Alone on Earth Read online

  Their mothers had been sisters. Pru’s mother, Riley’s Aunt Blythe, had died when Pru was eleven. From then on, Pru and Riley had been raised as sisters. Except for the fact that Riley’s mom had big plans for her and not so much for Pru.

  Pru closed the Mac and pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose. “I did. I saw you outside with Trevor doing things with your body that looked unpleasant. So I just got to work. The prep packet the studio sent mentioned that internet and cell coverage was unpredictable in Signal Bend, so I wanted to try to get a jump on as much as I could, in case we end up radio silent.” She came around the desk. “I’ve set stuff aside, but I haven’t started packing yet, in case you wanted in on that. But we need to get moving. Your mother changed the pickup.”

  “I know. Eleanor always knows better. Yeah, I want to pack my own clothes. Let’s get to it.”

  ~oOo~

  Riley and Pru packed, and then Riley showered, dressed, and primped. She’d have loved to travel in comfy clothes—she envied the women who traveled in yoga pants and t-shirts—but she lived in fear of being the subject of one of those awful paparazzi shots, looking like a slob and wearing no makeup. So she never, ever left the house undone. Ever. Maybe if her house ever caught fire. But only then.

  So to travel to the middle of the country in fall, she wore her softest pair of skinny jeans, a sheer, slub-knit tunic tee with a black camisole underneath, a funky scarf looped around her neck, and her favorite suede coat. She almost wore her matching suede boots, but they had 4-inch heels, as most of her shoes did (got to get height somewhere). She was heading to the country, and who knew what kind of terrain she’d have to walk on—did they even have paved sidewalks? So she instead grabbed a pair of cowboy boots she’d worn for Halloween a couple of years back.

  Marta knocked on the open door as Pru and Riley were closing up the bags. “Miss Riley, the car is here.”

  “Thanks, Marta. We’ll be down in a few minutes.” The housekeeper nodded and picked up two of the bags that were closest to the door.

  When Riley and Pru lugged the rest of the bags down and out to the front, a black limo was parked outside, and Joe, her favorite driver, was leaning against the rear fender, waiting.

  He smiled and opened the rear door, the trunk of the limo coming up at the same time. “Hello, lovely ladies.”

  “Joe! Glad it’s you!” But as Riley approached the door he’d opened, she saw that the limo already had a passenger. Her mother. She cast a betrayed eye at Joe, who’d been around long enough to know very well that Riley treasured her moments free from her mother’s keep. He shrugged, abashed, but said nothing. She understood. Nobody said no to Eleanor. Not for long.

  “Mother. Why are you in my ride?” The thought that Eleanor had somehow finagled her way onto this trip had Riley feeling suddenly panicked. She slid in and sat at the side. Pru followed her and sat next to Eleanor. Riley gave her cousin a good, hard look and decided that her mother had surprised them both. Good. At least they weren’t all in cahoots against her.

  “Don’t worry, muffin. I’m just along for the ride to the airport. I wanted to make absolutely certain everything was in order, and I wanted to give you a proper goodbye. I can’t remember the last time we’ve been apart so long.”

  Because it hadn’t happened before. Eleanor always came everywhere. It had caused a substantial amount of drama when it became clear that there would be no convenient accommodations for an entourage larger than one, and Riley had worked her best persuasive magic to make Eleanor think that it was her idea to have Pru go instead of her. “Mother, I am capable of packing and getting myself to the airport. Especially since I have Pru with me.”

  “Oh, please. I know. I just want to go over what the studio is expecting and what I’ve set up with the people in that town. Sign Post or whatever it’s called. The manager of the bed and breakfast you’re staying in will be your main contact point. Shannon Ryan is her name. She will liaise with the motorcycle people and with the woman you’re playing—Lilli. Who owns that bed and breakfast, by the way. Everything seems very tangled together in that place. I double checked, and Shannon has your menu. There’s not a gym anywhere around, but the motorcycle people have a workout room at their…clubhouse, I think she called it. I don’t much like the sound of that, but if you have your yoga mat, maybe you can just do some yoga in your room.”

  Riley had been trying to block her mother’s chatter out, but she couldn’t. She was tired. She had it handled. She wasn’t going to Siberia or something, and she was sick of listening to all the ways everybody had her life worked out for her. “Mother! Enough! Everything’s arranged. I’m going to be gone a week. I’m sure I’ll manage any hardships that arise. I’m not exactly roughing it.”

