4 comments/ 16665 views/ 4 favorites Gadarene By: dysartish The memory of cold clamped Jack's neck like a vise. Even sitting in the booth, the humid smoke of the tavern swirling about him, it clutched him. In his hand, he held a more welcome cold, but the comfort of the bottle was denied him. He was too far from home for any more than pretense at drink. The beer was stage dressing, a way to fit in with the crowd as he endured the night. He had drawn stares when he'd come through the door, but that was to be expected. It was 40 degrees outside, with a wind scouring the empty fields, and he'd crept into the bar in a t-shirt and jeans, exposed flesh ruddying instantly in the interior heat. But other than rolling eyes and sharp laughter, he'd hadn't drawn too much attention. Nothing like he would have if he'd worn his colors. That had been a no-brainer. He wasn't about to wear colors in an unknown tavern, even in a hick town like Acacia, Indiana, population 1,045 . . . 1,046 if you counted Jack. But he didn't plan on staying long enough to make the census. Didn't plan on doing much, other than sitting on his ass. Not when his club was a state away and his bike was dead on the curb, 24 ounces of heroin stashed in the bike's gas tank. But even without his colors -- the Stomper's scarlet and green boar's head glaring porcine slaughter out from the dark leather of his vest -- he'd felt eyes linger. A barely-twenty something over in the corner, nursing a drink and a half-drunken boyfriend, kept glancing his way, the glances lasting longer and longer as the night progressed. Off to his right, a gaggle of middle-aged women -- probably just come off a factory shift and looking for something, anything, to spend their hours on -- cackled a little too loudly and smiled a little too broadly every time he trucked back from the john. If he'd been in Cleveland, he'd have taken on either -- on a good night, maybe even both. But this wasn't Cleveland and this wasn't a good night. It was a night for avoiding trouble. The sort of trouble that came from a girlfriend's boyfriend who was probably sober enough to follow his girlfriend's eye back to Jack, but too damn drunk to size up the threat he was looking at. Or, a bunch of squawking hens, tail-feathers ruffled because they weren't the one getting gobbled by the fox that'd crept into the hen house. No, tonight had its surfeit of trouble. He'd been been roaring down a long stretch of graveled nothing, bordered by two fields full of stubbled nothing. Although he wasn't sure what they grew in Indiana -- in fact, the only crops he'd ever paid attention to grew in basements, under hydroponic lamps -- whatever it was it had been harvested a long time before he shown up for his break down. One minute, he was tunneling through the frigid dark, headlight and muffler flushing-out banded raccoons and yellow-eyed possums. The next, he was coasting to a stop, broken remnants of his drive chain whip-cracking against the frozen gravel. Somehow, remarkably, his phone had shown bars, and GPS indicated a town less than two miles down the nearest intersection -- if you could call the butt-crack between empty fields an intersection. Better yet, a yellow squiggle on the screen had meant that he'd have the perfect place to park his bike, even in the middle of nowhere Indiana. So off he'd trudged, pushing his dead bike and dragging his sorry ass to Donovan's Tavern. And he told himself to play it safe. For once. # When he'd nursed the cold beer to warm piss, Jack decided he'd chance another. Rather than wait on the waitress, and to give him an excuse to relocate booths, he headed up to the bar. With a name like Donovan's, Jack, who'd burned through a chunk of the nineties in Boston, had expected the usual faux-Irish regalia -- Guinness on tap, Gaelic graffiti scrawled everywhere, maybe even some red-cheeked geezer who looked like Spencer Tracy's redneck lovechild. But if this place knew about Ireland, he'd blow a leprechaun. The bar was a stained formica plank studded with drink-rings and nut bowls, padded stools sprinkled in the front, a serving slot slashing open the wall behind. Someone had tried their hand at corn-pone rustic decades earlier, but now the faded Cola signs and the blunted farm implements hanging on the wall looked like somebody's grandpa's rummage-sale leftovers, left to mildew and rot in the garage out yonder. As he slipped onto a stool between two knots of chattering farmers -- it seemed the Colts couldn't catch a break that year -- the warm smell of fried onions and hot grease slid over him. His stomach kicked him a good one, just to remind him that he hadn't eaten since Champagne, Illinois, and that had been half-burned pancakes rustled up by his dealer's cracked-out girlfriend. With cooking like that, she'd had to fuck like a rabbit. So, he rethought his beer and looked over the menu hanging above the serving slot, entries written in chalk that looked like it hadn't been erased since Ronnie Reagan drew down on the Evil Empire. "It's mostly shit." He looked over at the husky voice. The bartender was tapping beer into three tall glasses. She looked up at him as she set them on a waitress's tray. "Seriously." He smiled. "You've got a way of selling the merchandise." She shrugged. "You'd figure it out on your own pretty damn fast." "What would you suggest then?" "Me, I'd suggest just about any place but here. But since you seem to be stuck here," she poured two shots of whiskey, slid one in front of him. "I'd order the cheeseburger, then shoot that to cover up the taste." "Well then, a cheeseburger it is." He tipped back the shot, trickling Jim Beam down his throat. By the time his glass touched the formica, the bartender and the other shot were gone. He sat there, the whisky somewhat making up for his missing leather, and waited while an invisible backline cook threw his sandwich together. The whiskey shot was dicey -- he needed his wits. But, he pulled out his watch, he'd been here for over an hour, and the most threatening thing so far had been that table full of mom-a-sons. And even they had drifted away, chatting up a thirty-year-old who was in the middle of transforming his high school muscle to middle-aged flab, one Budweiser at a time. Jack could almost imagine a faded Varsity jacket tucked in the dude's closet. The cheeseburger that showed up wasn't half as bad as the bartender had made it out to be. Jack found himself wolfing through it, hot grease and cheese joining forces with the whiskey to finally loosen the ice vise from his neck. His opinion of pissant Indiana mellowed inside a haze of carbohydrates and bourbon. "Not too shitty," he said, as the bartender made her way past his corner of the formica. "Trust me, that shot helped." She swabbed the counter beside him with a terrycloth. "I've seen them make those things." "Spare me the details. I like my illusions." She smiled at him. "Most men do." A little warmer, a little loosened, he took her in. Maybe it was because she was the only friendly thing in a room full of strange, but she was easy on his eyes. Built small, she seemed tucked behind the heavy bar. Jack wondered if he'd found his leprechaun, after all. Her reddish brown