Hellrider Read online

  jG FAHERTY

  Hellrider

  FLAME TREE PRESS

  London & New York

  PART ONE

  Beginnings

  Hell Rider

  Roarin’ through the night like a demon

  Speedin’ through a life without reason

  Burnin’ with a fire, unholiest desires

  Hell Rider

  Comin’ for you

  ‘Hellrider,’ by Demon Dogs

  * * *

  Feeding from blood cursed through sins of mankind

  Devouring innocents who waste their lives

  Burning ships sail through the safety of night

  Immortal cursed now hiding from the daylight

  Sinking teeth through skin, in the sky so grim

  Falling to the death, yet living again

  Waking self torment, in the light that you’ve sent

  ‘Lead The Way,’ by Charred Walls of the Damned

  Beginnings….

  The town of Hell Creek knew all about death. In that respect, it was no different than any other backwoods Florida town. Like so many of its neighbors, Hell Creek had been built on the bodies of Native Americans (who the locals still called Indians, differentiating between them and their Asian counterparts by tapping their foreheads and saying ‘dot’ or ‘no dot’), settlers, and the unlucky men who’d laid the first highways through the alligator- and snake-infested swamplands.

  There is a vaguely incestuous similarity to many small towns. The unconscious – and sometimes conscious – insularity hidden beneath a façade of cheerful hellos and friendly smiles. The gossip that runs daily life, operating like a cruel wizard behind a curtain of friendship.

  And the verbal histories and legends of the people, often going back to before the community even had a name.

  True to form, Hell Creek’s residents had a variety of tales and superstitions, everything from haunts and spookems to swamp monsters and zombies. Of course, only a few old-timers still believed the old yarns; for most folk, talk of ghosts and vengeful spirits was usually nothing more than a form of entertainment, a tool to scare children or trick tourists into buying ‘hand-crafted’ artifacts and trinkets.

  All in all, on the surface there was nothing special about Hell Creek other than its name, which it had earned because of the supposedly bottomless springs at the edge of town, from which fresh water flowed into the Everglades. To everyone who lived in the area, Hell Creek was nothing more than your average small town, a place where people still hung their washing out to dry, bacon fat was a staple in nearly every kitchen, and the Confederate flag continued to hold a place of respect on every porch and pickup truck. A place where crime most often meant drunk and disorderly or hunting out of season.

  Certainly no one who lived there would ever have expected a murder in their sleepy town.

  Or the horrible events that followed it.

  Of course, things might have been different if they’d believed in ghosts.

  Chapter One

  Only a few hours before his life ended in agonizing fashion, Eddie Ryder’s night was already going so badly he figured it couldn’t possibly get any worse.

  After another day of almost no business at the garage, of just sitting around twiddling his dick and sweating from the heat, he’d stopped at the Piggly Wiggly on the way home to grab a pack of smokes and a six-pack for dinner. As he set his purchases on the counter, the clerk’s face turned sickly pale. Despite a bad reputation in town, Eddie knew his mere presence wasn’t enough to warrant that kind of immediate reaction, which meant the clerk’s sudden anxiety had to be the result of something – or someone – else.

  His fear was confirmed when a loud, raspy voice spoke from the entrance.

  “Lookee here, fellas. If it ain’t our good friend, Little Eddie. I knew I smelled pussy.”

  Instead of turning around, Eddie placed twenty dollars on the counter, pocketed his smokes, and picked up his beer.

  “Don’t worry,” he whispered to the wide-eyed clerk. “I’ll make sure they don’t cause you any trouble tonight.”

  The clerk nodded, too frightened to speak.

  Eddie took a deep breath and then turned to confront the three Hell Riders who’d entered the Piggly Wiggly. All of them wore denim vests with their names over their hearts and the words ‘Hell Riders’ emblazoned on the back in bloody script, curved around a skull wearing a Nazi helmet, all against a backdrop of the Confederate flag.

