46. Whiskey
Whiskey
Hogzilla's back from the fuckin' dead.
She's uglier than she was, sure. The left fairing is a slightly different shade of red, and the chrome on the exhaust pipes has a few new scars that won't buff out no matter how much I work 'em.
But she lives, baby.
I rev her twice in the parking garage, just to hear and feel her roar again.
Wraith paid for the repairs. Didn't even have to ask him. After his little bro-brawl with his brother in the parking garage that transformed Hogzilla into modern art, Wraith transferred the money with a note that just said:
For Hogzilla. Sorry.
So of course I fuckin' forgave him.
Besides, Ivy loves him. So.
"Ready?" I yell over my shoulder.
She's already on the back, her arms locked around my waist as far as she can get them, her brand-new helmet snug over her dyed-dark hair. She's in jeans and one of my old flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up, because she asked what to wear and I said somethin' you can destroy shit in.
She took that literally.
Good girl.
"READY!" she shouts back, her arms tightening around my midsection.
The squeeze sends a stupid jolt of warmth through my chest.
I kick the stand up and roll us out of the garage into the late afternoon sun.
The second we hit the street, she screams. The kind of scream that rips out of your throat when gravity drops and the wind hits and you realize nothing in the world can touch you because you're moving too fast.
I grin so hard my face hurts.
She's been buried under PR bullshit since this morning, taking a load off Thane's shoulders so he could have some coffee before dealing with it. He's been all dazed since she let him mark her, anyway. Everyone's tense. Everyone's exhausted.
And Ivy's been holding it together for all of us.
Not tonight.
Tonight, she's mine.
I take the long way on purpose. Down the waterfront road where the speed limit is generous and the straightaway lets me open the throttle enough to make Ivy whoop and press her helmet against my shoulder blade.
Every red light is torture because the engine settles to an idle and she squeezes me harder, and I never want the ride to end.
The rage room is in an old industrial strip, the barred windows full of all kinds of shit like busted old TVs, bent bicycles, and office computers. Neon purple and green lights shine on all of it.
"This is it?" Ivy asks, pulling off her helmet and shaking her hair out. She's already grinning, her cheeks flushed pink from the wind.
"This is it, wildcat."
"Fuck yes."
The place is called Smash or Pass, which I appreciate on a spiritual level, and the woman who runs it is a stocky beta named Ducky who's got more tattoos than bare skin and a nutcracking handshake.
"Whiskey!" She comes around the front counter and slaps me on the back hard enough to jolt my spine.
Her bleached mohawk is freshly trimmed and she's wearing the same patched leather vest she's had since I met her two years ago at a veterans' ride.
"You finally found someone! I was starting to think you only had eyes for your crotch rocket. "
"Hey now, Duck," I say, holding up my palms and spreading them wide, "Hogzilla ain't a crotch rocket."
Ducky looks out the window doubtfully.
My eyes narrow. I clear my throat. "Ducky, this is Ivy. Ivy, this is Ducky. She's gonna change your life."
"Nice to meet you," Ivy says in her usual pleasant tone, but she's already distracted, looking around the lobby with the wide-eyed hunger of a kid in a candy store.
Except the candy is smashable electronics.
The walls are lined with before-and-after photos of destruction sessions. Printers reduced to shrapnel. A row of old CRT monitors with their guts hanging out. A whole filing cabinet crushed flat and rolled up like a burrito full of empty bean cans.
"So you're the omega," Ducky says, sizing Ivy up with an approving nod. "Whiskey told me you knocked an alpha unconscious with a fire extinguisher."
Ivy blinks. "He told you about that?"
"Honey, he bragged about you nonstop when he called this morning. It's a miracle I could get a word in to make an appointment. Come on. Let's get you suited up."
Ducky leads us through a heavy steel door into the back, which opens into a concrete corridor lit by more of those neon lights. Somewhere deeper in the building, something shatters and someone cheers.
"Ground rules," Ducky says over her shoulder, pulling open a locker room door.
