hang on to the glory at my right hand
here laid to rest is our love ever longed
with truth on the shores of compassion
you seem to take premise to all of these songs
A scabbard. Apparently that is what a sword holder is called. It was a lot of work to figure out how to make one fit and it took a lot of time, but it distracted Eve from her others problems: the mercenary assholes, her money troubles, her continuing lack of higher education, which prevented her from getting a better job.
Eve rode alone the day it happened. She always carried her sword with her, tucked under the rear fairing where she hoped no one would notice it. The fact that it was out of reach to draw while riding didn't even occur to her. It did occur to the rider behind her. She saw him--some guy in black armor and an orange superbike. He was just hanging back there. It was creepy.
That rider was Biff. He actually owned 23 motorcycles, and not all of them were black. They couldn't be. A road ninja is not predictable. Biff was in the middle of something, and had no intention of interacting with Eve, but a tiny sparkle on her bike caught his eye. When he came closer, he saw what looked like an industrial grade diamond on the hilt of a sword. There was only one person in the world who had ever owned a sword like that, and he'd put the sword away himself.
Eve got nervous when the rider started getting closer. She took an exit. She did an entire circuit on a four leaf clover overpass and he kept following her, now directly behind, not even caring that she saw him. Eve took another exit, this time heading out of the city. Most guys didn't follow when you did that. Mr. Orange did though. He followed her for miles. Eve decided she was done being scared and switched to mad.
She pulled over suddenly, heading into an orchard. She wouldn't remember what kind of orchard it was, but the trees were planted in nice neat rows, and brilliant red leaves were everywhere. The ground, while smooth on the path, was fairly rough for a sportbike. Carby felt like his teeth were chattering, although he didn't actually have a mouth.
Eve pulled stopped the bike and got off, facing the other rider. He stopped behind her and parked his bike. The rider approached her. Eve stood near the back of her bike, two fingers on the hilt of her sword. Mr. Orange took off his helmet. It was Biff.
"It's you!"
"Yeah, me," said Biff. He kept walking towards her. Eve didn't draw the sword. She backed up. He walked faster. He seemed even less friendly. Something was wrong--something about his eyes. He backed her up into a tree. They said nothing. Then Biff stuck a needle in her neck. Eve collapsed onto the ground.
When she woke up...well...it wasn't good. She didn't just wake up. She swam to the surface of her subconscious, slowly. She was aware that she was awake before she opened her eyes. She was in discomfort. Her arms...what the fuck?
There were metal cuffs around her wrists, pulling her arms above her head. These were not the fuzzy, comfortable kind that she had bought with one of her high school boyfriend and never used. These were sharp, metal, police handcuffs, and her wrists had been in them long enough for the cuffs to dig into her skin and send spikes of pain down her forearms. Each wrist had its own pair of handcuffs, which connected to an eyebolt that was drilled into the wall. Eve tested them with a quick jerk. They were secure. She looked around.
She was in someones house, in their living room. Biff was on a couch in front of her, balancing her sword on his finger, watching the sunlight reflect of off the dirty gem on the bottom of the grip.
Biff looked at her. Then Eve realized that she was naked from the waist up.
Well, mostly. Her suit was unzipped and the top half was folded back, pressed against the wall. Her shirt was M.I.A. but at least she still had her bra on. Biff stared at her, unashamed, the same way he had been staring at the gem.
"What did you do to me?"
"Tranquilizer."
"Why?"
Biff ignored the question. "This is a unique sword...not the sort of thing you can just pick up in a tourist trap." He flicked his finger, sending the sword tumbling into the air. Biff caught it with the other hand as he stood up. "I'm wondering how you got it."
Eve didn't answer. Biff waited, but she continued not answering. Then Biff lunged at her, sword plunging straight for her heart. Eve screamed the loudest scream that ever escape her lungs and twisted to her right, squinting her eyes shut. The death blow didn't come.
When Eve turned back to face him, she was shaking and there were tears on her cheeks. Biff held the sword less then six inches away from her. "Where did you get this?" he asked again, this time in a softer voice.
"A kid gave it to me."
Biff placed the tip of the sword under her neck, pushing it up so he could look at her eyes from a different angle...or something. Who knows. "Really?" he asked.
Eve couldn't nod without impaling herself, so she just sobbed a quick "yes" under her breath.
