is probably a hazard—and the rugs look like they came with the mine when it was first carved into this hillside.
There’s a stage, and a band playing, and massive bars lining two sides of the room. There’s also a proper dance floor on the other side of the room where people are dancing—like couples. Men and women, like married couples. But it’s obviously more than some local hangout where Ma and Pa go to wind down on a Friday night, because there’s plenty of titties on display as well.
At least twenty half-naked women are serving drinks and there are two cages on either side of the main stage with a girl inside them wearing absolutely nothing. Not even shoes.
There are dozens of small circular tables grouped in front of the cages, and none of them are empty. They are draped in white tablecloths, and each one has a flickering candle in the center. Couples wearing everything from jeans, t-shirts, and cowboy hats to suits and dresses. There’s even one woman wearing a gown. While all the seated customers are leaning in to each other, like they’re all in the middle of a fascinating conversation, this woman is surveying the room like a madam.
Which she might actually be, since it’s highly unlikely that fully nude dancers are legal here either, since there’s no shortage of alcohol. And this kind of explains the clandestine nature of the whole set up.
On the last landing I pause, taking it all in.
What the actual hell? How is this here?
I can’t decide if I’m in a speakeasy, a whorehouse, or a gentlemen’s club, but in any case, it works.
It’s not some seedy little bar with a sagging tin roof, it’s a genuine Chateau Marmont out in the middle of the West Virginia woods.
A girl sashays towards me. Having probably deduced that I’m a first-timer, she sways her hips in a seductive way and flashes a welcoming smile. She’s not topless and she’s not carrying a tray of drinks, but it’s pretty clear from her outfit that she’s a Mule Pit employee. Her dress is flapper-esque. Something reminiscent of the Roaring Twenties of the last century. Like maybe she lives in Disciple and this old thing was just hanging in her closet.
It’s not out of place—there are plenty of women wearing costumes in the same vein—but the Mule Pit is not some Revival knockoff, so while there’s a lot to like about the dress, there’s also a lot wrong with it. In fact, that’s the perfect way to describe everything about this place. Enticing, but for questionable reasons.
“Can I help you?” she says, coming to a halt just below me. Her West Virginia accent is present, but not thick.
“Yeah. I’m looking for a drink, I guess.”
She reaches up to me with an outstretched hand, enticing me to take it with twiddling fingers.
I slowly descend the last few steps, stopping right in front of her. She’s short, maybe five four, so I’m looking down on her as she looks up. Her eyes are hazel—a little bit gray, a little bit green, a little bit brown. Her hair is dark blonde, maybe even brown in a more normal light, and she comes off as wispy, but not skinny. Her arms, while long and willowy, are also defined. I deduce that her breasts are better than average, even though she’s not showing them off. And she’s young. Early twenties at the most.
So this is my first question. “How old are you?” Because the last thing I need to get involved with is an underage girl working in an illegal titty bar. You can’t be too careful about this stuff in my experience.
“Twenty. How old are you?” She says this playfully. Like maybe I’m too old for her and my answer might dictate how this encounter goes.
But it won’t. Even if I was sixty, it’s this girl’s job to make me happy so I’ll spend money. “Twenty-seven.”
She smiles. “Perfect. Old enough to know better, but young enough not to care.”
Which is an astute thing to say, in my opinion. But I don’t bother dwelling on it because she’s already slipping her arm into mine, leading me deeper into the club. “Come on. Let’s get you that drink.”
She doesn’t take me to either of the bars, but instead ducks through a beaded curtain and we enter a long, dark hallway with rooms along either side.
“I’m not looking for sex, so if that’s what you’re expecting, I’d rather have my drink at the bar.”
Her face, when she glances over her shoulder at me, is sweet and unaffected at my suggestion that she’s a whore. “I’m not looking for sex either. I’m just gettin’ us a private room where we can relax.”
Which is a lie. She’s gonna bill me for this private room, but whatever. There’s nothing wrong with this girl. She’s nice to look at, so I’m not inclined to object.
I have money. Not a lot, but I live on a compound where all my basic needs are paid for and even though I’m the new guy at Edge, Charlie Beaufort set me up a sweet signing bonus when I got out a prison. The motorcycle was part of it. And this money is practically burning a hole in my pocket. So whatever this girl has to offer, I can cover it.
Maybe I didn’t come in looking for a girl to fuck, but would it be so bad if I found one?
We duck through another curtain and enter what appears to be a living room with a black leather couch facing a giant screen hanging on the wall. A black-and-white movie is playing with the sound turned down.
“Have a seat and I’ll get you a drink.” She points to the couch. “Will it be beer or whiskey?”
“I’ll have the whiskey.”
She holds out her hand, palm up. “Cash or credit?”
I pull out my wallet, grab a fifty-dollar bill, and slap it onto her palm. “Cash.”
Her expression doesn’t change, but I catch something here. Disappointment? Was she hoping for my credit card so she could run up a bill? Is this place just some honeypot to shake down the locals?
I doubt it. If it were, word would’ve gotten out. And while I’m not from West Virginia, I am from Tennessee and the places aren’t much different. Strangers do not build speakeasy bars in the middle of a forest with a plan to fuck over the locals.
Not smart ones, anyway.
Whatever is happening here—and clearly there is something happening here—it’s not about stealing from the locals.
It’s probably mobster shit. Or whatever equivalent organized crime they have runnin’ West Virginia. Moonshining is my guess. Which makes sense, since this place is a bar.
The girl and I are both holding on to the fifty-dollar bill when I say, “Is the whiskey moonshine?”
Which makes her laugh. “Look around, Ace. Then I’ll give you one guess.”
So they are moonshiners. “Are you from around here?”
She cocks a hip, but her expression remains playful. “Well, something I did or said has ruffled you. You’re full of questions.”
“Are you?”
“Of course. Can’t you hear it in my accent? Born and raised in these parts, Ace. My family goes way back into these hills. I’m talkin’ places you ain’t never heard of. Places you’d never find your way back from if you were to wander into them. My daddy’s a very important man.”
“And he lets you work here? He don’t mind when you bring strange men into a private room invitin’ said man to conjure up all kinds of lecherous deeds that might be done in that room?”
She tips her chin up, a little bit defiant. “It’s not up to him. But no, he doesn’t mind. Everyone owes favors to someone.”
Which is a weird answer.
But she doesn’t give me time to chew on it. “Anyway. Do you want that drink or don’t you?” And then she gives the fifty-dollar bill, which we are still both holding onto, a small tug.
I tug hard enough to take it. Then tuck it back in my wallet and hand her my credit card. “Let’s start a tab, darlin’.”
She places her hand on my chest, flat against my beatin’ heart, and looks up at me. “Anything you want, Ace.” Then she turns and ducks through another beaded curtain at the opposite end of the room and disappears.