Zodiac Kings MC Almaric's Power

I was burning. My skin felt like I had poured alcohol on a thousand cuts across my body. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even open my eyes. Why couldn’t I move? Where was I? What was wrong with me? I didn’t understand why this was happening. Was I in an accident? Was I injured? Then, I heard it. Laughter.         Oh no. Not again. Not this dream again. But wait. If this was a dream, why do I feel someone touching my foot? Feeling their way up my leg. It actually hurt though. Not a sensual touch, but a painful one. I tried to move, tried to pull away. The pain was getting worse. f**k! They’re squeezing my thigh too hard! Make it stop! Oh my god, this is how I’m going to die. I won’t even know what they look like. I hope I get to haunt their ass forever for this s**t.         I couldn’t decide if the pain radiating across my body hurt worse than them pressing on an obvious leg injury. Still, I guess this is what I get for fuckin’ around with my brothers for so long. Wait. My brothers! Where are they? Are they hurt too?! I can’t let them die. Ma would have my soul reborn just to kill me all over again. Yeesh. That thought alone scares me enough to crack my eyes open.         Oh s**t, that hurts. My eyelids feel like sandpaper. I blink a few times to try and get the crusty feeling to go away. The person who’s squeezing my leg is a woman. She hasn’t noticed that I’m awake yet. I slowly turn my head a few inches to the side to try and see where I’m at. Oh f**k. I’m strapped to a table in what looks to be a torture room.         Concrete walls with macabre-looking tools still covered in someone else’s blood. At least I think it’s someone else’s. I hope it’s someone else’s. I turn my head slowly the other direction and that’s when my heart rate picks up and I feel a sense of absolute terror. Hanging from a hook along the wall is my brother, Alistair. He looks like s**t. Bloodied all over. You can’t even tell that his hair color is light brown. It looks black from all the blood that’s in it. His once pristine face is swollen and there are splits all in his skin. Like someone beat him with brass knuckles, or a medieval mace.         His hands are bound in chains above his head and looped through scary as f**k hooks. Seriously, they look like the kind of hooks butcher shops have to hang an entire half cow on so they can cut it up easily. A shudder ran through me. I close my eyes quickly so the woman who’s still pressing on my injured leg doesn’t know I’m awake. She’s been having too much fun playing with my blood that’s been seeping out of whatever wound they made on my left thigh. I hear a pause in her giggles. A shifting of clothing. Her hands creep up my arm, and then I can feel her breath on my face. I can tell she’s looking right at me. So close. If I wasn’t strapped down, I’d grab her head and snap her neck for what she'd done to my brother. I was about to open my eyes when I heard boots thumping down the hall towards the room.         “Christ almighty, GLORIA!” A new voice shouts from what I can only assume to be the doorway.         “It wasn’t me jackass.” Says the woman still directly above me. I can tell she’s still looking at me because I can feel her hair tickling across my face and bare chest.         “Well then, who the f**k did this? Because I didn’t say anything about getting new play toys. Who are these fuckers anyways?” It’s a deep voice. Wait. I know that voice. Motherfucker. That’s the president of Poison Tree motorcycle club. Me and mine have a treaty with them. Holy s**t. It’s Animal. What the actual f**k is going on here? These shitheads are new in town and only have 8 members. Including their old ladies. Me and my brothers’ club, Zodiac Kings MC, has chapters in every state, including Hawaii. And we just recently went international.         “I don’t know. They were in here when I came down to feed Fluffy.” Gloria says, without any heat or any emotion really. Wait. Fluffy. I know that name. OH s**t!! Fluffy is the name of this b***h's f*****g gator! I heard some rustling of clothes as though Animal was looking through a pair of pants. Oh. Those are probably mine. Alistair still had his on when I snuck a peak.         BAM! The girl above me flinches and I feel her whirl around. “What the f**k Animal?! You scared the s**t out of me!” I take a peek by cracking my lids just enough to see what happened. Animal is leaning against a table that has a f*****g saw on it. His eyes are wide, his face pale and his entire body is shaking. I can’t see what he’s looking at but I don’t have to. Gloria walks over to him and takes what he has in his hands. It’s my wallet. I’d recognize it anywhere. My mom gave each of my brothers one for Christmas last year. They are custom made with our club's insignia on the front, our prospective road names and titles on the back. Mine reads “Amalric President and Founder”.         “Oh. My. God. What are we gonna do?! Their brothers are going to kill us all.” I heard in a fear-laced breathy voice. I figured it would be a good idea to speak up so no one suggests the saw they are still standing in front of.         “You can start by undoing the straps on me and then get my brother the f**k down from that creepy ass hook.” I say. s**t, my voice sounds even more gravel toned than usual.         “AAAHHHHHHH!!!!!” Gloria shrieks like a 6-year-old girl that just say saw rat crawl across her foot. I swear she jumps 3 feet in the air as she turns around. I didn’t know it was possible for Animal to get even paler than before. He started out looking like Edward from Twilight anyway. Now he just looks like death warmed over.         “Amalric, I swear I had no idea this happened! Please believe me. I don’t know what you’re doing down here.” Animal says in that deep baritone of his.         “I don’t know either. The last thing I remember is drinking at a bar with my brother Ammar. Then I woke up hear and she’s playing with my blood and injury like a cat with yarn.” I talk as Gloria and Animal both undo my straps. Gloria looks like she’s about to be sick. As soon as I’m free I slowly start to sit up. It’s hard. Everything hurts. I look down and find, not the many tattoos that I have amassed over the years, but bloodied bandages and bruises galore. I’m finally able to sit up fully and that’s when I notice my leg. It’s got a gash in it like someone took a f*****g scalpel to it. I look over and Animal is trying to get my brother down by himself. “Gloria, go help Animal get him down.”         “Oh, right. Sorry.” She says as she scrambles to do what I ask. I hear grunts and huffed breaths and a deep groan so pained sounding that I got even more worried that Ammar was dying. The sound of chains rattling as they got him down and unchained was loud in the room. I gingerly slip to the side of the table to see if I can get to the chair in the corner so they can put Ammar on the table until my other brothers can get here to take us to the hospital. I put my right foot down first so that I can test my legs to make sure they’ll hold my weight. My right leg does fine. My left feels like the skin and muscle are going to slid off my bone it hurts so bad. I gasp in shock with the pain. Gloria, without a word from me, comes over and tries to help me. Though I can appreciate the offer under different circumstances, It doesn’t do anything helpful. I stand barefoot at a solid 6’8”. Gloria might be 5’9”. At best. In heels. And a buck twenty soaking wet.         “I got it Gloria. I’ll just hop if I have to.” I say so she can stop trying to help. I put my pride aside and do just that. I hop over to the chair with the help of the tables on the side wall to help me keep my balance. I turn and instead of calmly sitting like I had my s**t together; I fall and go thump in the chair. I wince when I realize too late that I sat on my belt, phone and knife that I always keep in my pocket for emergencies. I pull out my phone, and unlock it as they get my brother situated on the table. He’s unconscious again. I can’t tell if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. The phone rings loud in the room when I dial my twin brothers Balor and Bram.         “WHERE THE f**k ARE YOU, ASSHOLE!” is the greeting I get in leu of a simple hello in his deep Scottish brogue.         “That’s good question. Hang on, lemme ask Animal.” I had put the phone on speaker when I dialed and Animal just looked a mixture of nausea green, and death gray. He slowly walked over and opened his mouth to respond and Balor interrupted him.         “What do you mean, ask Animal? What’s goin on Amalric?” He asked in a pissy tone.         “Do you actually want to know or are you going to keep interrupting like a i***t?” I ask in as much snark as I can muster. I hear a huff of breath on the other side of the phone.         Animal spoke into the phone with a voice that trembled and cracked with obvious unease and fear, “Hey Balor, um, ah, I don’t know what happened but what I do know is that your brothers were in the ‘play room’.” He did the quote marks with his fingers like my brother could see him. I internally rolled my eyes at that because I knew if I tried in for real my head would explode. It was bad enough I felt like there was a hammer pounding an ice pick into my skull.         