Through A Glass, Darkly (The Assassins of Youth MC #1)(53)
Chiles was frowning at his phone, turning it this way and that.
“Did we not get the contrast right?” asked Dingo, who had appeared at my elbow. “Maybe the res of the photos isn’t very good.”
“They’re high-res enough, all right,” I said. “Watch.”
Realization slowly spread over the scum-sucking f*ckwad’s face. Hope and vindication swelled in my chest when he lifted his idiotic face and stared emptily at me, slack-jawed.
I nodded cheerfully at him, giving another middle finger salute. The riding club guys did too, though they didn’t know why. Chiles mouthed a couple words to Pipkin. Pipkin drove off with more urgency this time, hanging a left at the T that led to Cornucopia.
“Whatever you sent him, it’s good,” said Maximus.
“Oh, it’s f*cking good.” Dingo bobbed his head in agreement. “It’s f*cking good.”
Dingo was finally getting a sense of who we were as a club. This was his first experience with club pride. I knew the feeling. I was fit to bust with our accomplishments. We were making headway in Avalanche.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MAHALIA
So there I was. Riding a borrowed “Yellow Bike” down the sandy road of Nine O’Clock Street. I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was ten, but like they say, you never forget.
At first, I’d felt ridiculous in this horde of half-naked, painted, dusty people. I only had my Cornucopia clothes, and the only other woman we knew was Kimball, whose clothes were just as inappropriate as mine. So a couple of nights ago, when we stopped to sleep in a motel in Battle Mountain, Nevada, I picked up some items in a convenience store.
That turned out to be the last place I could purchase a shred of clothing, so I was stuck with an electric purple bikini, a T-shirt blaring that I hearted Nevada, and some scarves I could tie around myself. At first, I was hugely shy for Gideon to see me wearing this minimalist garb. After all, he was already dressed like he was a Burner. He didn’t need to change one iota of his attire to fit right in, and he could ride his bike hands-free. He normally carried a bandanna to tie around his face to keep the bugs out when he rode. Luckily he’d brought a few of them, and the three of us now rode our bikes back to our camp, looking like terrorists with the colorful scarves covering most of our faces to keep out the incessant dust, with sunglasses on top of that.
We’d just come from the playa, zig-zagging through Burners in steampunk boots, wearing suits of broken glass, or painted skull faces from the Day of the Dead. Half-naked women with only glittery stars for pasties pranced by in furry Eskimo boots, or wearing harem pants only, their perfect breasts hand-painted with swirls. They made me feel ashamed at how “curvy” I was, although I felt I blended in a bit more now that Gideon had bartered a headdress for me made of beaded medallions and hawk’s feathers. I had round aviator goggles too, adding to the effect. He’d traded quartz specimens for them. Luckily he’d brought a few boxes—“flats”—of those along in my truck, as I quickly discovered everything worked on the barter system. I had nothing to trade, accounting skills not being needed much here.
Vonda was even more awestruck than I was. At least I had a couple of decades’ worth of experience on the outside, albeit in a straight and narrow existence, in my “Mormon bubble.” She’d been ten when we moved to Cornucopia, missing out on a lot of pop culture. She didn’t know why a group of people were dressed as zombies. “Are they dead? How can they walk if they’re dead? But half their flesh is gone. How do they move their legs?” And I didn’t have many answers, either. Vonda was a ceaseless chatterbox. Brazenly, she’d gotten a bikini too, although her T-shirt said “Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Should be a convenience store, not a government agency.” She’d had a handful of her hair temporarily braided and dyed pink. She wanted to know everything about everything, and that was where Gideon came in handy.
It touched my heart, seeing how they bonded. She had already declared him a “fox” and a “hellafine babe,” not to mention, “Mom, how’d you score such a smoking hot guy?” I remembered that Vonda was maturing—although still and maybe never old enough to wed!—and that she’d actually been boy crazy for a couple of years. Gideon patiently explained to her about Mad Max, steampunk, the significance of an enormous empty picture frame or a twenty foot tall goose made entirely of pennies.
Vonda loved the art installations, of course, being an artistic sort herself. She’d seen a neon sign saying “You are exactly where you need to be.” She climbed on the giant typewriter, the monstrous serpent skeleton they would later set on fire, the amazing art cars that must’ve taken the participants all year to build. She was inspired in her clothing designing, she said, by a man wearing a combination coyote and steer horns headdress. Other influences included belly dancing skirts adorned with tiny mirrors, four inch platform boots, and a guy with metallic wings he could crank open and closed.
We had to get over our guilt and prudishness at the sight of so much exposed flesh. I even accepted a free mojito, although Gideon advised me not to drink it. I was both an alcohol and a marijuana virgin. Everyone, it seemed, was touching each other. We even rode our bikes past the Orgy Dome, and I’d snuck glances to see if Gideon was considering it—he wasn’t. Growing up in an environment where people rarely touched at all, suddenly we were thrust into a microcosm of tantric eroticism. But the more I saw of it, the more it lost its ability to shock.