ANTELOPE VALLEY
The volume of the world turned up as Polly got her door open. Before he could even put together what she was doing she jumped feetfirst.
Both Nate’s hands left the wheel on pure instinct before his brain could think anything other than holy shit. He leaned across the car. His hand snagged hair. The hair went taut as her bottom half left the car. Her shoes skipped against the asphalt. He yanked. She came halfway back inside. Nate got his left hand on the wheel. Looked up at the road. They’d drifted across the center line. A flatbed loaded with migrant workers rushed at them. Nate yanked Polly inside the car. She yelped with pain. He spun the wheel. That weird floating feeling in his gut and his balls as the car twisted. They headed toward the side of the road.
The car coughed up gravel dust as they slid to a stop on the shoulder. Polly let loose another one of those animal sounds, something way past grief. The screams turned to tears. She wept so her whole body shook with electric-shock tremors. They sat at the side of the road as Polly wrung herself dry. Nate watched her weep, knowing he should reach out to her, hold her. But he didn’t know how. It wasn’t the sort of thing Nick had taught him. So he just drove.
After she’d emptied herself she slept curled against the car door out of his reach. She held her bear death-grip tight, smearing tear-snot across the top of his head.
He watched the girl from the corner of his eyes, like his full gaze might wake her. The only parts of himself he saw in her were her eyes and the buried rage she’d just shown him.
He didn’t know if the old cowboy had called the cops, or if the pack of Odin’s Bastards would come back down the road hunting him. All he knew was that he had only one thing left in his life, and that was keeping this girl safe. He saw now that sending her to Stockton couldn’t happen. She was no safer there than anywhere else. He couldn’t drop her off with the law, and not just because the ghost of his brother in his head would never allow it. Group homes and orphanages were no safer than the streets. They were cages full of predators and Polly was prey.
Nate knew how dangerous cages could be. He’d done five years with his head down. The sharks knew his brother. Nick the stickup king. Nick the killer. The name bought Nate safe haven, even after Nick died. His reputation was so good it left background radiation. Later on, Nate figured that the safe passage had fucked him. He’d never had to fight, so it looked like he couldn’t. If he’d let the anger out even once in those first five years, maybe Chuck Hollington never would have made his move.
Like a lot of the bad news in Nate’s life, it started out looking like good news. An appeal his court-appointed lawyer had filed, an appeal Nate hadn’t even paid mind to, had sprung fruit. Misdated statements, a prosecutor willing to take a time-served plea-down to preserve his conviction rate. Nate only cared about the bottom line: freedom suddenly loomed. He thought about getting a job. Maybe at a gym. He’d helped Nick train for his fights. Maybe that was something he could do.
Now, with Polly sleeping next to him, he wanted to lie to himself, to say he had planned that once he was free he was going to make things right and get to know this little girl. But he hadn’t. He had barely thought of her at all until he read the death warrants.
A week before Nate was set to walk free, Ground Chuck Hollington found him taking a mop break behind the boilers. Chuck had a smile that would make a kid scream. A soda-bottle meth cooker had blown up in his face a few years back, leaving his left cheek pink raw hamburger. That’s when “Ground” got added to the Chuck. Chuck had two blue thunderbolt tats on his left bicep. Aryan Steel soldiers got a blue bolt for each kill they made for the gang. Chuck was brother to Crazy Craig Hollington, president of Aryan Steel, the man who ruled the whiteboy world from his isolation cell in Pelican Bay. He hadn’t said boo to Nate in the past five years. Now he stood next to him behind the boiler, an inked hand raised for a fist bump. Nate gave it to him.
“What’s good?” Nate asked.
“Heard you’re short-timing.”
“A week.” The conversation was like a walk across a rotten wooden bridge. Nate could feel the wood wanting to break, each word a step.
“You hooked up? Someone on the street gonna set you right?”
“I got some shit cooking,” Nate lied.
“You know about the garage?” Chuck asked him.
Nate knew about the garage. Susanville had an auto shop. Convicts worked it. Prison employees got a discount. They patronized it exclusively. Chuck had noticed. He’d had a brainstorm. When a hack made an appointment for an oil change, the Aryan Steel hanger-on who worked the garage desk sent word down the line. The night before the appointment, an outside man went to the hack’s house, found his car, taped a bag of dope or whatever to the inside of the hack’s wheel well. The hack drove his car into the shop. A convict-mechanic would take off the bag while changing the oil. The scam turned the hacks into mules.
“Dude we had on the outside just got pinched,” Chuck said. “Pigs came into his house on a domestic, guess he’d tuned up his girl something proper, and the dumb motherfucker had left his pipe on the table. Pigs tossed the place and found a whole grip of shit.”
Chuck let Nate do the math. They needed a new man on the outside. Nate was heading outside. Pretty simple math.
Taking the job meant jumping from one prison right into another, one with invisible walls. Aryan Steel never paroled you, never let you loose with time served. It was a life sentence. Nate weighed his options, heard the creak of rotten wood in his head. He knew what the ghost of his brother would have him do. He put his weight down.
“Know what, I’m good,” Nate said. “Think I’m going to see what the world has to offer me.”
Chuck changed posture, stepped his left foot forward, turned his body so his side faced Nate. Unconscious things a fighting man does when he thinks blood is coming. Nate mirrored him. Fight-flight jet fuel made muscles twitch at random. He took three deep breaths, the way Nick taught him. The air felt hot down his throat, but it settled him.
“Dude, I don’t know what made you think I was asking,” Chuck said. “I’m telling you what’s going to go down.”
That’s when he heard the words. Heard them like Nick wasn’t dead, like he was right there in Nate’s skull. Nate let them come out his mouth knowing how stupid it was.
