KING(86)

Bodies.

Bodies. Everywhere.

Slumped over one another on couches, chairs, the floor. The white linoleum was covered in sludgy, dark red footprints.

Preppy sat in the doorway looking pale, clutching his side with one hand, blood saturating the area of his shirt his hand was trying to cover. Bear stood over him with his hands on his knees trying to catch his breath. Preppy looked up as we approached and scratched his head with the barrel of his gun. He flashed us a pained smile. That was so Preppy. Smiling while seriously injured in a room full of dead bodies.

“So…you guys ready to party now?” he asked, his usual loud and chipper voice was raspy, his breathing shallow.

He turned ghost white in a matter of seconds. The blood draining from his face at al alarming rate. His smiled faded as his eyes rolled back in his head until his pupils were replaced with only the whites of his eyes. Bear lunged to catch him as he fell face forward onto the cement.

Preppy exhaled on a strangled moan.

I would have given anything in the world for that smile and that breath, to have not been his very last.





Chapter Twenty-Six




King

Fifteen years old


“Fuck no! I ain’t gonna be nobody’s bitch,” Preppy slurred at Bear. He took another giant swig from the bottle of cheap tequila we were passing around. The three of us sat on overturned milk crates on the floor of the living room of the shitty apartment Preppy and I had just moved into. The crates were the only furniture we had. “That cut is cool as f*cking shit, but you ain’t gonna see me announcing to the world that I’m a criminal. I keep my shit on the DL.”

The place was a complete shit hole. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen that consisted of a hot plate and a sink that sat on top of two cabinets in the corner of the square living room. One strip of black and white linoleum squares marked off the ‘kitchen’ area.

It was dirty. There was an ant mound growing under one of the baseboards, flies stuck to traps hanging from the ceiling. A fan with two broken blades that didn’t turn on hung uselessly from the living room ceiling. The only window in the main living area was nailed shut so it couldn’t be opened.

It was the greatest f*cking place ever.

“Nah man, it’s totally cool. Cops don’t f*ck with us cause they’re scared of us. Besides, the MC parties all the f*cking time. * and blow everywhere, as far as the eye can f*cking see, man.” Bear swayed to one side and kept himself from falling off his milk crate by straightening one of his legs and anchoring the heel of his boot to the floor. “It’s totally tits, man. You gotta join up. Prospect it out like me. Once I’m in, I’ll vouch for you guys. Then after a year, it’s f*cking smooth sailing on the SS Tits and Ass. Besides, you’ll love the clubhouse. It has a pool table and a f*cking bar.”

Bear had first told us he was going to turn Prospect for his dad’s MC, The Beach Bastards, when he started buying weed from us in the eighth grade. He’d known what his future held for him since the day he was born. Since he spent most of his time with either the MC or us, he’d been trying to get us to Prospect with him since the day he decided that we were all going to be friends.

“Not for us, man. We’re like our own MC of two. We’re like the non MC, MC,” I said. I’d moved on from the tequila and was lighting the two-foot tall purple glass bong that sat in the middle of the living room on yet another overturned milk crate, this one acting as our coffee table.

“You gotta kill people and shit?” Preppy asked in a lowered voice, like someone was listening in and he didn’t want them to hear. He reached over to take the bottle back from Bear, stretching out his too-long-for-his-body arm.

Where I was fifteen and taller and more built than most adults, looking several years older than I was, Preppy was smack dab in the middle of an awkward phase that made his arms and legs look like a stretched out Gumby and his face looked as if he’d had a chronic case of the chicken pox.

“Only people that need killing,” Bear answered like he was reciting something he’d heard a million times before, and no doubt he had. “No women or kids, nothing like that. Just people who know the score and understand the consequences, or people who f*ck with the MC and us earning.” Bear looked up at Preppy through his messy white hair and brushed it out of his eyes. “Why? You got someone who needs killing?”

He sounded very much like his father, President of The Beach Bastards. Bear’s father was a psychopathic killer, who dealt in drugs and women, but Bear still managed to have the most stable upbringing between the three of us.