Biff traced the sword down her neck, past her collarbones and down her chest. The stroke was slow and painful, but didn't draw blood, and Eve would be surprised later to find that she didn't have a mark on her. Biff slid the edge under her bra and tugged once. "You were at her grave?"
Eve nodded.
"Why were you in that place on that day?"
"I wanted...I wanted to find out more about you. I was just curious. You're so-"
"You drove six hours away because you were curious? Maybe I should have just fucked you in that old factory...and satisfied your curiosity."
Biff, with a flick of his hand, sliced the bra open from the middle. The bra popped off, as if being launched outward by her breasts. Eve watched her formerly favorite but now ruined $60 victoria's secret bra that was a present from herself fall to the floor.
"Yeah, well, you should have, sugar."
The point of the sword was on her skin, and traveling downward. Biff stepped close, close enough that Eve could feel his breath on her cheeks. "Did you talk to anyone?"
"You mean did I spill the beans on your disappearing act?" asked Eve. She felt the tip of the sword on her stomach. "Relax, they still think you're dead."
"So what now?" asked Biff.
Eve shrugged. She felt the sword trace around her belly button. She imagined a crimson red line in the shape of question mark.
"What would you do if I fucked you right now--cut off all your clothes into tiny pieces, and--"
Eve leaned forward just a little. "I'd enjoy it." The sword crossed below her belly and came to rest on the zipper of her jumpsuit. Her entire body was on fire again. She didn't care about...anything. It was like the time after they got chased by the cops. She just wanted him inside her.
Biff turned away and threw the sword into the floor. It stuck enough to stay upright, wobbling a bit. "I know girls like you."
"You don't know me."
"No, but I know girls like you." Biff bent down to rummage through a black bag that was on the floor. Eve caught a glimpse of a drill. From this bag Biff pulled out a red juicebox. The kind you give to children. Biff turned back towards her and sunk into the couch, slowly. He he tried to pop the little bendy straw in the juicebox, while crossing his legs, preventing Eve from determining if the last few minutes had any real effect on him. Then a part of Eve's brain that had been lying dormant suddenly awoke and pointed out that she had been drugged, kidnapped, handcuffed to a wall, sliced, and after all this she was straining to see if the guy who did it had a hard on. Damn, girl.
Biff popped the straw into his juice box and took a satisfying sip. "I've seen this before, over and over again. I used to enjoy it, I used to thrive on it, month after month, or maybe week after week, putting a different girl on her back. But something always happened." Biff took another sip. "You girls," he pointed at her with his juicebox hand, "want a...what is it...oh, a 'bad boy.' You know...rough around the edges, tough, makes your heart race, maybe jail and tats, all that bullshit. But you don't know what that means. The kind of guy you want to fall in love with is someone who is tough on the outside, but who has a soft gooey inside that you can hold on to while you ride the afterglow. You want someone who can pound the living shit out of rude boys at bars, but will at the same time never put a hand on you and maybe go on a picnic, or at least treat you like a princess. Are you following me?"
"Yes." No.
"Are you familiar with the X-men?"
"What?"
"The X-men. It started off as a--"
"Yeah. Yeah, I saw the movies."
"My favorite character was Wolverine. Hell, everyone's favorite character was Wolverine. He's badass, and he has claws, but thats not what I like about him. What I like about Wolverine is that he is different than the others. He is not some geek that just dresses the part. No...wolverine is an animal. He is an animal to his core. Wolverine has those claws on the outside and much more dangerous claws on the inside. Nothing shows this better than the scene where Rouge--the girl he was trying to protect--tries to wake him from a nightmare. She does wake him, but its like she woke a lion. Wolverine impales her with his claws before he even realizes who she is."
Biff paused and took a long sip of his juicebox. Eve had no idea how to respond to that.
"The thing you need to understand about me is that I am like wolverine. I'm not an animal--no, not that. I am on the inside what you see on the outside. There is no man hiding inside me that you haven't met yet. I'm an empty shell. Everything you could ever want to know about me, you've learned in one conversation. The man you discovered when you went back...there...that man injected nitrous oxide into his car engine and held down the accelerator until it flew off the edge of a cliff at somewhere just shy of two hundred miles an hour. He died." Biff took one last sip of his juicebox. It made that gurgling sound they always do when they're empty.
"So you tied me up to prove that you're a psychopath? Good job."
