SWEENEY HAD NEVER owned a bike. But he’d ridden a few over the years, usually smaller rice burners loaned by friends and usually in empty parking lots or off road. And though he couldn’t remember who gave it to him, he did recall one piece of motorcycle wisdom: sooner or later, everybody has to lay his bike down.
This occurred to him about ten minutes into his kidnapping, as Buzz negotiated a series of blind curves without reducing his speed in the least. Sweeney leaned into Buzz’s back, turned his head sideways and watched the run of pines blur.
He kept waiting for the speed or the noise to decrease but they would not. When a new set of bends and curves appeared in the road, Buzz refused to slow down. And that was when Sweeney discovered a new breed of fear. Buzz was angling the bike to the road at suicide velocities, and Sweeney became convinced they were seconds from the kind of death that teenagers turn into legend. And with each instant that they did not die, Sweeney learned more about the fear. It was a living panic and in this way it sat in opposition to the dead panic he’d inhabited for the last year. There was a juice inside this terror, a surge, part electric and part chemical. The dead fear left him numb in its wake. But he knew that, should he survive this ride, he’d be anything but numb. He’d be overloaded and fused, twitching in the aftermath of maximal stimulation.
It went on this way for what seemed a long time, though the rush never faded. Sweeney’s sense of time became degraded and then, irrelevant. Whatever Buzz was planning on doing to him at the end of this ride seemed, in those moments, unimportant. Because, for a while, it felt as if the ride would never end. He felt certain they’d passed out of the city, possibly out of the county, and maybe out of the state. Afterward, he realized that not once during the entire experience had he thought of Danny or Kerry or the accident.
Something changed when the scream of the engine’s work became a chorus and Sweeney understood that they were being joined by the rest of the Abominations. The others came out of the wooded bluff on either side of the road. They appeared solo, falling in behind Buzz, one by one, a new addition every mile or two. When all twelve had surfaced and converged, they took over the route, riding on either side of the dividing line. The first car they encountered had to roll up the bluff to avoid them.
When the sun became fully visible over the trees to the left, their pace seemed to slacken a bit and Sweeney allowed himself a look behind for the first time. He expected to find Nadia Rey straddling the rear of a machine, but there was no sign of her. He swung forward just as Buzz kicked back into high, lurched ahead of the rest, and pulled the bike right, suddenly, off the highway, over the shoulder, and up a dirt trail that cut through the pines.
The trail threaded up a hill that might have qualified as a small mountain. Engine scream echoed farther and louder the higher they climbed and Sweeney could feel Buzz willing the hog skyward. They reached the far side of the rise and what had been hardpack turned into granite and though the trail became narrower, the climb got easier. Sweeney made the mistake of glancing to the right and saw the road’s shoulder gave way to a plunge, maybe five hundred feet into a rocky chasm. After that, he kept his eyes on Buzz’s back.
It took about a half hour to reach the plateau, a lip of rock that jutted out from the last wall of granite. The riders parked in that same formation that Sweeney had first seen outside the Harmony factory. They idled until Buzz cut his engine and dismounted. Then the rest of the pack followed suit. Buzz pulled Sweeney into a shoulder hug as soon as the passenger’s feet touched granite. No one spoke. Buzz walked Sweeney to the edge of the plateau. Depending on one’s feelings about height, the view was either spectacular or agonizing. The air held a hypnotic clarity. But looking down revealed a fatal plummet, the kind that, in movies, allows a human scream to echo into seeming infinity.
“You impressed?” Buzz said.
Sweeney nodded and Buzz slapped his back hard enough to make him pitch toward the brink, but held onto an arm to keep him in place.
“This where you do all your victims?” Sweeney said, staring at his own feet.
“Victims?” Buzz said and sounded genuinely surprised. “Ain’t you got a complex? You fuck our woman and you’re the victim?”
“I didn’t,” he started to explain and gave up immediately.
“You’re no victim, Sweeney,” Buzz said. “You gotta stop telling yourself that. That’s one of your main problems. You are what you think you are. No one ever tell you that?”
“Why’d you bring me here?”
“For your own good, son,” and there was that trace of down-home accent again. “You needed some air. And this is where you come when you need some air. You feel it?”
He let go of Sweeney and tilted his head back, took in a deep noseful, closed his eyes and shook his head.
“This is one of my favorite places. Thought I’d share it with you. You got to get out of the tombs from time to time, son. You’ll become one of those people.”
“My son’s back there,” Sweeney said, then regretted mentioning Danny.
“Yes, he is,” Buzz said. “And it’s one thing to want to be with him. And it’s another to want to be like him.”
He took Sweeney’s chin and cheeks in his gloved hand and said, “You’re one of us now, son. And you’re starting to make some bad choices. For you and for the boy.”
“I’m not one of you,” Sweeney said.
Buzz squeezed in on the cheeks. “You fuck our woman,” he said, “you’re one of us.” Then he started to pull Sweeney’s face forward over the lip of the cliff. “Otherwise,” he said, “what you did would be a problem.”
He let the words hang, then he released the face and patted the bruised cheek, grabbed the front of Sweeney’s shirt and pulled him back to where the others were standing next to their bikes, waiting.
“I think you know most of the family,” Buzz said and he started pointing to each in turn. “Mouse, Turtle, Monkey, Rabbit, the Elephant — also known as Tubby — Crabs, Bear, Fluke, the Ant, Roach. And this here is Piglet. You be good to Piglet and Piglet will be good to you. That right, Piglet?”
Piglet was small and a little sick-looking, with ashen skin and thin, straggly hair. His eyes were too small for his face, but it was probably the stubby, upturned nose that accounted for the name. In general, he looked greasier, more feral than any of the others by a factor of two or three.
Piglet didn’t give an answer and Buzz smiled as if he really hadn’t wanted one.
“Boys,” Buzz said, “you all remember Sweeney.”
Nobody moved except for the one called Monkey, who bobbed his head and showed some caramel teeth.
“Once we get to know you better,” Buzz said, “you’ll get your name.”
Sweeney looked around the precipice. There was nowhere to run but back down the trail and they’d be on him in an instant. He had a sense that Piglet would love an excuse to toss him off the mountain.
“Now, listen,” Buzz said, moving between Sweeney and the rest of the clan. “This is not gonna work out unless you trust us. What you got to do here, you got to make a leap. You got to ignore your own common sense and throw in with us, son. ’Cause whether you believe it right now or not, we’re the best thing that’s happened to you in a long goddamn time.”
Buzz waited for an argument but Sweeney kept his mouth shut.
“And we’re the best thing that’s happened to your boy. We’re sure as hell a shitload better than those fuckers down in the tombs. That shithead Peck and his little bitch of a daughter. They are poison. They’re the last people can help you and Danny.”
He was baiting but Sweeney wouldn’t rise to it.