It took a full minute for my brother to reply. And he used the tone of voice usually reserved for prospects who f****d up so bad it costed thousands of dollars to fix. “What do you mean by play room Animal? Are you referring to a play room with a circle rug on the floor and bins of toys for the kids and video games? Or are you referring to the play room that requires bleach and a hose down when someone’s done?” If I hadn’t taught him how to get his voice that low, and that scary, I myself would have been afraid. I’ve seen the look he gets on his face when it gets that bad. We’ve had prospects literally pass out from it. Animal resembled that to a T.         “Um, well, ah. Hhng.” Animal started to say, then proceeded to throw up in the nearest trash bin. It wasn’t pleasant. The smell of the room alone was bad, but add in vomit and my own gag reflex wanted to make itself known. I was what you called a “sympathy puker.” My brothers thought it was so funny growing up, but when you are an adult and someone throws a kegger and people start getting sick form the enormous amount of alcohol. It stops being funny because then you end up having to hose said friends off. Literally. I personally no longer go to keggers unless it’s required for Club Business.         “Ah, gee thanks Balor. f**k. Oh god, the smell!” I say as I start gagging. Gloria moves out from her frozen place and takes the trash and Animal out of the room and into the hall. “Thanks Gloria.” I croak out as I take deep breaths trying not to throw up myself. I start humming ‘Come get your love’ because I read that humming with help with the feeling of getting sick. Huh. It was actually starting to work. For once social media didn’t let me down.         “What the f**k is wrong with Animal? And you? And where’s Ammar? What the f**k is going on brother?” Balor spouted off questions in rapid fire succession without letting anyone answer them. He has always done this. Even when we were kids growing up in Scotland.         “Animal is terrified right now which is why he is currently hurling his guts out, I’m in extreme pain, Ammar is unconscious, and I’m fairly certain someone from his club drugged, abducted, and tortured us for funsies. I have no idea where we are, I’ll have to ask Gloria, and we need emergency medical attention. Like now. So, stop bitchin and get your ass over here so you can take us to the hospital.” I bit out. “Gloria, tell my brother where we are so he can come get us out of this hell hole.”         Gloria looks like she’s five seconds from passing out at the thought of my brothers coming to wherever we are. “Oh, ok. Um. We are currently under the clubhouse. In the basement.” I look at her and feel my face frowning. We’re in Texas, no one has basements in Texas. Wait. If we are under the clubhouse then that means I was right. Someone from his club took us. And all of his members and their spouses know us. From what we look like to our names and reputation.         “In Sherman Gloria?” Balor asks in a quizzical tone.         “Yeah. Why?” she asks in an almost whisper voice.         “Because me and Brom are in Frisco at Stonebriar with mom and dad. It’ll be easier and faster to get Adalricus to come pick you up. I’ll call him. Have Animal let whoever’s at the gate know.” And with that he hung up. I looked at Gloria, then peeked my head out into the hall to check on Animal. He still looked green but he wasn’t throwing up anymore so that was something. I looked back at Gloria and asked, “Any chance he’s gonna be well enough to take my brother upstairs? Because I can do the butt scoot on the stairs, but Ammar’s still out.” Gloria just looked at me, looked at my brother, looked back at me then peeked out into the hall at Animal.         “Maybe, but I would advise going slow.” She walked back into the hallway and told Animal, “Hey I’m gonna go open the front gate for those guys.” And then went up the stairs into the rest of the clubhouse. I slowly got up, not putting weight on my leg because that s**t hurt, and hopped to the doorway.         “Yo, get your s**t together and grab my brother. I can’t carry him by myself and he’s not awake. Plus since your boys are the ones who brought us down here, I don’t trust them to help get him upstairs.” I barked at Animal. We may not belong to the same club, his being only six months old and mine being close to 25 years, but that didn’t mean s**t at the moment. His boys f****d up. Bad. Bad enough to spill blood over. But not today. I was too tired. Who the f**k knew that being only forty-one, almost forty-two, would make you wanna get an early bird special at the local Cracker Barrel, go home, cuddle your dogs and go to bed at six in the evening. Of course that mindset probably has more to do with the fact that I’m one of the four Founders to one of the largest MCs in the world. My brothers and I used to head up our own chapter but we decided to step aside for others. Now me, my three brothers, and my parents, go for rides whenever the f**k we want to. We still participate in runs and all the charity rides and s**t, show up for the occasional BBQ at the closest chapter to us. Usually it’s the Sherman Texas chapter. Occasionally when we’re all out riding around or doing road trips, we’ll bunker down in the closest chapter that particular state has. If there isn’t one close by, we either grab a motel room for the night, or we grab our sleeping bags and sleep under the stars.         As I’m reminiscing on my life, Animal has gotten Ammar thrown over his shoulder in a fireman hold. Not gonna lie, it’s surprising he can do that. Now we just wait and see if he can carry him up the stairs like that without further injury. I grab my stuff from the chair, hop over to the stairs, and start my humiliating climb up on my ass. I’m half way up when I head a shuffle in the corner and then a hissing noise. It’s at that moment I remember Gloria has a pet gator named Fluffy, and I scoot up the stairs a little bit faster. I’ve been to the bayou. I’ve seen gators stand up and run flat out at someone. I’m not too proud to admit that seeing something like that gave me nightmares for a week. New Orleans is a fun party town. And the scenery is awesome, people are great. But if there’s one thing I learned, Mexico has ‘don’t drink the water’ rule; New Orleans has a ‘don’t drink the moonshine’ rule. They just fail to mention that to the tourist and suckers that are unfortunate to get conned into have a shot or five.         By now, I’m up the stairs and hopping down the hallway like Peter the f*****g Rabbit. I take a closer look around as I’m going down what I hope to be the right way and then I hear it. There will never be a time that the sound of twenty-plus motorcycle engines doesn’t make me pop a semi. Seriously the best sound I’ve heard all day.         “What the f**k?” Is what I hear from behind a closed door at the end of what otherwise is a completely barren hallway. Literally. No paint on the walls. Just that plain ass ‘eggshell’ colored crap that goes on every basic build job, no pictures. Nothing. Just walls and closed doors. I follow the sounds of yelling, screaming, and engines.         “What the f**k is wrong with you people?! You can’t come barging into another clubs clubhouse you stupid ni-“, the angry voice gets cut off as I open the door. Ah. That would be the clubs VP. Psychward. Appropriately named since he’s been committed to so many in his lifetime. I don’t judge people who need help with their mental state. But when you have been court ordered by a federal judge, not once but twice, to have a ninety day hold because you can’t stop bashing peoples heads in for no reason other than that they didn’t want you to have s*x with their wives or girlfriends. Then that’s when I start judging.         And the reason that particular ray of f*****g sunshine is no longer talking is because the Sherman chapter president of the Zodiac Kings has him by the throat and dangling in the air. Psychward isn’t exactly overweight, but he’s got that beer gut going on. I look at his friends sitting on the ratty couch in what I’m beginning to understand is their sorry excuse for a common room, and I see several empty liquor bottles on the beat to s**t coffee table and floor. My bad, scotch pot belly.         Adalricus is a beautiful man. Standing at six feet and seven inches of pure milk chocolate brown muscles. The man is a work of art. Literally drool worthy. I have a feeling I knew what racial slur Psychward tried to sling around. But looking around, no one else wanted to get involved in trying to stop Adalricus in teaching that jackass a lesson in manners. A person shifting through the crowd of fifteen-plus people and I look up and see none other than the man I would break all my rules for, Crow. The Sherman chapters Treasurer. Six feet five inches and almost two hundred and ninety pounds of pure muscle. Those piercing hazel eyes set deep in his face. That gorgeous face sculpted by the old gods themselves. High cheekbones, prominent brow, straight nose with a sharp pointed tip, shoulder length dirty blonde hair with pretty light blonde highlight from spending so much time in the sun. That right eyebrow with the ring in it raised slightly as he got closer and I kept staring like an i***t. I looked away back to Adalricus to see what I had missed.         