Rooster’s Remorse (Reapers Rejects MC: Second Generation: Mexico #4)

Prologue

Eight Months Ago…

Mila

Nine.

The count is the only thing left that belongs to me.

Rafa's arm comes down, and the leather bites into the meat of my shoulder and opens something that was already open.

The sound that comes out of me isn't a word.

It's lower than that.

It's the noise an animal makes when it stops pretending it's anything else.

Blood runs.

It doesn't drip, that's what people get wrong, it doesn't drip like a faucet.

It sheets. It's warm at my shoulder blades and cool by the time it reaches the waistband of the cotton shorts they put me in.

It soaks through, and it goes down the backs of my thighs, and it’s the warmest thing I've felt in years.

Ten.

He grunts when he swings. Every time. He's never known he does it.

My wrists are cinched to the eye bolt above my head with a zip tie he pulled too tight, which means my hands went numb around the fourth one, and I can't feel my fingers now.

That's fine, that's good, I don't need them yet.

My cheek is against the drywall. It's a client room.

There's a mattress six feet behind me with a fitted sheet on it, pale blue, and a lamp on a nightstand with a dimmer switch. Somebody hung a framed print of a saguaro at sunset on the wall like this is a Best Western.

Eleven.

The dark comes up around the edges of my vision like water coming into a boat, and I let it come partway, and then I push it back, because I need this. I need every second of this.

Rafa stops at twelve. He always stops at twelve. He's forty-four, smokes, and his shoulder gives out.

Wes wouldn't stop at twelve. But Wes is downstairs, where Wes always is, and nobody called him up for me.

They called Rafa because Rafa was closest, and it was late, and nobody wanted to make a project out of me.

Twelve.

He drops the strap on the carpet. Carpet. There's carpet in here.

"Puta loca," he says, and he's out of breath, and I hear him wipe his hand down the front of his shirt. He says it like I hurt his feelings.

I don't say anything.

I haven't said anything in a very long time, and every year I don't say anything. They watch me a little less, and that's the game I've been playing since I was twenty-two years old.

Except I broke it tonight.

The man's name was Doyle or Boyle, they never give real ones, and it doesn't matter.

He had a wedding ring, sunburn, and hands like a man who'd never done a day's work in his life, and when he put those hands on my throat, I did what I've done a hundred times, which is nothing.

Which is go somewhere else, let him have the part he paid for.

Then he leaned down and put his mouth against my ear and told me he was going to kill me.

He wasn't lying. I know the difference now.

I've had years to learn the difference between a man saying a thing because it makes him hard and a man saying something because he’s decided he’s going to do it.

His voice went flat, bored, and reasonable, like he was telling me about the weather.

The room went gray at the edges, and I understood with total clarity that I was going to die on a pale blue fitted sheet in a room with a saguaro print on the wall.

My body made a decision without me.

My nails are the only thing about me that's grown well in here.

Ten years of nothing and they still come in hard.

I got my thumb in under his jaw, and I opened his face from his eyebrow to his chin in four lines.

He screamed like a woman and let go. I was able to get him on the other side before he could get his hands up.

I regret one thing about it. Not the face. I should have gone for the eye.

"Get her down," someone says from the door.

That's Chuy. Chuy is the one who sleeps in the truck. Chuy is the one who is always, always annoyed.

They cut the zip tie, and I go down onto my knees because there's nothing else my legs are prepared to do.

My arms come down and the blood starts moving back into my hands, and it's worse than the whipping was.

It's a hot, ugly howl from the elbow out.

"Ah, no, no, no," Rafa says, backing up, hands out. "Look at her. Look at that. I'm not carrying that."

"You want to leave her here? For Wes to find? On the carpet?"

There's a pause where nobody says anything.

Their hands come under my arms. Both of them, one on each side, and they lift me, and my feet drag.

Here is the thing about a woman whose back is opened up: nobody wants her on them.

They're holding me by the arms.

Not around the waist. Not over a shoulder.

By the upper arms, at a distance, the way you'd carry a bag of trash that's leaking, arms extended, faces turned away.

Chuy actually says ay, güey under his breath when it gets on his sleeve. They hate this. They want this to be over.

My head hangs. My hair is in my face, and it's wet.