  “Not in here, Hank.” Eddie nodded at the doors. “Out in the parking lot.”

  Henry Bowman – Hank to everyone in Hell Creek – shook his head. Long, unkempt brown hair slapped back and forth in time to his movements. “No way, fuck face. Your ass is mine.”

  Pointing a finger toward the ceiling, Eddie said, “Cameras, remember? You start trouble in here, you’ll end up in jail just like your brother.”

  Leroy ‘Mouse’ Bates, the smallest of the Hell Riders, frowned. “He’s right. That’s how Ned got caught the last time. Camera got ’em.”

  “Shit.” Bowman jabbed a finger into Eddie’s chest. “You’re lucky we got a party to go to, otherwise I’d smear you across the parking lot. Guess you’ll have to wait for that ass beating. Don’t worry, though. We know where to find you. C’mon, boys, let’s get us some beer.”

  Eddie stood aside as the three of them walked past, all sneers and laughter, then nodded to the clerk and left the store’s meager air conditioning for the wretched tropical heat and humidity of a typical summer night in South Florida.

  Ignoring the mosquitoes and biting flies that dive-bombed him before he stepped two feet from the doors, he climbed onto Diablo. As the engine roared to life, he considered doing some damage to the three Harleys parked out front – kick them over, run his knife along the gas tanks – but in the end he just drove past. Even though he no longer belonged to the gang, he still adhered to the prime tenet of biker rules, the same rule that had kept Hank and his friends from touching Eddie’s bike: you could do whatever you wanted to the person, but you didn’t fuck with their wheels. Or their mother.

  The ten-mile ride back to the house gave Eddie too much time to think about gangs, mothers, and bikes, all of them constant problems entwined together and festering in his head.

  It’d been almost a year since he’d taken his lawyer’s advice, pled guilty to the robbery charge, and accepted one year’s probation in return for ratting out fellow Hell Rider Ned Bowman, Hank’s older brother. Ned, the founder of the gang – group, according to the club’s lawyer – and the only member currently over the age of thirty, had molded an assortment of teenage and twenty-something-year-old acolytes into a troop of beer-swilling, hog-riding petty criminals who were nothing more than Hell’s Angels wannabes, although none of them knew it back then. Eddie had been right there with them, thinking he was all big and bad, believing that the police were just like the rest of the town, quivering in their boots whenever the Hell Riders tore through town on their obnoxiously loud Harleys. For three years, he’d believed he was the absolute shit, that nothing could stop him. He’d had no idea the local cops, who they’d all considered dumber than dirt, had merely been giving them enough rope to hang themselves.

  Sure enough, less than an hour after he and Ned had robbed the Piggly Wiggly by pretending they had guns in their pockets, Chief Jones and the boys in brown had rolled up on his house. It was then, with his mother and brother crying in the living room, that he’d learned about the cameras in the ceiling.

  And realized he wasn’t nearly as smart or tough as he’d thought he was.

  After three weeks in the county jail, the growing cert
ainty of doing time in prison had changed his life. Scared the hell out of him, much as he hated to admit it. Knowing he couldn’t leave an ailing mother and younger brother to fend for themselves, he’d taken the deal the DA offered, even though it meant making instant enemies out of the derelicts he’d once considered not just friends, but brothers.

  Thanks to Eddie’s testimony – and the bags of coke the cops found in Ned’s apartment – Ned Bowman ended up getting a five-to-ten stretch in the state prison, while Eddie was back to work two days later, with credit for time served.

  Since then, his life had gone from shit to worse.

  The dual demon headlights of his bike spotlighted the battered, rusty mailbox at the edge of the road and he slowed to take the turn into the long driveway. By the time he reached the two double-wide trailers his old man had welded together to create a decent-sized house, the bike was coasting in neutral, its customary growl muted to a dinosaurian purr.