Apparently my staring at Crow got noticed, by everyone. s**t. I’m just lucky I had the right of mind to place the bundle of clothes in front of my d**k so no one spotted my c**k at full attention. I cleared my throat and glared at everyone around me. “What the f**k are you looking at ya half wits?” My Scottish accent got thicker anytime I got aggravated. Been in the states since I was a small lad and still had a lilt to my words. Won’t complain, it’s gotten me laid in the past, often. Instead of them quaking in their boots like I was going for, everyone just looked at me and Crow with a smirk, small smile, or like Adalricus, and full-blown s**t eating grin. Bastard.         Without a word, Crow hands me a pair of black sweats and helps me to the arm of the couch. Then, he does something I never thought I’d get to see outside of my fantasies and jerk-off dreams. He got on his f*****g knees in front of me and looks up at me with that smug smile that makes me want to shove my c**k in his f**k worthy mouth to wipe it off his face. My traitorous d**k decides to twitch and grow more at that. Crow notices. His pupils blow out and he full on grins at me. As I look at him, I notice he has more piercings in his face than the last time I saw him. He has a ring in his left nostril, the right side on his bottom lip that’s begging me the pull on it with my teeth. And as his tongue peeks out to wet his lips I see a f*****g tongue stud. f**k me. Seriously. I want my d**k, and his d**k, to be best f*****g friends right now. I know exactly how good it feels to have your c**k sucked by someone with a tongue stud. I myself have one. Usually. It’s only then that I realize that I don’t have any of my piercings in. I look down and then peek in my boxers. I hear a few chuckles as I glare up at the Poison Tree’s VP.         “You took out my f*****g d**k ring?!” I say loudly. Everyone stops laughing and looks over to the VP who is now turning an alarming shade of purple. Adalricus drops him to the floor where he sucks in air and coughs it back out of his strained throat. A bruise in the shape of a handprint is already starting to form on Psychwards’ neck.         “What the f**k happened guys?” I look over to Animal since he’s the one asking the questions. “We have a treaty with this club! What the actual f**k were you thinking f*****g with two of their f*****g Founders!” Animals shouts louder and louder the longer he goes on. I feel a brush on my right foot and my first thought is it’s either a rat, roach, or a spider and I jerk my leg out of the way and almost knee Crow in the face. Opps. It was his hand trying to help me put the sweats on. I cringe and let him help me since moving my left leg is out of the question right now. I stand with his help and he helps pull the sweats all the way up. My god, his face is only a scant few inches from my d**k and said traitor is making himself known that he likes the new attention.         “We found them hangin in our turf without permission Prez. We figured we’d teach ‘em a lesson since they think they’re the s**t. Wait. Prez, did you say Founders? As in the ones who created the club itself?” Psychward says. He looks at me then back to Animal, then back to me. His eyes get comically wide and he starts to shake. Yeah, our reputation is that scary. We may not be one-percenters, but we still strike fear into our enemies easily. My family knows a few tricks that make that Geoffrey kid from that one show look like the f*****g Easter Bunny. At that point Psychwards eyes roll back in his head and he crashes to the ground, face first. I can hear the crunching of his nose from clear across the room. If that’s what you want to call this place. Still as dingy as the hall. And almost as bare. One L-shaped couch that’s seen better days in what can only be described as pus green with cigarette burns and other mystery stains. A coffee table that has empty alcohol bottle, a gun, packs of cigs, a baggie of grass, and residual white powder that I will never touch as long as I live.         Crow stands up and bends down in front of me. I don’t know what he’s doing until he throws me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. “AY! What the f**k are ya doin?” Geeze, Scottish brogue back out in full force. “I can get outside just fine without ya help. I’m not a wee lad ya arsehole!”         And then something happens that I never thought would. Crow smacks my ass with his hand. Hard. It was so unexpected that I did the most undignified thing a man can do. I yelped like dog. “Oi. That’s enough outta you old man. Take the help because ya need it.” And with that, Crow carried me out of the room that was practically shaking with how hard and loud those jackasses were laughing at our antics. Fuckers.