I let it hang. Because from down here, with my chin on my chest, I can see everything.

The hall from the client building to the yard is fourteen paces if you're walking, twenty-two if you're being dragged, and your feet are catching.

The door at the end has a bar across it and no lock, because it's a fire door, because there was an inspection once, years ago, because somewhere in a filing cabinet this place is a working ranch with a bunkhouse.

I've never seen this hall.

Eight years. Nine? I've lost the exact number, and it doesn't matter, and it makes me want to howl, and I have never seen this hall, because women don't come up.

Women go down.

They bring the men to us like we're an exhibit, and the only time I've been above the dirt since I was twenty-two is when they wanted the others to hear me scream.

So they brought me up here to make a point.

And now I'm looking at a fire door.

Cold hits my face when they push through it and it’s May in the high desert.

It’s nothing like the cold in the bunkers, which is wet, close, and smells like a drain. This is dry and enormous. It's got sky in it.

I'd forgotten there was a sky.

Twenty-two paces of gravel. The mercury light over the equipment shed with the bulb that flickers, the one I can see a sliver of through the vent in the corridor.

The one I've been watching for six years and know goes out at nine and comes back at nine-fifteen.

There's the water tank. There's the pole barn. There's a stock trailer with a flat tire that hasn't moved in a decade.

It's all real. Every piece of it is exactly where I built it in my head.

Years of listening to engine notes, counting boot steps, and remembering every single sound that came down through eleven feet of dirt.

I built this place from the inside, and I built it right, and I’ve never been so certain of anything in my life as I am in this moment, upside down, bleeding into gravel, being carried by two men who are trying not to touch me.

The stairs down to the bunker are ahead.

The stairs down are the end of everything.

"Log her," Chuy says.

"You log her."

"She's your fuckin'—I'm not going down there, my shift's over."

"So, she's logged."

"Just say she's logged."

Wes counts.

That's the whole problem, that's been the whole problem since I got here.

Wes is downstairs, and he takes his job seriously.

He counts twice a night, every night, doors and faces. He doesn't drink, doesn't sleep, and he doesn't take anyone's word for anything.

But Wes counts who came back.

I didn't come in tonight. I went up.

His clipboard has my number on it, and tonight there's a line through it in a different pen.

Rafa doesn't log. Chuy won't go down. It's late, and I'm bleeding on their shoes.

Where do they think I'm going?

Rafa lets go of my arm to open the stairwell door.

One hand. One.

And Chuy is holding a hundred and four pounds of dead-limp woman with his arm straight out, his face turned away and his fingers slick with somebody else's blood.

I don't fight him. I don't pull.

I fall.

Straight down, all of it at once, no warning, the way a body goes when it's finally done—and his grip is wrong, it's up high on my bicep, it's greased, and I go through it like water and hit the gravel, and I don't make a sound.

"Jesus—" Chuy says.

I'm already rolling.

Not running. Rolling, under the stock trailer, into the black of it, into the space between the flat tire and the axle where there's eleven inches of clearance.

The rocks tear into my back and open every line Rafa put there, and I bite down so hard I taste enamel.

"She fell," Rafa says. Bored.

Boots on gravel.

"So pick her up."

"You pick her—where is she?"

A pause.

I've built a map with no paper since I started trying to get out of this hellhole.

There are a few places on this property where a person could hide.

I picked the one nobody would look under, because nobody looks under.

I'm not going away. Not yet.

Men look out. Men look at the road, at the fence line, at the horizon, because a woman who runs is running away, and away is a direction.

I go under.

Two hours and eleven minutes.

That's how long they look for me.

I know because the mercury light goes out at nine and comes back at nine-fifteen.

It does it once while they're shouting and once while they're not.

Here's what two hours is when your back is open on gravel: it’s every single second of it.

It’s Rafa's boots coming past me at a distance of four feet, and stopping, and my whole body screaming to hold still while the blood pools in the small of my back and runs down into the rocks and I think about how he’ll see the wet gravel, but he doesn't, because it's dark and it's dirt and men don't look down.

A dog barks somewhere out past the pole barn and my heart goes so hard I'm sure they can hear it coming up through the ground.

Then Wes comes up.

Wes coming up is the worst thing that has ever happened to me and I include everything.

He walks differently.