hair, worn long and fringing her shoulders, would have blended in perfectly in any Boston bar. The shoulders and upper arms that rose from her low-cut blouse were soft and round, hinting that she carried a few extra pounds. Jack fell to wondering what that flesh would feel like on top of him, a cushion of woman, soft and warm. He realized he was staring. So was the bartender. Busted, grinning, he held out his hand. "Jack." She shook it, her palm and fingers moist from the bar cloth. "Pam." "And here I was hoping for a Diane." He cocked an eyebrow. "We don't play Johnny-fucking-Cougar in here." She cocked an eyebrow back at him and headed off down the bar. # For the next hour, he haunted a booth near the end of the bar, sipping through a series of cokes. The bartender had picked him out so easily, that he had to second-guess his efforts at camouflage. As he doused his bourbon buzz under a steady stream of caffeinated drinks, he let his eyes rove over the tavern, looking for anyone else that was looking at him. But his eyes betrayed him, kept landing back on the bartender. She flowed up and down the bar, shooting him glimpses of white flesh as knots of drinkers hid and then revealed her. Peekabo, Jackie-boy. I see you. From his new vantage point, he could tilt his head up over his drink and keep his eyes fastened on her, watch her blue-jeaned ass swivel away, her white-bloused breasts sway back. When the phone vibrated against his leg, he came back to himself with a start. "We just crossed the state line," Taggert said. "Jimbo thought we were made by a State cruiser, but he was full of shit. Like usual." Jack smiled into his coke and tucked the phone between head and shoulder as he fished his Dad's old watch out of his pocket. "That puts you here no earlier than four o'clock, right? No speeding." "No speeding, boss." Taggert's reply had all the exasperation of a husband-chided wife. "It's not like this is my first time. I was pulling runs like this when you were still shitting yourself." "If you show up with a cop on your ass, I'll be shitting myself all over again." Jack looked up from his coke as someone walked close by his booth. In a swirl of perfume and residual spirits, the bartender was past him, headed for the front door. He listened to Taggert prattle on for a few more seconds, not really listening, but thinking hard, fast, the sort of electric fragment of thought that shot through his head when he was guiding in the next punch, or steering through an icy curve. Not quite instinct, but not far from it. Fuck it. If this were stupid, so be it. "Listen, Tag, I gotta drain the lizard. Give me a call when you hit Gas City. That's about an hour from here, according to Mr. Google." Then he was out of the booth, headed towards the front door. # Donovan's was one tooth in a mouthful of buildings that jutted along what passed for main street in rural Indiana. The buildings were tall, narrow-windowed survivors from when the farmers had rolled into town behind the asses of fat old mules. Over time, buildings had blazed up or fallen down, and the street had a gap-toothed look, with over-wide alleys passing between the brick-fronted buildings. Pam was taking a smoke break in a skinny door just past the maw of an alley, the gap in the facade making it seem she floated alone and isolated in the darkness. For a few seconds, Jack stood just outside the doorway, suspended in an orange neon penumbra, sinuses contracting so fast in the cold air that his eyes teared up, duplicating the bartender in salty tears. Blinking clear, he refocused, eyes settling on his bike, halfway down the block on the far side of where she stood. He hitched his jeans up and moved down towards it, rubbing the back of his hand over his wet eyes. As he crossed the middle of the street, boots rasping over the bubbled asphalt, the smart part of him that lived north of the belt buckle gave the southern resident a lecture about what he should be doing. He didn't know this woman -- or this area -- and the smart thing was to check his bike over like a good little weekend biker, then stroll back into the tavern and wait out his ride. He could, maybe, spare her a nod, maybe even a smile, on his way back in. Cold night, huh? Obediently, he gave the Harley a glance over, carefully ignoring the gas tank. The fender bib at the rear of the softail was empty except for a handful of tools and extra ear plugs -- he'd stashed his colors further up the road, wrapped in a black trash bag and carefully stuffed into a silver drainage pipe. Anyone filching through would find a whole lot of nothing for their frigid trouble. Satisfied, he started back across the street. That's when the northerner started jabbering, asking why he was crossing all the fuck of the way up here. Didn't he know he'd have to walk right past her? The plan. He was fucking up the plan! But his damn feet kept clickity-clacking over the sidewalk, just the same. The south shall rise again. As he neared her, the icy wind carried the scent of her -- cigarette smoke and perfume, gray thorns nestled inside a pink corsage. "How's the bike," she asked as he drew near. The tip of her cigarette winked an orange eye at him as she took a long drag. "Cold," he answered. "Thinks he ought to be let inside. Too fucking cold out here." She laughed softly and shook her head, a brunette wave that crashed around her shoulders. His eyes flicked past that motion to where the white cotton of her blouse gathered over her breasts, hardened nipples announcing the cold. She plumed out a fan of smoke that wreathed around their faces, hazed her torso from him like a faded daguerreotype. "Some things," she tipped her cigarette hand toward him, "you have to suffer for." Jack leaned up against the other side of the door. They stood close, less than an arm's length apart. She didn't move, just stood looking at him. In the dark, she was glittering eyes and pale skin, her face fading in and out with every draw of the cigarette, lambent features cycling to smoke-filled darkness and then back again. Waves of Pam, flowing over and over him. For a few minutes they just stood there while she smoked. Jack was cold and growing colder but liked where he was. He watched, and she allowed herself to be watched. "You're here for the duration, aren't you?" Her words were chugs of white. "Looks that way." "We don't see many like you on a Saturday." She flicked the ember of her cigarette into the street, then lit another, sparking red highlights against the dark overhang of her hair. Something primal inside of Jack ignited along with that flint. "You're quite the topic of conversation." He set his lips and leaned back into the doorway, thinking. "We mainly draw farmers and factory joes out for a few beers and flirts before the wife wants them home." She looked across, eyes reading him. "But we get a few off-hour firemen and at least one deputy. The type that notice things." Jack let his eyes drift over to his bike. Maybe he could spend some time working on it, tools clearly spread out on a blanket beside him. Although he knew he couldn't fix the chain, it would at explain his presence. But there were two problems with that scenario. One, he hated the fucking cold. And