Lamp Riders: A Jinn Motorcycle Gang Novella (2 page)

“Nope. For the babes,” replied a redheaded cutie with the name ‘Dahir’ embellished on his motorcycle jacket. He was standing next to the blonde man who had broken the tension. The blonde had the name ‘Murrah’ inked on his arm with an arrow pointing towards his face.
At least they make it easy to keep track of them,
Celia thought, shaking her head at their antics.

The names stuck in her mind, however; they were unlike any road names she had heard before. She had seen all sorts of motorcycle clubs roll through, and they all had nicknames for each other. Some guys had funny names like ‘Roadkill’; other guys had intimidating names like ‘Killer’ and ‘Big Creep.’ None of the names she had seen so far had been like these guys’. She made a note of it, as she did most things out of the ordinary in the small town.

“You guys have a good day and a safe ride,” she called as she finally got the last purchases rung up and pushed into the group’s greedy hands. They overpaid by at least double and refused to take any change as they all shuffled out the door clutching their bags of food. Abdul stood by the door counting off all the guys and making sure they had everything they needed. When the last one had exited onto the porch, Abdul turned and gave Celia a final grin.

“You have a nice day. Maybe we’ll see you around,” he said playfully before stomping out the door.

“Maybe,” Celia replied to his departing back.

Fat chance,
she thought to herself.
Fat chance.

T
hat evening, after closing up the store, Celia went home to eat dinner with her parents. They had long ago given up all business responsibility to her, and now spent their retirement days caring for their desert tortoise named Pico, working on puzzles, and reading great works of literature. They were like any other upper middle class California couple who threw big parties and went to the opera. Except, of course, they lived in a trailer in the desert that only barely had running water from a nearby well. And yet, somehow, despite appearances, the loneliness of the desert suited them well. They seemed to have no regrets about moving to the tumbleweed capital of America.

“Hey guys, how is Pico?” Celia called, walking up to the long silver trailer that she shared with her parents. It sat tucked away behind ragged bushes about two hundred meters from the store.

“Pico has had quite the day. Your mother gave him a bath and brushed his neck for over thirty minutes,” her father, Miguel, drolly replied from under the shade of the trailer’s awning. He was clutching a well-loved copy of Moby Dick.

“That’s a bigger day than I had,” Celia laughed, flopping down into a lawn chair beside her father. She waited for him to hand her a cold beer from the cooler by his feet.

“Shush you two, I don’t want to hear any fussing about Pico tonight,” her mother, Maria, called from inside the trailer.

Her mother was no doubt inside working on one of her paintings. They were lovely renditions of countryside cottages, complete with little gardens and happy plumes of smoke rising from the chimneys. Each one was basically the same, except Maria always made sure to change up the type of flowers in the garden. It would have been a wonderful hobby for some dotty old lady in an English village, but the lush vegetation of the picture looked too green and too overdone when compared to the barren outside world. Celia had never seen lush countryside like her mother painted, but it looked so crowded and dense with life that it made her feel a little claustrophobic.

“You know, you guys should retire to somewhere nicer,” Celia said, for at least the fifth time that month. “Maybe to the beach.”

“Why? We like it here. It is everything we want,” Miguel said, not looking up from his book. “We have beautiful sunsets, peace and quiet, and plenty of fresh air.”

With glasses perched on his nose, and a hand wrapped around a cigar, he looked the part of an English professor at some East Coast school. Celia once again tried to imagine what had made her nice, normal parents decide that living in Viento Frio was a good life choice.  Even after they had seen the place they had decided to stay! They had driven out to the middle of nowhere, looked at each other, and decided it was a completely rational idea to stay and pretend they still lived normal lives in Middle America. Over twenty years later, the town was now only known for the size of its scorpions and the amount of meth that got shipped through. Yet Miguel and Maria continued to stay without a second thought.