"Anything in the room is fair game. No throwing shit at each other on purpose, but accidents happen and that's what the gear's for.
No stopping until the timer runs out or you physically can't lift your arms. Whatever comes out of your mouth stays in the room. We don't judge here."
The locker room has two benches and a wall of gear. Ducky gestures to it all, gives us a quick salute and a muttered "don't go too far like last time," and takes off.
"Hey, that was all Wraith," I call after her.
Ducky ignores me.
It's kind of a half-truth anyway.
"Wow," Ivy says from beside me, staring around the room at all the equipment.
Military-grade protective vests, thick reinforced gloves with rubberized knuckles, shin guards, elbow pads, fucking masks. The works. It's the kind of gear I wore when they sent me into buildings that were definitely not empty and full of fun shit to smash.
People are, uh, considerably less fun to smash.
Except on the ice.
I haven't told Ivy that much about my past because the topic hasn't come up naturally. But she notices me pulling the vest on like I did every day for years, cinching the side straps by muscle memory without looking down.
"You've worn this before," she says.
"Heh. Once or twice." I tap the Kevlar chest plate. "Wore shit like this in the Marines."
Her hands pause on her own vest straps. "You really were a Marine?"
"Oorah." I flash her a grin and then I'm helping her tighten her vest because it's swimming on her. "I'll fill you in later, if you want."
She nods, letting me help. "Yeah. I'd like that."
She's so fuckin' tiny the smallest size still hangs past her hips, so I double-cinch the waist straps and adjust the shoulder plates until they sit right.
Omegas are cute as hell.
Especially this one.
"I look like an action figure," she says, twisting to check her range of motion.
"A fuckin' sexy one. I woulda had you marry all my G.I. Joes."
She giggles.
Masks are next. The good kind, too, not the shitty latex type you'd wear on Halloween. One's a hot pink gas mask with green tiger stripes. The other's white with dark splatter patterns that make it look like a skull.
I hope she takes the pink one.
Nope. She goes for the skull mask.
Aw, fuck.
She grins at me like she did that on purpose, and she probably did.
I shrug and grin right back at her, pulling the pink mask on. "I can rock it. I've got enough raw masculinity pumping through my veins to make up for a li'l pink."
This time, she doesn't just giggle. "You're fucking insane," she cackles, stretching up on her tiptoes to kiss the jaw of my mask before tugging her own over her head.
Shit. Now I'm all blissed out. How the fuck am I supposed to wreck a room if I've got fuckin' butterflies pumping through my veins instead of adrenaline?
Next, the weapon wall.
Baseball bats, crowbars, golf clubs, a fire axe that would pair well with Ivy's usual favorite weapon of choice. And hanging from two heavy-duty brackets at the end like Excalibur waiting for its king or queen, the biggest sledgehammer I've ever seen.
Fucking beautiful.
I pull it off the wall and hold it out to Ivy.
She stares at it.
"That's enormous," she says, tugging on a pair of work gloves.
"That's what she said."
"Whiskey."
"Take it."
She wraps both hands around the handle and the weight nearly tips her forward before she adjusts her stance, planting her feet wider.
The sledgehammer hangs at her side, the head resting on the concrete floor, and she looks up at me through the gas mask with those blue-green eyes and I swear to every god that exists my heart fucking stops.
"Why this one?" she asks.
I grab a crowbar for myself and spin it once, because I'm me and I can't help it. "Because you've spent a long-ass time making yourself small."
Her grip tightens on the handle.
"Tonight, you get to be loud," I tell her. "Loud as you want. Break whatever the fuck you want. Scream whatever the fuck you want." I tap the sledgehammer's head with my crowbar. "And this baby? Nobody can be quiet with a sledgehammer."
Her shoulders drop a little.
"Okay," she says softly.
Then she says, louder, "O-fucking-kay."
That's my girl.
The room I reserved for tonight has a big green neon sign over the metal blast door that reads THE WASTELAND, complete with a skull with green LED eyes hanging off the sign, and it's everything I dreamed it would be.