Biff shrugged. "I had to cure you somehow." He grabbed the bag off the floor and stood up. "The next time you pull over to fuck somebody, don't let them just walk up and stick a needle in your neck. The next time it happens, it won't be me." Eve felt a twinge of disappoinment at that last--no she didn't! Biff walked into the next room. The front door was there.
"What? Who does that?"
"Haven't you seen Dexter?" asked Biff.
"Have you failed to grow up?"
Biff didn't answer. He just walked to the front door and opened it. Something that had been simmering in the back of Eve's mind now bubbled to the surface: this was definitely not his house. Biff was not a bald black man with two kids like in the photographs.
"Hey!" Eve yanked on her handcuffs.
Biff nodded in her direction. "I sunk those in without drywall anchors." Then the door slammed shut behind him.
Eve looked above her. Yes. She was handcuffed to the wall in a house of people she never met before. Great. Real great. Eve could not pull with her wrists; she had been unconcious for too long. She grabbed each eyebolt with her hands and tried to jiggle them. Not much luck. She jiggled them again. She tried pulling. She tried putting her weight on them, but it was difficult because her fingers were not powerful enough. Eve wasn't going anywhere, so she pressed on. After a few more minutes, the eye bolt connected by handcuffs to her right wrist came out. In all that time the left one had not budged. Perhaps Biff had carelessly sunk it in to some fucking hardwood. Perhaps road ninjas sucked home improvement. Eve grabbed the eyebolt with both hands and turned it. It was difficult to turn it far, because that twisted the hand cuffs and required her to turn in circles with it, but Eve eventually unscrewed it enough to loosen it and rip it out of the wall.
Eve was now standing in the living room of a total strangers house with handcuffs and giant screws hanging off her arms and her pink riding suit flopped down behind her. She could not put her arms in the riding suit while the handcuffs were on her wrists. It just hurt too much. Eve looked outside. The sun was setting. Eve was still wearing her jeans under the suit. She had her phone. She called Dave.
She had still not told Dave about Biff, and she had still not slept with him, which meant that she had a tough time explaining why she was asking him to explain, over the phone, how to unlock police handcuffs. Dave pressed her for an explanation. The best she could think of was "it's a surprise." Shit. That was probably worse than saying she'd been kidnapped by the psycho she was stalking.
Eve heard him typing. He asked whether or not she had various household objects, clearly assuming she was in her own apartment. Eve did her best not to break that assumption and dashed around the strangers house. She finally found a paperclip in the kitchen. Dave suggested multiple times that he just come over and show her how to do it. Eve's refusals grew more and more terse until he got the point and stopped asking. It took forever, but finally the handcuff on her right wrist clicked open. By this time, the sun had set.
"So when's the surprise?" Shit.
"Uh, I'm not sure. Hold on let me call you back later."
"K." Dave hung up.
Eve walked back into the living room while she attacked the lock on her left wrist with the paper clip. She almost had it when the living and other rooms were briefly bathed in a flash of white light from a car's headlights. Eve looked outside. It was swinging down the drive. Eve dropped to the floor. She finished the lock on her left wrist. She grabbed her sword, her ruined bra, and the handcuffs, and crawled on her knees towards the back of the house. She heard car doors slam. She found the laundry room. She could hear the front door opening just as she opened the back one.
Eve waited at the corner of the house. She eased her arms into her riding suit and zipped it up slowly, trying to mute the sound with her thumb. She peeked around the corner. Kids and someone taller were still slamming car doors shut. She waited to hear yelling. As soon as they disappeared to the front side of the house she bolted. She found a tree and crouched on the other side of it. She expected to hear yelling, or screams, or someone to come out the back, but nothing happened. She waited for like an hour, then looked at her phone: ten minutes had gone by. Eve then realized that perhaps no evidence of their presence had been left behind, save for two holes in their wall. Perhaps they would notice them soon enough. Eve glanced at the house and then ran again.
The trees. She was back in the orchard. It wasn't long until she found Carby, still standing there. Eve tried to tuck her bra into the riding suit in such a way as to make the ride home more comfortable, and dropped the handcuffs in the tiny compartment under the seat.
Damn girl, somebody had a good time, said Carby.
Eve had it in her head to push Carby until she got to the road, so as to remain quiet and unnoticed, but that got old after about twenty feet. She started him up--his engine sounded to her like thunder that would wake the countryside--and rode away as fast as she dared.
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