two, what if one of those good-natured types that noticed things decided to play the Samaritan and offer him a ride somewhere? No, thanks officer. I'm just waiting on my club to pick me and my heroin up. Thanks for the offer, though. "So, Jack-who-doesn't-have-a-jacket, maybe you should find a reason for hanging around." Pam leaned back in the doorway and smiled at him. "Something you're waiting for." And for the second time that night, Jack found himself smiling. # At 2:55, every bar is the same. They may start off with potted plants and dartboards, or maybe sawdust and cowboys crooning out the jukebox, but they end the same. Jack watched a handful of middle-aged men stare into their beers, thinking that if they ignored the clock on the wall, it would leave them be. But the time came, as it always did, and the bartender's voice pierced through the fumes of alcohol that misted their faces, blurred their memories. Like a single, barely articulated beast, they stumbled to their feet, doughy faces already smarting from the sharp, not-yet-morning cold that waited for them on the concrete outside. Most of the bar staff were gone by now, trickling out as the night drew on. A surly looking fat man came out from the backline, wiping his lobster-red hands on his apron and eying Jack like one more chore that needed tending. Pam was down at the far corner of the formica, tapping Morse code into the till. Before the fat man reached him, Jack pried himself off the bar stool and tipped a handful of folded bills onto the counter. As he joined the sluggish promenade out the door, he fought the urge to look over his shoulder. The night was past, without any questions from ham-fisted rednecks. That should have been enough. Pam had passed through his orbit through the hours, close enough to show the bubba's that she didn't mind the stranger talking her up, but not so close as to imply that he was getting anywhere. If he looked at her now, the fat man might take notice. It was one thing to chatter the night away with the bartender, it was another to wait for her in the darkness. Like she'd asked him to. Outside, the cold shook their bones. While flannel-coated men fumbled their way into their pickups and rust-buckets, he sat on his bike and fiddled purposefully with the handlebars, hands mimicking the normal start up routine. Kicking back the stand, he heeled the dead bike in a wide, slow arc across the street, just past the mouth of the alleyway where Pam had smoked her break. With a quick, smooth glance up and down the street, like it was the most natural thing in the world he was about to do, he planted his feet and shoved off, spearing his bike backward into the shadows of the alley. Grunting with the effort, he backpedalled through the sodden, newspaper-carpeted alley. As the Harley glided silently backward, tire-flattened beer cans glittered up at him from the asphalt like a collapsed Milky Way. An overloaded dumpster swept by on Jack's right and he turned the handlebars left, angling the softback into the darker shadows. He squeezed the brakes too hard for his slight speed and nearly tumbled off the back of the bike. With a brittle, frosty crunch, the bike stopped. Wrapped in silence and cold, he listened to pickups coughing awake and cars pulling away, One by one, they ghosted past the mouth of the alleyway. And with every one, he felt a little less part of the world beyond the alley, more tied to the darkness and the filth around him. His awareness contracted to the patch of streetlight at the mouth of the alley and the throbbing heat against the front of his jeans. He waited. # Longer than he thought it would take, he saw the fat man, dishwater hands faded to a normal pink, waddle around the corner of the alley and stop. The man was huge, and the parka wrapped around him made him look like a bald-headed bear. He stared down the alley, craning his head to the side. Jack almost imagined he could hear the bear-man sniffing, scenting him out. Keeping his body still, Jack slid his hand slowly down his right calf, toward the knife tucked in the cuff of his boot. The man spat into the alley. "Damn it. I thought Ray's said they were going to clean that dumpster out. Looks like a fucking rat nest back there." From back toward the tavern, a husky voice answered him. "They said Tuesday, Jim. Tuesday." Jim shook his head and kicked a flattened can. It cartwheeled down the alley, glittering past where Jack hunched low on the bike, shallow breaths crystallizing out of him. "Lazy sons-of-bitches." Pam stopped in the alley, a brunette Goldilocks beside Papa Bear. A spark and then smoke curling above her head. "It's always been Tuesday." Jim shook himself, then looked at her. "Yeah, I guess it has." He swept out a massive arm and gave her a hug that scooped her half-off her feet. "Sorry, darling. You know how I get." Wheezing out something between a laugh and a cough, he released her, lumbered out of view. Jack sat in his darkness and watched as the bartender followed, trailing smoke over her shoulder. Then, a door squealing open and shut, an engine turning over and finally catching, then a rusty truck rolled past, billowing clouds of exhaust. As the engine receded, Jack heard footsteps dwindling up the street. Gadarene Had he heard her wrong? There was nothing to do but sit and listen to the footsteps fade, faint enough now that the stirring wind blew patches of silence through its cadence. In those lengthening moments, the stench of the alley seeped into his mouth, a stew thick with spilled beer, turned mayonnaise, and sodden tobacco. How it hadn't bothered him when he first rolled in, he hadn't a clue. Probably the industrial strength hard-on he'd been sporting had helped with that. But with his lust fading, the darkness and the stench and the cold rushed in to fill the amorous void. And hovering over this dismal whirlpool, like fading smoke from departed lungs, floated the dense cloud of his own stupidity, the horndog lust that had played him out and left him freezing in an alley, a mother-fucking alley, at 3:10 in the morning. The phone in his pocket began to vibrate. "Just passed Gas City. Where the fuck do they get these names?" Jack slid down on the seat, settling his back against the padded leather. It took a cold and miserable night to make welcome Taggert's bitching. "Hurry the fuck up. It's gotten real cold over here." Taggert's voice lost bass as he pulled the phone from his mouth. "Jack says to floor this fucker, Jimbo." "I did not," Jack said. "How we going to outrun the county mounties if we don't step on it?" In the background, Jimbo howled like a wolf. "You bring mounties, you just keep going." Taggert laughed. "Where you gonna be, boss?" "The alley one block north of Donovan's bar." "Alley? What the fuck?" "Long, long story," Jack said. The smell of the alley was starting to get to him. "Just back in and kill the lights. I'll be waiting." He thumbed off the phone and slipped it back into his pocket. "How much time that give us?" Jack was rolling off the bike, hand fumbling for his boot knife, feet slipping through half-frozen muck. A punk gangbanger could have laid him out with a whiffle bat. Smokey laughter swept over him. "Did