Celia sighed and slumped back in her chair. The sunset was coming, which was always worth watching; her father had a point there. Without any trees to block the view, the swirling colors seemed endlessly intense in the vast sky. The pinks and purples danced for miles and miles into the horizon making a light show that never failed to amaze Celia, even all these years later. She had been to Disneyland once, where fireworks attempted to light up a sky filled with city lights and smog. The desert’s beauty washed over her and dazzled like the fireworks had failed to do so.

“Did you guys come for the sunsets?” she whispered as the final colors melted away, leaving the dusty denim blue of evening behind.

The corner of Miguel’s mouth twitched, but a full smile didn’t manage to slip out. Celia endlessly bemoaned the fate of having grown up a ‘desert rat’, but it was clear she had a love for the same rocky hills that she claimed to hate. Her conflicted emotions for the land had been fought over endless times when she was an angry teenager, but was a source of mere amusement now.

Maria finally came out of the house. She had a paintbrush behind her ear and a big plate of sandwiches in her hands. “I thought we’d eat something easy and cold tonight, with the heat being what it is,” she said cheerfully.

Celia eagerly grabbed a turkey sandwich from the top of the stack. Her mother found any excuse to not cook, and they had sandwiches at least three times a week. Luckily, the sandwiches were delicious, and it was hard to complain. How her mother managed to make something so good from canned meat and old army MREs, Celia would never understand.

“Honey, your father and I did want to talk with you tonight about something,” Maria said softly as she settled into a chair next to Celia, shooting a quick look at Miguel.

Miguel cleared his throat and leaned forward in his chair, finally putting down his book. Celia chewed slowly as she looked from her mother to her father trying to figure out what was coming next. She was not a fan of surprises, especially ones that came after a dramatic throat clearing from her father.

“Have you given any thought to what you want to do next?” Miguel started, looking intently as Celia.

“Next? This week? I thought I’d get the store ready for Christmas. Can never start too early preparing for the holiday rush.”

“We’re serious, Celia,” Maria sighed.

Miguel tried again. “We are talking about your future. We know you didn’t want to start college right after school, and we’ve tried to give you some time to figure things out. But we don’t think you want to stay here and work in the store forever. You are twenty-one and have a whole world of opportunities out there.”

“Why shouldn’t I stay? We need the store and someone to run it!” Celia said defensively, putting down her sandwich because it suddenly tasted very bitter.

“Your mother and I don’t need the store. Our retirement is just fine without it. The town perhaps needs the store, but we can always find someone else to run it. What you need, though, is to get out there and explore. This was a wonderful place to raise a child, but we think you should also go out and find your own adventures.”

Celia was going to argue that Viento Frio was, in fact, not a wonderful place to raise a child, but thought better of it. She simply glowered at her parents. They had decided to raise her so far from other cities that she felt out of place anywhere except in the desert. She was made from shifting sands, and always would be. The last thing she wanted to do was to try to go to Los Angeles and be a laughing stock since the only people she could relate to were old wrinkly bikers. She had been the only kid in her high school class. It was not like she had the social skills and training to make it in the wider world! Even if she did leave, she had no idea what she would do out there. The idea of trying to leave frightened her and not much managed to do that.

“I don’t have anywhere I really want to go. Besides, I can’t just leave you guys here! What if something happened?”

“We are in our fifties, not our eighties, Sweetie,” Maria broke in, her tone clipped and dangerous. “No matter what you may think, we can take care of ourselves. We are happily retired here and would love for you to come back and visit. But we’d like you to think about where you want to end up. It doesn’t have to be here.”

“Yes it does,” Celia said sullenly, getting up from the table and going to enter the trailer. “There is nowhere else for a girl like me.”

A
fter storming out of dinner, Celia went to her room and stared at the ceiling for an hour letting rage boil through her. She ignored a gentle knock on her door, no doubt from her mother, and pretended to be busy. Busy doing what she couldn’t have said, but she wanted to appear like she did have hobbies and friends that absorbed her time.