  Eddie killed the motor, plunging the lawn back into darkness, but it didn’t happen soon enough for him to avoid getting a good look at the place he’d called home his entire nineteen years of life.

  Compared to some of the neighboring trailers, the Ryder place was a castle. No cars with cement blocks instead of wheels decorating the front yard. No lawn chairs with broken arms and sagging ass straps. The tiny lawn was kept mowed and free of broken toys, empty beer bottles, and other junk. Twice a year he power washed the bird shit and leaves off the roof. None of the windows were cracked or covered over with cardboard, and none of the screens were patched with that second-most common building material of all trailer parks, duct tape. He even made sure to bring in the holiday lights every January, right after New Year’s, instead of just turning them off and letting them hang dark the other eleven months of the year. In short, it was the antithesis of all the surrounding trailers, a redneck anomaly.

  Or, as Eddie usually thought of it, a piece of fruit in a punchbowl full of turds.

  And yet he still hated the sight of it.

  God, I wish I could just get the hell out of here.

  The temptation was so strong, so fucking crazy powerful, just as it always was when he contemplated the life he’d been saddled with. He refused to act on it though, despite the never-ending pull. During those long nights in his jail cell, he’d made a vow to never be like his old man, and it was a promise he intended to keep. Even if it meant sacrificing his own happiness forever.

  His family deserved that much. And more.

  Before he opened the door, he took a deep breath and focused on projecting a happy attitude. Entering the kitchen, he found Carson at the table, a textbook and notebook open in front of him. The younger boy’s brow was furrowed in deep concentration.

  “Hey, little bro. How’s it hangin’?”

  “Cool. School started today.”

  “So I see.” Eddie went to the fridge, stowed his beer, and pulled out the meatloaf he’d baked the night before. He did a lot of cooking on Sundays, since most weeknights he didn’t get home from the garage until seven. As he prepared plates for microwaving, he watched Carson eagerly writing notes and flipping pages and thought how different he and his brother were.

  He’s probably done more homework tonight than I did in all my years of high school. And he actually enjoys it, enjoys going to school. Hell, when I was sixteen, I spent most of my time cutting classes so I could party and get laid.

  Which is why you’re running your father’s garage, barely keeping the family above water, instead of taking classes at the community college, he added to himself.

  Eddie imagined his mother shaking her head at his words. Between her being sick and Carson being too young – and too damn smart – to quit school, supporting the family had landed on Eddie’s shoulders like a ton of bricks the day his father, Big Eddie, had up and left. His mother did her best at first, but her illness had quickly robbed her of the ability to work, or even clean the house. Because of that, Eddie had pretty much been working full time from the age of sixteen. At seventeen he’d officially left school for good.

  And done the one thing he’d always said he wouldn’t do: fallen into the spiderweb trap of holding a dead-end job in a pissant town.

  After making a plate for Carson, Eddie fixed one for his mother. As always, walking down the hall to her room was the worst – and the best – part of his day.

  “Hey, Ma,” he said, after knocking at the open door.

  “Hey, yourself,” Sally Ryder answered, her pale face breaking into a smile. She was sitting up in bed, watching a game show on the little color TV he’d gotten her for Christmas, a replacement for the old black-and-white set she’d had since before he was born.

  Every time he saw her, he was amazed she’d kept so much of her beauty despite the thieving emphysema that stole little pieces of her life away each day and replaced them with dead lung cells and weak muscles. Her long black hair, equally dark eyes, and bronze skin identified her as a Martinez in ways no married name could hide. Eddie was proud to have inherited her looks, including her tall, thin frame, rather than Big Eddie’s freckles and red hair. Those had gone to Carson instead. Fate had evened things out, though, by passing Sally’s brains to Carson and Big Eddie’s temper to his namesake.

