The Hollow Man
After returning from Iraq, David thought his life was over. Then he met a man who made him realize that it was just beginning . . .
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Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
Wild Ride
Chapter 1
Six men surrounded a small, cowering figure in the parking lot of a mini-mart. Their eyes were full of hate as they glared at the slender young man, who didn’t look threatening enough to have earned that kind of reaction from them. His face was twisted with apprehension and fear, as he glanced wildly around the circle. “Please let me go,” he whimpered, clutching at the plastic bag containing the bottled water and bag of chips he’d just bought.
“You ain’t goin’ anywhere, fag,” one of them growled.
“P-Please. I haven’t done anything to you. Let me go,” the young man pleaded, trying to back up toward the store.
But they weren’t having any of that. The little circle tightened, and one of them reached out to knock the bag from his hands. It fell to the ground, the bottled waters breaking open on the unforgiving concrete. The young man trembled, probably imaging that he would be next…
“Fags get what they deserve. Dirty perverts,” snarled one of the other men. “Get him!”
They closed in on him, and he cried out in terror and despair as rough hands grabbed him and a fist crashed into his face. They began to beat him mercilessly, their fists plowing into his ribs and his face. He threw up his hands to guard his face as best he could, and one of them kicked him in the groin. He went down, crying out, his hands cradling his crotch as they began to kick him instead.
Who knew if they’d ever have stopped, and what the young man’s fate might have been, had not a low, deep sound caught their attention? A sleek black Harley swung into the parking lot and idled to a stop. The man sitting on it turned his head and raked a glance over the little crowd, his eyes finally settling on the sobbing figure lying curled up on the ground at their feet. “What’s going on?” the biker drawled in a voice almost as deep as his bike’s engine.
“Nothing, man. Just ride away,” growled one of the attackers coldly.
A lifted brow. “Looks like it’s something to me. Looks to me like you’re beating up on a guy who doesn’t seem like he could hurt a fly - and there are six of you to one of him. Now, that doesn’t seem very fair,” he unfolded his massive frame from his bike in a slow, inevitable manner, like a mountain moving. “Why don’t you boys dance with me, instead,” he continued menacingly, his eyes nearly lost under the shadows of his lowered brows.
They glanced at one another uneasily, their blood lust dissipating in the face of this real threat. “Hey, you don’t need to get upset, man,” one of them said, holding up his hands. “He’s just a dirty fag boy…”
“I’m not upset. In fact, I’ll be smiling when I knock your head off,” the biker said silkily, stepping toward the little group. He cracked his knuckles together, a loud report that made them jump.
There was a general consensus that they should run away, which was heightened when the biker reached out and grabbed the nearest attacker and laid him out flat with one punch. The cracking sound his jaw made convinced them to scatter and run away in terror for their lives, except for the guy with the broken jaw. He lay unconscious on the concrete, and the biker elected not to chase the others. But he did kick the man on the ground once with his steel-toed boot, hard enough to crack ribs. “Motherfucker,” he muttered in disgust.
He stepped over the unconscious man and walked over to where the young man that they’d been beating on lay. He knelt down and reached out to cradle his face with his big hands, seeing a dazed expression in a pair of wide blue eyes. “Hey, there,” he said. “You okay?”
There was no answer. The blue eyes flickered shut, and the young man fell into unconsciousness now that he was safe from his attackers. The biker grunted as he scooped the slender form up in his arms, carrying him over to the Harley. It wasn’t easy, but he eventually managed to get the battered body draped in front of him on the bike. He kick-started the bike, holding the beaten man with one arm and steering with the other. He roared out of the parking lot, leaving the single unconscious attacker still lying on the concrete behind him.
He only remembered bits of things for awhile. White walls, a sterile smell, people in masks prodding him. Voices talking above his head, garbled and senseless. Pain and then blessed release from pain. He wavered in-and-out of consciousness for a long time, not sure where he was and not really caring. This drugged haze was very nice. He liked it. He could have stayed here forever.
But alas for him, it couldn’t last. He awoke from a fitful sleep to late after noon sunlight pouring into the room he was in, and falling onto the blanket lying over his legs. He blinked, trying to understand where he was. It took him a moment to realize that it was a hospital room, and that his mouth felt dry as dust. He moaned a little, and the woman leaning over the table beside him straightened up. “Welcome back, Mr. Singer,” she remarked. “How do you feel?”
“I’m thirsty,” he croaked.
She bustled over to fill a plastic bottle with a straw in it from a carafe of water. Then she came back and held it for him to sip out of. The water tasted like heaven. “There, now,” she said soothingly. “That’s better, right?”