I forget to mention the back way in?" # His knees were ice cold and lanced by something sharp. Pam stood over him, a dark shadow in the alley. "Yeah, you kind of left that part out." From his vantage point on his knees, he couldn't tell if she were smiling, but he thought she might be. And he didn't mind. Not being alone in a frigid alley at 3:15 in the morning was salve enough for any bruising of his ego. She walked closer, and he had to crane his head back to get a better look at her. Close, her hair was a black curtain falling around her face. She wore one of those heavy corduroy coats that he remembered mothers wearing from his childhood, the sort with big pockets filled with Kleenexes for kids' runny noses. As she stopped in front of him, the edges of the coat closed around him like the corded wings of a bird. "You look so cold down there." Her voice purred out at him from the darkness of her face. For an answer, he leaned forward and wrapped his arms around her hips, pulling her against him. The smell of perfume, cigarettes, and something darker wrapped around him. The coat became a cave, throwing his breath back into his face, warming him. He slid his hands up beneath her shirt. "You're ice," she whispered, and shivered against him, the soft flesh of her back rippling beneath his fingers. "I'm warm where it counts." He straightened from the muck, the length of her sweeping past his face in a blur of blue jean, shirt, and hair. He gazed down into her face. From somewhere higher up the alley, a red liquor sign was still flashing, strobing her upturned face scarlet. Her eyes glinted like rubies. "I thought you'd bailed on me." She smiled up at him. "That would be one hell of a way to welcome a stranger to town, wouldn't it?" She chuckled, deep in the back of her throat. "And besides, we have unfinished business." "I don't suppose you have a key to the bar, do you?" "Nope," she said, and leaned her body into his. "Somehow, I didn't think so." "You're not afraid of a little cold, are you?" He slid his hands beneath her ass and lifted her up so that her face drew level with his, the corded muscles of his back scissoring beneath his shirt. Her legs swept round him, cinching her pelvis against him. "I'm not afraid of anything," he said. She opened her mouth and sighed into his face. "Then what are you waiting for?" And her mouth was on him, her tongue slipping between his lips. She had a long, lean tongue that twirled and twisted in his mouth. His own tongue fell limp as she slithered beneath him, licking the length of it, her tobacco-tainted saliva painting the inside of his mouth. Her lips sucked against him and his tongue followed her own past her sharp teeth and into the warmth of her mouth. Her tongue was frantic -- dancing, sliding, rolling over his. He moaned. Pam pulled back, laughter bubbling from her throat. "You should see what I can do with a cock." "Yes, I should." He looked over her shoulder, past the swell of her dark hair and into the depths of the alley, saw a stack of pallets tossed up against the wall. Across from these, a green EXIT sign glowed from the rear door of a merchant's shop. As he carried her to the pallets, the green light glinted off her silver earrings as she bent her head forward and licked the exposed flesh of his throat. He dropped her onto the pallets. With a heavy creak of wood, she settled back onto her elbows and looked up at him. In the EXIT light, her breath ghosted out in green clouds as she panted up at him. She reached up and performed magic with her fingers, the buttons of her blouse flying open. Her black bra glowed with verdigris. "Show them to me," he said. Propped on one elbow, she used her free hand to slide up her bra, spilling heavy breasts into the November night. Large round nipples hardened as soon as the air hit them. Dropping back on both elbows, she slid her hands up and cupped them, pushing them together, rolling them beneath her palms. "So cold," she said, and arched her back. Her skin rippled with goose flesh. Jack leaned over her, the sharp edge of the pallet digging against the cock straining inside his jeans. He pushed aside one of her hands and pressed his face to her breast, his sharp, whiskered chin digging into her mounded flesh as his mouth settled around the teat. As the nipple unfolded beneath his tongue, the smell of garbage and talcum mingled in his nostrils. The location was incongruous, ludicrous, but the juxtaposition of her pale flesh against the filth of the alley loosed a rutting spirit upon him. She writhed on the pallet, heavy breasts wobbling on her ribs, a beast on her back, serene in her surroundings, goblin green eyes glinting up at him. He filled his lungs with the icy air of the alley, let his senses meld the filth and the decay with the pale wonder of her flesh, wed them together in an amalgam of lust. He sank his weight onto her, burrowed his face between her breasts. He lost himself, then, ego drowning beneath a wave of lust that dampened his mind and swept through his body. His lips and tongue savored her, licking, sucking, tasting. From some far distance, he felt the tingle of electronics against his leg. And again. A persistent, droning vibration that slowly re-assembled his reasoning brain. He staggered up from her, landed against the cold bricks of the far wall. As his numb fingers fumbled out the phone, he felt the crackle of frost on his cheeks, his skin frosting over from the sheen of saliva that had smeared back from her breasts and onto his face. As the screen of the phone splashed color against his cheek, Pam stared across at him, her face hardening in the chill. "Which alley?" "What?" he tried to shake his head clear. Taggert spoke slowly. "The one north of the tavern or the one south?" In that instant, a panel van rolled past the mouth of the alley, Jimbo's blond bulk crammed behind the steering wheel. Pam slipped down from the pallets, the front flaps of her blouse fluttering out from her corduroy jacket as she padded across the alley. She stopped before him, cocked her head. Her eyes were thoughtful, withdrawn, calculating. "South," he whispered, as Pam's hands began to knead the front of his jeans, squeeze the bulge of his cock. "But give me a minute." "What?" And with a glare of white backup lights, the van swept back into view, swung ass-end into the alley. "Fuck." Jack slapped the phone off. With a hiss of corduroy, Pam slid down his torso, her fingers snagging down his zipper. As the van stopped and its lights died, her hand reached through the moist flap of his underwear and pulled him out in the icy air. He felt the head of his cock enter into the blazing circle of her lips, her tongue cupping his glans. "Baby, my ride," he protested, weakly. His arms fell to his side, palms scraping against the ridged brick behind him. As he felt the length of his cock slip into Pam's mouth, heard the wet vinyl sound of his flesh between her lips, the panel van's doors opened and closed. Footsteps crunched towards them. "Jimbo, Tag, I'd like to introduce you to Pam." He lifted his hands to her head, buried his fingers in her hair as she sank her mouth to the base of his cock. "The best fucking bartender in Acacia, Indiana." # Taggert