Chapter Nineteen #2
Neither of them replied, and they didn’t pull apart, but Mel felt the curve of her smile beneath his lips.
“Yes, I do,” she whispered softly, for him only, when they finally closed their mouths. “Yes, I do.”
“Me too,” he whispered over her cheek.
Dom’s voice broke into the moment, firm, clear, and coming from above their heads. He’d stood up. “I hate to break up the four-way y’all’re gettin’ started, but somethin’s poppin’ off up by the fire.”
Releasing Abigail at once and doing a twisting roll to his feet, Mel focused where Dom was focused: at least four men were fighting near the fire, with more headed into the fray. They were only silhouettes, backlit by the orange flames, but Mel made out the shape of kuttes.
Horde were fighting. At the festival. In town. Surrounded by civilians.
Suddenly, one of the silhouettes was either pushed or fell into the fire. Sparks flew into the sky like fireworks when he landed.
“Abs, Mindy, get back, far’s you can—get to the fairway if you can, but go wide around!”
With those instructions and a quick, hard kiss on Abigail’s lips, Mel spun around, and he, Dom, and Thumper bolted forward, toward the trouble.
A shot rang out.
And then the night was chaos.
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~oOo~
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A s Mel ran toward the trouble, flanked by his friends, he drew his Glock and was glad he could.
Abigail didn’t love to see his gun under his kutte, so Mel usually went to her unarmed.
Tonight, he’d almost taken it off and stowed it in his pack, but he’d thought twice.
Wariness had been buzzing inside him all day, like an unattended alarm clock.
Though he couldn’t quite conjure the idea that real trouble would happen during the picture-postcard Harvest Festival, he’d kept his piece holstered under his arm anyway.
At the time, it had felt more like a security blanket.
Or a talisman. Something to make him feel better, but not otherwise necessary.
But at the sound of that shot just now, as Mel and his friends all immediately drew their weapons, he wondered if he hadn’t had a flash of premonition.
At any rate, he was damn glad he had his weapon, and he hoped he wasn’t about to have to shoot a brother.
As they arrived at the commotion, Mel couldn’t immediately make sense of the information his senses were collecting. Smoke, spark, flame. Screaming, crying, yelling. Civilians—women, kids, old folks—running in no kind of direction or order.
In the midst of all that, the three charters of the Night Horde were in full-out battle.
He had no idea if the brawl was the cause of the chaos, or something else had caused both the chaos and the brawl.
Another shot. Two more. Mel, Dom, and Thumper all ducked reflexively. Mel tried to discern where the shots were coming from, but the visibility sucked.
“Holy shit!” Thumper yelled.
“What the fuck!” was Dom’s guttural growl.
Mel didn’t shout; he veered toward the fire, where Jonesy, Nacto, and Bobby, a SoCal patch, clustered around the patch who’d fallen in. It was the one clear thing he could see. They were trying to beat the flames down with blankets. But they were fanning the flames more than anything.
“Roll him!” Mel shouted as he ran. “ Roll him in the blankets, don’t flap ‘em like that!” Arriving, he yanked a smoking blanket out of Jonesy’s hands and dropped to his knees, falling over the body with the blanket spread in his hands.
He could feel fire licking at his hands, his face, but he kept going, rolling the patch—he still had no idea who it was—over and over until his was packed in the blanket like a sausage.
When the flames were out, Mel pushed back to his knees. When the patch groaned, the sound weak and agonized, Mel said, “Easy, brother, easy. We gotcha.”
He drew the charred blanket from his face.
It was Maniac Weathers. His face was bright red, wetly shiny across his forehead. Most of his hair was gone. One ear was nearly black. He blinked smoke-smeared eyes and tried to form words through blistered lips.
“My ...” he forced out in a whispered croak. “... My ... back .”
Nacto dropped to his knees beside Mel. Jonesy and Bobby were gone; they must have run back into the melee to do what they could. Mel couldn’t say whether they meant to add heat or cool to the situation.
“He went in backward—he needs off his back,” Nacto said and reached over Maniac’s body to grab at his arm.
Understanding, Mel pulled Nacto away and moved to Maniac’s other side, where he could push rather than pull.
“You gotta be able to turn your head if we do this, Mane. Can you do it?”
Maniac thought about that for a moment before he creakily turned his head to left. The skin on the right side his neck split as he did it, but he didn’t make another sound of pain. When Mel and Nacto got him onto his belly, however, getting his weight off his ruined back, Maniac screamed.
Another shot went off. Mel whipped his head to glare over his shoulder. Who the fuck was shooting in all this mess, and why wasn’t anybody dropping that asshole?
“Oh!”
At that sweetly shocked cry, Mel’s head whipped back around. Abigail stood above him, her brow creased with worry and her eyes wide with fear. Her chest heaved with her wildly panting breath.
“Abs! Get the fuck outta here!”
“I can help!” She hefted the big old leather bag she called a handbag and reminded him more of a mail bag. “I can help! I have some supplies that can help!”
Every instinct in his body demanded that he leave Maniac, grab Abigail, and get her the fuck out of danger.
Somebody was fucking shooting out here! But what medical help was here?
Tasha was at some big deal medical conference in Boston, and the other doctor in her clinic didn’t attend town events like this.
They had nurses on staff at the clinic, of course, and some or all of them might be here, but where?
Only Abigail was here, standing above a badly burned Night Horde patch.
“What can you do?” Nacto asked her. “What supplies?”
Dropping to her knees, Abigail opened her bag and pulled out a medium-sized Mason jar full of what appeared in the strange light to be opalescent goo.
“It’s aloe vera. I always bring it to festivals because there’s so much open-fire cooking.
I have gauze, too. And this. Maybe it’ll help for pain.
” She drew a corked bottle out, and Mel smiled a little. Her cider.
Looking down at the side of Maniac’s boiled face, he tried to make eye contact. “It’s her cider. It’ll drop a full-grown man in about four big swallows. Think you can get some down?”
“Yeah,” Maniac gasped. “Nac, help.”
They got him up enough to get the mouth of the bottle to his lips, and he swallowed down about half of it.
“S’good shit,” Manic mumbled and then belched.
Abigail was already fully at work. Arrayed on top of her bag was a small bottle of her homemade hand sanitizer and a sizable roll of wide gauze.
She pushed Mel out of the way and asked Nacto to help her get to Maniac’s back so she could cover it with aloe and at least protect it from further infection.
Another shot was fired—and this one whizzed by them, close enough to be heard in the air.
Close to Abigail.
Focused on her work, she didn’t register the near miss, but Mel shot to his feet.
“Keep her safe!” he shouted at Nacto as he redrew his Glock and stormed into the continuing battle. He was going to find the fucker shooting that gun when women and children were around.
His fucking woman chief among them.
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~oOo~
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H e arrived at the heart of the chaos, and tried to take a beat to find the shooter or at least a place where he could do some good, but it was a scene straight out of a Cecil B.
DeMille epic. Brother fighting brother. Knives, fists, logs, chairs, anything they got their hands on.
Civilians in the mix as well, giving as good as they got.
Few innocents, as far as he could tell, remained here, in the thick of it all, but those few were in full frenzy, too panicked to find their way out.
Nearby, he saw Showdown battling it out with Gravy and another Montana patch. The old man was losing, and Gravy had a pig sticker in his hand. He had to help Show before Gravy fucking killed him.
It was the last thought Mel had that night.