“Fuck you, bitch.” He popped a middle finger in Chuck’s face.
The shank came out of nowhere. Nate grabbed the knife-wrist. His other hand grabbed Chuck’s billy-goat beard. He put his foot behind Chuck’s. He twisted his hips. He slammed Chuck onto the floor. Chuck’s skull thocked against the concrete. He followed Chuck down. He drove his knee into Chuck’s liver. He bent Chuck’s arm at the elbow. He pressed the shank point at the hollow of Chuck’s throat. Flesh dimpled at the shank’s point. One drop of blood bloomed.
Nate knew the smart thing was to let Chuck go. Leave him alive, dodge Aryan Steel for a week, and walk out a free man. He thought that was the smart play, kept thinking it even as he pushed the blade down into Chuck.
The shank went through the neck. Shock waves bounced back into Nate’s arm as the shank point bounced off concrete. Chuck died with scared eyes and a mouth full of blood foam. The last thing he saw was Nate’s middle finger.
Nate took three deep breaths. He took in what he’d done. He had never killed before. Like a lot of things in life, it didn’t feel as big as you thought it would. He washed his hands in his mop bucket. He headed back into the hallway. Nobody around. He finished his mopping and was back in his cell by the time they found the body and locked the prison down.
That night he studied the roof of his cell. He couldn’t tell if the bridge had collapsed under him or if he’d made it to the other side. He didn’t know if he was floating or falling. He figured he wouldn’t know until he hit the bottom.
Investigations happened, plural. DOC Special Services detectives with bad sports coats and paunches came through first. They locked the place down for a full week. They questioned everyone. Cons snitched to their own advantage. They snitched drug-turf rivals. They snitched cons they owed big money to. They snitched on the guy in the next cell with the screaming meemie night terrors just to get a good night’s sleep. The hacks made zero progress. They weren’t the ones ruining Nate’s sleep anyway.
Aryan Steel did their own investigation. Word came down from Pelican Bay. News had reached the isolation cells of Supermax. Crazy Craig had learned his brother had been killed. He ordered the knifeman found. A peckerwood killer named Dog—four blue bolts on his arm, an Othala rune above his heart, a long and jagged thumbnail on his left hand—took Chuck’s crown in Susanville with Crazy Craig’s blessing. Nate heard about Dog’s investigation one night around the card table. Dog knew a Black Guerilla Family soldier named Cocaine who had squabbled with Chuck. Dog used his long thumbnail to gouge out Cocaine’s eye. Cocaine confessed to the kill—of course he did. Dog got Cocaine to tell it again. Cocaine got his facts wrong. Dog knew a phony confession when he heard one. It’s the ones who get the details right, even when you hurt them close to death, that are the guilty ones. They left Cocaine bleeding and half blind, bringing another lockdown prison-wide.
Nate counted days, wondered if he’d gotten away clean. When he got to the day before his release, he figured he’d made it out clear. Then it all came crashing down. A kid named Lewis, a nineteen-year-old nobody—the kind of scared whiteboy who swam by the side of Aryan Steel like pilot fish by a shark—gave Nate the warning that saved his life. Nate was never sure why. Maybe it was how Nate always gave the kid his dessert when Nate was eating clean. Something small like that. He came to Nate in his cell. He pressed a piece of paper into Nate’s hand.
“Don’t come out till you read it,” he whispered.
It was a photocopied kite. Nate read it, each word ratcheting up his heartbeat.
to all solid soldiers on the block
or in the streets
open season on the race traitor
who got my brother
I here his name is Nate McClusky
he is getting sprung soon
full greenlight on the knifeman
he has a daughter named Polly
he has a woman named Avis
I here they are in Fontana
full greenlight on his woman
full greenlight on their seed
they should die by blade
salt the earth
all who refuse to help are added to the greenlight
membership guaranteed for those who complete it
franchise guaranteed for those who complete it
crazy craig, president
steel forever, forever steel
He didn’t know how they knew. He didn’t know why Lewis had warned him. But those were questions that didn’t matter, and Nate only had time now for things that mattered very much.
he has a daughter
Nate stayed in his cell, his back to the wall. He spent that night waiting for the kill to come. Every step on the walkway outside his cell shook through him like electric shocks.
Around midnight a voice bounced in from someplace in the cellblock.
“Jump off the tier and save us some time, motherfucker.”
“I always wanted to see if a whiteboy could fly,” some Mexi con yelled.
“You dead already, Nate,” a hoarse voice—Nate pegged it as Dog—yelled. “You just a zombie walking is all.”
Laughs. Cheers. The chant caught on. Zombie walking, zombie walking.
Morning came. The hacks handcuffed Nate for his last walk off the tier. A last-second assassination not out of the question. But it didn’t come. Best Nate could figure, they just hadn’t had time to set it up proper.
Zombie walking. The words rang out in the voice of a hundred hardened cons.
Zombie walking.
He got processed. They gave him his old clothes and three hundred dollars gate money. He tasted free air. He found a pay phone to call Avis. The number came up dead. Of course she’d changed it in the last five years. He found a car old enough that he knew how to hotwire it. He busted the window to get in. He got it started with a screwdriver. From release to felony in eighteen minutes. That had to be a record.
Now, on the road out of Antelope Valley, Nate pulled to the side of the road just off the highway off-ramp, where the 138 met the 14, as Polly slept grief-exhausted next to him. He weighed options. He was back on that wooden bridge. This time it was worse. This time he had a little girl strapped to his back.
She was strapped to him, there was no escaping that. He saw that now. If nowhere was safe for her, then the only place he could let her be was with him. If they were going to fall, they’d fall together, and he didn’t know what else he could give her than that.