and Jimbo stood there, frozen in the green periphery of the EXIT sign. Jack was having a hard time reading their faces -- having his cock sucked didn't help his powers of observation. As Pam slowly pulled her mouth from him, his cock grew a sheath of ice. She turned her head and pressed it against the side of his leg, facing away from the van and its two strangers. His cock pawed the air, twining through her hair. In the silence of the alley, he heard her pant. "Boss?" Taggert was looking at his feet. "Maybe Jimbo and me should head back in the van for a little bit?" Jimbo was staring forward. If anyone fit the stereotype of an outlaw biker, it was Jimbo. Well over six feet tall, and built like a steer, he was strong enough to solo-lift a bike onto a mechanic's table. And if the women that clung to his back weren't all damn liars, his strength wasn't the only attribute he shared with a bull. "I don't want to go in the van," Jimbo said heavily. His eyes, hot and beady, were locked on Pam. Jack had to play this right. Jimbo had always been . . . different. He let his hand fall from Pam's hair and onto her shoulder, a nearly paternal gesture. "Why don't you two roll the bike into the back." His voice was soft, reasonable. "I can give you a hand in a second." Taggert clucked Jimbo on the shoulder and Jimbo shook his head, like he was coming up out of deep water. "Sure, Jack. Sure." The big man lumbered towards the bike, his broad back turning to them. Taggert scowled a silent warning at Jack, then followed, opening the rear doors. During this exchange, Pam had knelt in the garbage at Jack's feet. What he had first taken as shivering, had deepened into a sustained trembling. Jack realized that he knew almost nothing of this woman, where her limits and proclivities lay. But he was relatively sure that they didn't extend to situations like this. Gently, he raised her to her feet. "Listen, we can give you a ride--" And she was on him. As her lips smashed against him, tongue spearing against his teeth, he fell back against the wall, starring his head. For a second, he felt dizzy, and the alley spun around him, the white oval of Pam's face weaving in front of him as her lips feasted on him. Her body shook, and what he had assumed to be fear revealed itself as a body worked past the limits of tension, a red-lined engine shaking itself to pieces. She draped herself over him, hand grabbing his half-softened cock, pumping it against her abdomen. He heard the van's shocks settle under the weight of his bike and turned his head sideways, away from the furnace of her lips. Taggert and Jimbo were gazing into the rear of the van, ignoring whatever was going on behind them. Fuck it, he decided. He reached out and put his hands on Pam's shoulders, urging her to her knees. If his ride didn't mind and Pam didn't mind, he'd roll right along with it. "No," she whispered. He looked into her face. The dome light of the van cross-hatched her features, white and green. Her hair was matted across her forehead, lipstick and saliva smeared across her lower lip and chin. Her eyes were sharp green embers. She stepped back from him and reached down, past the flapping tails of her blouse. Her fingers bunched at the front of her jeans, unbuttoning, then pushed jeans and panties down her legs. She kicked her feet free, then stood in the alley across from him, naked from the waist down. Thick-soled white shoes, the type favored by nurses perambulating through long midnight shifts, rebuffed the bare flesh above them. In the moonless darkness, her vulva, shaven and pale, flashed its crescent at him. Her lunar thighs quivered, whether from cold or from lust, he didn't have time to say because Pam turned and walked the three paces it took to reach Jimbo's broad, carefully turned back. Like a den mother snatching hold of a rambunctious scout, she grabbed his arm and swung him around. Jack caught a look of dull shock on his enforcer's face, then Pam reached up and grabbed his full beard in her hands, pulling his face down to her's. As she kissed him, Jack watched her mounded buttocks clench, screw her mound forward against Jimbo's grease-stained jeans. Taggert looked at Pam, looked at Jimbo, then looked back at Jack. "Boss--", but then Pam's hand shot forward and grabbed the front of his jeans, clutching, squeezing. Taggert fell back against the opened door of the van, rocking it forward. Taggert was faster on his feet and with his wits than Jimbo, who swayed in front of Pam like a cobra before a snake-charmer. With sharp, measured efficiency, Taggert batted her hand away, shoved her backwards. She fell from Jimbo, staggered into the middle of the alley, surrounded by Jack and his men. Taggert leaned forward, as though ready to follow up with further violence, if needed. Jimbo simply stood, eyes dulled, face clouded. "What the fuck do you think you're doing?" Taggert was loud, and growing louder. Jack couldn't tell if the anger were genuine or summoned for his benefit. None of them knew how to read either the situation or the woman in front of them. Jack had heard the old timers' war stories about pulling trains, but it was a vanished rite among the club. And never had it been described like this. Pam turned and looked at Jack, hair whipping around her face. "Jack, you promised me a ride." Where Taggert boomed, she whispered. Her thin voice was as sharp as the wind. Jack felt the hair rise along his neck. He pushed off from the wall, uncomfortably aware of the semi-erect cock dangling from his zipper. He held his hands in front of him, as though placating a cornered stray. "Listen, I"m not sure what you thought was going on here. But this ain't going to happen." Pam barked out laughter. "I thought we were going to have some fun. Isn't that what you wanted?" She reached down and ran her hand between her legs. "Isn't this what you wanted?" "Whoa, whoa." He edged closer to her, trying to think of some way to defuse the situation. His mind was on the felony tucked in the gas tank and the out-of-state van sitting in the alley. Fun time was over. "Look, we had our fun. But I've got to go now." "Our fun." She spat the phrase, the vehemence stopping his approach. "Your big night in hick-ville is over now, right? And I'm supposed to just trot my little ass home because the big man has 'got to go now.' You're done with me." Taggert was edging the rear door closed, Jimbo only moving as the door closed in on him. The big man seemed to be in a trance. Jack was circling around her now, getting between her and the rear of the van. A few more steps and he'd be on the good side of her, ready to duck into the van. "That's not how I see it, Pam." The cold had shrank him now, and he felt the underside of his glans rubbing against the cold metal mouth of his zipper. Pam was watching him, hands swinging loosely at her side, fingers curled like talons. As the van door clicked shut, the green EXIT light reclaimed her, shading her a bilious green. "Boss," Taggert said, rapping the side of the van. Jimbo stood as Pam had left him, mouth hanging open like he'd fallen victim to a stroke. His eyes were locked on the woman in the alley before him, his breath steaming up over his face, a