Outcasts (Badlands 3)

I wasn’t going to deny those facts.

I’d fucked up, but I was sick of thinking about all that was. I was tired of feeling lost.

I stood in the dull bathroom under a lackluster light and boldly dared to look at my reflection. Someone who didn’t know what I’d been through would look at me and not see anything wrong, or anyone other than the same old Arlen Prosner.

The bruises between my thighs and missing patches of skin I’d scrubbed at too hard were only evident to me and the men who left them there. I couldn’t shake the feeling of their heavy breath on my neck, or the way they felt me up.

No matter how many times I washed myself, I felt like I was coated in layers of grime and filth. My body was a temple, and they’d tainted it. Invisible scars weighed me down heavily.

Like a moth to a flame, my wings had burned away. I dug down deep inside myself, searching for the part of me that cared, but whatever it was that shifted had me caring a little less lately.

I wasn’t sure about this new me. I thought I’d picked up all the broken pieces, but the ones I h

ad didn’t align anymore. This Arlen was a stranger, and she offered no explanation.

I’d waited for my shadow, but he never came. Turns out this whole surviving thing was pretty goddamn hard. It was even harder when you had nothing left to lose and all you felt was a cruel, never-ending wanting.

At what point did I stop facing denial and ask myself what I was struggling to survive for?

Chapter Five

I rode for a full day and night to get where I needed to be, stopping only to refuel, knowing exactly the range my Fat Boy could handle before it would start to sputter.

On my final stop, I stashed the bike in the exact spot I’d mapped out the week prior, pre-fueling with the gas can I’d stashed under a caved in portion of the abandoned garage.

All that was left to do was wait.

I munched on smoked jerky and sipped some hooch to pass a little more time, before taking a piss and then prepping to move into a proactive position.

I snagged my ReaperTac from my bag, now secured with the others, and then attached the suppressor to my Glock 17 after checking the magazine. The black gun was simple to use, durable, ubiquitous, and took the most easy to obtain ammunition there was: 9 mm Parabellum.

Cutting through a few weed-covered yards, I moved closer to the house I knew Arlen was being held at. The heat was a sonofabitch, but the oncoming shadows helped to shade me from full on exposure.

I’d lived in this fucking place my entire life, spent half that time on the road, and still abhorred the sun. I couldn’t stand its intensity or its light. I was a creature of the night.

The dark was easier on the eyes, and much better for killing, hunting, and getting pussy.

And that was why I’d planned to make my move when the sky was a deep purple and the Badlands’ natural terrain was only lit up by a crescent moon.

The house had been easy to find; it was the only dingy blue one in the entire run-down neighborhood. There was a dark green pickup truck parked right on the front lawn, and I watched a laughing Noah climb into it with three other men.

I wasn’t there for him. Not this time. His hourglass was near empty enough. I couldn’t wait to shred him apart with my bare hands. My objective right then was to get to my girl.

Not knowing how long they would be gone, I tracked the movement inside the house, trying to get a feel of the precise layout.

I needed to get Arlen out ASAP, but I was never one for rushing into shit without taking in as much detail as I could. Acting brashly got people killed for being complete dumbasses and not using their heads.

Me and my brothers learned that at fourteen when we sat back and watched a group of cannibals get slaughtered trying to steal a dairy cow, of all things.

The family had set traps around their property to prevent that very thing from happening. Lucky it was those fuckers and not us, because that’s exactly what we’d been there to do.

We still ended up with the cow in the end; we just took out the family later that same day as they cleaned the bodies up. But it was still a beneficial learning lesson.

Carrion birds perched on the house’s depleted rafters, and the dying tree off to the side of it. They had a habit of showing up when shit was about to go down around me.

I hadn’t figured out why, and I couldn’t lie and say it wasn’t creepy the first few times this happened.

But as with everything else that shaped who I was, I’d come to like them, and it heavily attributed to my alias.