Jack O'Connell - The Resurrectionist

That combination of friendly tone and rough physicality set the pattern for their exit from the Clinic. Buzz stood, grabbed Sweeney’s shirt and pulled him into a seated position. And then he punched Sweeney, this quick jab that landed where the shoulder hinged under the breastbone. It connected perfectly and Sweeney felt as if the bone had chipped. But then it was another round of backslapping and arms locked as if to promenade.

“Nadia will meet up with us later,” Buzz said. “You ready for your initiation ride?”

Sweeney didn’t answer, but it didn’t seem to matter. Buzz threw an arm across his back and gripped the bruised shoulder on the other side. Then he proceeded to waltz Sweeney out the front door of the Peck, past the delighted eyes of Romeo the janitor, who was dusting in the reception area.

In the predawn quiet, their steps crunched on the driveway gravel. Buzz was moving quickly, spieling something about Nadia being one in a million, yes sir, and all the Abominations agreed about that and you haven’t known a jones till you’ve had a piece of that honey there. The words mattered less than their speed, their charged tone and the way they jumped from Buzz’s mouth. Sweeney had known a neighborhood speed freak in high school and had studied the symptomology in college. So he felt fairly certain that while he’d been dream-fucking Nadia, Buzz had spent the night injecting some high-test crystal meth.

They circled the west wing of the building and climbed the hill that led to the rear parking lot where Buzz’s hog was waiting.

They came to a stop before the bike and Buzz said, “The boys are pleased, I can tell you that. The boys are very excited about this.”

Sweeney didn’t try to escape the embrace but he said, “Fuck you,” in a clear, emotion-free voice.

“We’ll see about that later,” Buzz said without any smile or hesitation. “Right now, we got to get you initiated. And seeing how you don’t have a bike, there’s only one way that can happen.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Sweeney said.

Buzz rubbed and picked a bit at a nostril with his free hand and said, “The thing is, Sweeney, you are. And you’re not stupid. So you know you are. I can kick your ass from one end of this lot to the other and tie you to the back of this thing like a bitch. But neither one of us wants that. So just get on. You’ll be glad you did. At some point, you’re going to have to trust me.”

Sweeney looked back to the Clinic.

“I can start screaming.”

Buzz nodded. “You can. That’s true. You could get a scream out. But two things, okay? First off, nobody in there likes you very much and they’re not going to do shit to help you out. Okay? And second, I’d bust you in the throat as soon as you squealed and you’d end up puking and maybe passing out. I know you, Sweeney. You don’t want Nadia to see that. She’s watching you right now.”

His eyes scanned the windows on the back of the building but he didn’t see any shadows.

“So just get on,” Buzz continued. “And let’s run this fucker the way she’s meant to be run.”

Sweeney thought about bolting and then stepped up to the bike and mounted it. Buzz was delighted.

“You’ve made me happy,” Buzz said. “It’s gonna be much better this way.”

Buzz mounted in front, kicked over the engine and throttled up a few times. Sweeney wrapped his arms around the driver’s trunk and yelled, “What about helmets?”

Buzz thought this hysterical. He yelled, “You are the shit, man,” put the bike in gear, and sprayed gravel to either side as they rode out of the lot and down to Route 16.

SWEENEY HAD NEVERowned 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.