After a while, however, staring at the ceiling began to make her neck hurt, and she flopped over onto her stomach dramatically. She stared at the 1970’s orange shag carpet that covered her bedroom floor, and listened to her parents murmuring in their bedroom. The trailer was actually a nice size, being a singlewide with three bedrooms. One entered through the living room and kitchen, and then the first bedroom on the left was Celia’s. Next door was the bedroom-turned-art-room of her mother, and finally at the very end of the trailer sat the master bedroom. It gave Celia some measure of privacy on nights when she wanted to hide.

That night, Celia mostly wanted to hide because she knew her parents were right. As angry as the talk with them had made her, she did see their point. She had no real friends and no ambitions. She had just curled up inside and decided that she was only a Viento Frio Dust Bunny, and there was no escape for her. She knew she’d end up shriveled and dried out like everyone else there because no one ever made it out. The only way out was to be buried in the rocky cemetery behind what used to be the church, before the preacher had gotten hooked on crystal meth and started trying to track UFOs.

After flopping around on the bed for quite some time, Celia couldn’t let herself mope any longer. To escape her feelings of confusion, Celia decided to dress up and head to the town’s one and only source of nightlife, the Rusty Jug. The run-in with the fabulously hot (and slightly weird) biker gang that day had left her feeling restless and bored, and the awkward chat with her parents had not helped. She wanted to get out and forget herself for a little while, to feel twenty-one instead of forty-one.

The Rusty Jug wasn’t a glamorous hotspot. It wasn’t even a mediocre hotspot, no matter how liberally one used the word ‘mediocre’. It was a dilapidated tin structure with a creaking roof that violated every building and fire code known to the state. It also had cheap whiskey and pool tables, which to Celia outweighed the risk of death. As a bonus, the pool tables were populated by a wide variety of desert-hardened old men who had leathery skin and bristling white beards. They enjoyed outrageously flirting with Celia, buying her drinks, and then respectfully sending her safely home. It was a good ego boost for all concerned.

Those old timers weren’t serious though, and they didn’t count as a romantic interaction. She hadn’t been on an actual date in months, unless she counted the time an old prospector had come into the convenience store and given her a wilted rose. The heat had apparently gotten to the old guy and fried his mind a little bit as he had repeatedly called her by the name ‘Abigail’. The handsome biker leaning all over her counter that morning was the closest she had come to a potential young, sexy guy in a long time. She vowed not to think about him though. The sooner she forgot that smile that led to trouble, the better.

Celia picked out skintight jeans and a low cut red shirt for the night’s attire. If nothing else, it made her feel pretty and feminine, which she didn’t often bother with. For shoes, she stuck with her trusty sneakers. The Rusty Jug was a ten-minute walk down a dusty back street, and the last thing she wanted was to step on a snake or scorpion in the darkness. She wanted to make an impression that night, and not
that
type of impression.

From the way the bartender, Phil, dropped a shot glass when she finally entered the door of the Rusty Jug, she knew she had managed to make her impression. Being the only female under forty-five in this dusty hole had its advantages – she always looked fabulous no matter what. She slid onto a stool and took the double shot of whiskey Phil silently handed her. Phil tried not to look down her shirt while he did so. He failed, but Celia appreciated the effort.

She gulped down the liquid fire and then took a look around the room. A group of dusty miners were huddled around the pool tables gesturing wildly. No doubt all of them were trying to cheat one way or another. The old woman who ran the post office, Phyllis, sat at the other end of the bar. She was drinking more than the average pirate, a pyramid of empty shot glasses stacked in front of her. Between gulps of a pint of beer, she mumbled wildly to herself, making the pyramid sway in an unnerving way. Phil would have more than the usual number of broken glasses to clean up that night.

“That’s why the mail gets lost all the time,” Celia muttered to herself as she watched Phyllis hiccup and sway on her stool.

Celia gestured to Phil for another shot and continued to scan the room. Beyond Phyllis, in the far corner of the dimly lit room, sat the old jukebox. Long broken, it was there merely as a weak light fixture. It cast an odd rainbow on the booths next to it, where a group of men sat around a table talking intently. Celia squinted her eyes trying to see through the dust; she didn’t recognize those guys. They all had black vests on and white shirts that seemed to glow under the rainbow glare of the jukebox.