bull paralyzed in mid-charge. "Pam, listen, we're just going to get into the van, okay? We can take you wherever you need to go. Not a problem." But Pam paid him no attention. Done with words, done with Jack, she was slinking towards Jimbo with small, slow steps that quivered the dimpled flesh of her thighs. Between steps, her shaven mound winked at them. "Jimbo." Jack leaned close, pitching his voice low. "You need to get into the van. Now." "But you don't want to go into the van, do you?" Pam purred. Her left hand arabesqued down her leg and then up, her fingers cupping herself, slipping inside. She was close enough now that her breath mingled with Jimbo's. "I don't wanna go in the van, Jack." Jimbo parroted back. "Not right now." "Dammit Jack, what the hell's up with this cunt? Can't take no for an answer?" Taggert moved to step between her and Jimbo. "Take a hint, honey, and piss off." Taggert flew across the alley, smashed into the side of the dumpster. An avalanche of frost-stiffened garbage bags crunched down over him as he fell to the ground. Jimbo hadn't even broken eyes with Pam, just pistoned out a arm and batted Tag like a fly. Some of the bags had split open, and Taggert was coming up covered with rotten lettuce, damp cigarette butts peppering his hair. Jack didn't have to read the man's face to know what was going through his mind. He stepped in front of Tag, reached out and stopped him from pulling the knife from behind his back. From behind him, he heard a huff of air as Pam was plucked off her feet, then the watermelon-slurp of lips against skin. "What the fuck is going on?" Instead of anger, Taggert's eyes swam in confusion. And that put Jack back on his heels. "We've got to get out of this damn alley. That bitch is trouble." Taggert ran a hand over his scalp, looked as though he were about to vomit. Jack put a restraining hand on Taggert's chest, waited til he got a nod back. Ok. When he turned back to Jimbo, the giant had carried the bartender back to the pallets. She lay on the splintered wood, bra hiked above her breasts, while Jimbo mauled them with his over-sized hands. She looked over at Jack with a lazy turn of her head, a bitter smile etched across her face. "You came into the alley to fuck me." She reached out and unzipped Jimbo's fly. His meat smacked into her palm. She stroked her hand over its length, fingers barely able to encompass it. "Turns out, I'm the one fucking you." From behind him, he heard Taggert stumbling forward, moving towards the mocking bitch sprawled on her wooden dais. He could have held up his hand, could have just shook his head, and Taggert would have stopped. But he didn't. And as Taggert swept around him and moved towards her, Jack began to smile. He was tired of being fucked. # "Tag, grab her legs." The older man looked over the wedge of pallets at Jimbo, inclined his head at the over-sized biker. Jimbo was standing, head thrown back, breath thundering through his throat as the woman beneath him squeezed and stroked his cock. Jack nodded his head back at Pam. He didn't think they had to worry about Jimbo -- he was preoccupied. When Taggert's hands touched her ankles, Pam groaned and tried to spread her legs wider. Taggert's shoulders bunched, and her feet slowly scissored together. Jimbo grunted as the hand gripping his cock tightened in response to the struggle of wills. Gadarene "Swivel her around on the pallet," Jack ordered. Taggert looked across at him with a sour expression, a man who hated fish being forced to clean the catch of the day. Dutifully, Taggert lifted Pam's ankles into the air, hefting her half off the splintered wood as he pivoted her in place. Somehow, through the arc of movement, she kept her grip on Jimbo, and he dog-trotted along beside her, leashed by his enormous member. Jack walked up to the pallets and looked down into her face. Here, submerged in the EXIT light, she seemed a deep sea creature, dredged up in their net and drowning in the surface atmosphere. Her eyes were huge, pupils expanded to gather in the darkness. The creamy flesh of her shoulder rippled as she pumped her fist up and down Jimbo's shaft. Jack leaned down into her face, stopping just shy of where his eyes lost the ability to focus on the narrowed bands of her green irises. "You sure you want this?" Her upside down smile seemed a grimace to him, full of hungry teeth. "Time to get fucked," he whispered, caressing his hand over her forehead. He straightened, knitting his fingers in the overhang of her bangs. He stepped back and pushed his hand downward, tilting her head off the edge of the pallet, aiming her open mouth like a rifle. "Jimbo." The big man slowly pivoted his head and looked over at Jack, then followed Jack's arm down to the round circle of Pam's mouth. Her hand slowed its motion, slipped loosely from his cock. Gingerly, the big man stepped in front of her. Closer than he'd ever been, Jack could see the sheer size of Jimbo's cock. It was the sort of thing that only made sense in a porn movie, attached to some chiseled, buffed-out Cali-boy. Not to Jimbo, the man that lubed his bike when he brought it into the shop and wailed Led Zeppelin when he was plastered. But it was there, nonetheless, and it was nosing its way into Pam's open mouth. Jack kept his hand in her hair, holding her throat open as the shaft disappeared between her lips, as Jimbo's open fly approached her chin. Pam made a protracted noise half-way between a groan and a cough and Jimbo hesitated. He needn't have bothered. Pam's arms rose up, one reaching around Jimbo's side, the other sliding up between his legs. With one steady motion, she pulled the biker forward, sweeping his hips into her face, his cock down her throat. Jack released her hair and stepped back as Jimbo loomed over her. Taggert still held her ankles. Her thighs clenched and released on the rough surface of the pallet, the edges of her nurse's shoes gouging out tiny splinters of wood as her heels sought for purchase. The three of them stood there in the dark stinking alley, Pam stretched between Taggert and Jimbo like a pulsating bridge of flesh, Jack tucked to the side, witnessing what was being done to her. The alley echoed with wet, half-strangled sounds. A dark part of Jack responded, the part he'd always known was inside of him, but locked away. Until tonight. Taggert seemed to be fighting his own losing battle with what was happening on the pallet in front of him. His fingers were clenched over her ankles so tightly that the wool of her socks came up between his fingers like risen bread. Jimbo stared up towards the sky, head tilted back, mouth open. He looked as though he was the impaled, not the impaler. The air had gained humidity, and tiny sand grains of ice drifted down the alley like gnats alighting on the steaming slab of Jimbo's tongue. The sound of Taggert's zipper was ripping sheet metal against Jack's over-sensitized tympanum. Once, he'd had to fire a magnum inside the confines of a truck cab, and the ringing disorientation of those first few moments after the explosion of gas from the barrel approached the dislocation that he was now experiencing. Approached, but did meet. The old man's cock swung like a strangled