  “Brought you some food.” Eddie set the plate on the nightstand. He knew she’d pick at it through the evening, between bouts of sleeping and coughing. Losing her strength hadn’t robbed her of her desire to fight, even though she knew it was a battle she’d never win. As different as night and day when it came to honesty and temper, one thing Sally and Big Eddie had always had in common was a spit-in-your face, never-give-up attitude, a trait both children had inherited in spades.

  “How was work?”

  Eddie suppressed the urge to chew his lower lip. Her voice sounded weaker than it had when he’d checked on her before leaving for work in the morning. He told himself it didn’t necessarily mean anything, she could just be having a bad day, or she might have been a little more active than usual and worn herself out. These days, that could happen just from taking a shower or getting herself a drink of water.

  Except deep down, he knew it wasn’t true.

  “Fine.” After a pause, during which he regretted his terse response, he kept talking, reminding himself how much she enjoyed hearing about anything that went on outside the four walls of her prison. “A couple of jobs came in, nothing major, but it might mean things are gonna pick up again.”

  Another lie in a long list of them, but at least this one had a purpose. The last thing he wanted was her worrying about money. Even if the economy remained stuck in the shitter and business kept getting slower than ever.

  “That’s good.” Sally closed her eyes and leaned back on the pillow, careful not to crimp the line to the oxygen cannula resting under her nose. “I think I’ll nap a bit before I eat. You go help Carson with his homework.”

  “Sure, Ma. See you later.” Like he could answer one question out of fifty from Carson’s books.

  Eddie was about to ask her how she felt, and then realized she hadn’t coughed once since he got home. He glanced at the nightstand. Sure enough, the inhaler sitting there had a different label than the old one, meaning Doc Holmes had been by during the day and prescribed something stronger. Again.

  She’s dying. And not slowly, either.

  Shut up! Eddie wished he could take care of the voice in his head the way he took care of most other problems, with threats of violence. Or his fists, if threats didn’t work.

  Not that he could go down that road anymore, either. With his track record, one more time in trouble with the police and it would mean jail, no matter how many strings his mother or Doc Holmes pulled with Chief Jones. Which was why he’d resorted to talking his way out of trouble with Hank Bowman when every bone in his body had urged him to break the asshole’s nose. Back in the day, it wouldn’t have matte
red he was outnumbered three to one. Although skinny as a broomstick, he was quick and strong, and had no doubt he could’ve taken down Hank and one of the other two before the third did any serious damage to him.

  Instead, he was still seething inside, his pent-up fury a living thing, adding to the storm that always boiled below the surface, just waiting for moments like tonight to erupt.

  He’d learned the hard way he had to let it out before it grew too strong and he exploded at the wrong time. So he’d made sure he had an outlet. Once Carson was asleep, he would sneak back to the garage and take out his frustrations on the heavy punching bag he kept in the office, a relic from Big Eddie’s amateur boxing days. Twenty minutes attacking the bag followed by a couple of hours tinkering with Diablo’s engine was usually enough to bank the angry fires inside him so he could go home and grab a few hours sleep before starting the whole rotten cycle over again.

  “Good night, Ma,” he whispered. She didn’t answer, and he tiptoed his way out of the room and back down the hall to the kitchen, where Carson was washing his plate.

  “What’s on the agenda for tonight, little man?” Eddie asked, putting together two meatloaf sandwiches for himself.

  “I finished my homework, so I’m probably going to play some computer games for a while and then go to bed.”

  Eddie paused in slathering mayonnaise on white bread, pointed the knife at Carson. “Dude, you need to get some real friends, not a bunch of faceless dorks online.”

  Carson rolled his eyes. “They are real. They’re from school. But it’s better this way.”

  “Better? How?”

  “’Cause they don’t have to come over here.” Carson kept his gaze down as he said it.

  Eddie’s first instinct was to yell. Chew the kid out for acting like a spoiled ass, remind him that at least they had food on the table and a mother who loved them. But three years of filling in as the head of the family after his father took off had taught him some tough lessons, one of which was things usually turned out better if he did the opposite of whatever their father would have done.