Everybody else on this property walks like men who are bored.

Wes walks like a man who's counting his own steps, even, unhurried, and he comes out of the stairwell and stops and doesn't say anything for a long time.

"Where?" he asks.

"She fell, man, she was—she's got nothing, she's got no shoes, she can't even walk—"

"Where?"

"West fence. Gotta be the west fence, it's the only—"

And that's it.

Because Wes is right about everything except this: Wes thinks I'm running.

Wes thinks I'm a hundred and four pounds of terror with a head start pointing myself at the nearest fence line, because that's what they all do, that's what every woman who's ever tried it has done, they run at the dark and they get four hundred yards and the dogs bring them back.

I let them go west.

I lie under a trailer and listen to four men and a truck peel off toward a fence line two miles from here.

The cold comes up through the gravel into the open meat of my back, and I don’t move. Moving would get me caught.

That's what I figured out during my third year here, lying on a mat in the dark with a smell in the room I won't ever get out of my nose.

I figured out that a search is a shape.

It starts small and it gets big, and everything it leaves behind is empty.

If you’re patient enough, if you are willing to lie in the worst place on earth for long enough, the worst place on earth becomes the safest one.

I've been patient for years.

A couple more hours is nothing.

The truck comes back at eleven. Four doors. Four men, and Wes goes down.

Then the middle is empty.

* * *

Gravel first. Twenty-two paces.

The office is unlocked because Chuy’s in a truck at the west fence with the rest of them.

The door only latches if you pull it, which is something I learned from a woman named Pilar who's dead now.

I take the ledger off the desk.

It's a Mead composition book, marbled black and white, ninety-nine cents, the kind I did my chemistry homework in during high school, and there's a rubber band around it.

There are others. There's a drawer of them. There's a whole shelf. I don't have time, because the truck is coming back.

I take the one on the desk and I take a key off a cup hook by the door because it's the only one there.

I don't know what it opens and I’ll find out later, or I won't, and then I'm out and moving.

My back has stopped being painful and started being something else, cold and far away, which I know is bad, which I will deal with when I’m a person again.

Fuck, the corridor… I have to go past the doors.

I could go around.

There's forty extra yards in going around, and forty yards is nothing, forty yards is a gift, and I stand there in the dark with a ninety-nine-cent notebook against my chest, and I know exactly what will happen if I go through… and I go through anyway.

Because I'm not leaving without seeing it.

The long row. Doors on both sides. A strip of light under each one and a slot at the bottom for the trays.

They hear me.

They know the sound of every man on this property and I don't sound like any of them, and by the fourth door somebody is up off the mat and her fingers are in the tray slot, white in the dark.

"Quién es—"

"Hey. Hey. HEY—"

"Is somebody there, please, please—"

They come alive down the whole length of it like a fuse burning.

Hands in the slots. Palms on the doors.

My name isn't a name in here, but there's a girl at the eighth door on the left who was brought in eight months ago and cried for a week.

I never said one word to her, not one, because saying words is how you get watched, and she's screaming take me, take me, take me and she's beating the door with both hands.

I stop.

God help me, I stop, and I put my hand flat on the eighth door on the left, and the wood is warm from her hands.

I could open it.

That's the truth and I'm going to carry it.

The key's in Wes's desk, and Wes is at the west fence, and I could open every door on this corridor in ninety seconds, and I could get eleven women into a desert.

Into the desert, with no shoes, no water, but they would catch us.

All of us. Inside an hour.

And they'd kill two as an example and they'd move the rest, and they'd move them tonight.

For years, I had to learn one thing: you can't help anybody from inside a hole.

"Volveré," I say.

It's the first thing I've said out loud in longer than I can hold in my head, and my voice comes out ruined.

I put my mouth close to the gap so she can hear me over the noise.

"?Me oyes? Volveré. Lo juro por mi madre."

She's crying. She's saying please. She's saying it in English and then Spanish and then something else, and behind me, a truck door slams somewhere out in the dark.

I take my hand off the door.

And I walk out of La Nada with a stranger's notebook against my chest, a key I can't identify, and my mother's name still in my mouth.

The desert takes me, cold and black and enormous and mine.

I count my steps.

An old habit of mine, but I’ll need to remember this later. All of it.