turkey as he dug it out from his jeans. Whatever black emotion burned inside him hadn't warmed the meat between his legs, and he stood there pulling on his foreskin as Pam, legs released, drummed her heels against the pallet. "Jimbo, pull back." Jack could only speak by forcing himself. His vocal cords were stiffened by what he was seeing in front of him. "Give her air." Jimbo took two steps back, but Pam used her heels to propel herself after him, pushing her mouth back onto his cock. Jimbo reached down and grabbed the woman's head between his hands, forcing her off of him. She came away gasping, coughing, cursing. "Fucker," she choked out. Her hand reached up and snagged hold of his cock, fisted around it so tightly that the head of Jimbo's cock turned an instant purple. "I didn't tell you to stop." "Or are you as fuckless as the old man?" Taggert snarled at her, reached down and grabbed her hips, throwing her to her side, then tumbling her over on her stomach. With an explosion of air, Pam sprawled on the pallet, finally releasing her hold on Jimbo. Taggert was behind her now, and her ass lifted up, whether from Taggert's unseen hands or her own will, Jack couldn't tell. Taggert rammed up against her, forcing his half-hardened cock into her. Pam laughed, her vocal cords still raw from the bludgeoning of Jimbo's cock, and began to buck herself against him. If Taggert had meant to take her, he became the taken, as she rammed herself against him in a rhythm that threatened to topple the pallets. Again and again, and Taggert's breath was rasping out his throat, his visible expiration floating out over Pam's back like a snow machine powdering an Autumn ski slope. Her hair, once wet with sweat, now sprawled over her back in tight curls, stiff with frost. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck." She chanted with every thrust backwards. Jack stared as she jack-hammered her ass into Taggert, the thick flesh of her rump rippling with every collision of skin and denim. And then Jimbo was in front of her again, his cock dancing in front of her face. For a second, Jack wasn't sure she was even aware of it. Her face was staring down at the barred wood, her shoulders hunched with the effort of propelling herself backward, again and again. "More," she panted, words syncopating each meaty slap, voice dripping with vibrato. "Is this my fuck, Jack? Is this it?" Jimbo ran his hand over his face, a little boy trying to wipe away the horror movie playing on the screen in front of him. Taggert was holding on to her hips, meeting every backward thrust with a bone-jarring whip forward that shook his scrawny frame. Red blotches lit his cheeks. His eyes were squeezed shut. Jack walked up to her. With the three of them around her, she seemed a small thing, a tiny creature trapped between them. But he knew now she wasn't trapped, had never been. She was throwing herself against them, a cat rending its scratching post, a doe stripping the bark from a sapling. In between the walls of their bodies, her nude body seemed an already dead thing, a bit of death writhing between the tombstone slabs of their bodies. And death had them all in her grip. She turned her head and looked at him. In the darkness of the moment, when the blossom of their act clouded out the stars and the green EXIT light became a hellish sunrise, he could suddenly see her face and her features as though he were studying her in the stark light of a coroner's fluorescent. Whether it was onset hypothermia, or whether it was the stench of the alley, or whether it was the stranger's bodies inside of her, Pam was no longer recognizable. Or, rather, the real Pam was finally recognized. He had glimpsed the stranger in the bar, serving him drinks. He had ogled the potential fuck, batting innuendos at him like pop flies over a summer meadow. But now, with all of that assumed pretence stripped away, he locked eyes with reality. He saw her need, felt her hunger, that void inside of her that she'd sought to fill with his body, then, wonder of wonders, with those of his men. He saw the darkness and the stench and the filth of the alley pouring inside her consciousness, her skull an alembic fusing it all together, trying to transmogrify the lead into gold. And he understood, or believed he did, the hunger that drove her, the sheer fury of the lust that admitted no limits, that burned and battered and consumed her flesh from the inside out. What they did to her body was nothing but a pale mimicry of the madness that lapped behind those jaded green eyes. As Jimbo's cock reached her mouth, her eyes broke away from him. There was no laughter now. The time for that was over. Now, she stretched her mouth over Jimbo's impossible girth and forced her teeth apart, fought down gag reflex as she swallowed his cock. Jack reached down and put his hand on the back of her head, nestled his fingers into the stiff, cold, ringlets. Steadily, slowly, he pulled and pushed her head back and forth on the invading member, fucking her throat on the other man's cock. Pam's fingers found his own. They were five flaming embers wrapped around him. He had been half hard through all of this, but from the moment that their eyes had locked, the frisson had sparked through his blood, stiffening him. She stroked, she squeezed, she scratched, and his hips flew to meet her, pounded his aching muscle into her clenched fist. Taggert was groaning now, shoulders hunched in on themselves. The still rational part of Jack's mind noted the flushed skin, the rattled breathing, the rictus contorting the old man's face. In any competent ER in the country, he'd have been poured into a bed and webbed with wires. But here, in the alley, a different triage was in effect. He would fuck until he dropped, one way or the other. Jimbo reached down and buried his hand in Pam's hair, beside Jack's already clenched fingers. Across the no-man's-land of her scalp, Jack could feel the fever of the other man. And in that instant, he felt a fusion of flesh, a shift in perspective. The three of them, three in one, pounding and thrusting into Pam, filling her -- they lost their identity and became accessorized to her lust. One multi-cocked organism assembled by Pam for her pleasure, for her degradation, for lifting her wherever she needed to be carried. Synchronous now, Jimbo-Jack thrust her head forward, pulled it back. On every backward pull, her lips slipped loose from Jimbo and the air that gasped through her mouth sounded like wind tortured through a cracked window pane. Then, the slow gurgle forward as meat filled her mouth and crushed down her tongue. As Jimbo's pelvis ground into her face, a syrupy gagging slipped from her throat as muscle surrendered to intruding flesh. Again and again. Taggert was shivering over her body now, his torso shaking like an epileptic in mid-seizure. All movement of his hips had ended, and it was Pam fucking herself on him. Suddenly, with a coughing, strangled lurch, he fell back, his cock bounding up and down like a dive board after the departure of its diver. Cum shot out from him, spraying the cheeks of her ass, as he fell back against the brickwork, hand pumping furiously over his cock. The brined scent