It's a gutted warehouse space about the size of a racquetball court, lit with flickering red and amber lights to simulate flames.
The boombox mounted in a protective metal cage pumps an industrial song that rattles the spray-painted walls covered in post-apocalyptic graffiti.
Biohazard symbols, slogans like THE END IS NOW and EAT THE RICH.
Old office furniture is stacked against a false door like a barricade to keep out zombies, desks and filing cabinets and swivel chairs piled on top of each other in a mountain of destroyable glory.
Keyboards and printers and a fax machine with that good hard plastic that shatters into a million pieces when you give it a good smack.
"Holy shit," Ivy breathes.
"Welcome to the end of the world, wildcat."
A digital timer on the wall reads 30:00 in red. I slap the start button.
The countdown begins.
For the first few seconds, Ivy just stands there with the sledgehammer, scanning the room. Then she spots her first victim.
A printer.
She crosses the room, plants her feet, draws the sledgehammer back over her shoulder with both hands, and brings it down so hard the printer fucking explodes. Plastic shrapnel and toner dust sprays across the concrete.
Ivy lets out a victory scream.
My crowbar hangs forgotten at my side because this five-foot-nothing omega absolutely annihilating office equipment just might be the most beautiful thing I've ever witnessed in my life.
She hits the printer again. And again. Each swing is wilder than the last, her whole body rotating into it, the flannel flaring out around her waist. Cartridges go flying. A chunk of the printer's lid skips across the floor and clangs against a filing cabinet.
"FUCK YOU!" she screams at the printer's corpse, flipping it off.
I don't know if she's talking to the printer—because let's face it, printers suck fucking ass—or to Wade Kelly or to every person who ever made her feel small, and it doesn't matter.
She's loud.
She's so fucking loud.
I join in because standing still is against my religion and there's a perfectly good fax machine begging to meet its maker. I wind up with the crowbar and swing for the fences.
The fax machine splits down the middle with a satisfying crunch and its innards spill across the floor. I kick the remains into the wall and they scatter.
"Fuck yeah!" Ivy shouts from across the room.
The chairs go next. She brings the sledgehammer down on the first one's seat and it cracks in two, the four legs shooting out in every direction.
I hook the crowbar under the top drawer of a massive filing cabinet and wrench it open. Probably weighs almost as much as I do, but I hook the thing again and flip it over, drawers facing the ceiling, and go to town.
It rains old receipts and memos with every strike, yellowed paper curling through the air.
Ivy charges through them like it's snow.
She's laughing now between the screams. Full, ragged, breathless laughter as she winds up for another swing. She takes out a monitor and the glass implodes inward. She doesn't even flinch. Just pivots and swings again at the one next to it.
"LEFT!" I yell.
She spins and nails a keyboard I chucked into the air for her. It explodes into a shower of keycaps that rain down around her. She drops the sledgehammer to throw her arms up, howling.
I match her energy because that's what I do. Crowbar meets car hood. An old monitor goes sailing when I hook it with the crowbar's curved end and launch it into the graffitied wall. It shatters and leaves a beautiful crater in the drywall.
We find a rhythm without trying. She smashes, I clear the debris. I set things up, she knocks them down. We orbit each other in the destruction like we've been doing this together our whole lives, and when our paths cross in the middle of the room, she bumps her hip against mine and keeps going.
My arms are burning. My back is on fire because I'm apparently not completely healed from the car crash in Canada, but there's no way in hell I'm stopping.
When the timer hits zero and the alarm sounds, Ivy pulls her skull mask onto the top of her head and looks around, leaning on her sledgehammer, panting and grinning at our destruction.
"Holy fucking shit," she says.
"Holy fucking shit," I agree, coming up alongside her and pulling my own mask off my head. "You tore this place apart, wildcat."
"Too bad there are cameras in here," she says wistfully, batting her lashes up at me.
"Huh? Why?" I ask, blinking.
Her face splits into a grin that tears the air right out of my lungs and goes straight to my fucking dick.
"Well, shit, wildcat," I say breathlessly. "Night's still young."