“Yes. Why am I…in a hospital?”
“You don’t remember?” she asked in concern. “You have a mild concussion, which would account for any memory loss.”
He frowned a little, feeling the broken skin on his lips pulling as he did so. “I was…driving to my…parents’ house,” he began uncertainly. “I stopped…to get something…to drink.”
“Yes, the man who brought you in said that you were at a mini-mart when you were…attacked. Some men beat you up. There’s a police officer who came by earlier that wants to talk to you about it, if you remember anything.”
Her words made the awful memories come crashing back. The hate-filled eyes and hard fists of those men, hitting and hitting him for no reason except for the fact that he was gay…a sob caught in his throat. “Here, now,” the nurse said, bending over him. “It’s all right. You’ll be fine. You’re lucky that that man came along and saved you, though.”
“What man?” he asked in bewilderment. He didn’t remember much after he’d fallen to the ground and they’d started kicking him.
“A big biker,” she said, shaking her head. “A really scary-looking person. He carried you in here last night, and an ER nurse told me that that he was huge. At first they thought that he’d been the one who beat you up, until he explained. He stayed around to make sure that you were going to be okay, and I caught a glimpse of him when I came on duty this morning. I wouldn’t want to run into him in a dark alley,” she added with a shiver.
This seemed so strange that he couldn’t quite take it in. A biker had saved him? Had brought him to the hospital and stayed around to make sure that he was going to be all right? It seemed like some strange drug dream to him. “Don’t worry about it,” the nurse told him. “Why don’t you eat something and I’ll bring you some more pain killer? The other one should be wearing off about now.”
Yes, his whole body was starting to ache. He slumped back against the pillows and closed his eyes wearily. But he couldn’t go back to sleep right now, much as he wanted to…he needed to call his parents and tell them what had happened, and if the nurse was to be believed he also had to talk to a cop about his beating. He felt as though he were a thousand years old, and he wished that he could just curl up under the blanket and never come back out again.
“Peter!” his mom cried, rushing to his bedside and grabbing his hand. “Are you okay, honey?” her eyes searched his face as his dad entered the room, and the bruises there made the anxiety in her gaze deepen.
“I’m okay, Mom,” he reassured her. “Really.”
She looked like she didn’t believe him, which he couldn’t blame her for. He had to look awful by now, because the bruises were darkening and stiffening all over his body. He could barely move. “Oh, Peter, who did this to you?” she asked, squeezing his hand.
“Some guys,” he replied. “At a mini-mart. Gay-bashers. They beat me up just because they could tell I was gay.”
“Animals,” she snarled. “I wish I could get my hands on them right now,” the evil look in her eyes said that the attackers would wish that they’d never been born.
“Well, it’s over. I guess a biker saved me,” he explained, squeezing her hand back reassuringly.
“A biker?” his dad said, shaking his head. “That seems strange.”
“I know, but apparently he brought me here and waited to see that I was okay before he left. My nurse said she saw him this morning.”
“That’s weird. But I’m so glad that he DID save you. If I ever meet him, I’ll give him a big kiss,” his mother said stoutly.
He tried not to giggle at the image of her bussing some big biker on the cheek, because his ribs hurt enough that it would be awful. He knew he’d probably never see his unknown savior again, but that he’d always think fondly of the man who’d most likely kept him from being beaten to death in the parking lot of that mini-mart.
He was sitting up, reading a book that his nurse(her name was Cecilia) had brought him, a few days after his attack. The police were looking of the men who’d beaten him, and since they now had one in custody(well, he was in a hospital at the moment, recovering from cracked ribs and broken jaw), they were confident that they’d find his friends soon too. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that; because if they were caught he’d have to testify against them, and while he didn’t want them to get away with it the thought of taking the stand under a dozen sets of judgmental eyes made him feel rather sick. But he’d do what he had to. Those men could not be allowed to roam free and attack other gay men as they had him.
There was a knock at the door of his hospital room. He looked up, expecting to see one of his co-workers or friends come to visit him. But to his amazement, he saw a massive, towering figure filling the entire doorway. This person was wearing a black t-shirt that stretched tightly over the most impressive set of muscles that he’d ever seen, under a simple black leather vest. Black jeans hugged tree-trunk legs, and a belt of thin chain link encircled a wide waist. Steel-toed square biker boots covered his feet. Pale blonde hair had been pulled back into a braid behind his head, and his strongly-planed face had a scruffy growth of new beard on it. Eyes the color of jean rivets met his wide blue ones, as the biker said in a casual rumble: “Hey. Glad to see you awake. You look better than the night I brought you in here, that’s for sure.”
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