of cum split the air like a razor. As Taggert slumped backward, Jimbo whipped forward and slammed himself against Pam's face, his fingers twisting so tightly in her hair that his hand was suddenly against Jack's, squirming over it as his palm tried to grip the entirety of her skull, sealing her face tight against him. Their earlier synchronization was lost. In a jumble of fingers, Jack and Jimbo fought, the one pulling back, the other grinding forward. And through it all, as Jimbo's pelvis ground and Jack's hand pulled, Pam sagged limply back and forth, corduroy coat rasping over the wooden boards like waves hissing over a moonless beach. How long does it take to cum? Jack had never considered the question. It was a switchback Rocky Mountain road, something to gun the engine into, roaring up the ascent, a floating-belly idle at the crest, then the sluiced descent down, boulders and signposts flashing past as throttle coasted loose under his hand. Time dilated around that moment and minutes could become hours, seconds swallow eternity. How long does it take to die? The question could not be answered, Jack would later think. It partook of that same internal dilation, a warping of time inside the skull. But from the outside, in that moment with the half-frozen filth of the alley lapping at his ankles, it seemed to Jack a thing approaching quickly. Arms that lifted chrome and steel, now strained over a different weight, so very much more fragile then anything that rolled off the assembly line at Detroit. Jack hammered, he pounded, he twisted his fingers between Jimbo's ape-like hands, but crotch and face were one thing now. Pam's body bucked over the wood, her nurse's shoes dancing to some medieval tune, evoking half-remembered doggerel in Jack's head. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. Then Jimbo's mouth opened and he howled silently to an unseen moon, face tilted up and moon-mad eyes catching grains of the still falling ice-sand that drifted down. A bellows-full of air blew out his throat and his legs shook, faltered, then failed, dropping the giant down beside the pallet. As he fell, his ape-fists trailed Sargasso strands of Pam's hair like the fluttering black pennants of a sinking galleon. And Pam was on her knees, gasping, holding her throat in her hands, swallowing convulsively. Ropes of semen-saliva pendulumed from her gaping mouth. She lurched forward and Jack was there to catch her. She convulsed against him, arms flailing out to either side like a broken-winged bird testing the wind. From beneath them, Jack heard Jimbo rolling away, grunting like a pig in slop. Across from them, Taggert was wheezing and stumbling sideways, away from the pallet and what he had done there. Jack stroked the back of Pam's hair, cradled the bruised creature of flesh and lust. In time, her breathing stabilized, and she stirred, as though waking from some frigid nightmare. The face that pulled back from his was reddened, as though it had been slapped repeatedly. Frozen tears glistened on her cheeks. But from beneath the matted hair and from within the smeared mascara, those voracious eyes were waiting for him, ambushing his concern. With one smooth leap, she was on him, legs wrapping round as she clambered onto him. His cock, rock hard from adrenaline or from darker secretions, dove into the sea of her heat. He sank deeper and deeper, then felt the textured boundary where his jeans pressed up against her, blocking the touch of her skin against his. He released her and jerked his ass backwards, plunging from summer back to winter, and used both hands to throw his pants down, the cold air slathering his exposed ass and thighs with scrim. And as she locked those raw, famished eyes on him, he pushed forward and entered her, pushed forward until the skin of his hips pressed into the clenching heat of her. What Taggert and Jimbo were doing, or not doing, he didn't know. He might have heard shocks rock as the men threw themselves into the passenger compartment of the van, but it could have been his ears assembling random sounds into meaning. Every ounce of his awareness funneled down into the eyes inches from his. Even the pounding of the flesh below, the sensations slipping up the length of his cock and into the core of his sex, were all secondary to the dark spirit that beckoned to him from those maddened green eyes. Never before and, perhaps, never again, would such immediacy sweep over him, the palpable awareness of the beast ravening in another's skull. He tasted her hunger then, felt her yearning as though it flitted through his own cerebral cortex, sparked across his own synapses, an ancient lust that thundered through his mind on sharp, cloven hooves. He wanted only to fuck and to be fucked. He wanted to pluck the lust from her mind and devour it like some cave cannibal digesting the spirit of his dead from a spitted haunch. But though they pounded and they stared, they still labored in different bodies. And the more he thrust and the closer his orgasm came, the further he fell from wherever Pam was being carried. It could have been oxygen starvation. It could have been the onset of hypothermia. It could have been the touch of whatever spirit swept down frozen alleys under the dark of the moon. But as her eyes rolled to white and her cunt spasmed around him, he knew that she had slipped into a darkness where he could not follow. And he was exploding in her and losing her, shattering the flawed communion of their eyes. Frantically, he pressed his mouth to hers and sucked her limp tongue into his mouth as he spurted inside her. And the salty, tobacco-tainted saliva bled into his mouth like a carnal sacrament. # On the long drive to Cleveland, after they had dropped Pam at her house -- Astro minivan in the gravel drive, trio of bicycles leaning against the vinyl siding -- none of them spoke. Some rites were best left buried in the past, though Jack doubted that the ceremony tonight shared any features with the beer-swilling rituals that the geezers reminisced over when strippers and porn had dredged young lusts to the surface of old minds. No, tonight wouldn't become another club story. It would fade and die between the three of them. Jack didn't think he'd be spending much time with Jimbo or Taggert for a while. There was enough work in the club to keep them separately occupied until time faded this night, their acts. He thought it would fade, at least for them. But he knew it would never go away for him. As he sat in the back seat, sandwiched between the smell of axle grease and the furnace-blast of the heater, he still stood in the alley, shin deep in filth, slowly making sense of the stream of noise that poured out of Pam, head lolling on his shoulder as strangers' cum froze over the lips of her cunt. At first, an unintelligible murmur slipping from a throat bruised by cock. Then, a stream of babble resolving itself into words, eventually clarifying as the same word, repeated over and over. Finally, two recognized syllables coughing out of her, fucking their way out of her throat and into his ear, penetrating his mind. "Almost. Almost. Almost." And in the heat of the van, Jack shivered as the darkness awoke inside him.