  Eleanor laughed at that. “Oh, sweetheart. Wait until you see. It’s not the Marmont, that’s for sure. And I don’t know how in touch we’ll be able to be while you’re gone. I keep hearing that cell reception is a bit spotty in most places out there.”

  That was the best part, as far as Riley was concerned. She might just turn her phone off. If she could convince Pru to do so as well, it might be an okay week.

  Finally, they arrived at LAX, checked their bags with a skycap, and sent Joe and Eleanor away with a wave.

  Riley gave her long, blonde hair a flip and hooked arms with Pru. “Okay. Onward to the heartland.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bart sat at the bar, alone in the dim Hall of the Night Horde MC clubhouse, his main laptop open in front of him. He wasn’t working. Mostly he was daydreaming, bouncing around entertainment and gossip websites, killing time until Isaac, the MC President, showed up. Isaac liked to be the last one in. He wanted to walk in and get straight to work. Waiting around pissed him off mightily, so pretty much all the Horde made a point to get in early when they were meeting the boss or were due in the Keep. Bart didn’t have far to go; he still lived in the clubhouse. He’d never had much interest in finding a place of his own. There was an eighty-inch television on the wall and a fully stocked bar right here. And chicks to do his laundry and clean his room. Seemed stupid to lay money out for something else.

  He was perusing the results of a Google image search when the front door opened, and Isaac walked in, hooking his shades into his kutte pocket. Quickly, Bart minimized the photo of Riley Chase wearing a very small bikini, then turned and stood. He was six feet tall, and he worked out, but he always felt like a shrimpy little shit when he stood next to Isaac, who had seven inches on him and maybe eighty pounds, all of it muscle. “Hey, boss.”

  “Morning, Bartholomew. Got an update?”

  He did. Isaac sat on an adjacent stool, and Bart took his own seat again. “Everything’s good to go. Tanner Stafford and Riley Chase are due in this afternoon. Douglas Warness and Peter Gruen are in the day after tomorrow. Everybody else is coming in just for a night or two, next week. The only snag is Lindy Timmons.”

  “Who’s that again?” Isaac had gotten impatient with the movie a long time ago, and he was relying on Bart more and more to be the one in charge of the details. Frankly, it scared the crap out of him. He’d already fucked up once this year—or, at least, Isaac thought he’d fucked up—by not finding out that Showdown’s old lady had put a kid up for adoption when she was eighteen. Not that he would have found the info on a twenty-year-old closed adoption by hacking. Those records were probably still paper—or, at a minimum, even assuming that an adoption agency twenty years ago had been digitized, records that old were probably stored offline. But still, intel was his job, and as far as Isaac was concerned, he’d dropped that ball.

  “She’s playing Daisy. They made that role bigger in the rewrite, when we made them pull back on the details about what Lilli went through. She’s coming in to talk to people about Daisy. She’s only staying a day or two, but Show doesn’t want to meet with her.”

  Daisy, Show’s oldest daughter, had been killed horribly in the violence with Lawrence Ellis, the powerful druglord Sig
nal Bend and the Night Horde had ultimately defeated—all of which was the focus of the movie coming to town. Lilli had been kidnapped and tortured. Neither she nor Isaac—nor anybody else—wanted to make the details of that ordeal public. Show had offered to cooperate, giving Hollywood Daisy’s story in detail. He’d talked at length with the screenwriters several months back. But the prospect of sitting down with the girl who would play his daughter had him unsettled.

  Isaac nodded. “I’ll talk to him. Won’t lean on him—if he doesn’t want to talk to her, then she’ll have to figure it out on her own. But I’ll talk to him. What else?”

  “That’s pretty much it. The gossip sites have been pretty quiet about this trip. The studio has the lid on, I guess, so I don’t think we’ll see reporters around this week. It’ll be a different story if they do any location shooting. But for now, it’s just the actors and whoever they bring with them. The B&B is booked solid. I’m going to take the B&B van and pick up Riley and Tanner, and their people, this afternoon.”

  Isaac lifted an eyebrow at that, and Bart felt his cheeks warm. Everybody else in the clubhouse hated the idea of the movie, but Bart was excited. He was online a lot. It was his job to be online a lot. And he was a geek. He loved movies, and television—especially cult shows—and video games. Not ashamed of it, either. So he knew who all these people coming into town were. He was a fan of Hades High, and he thought Riley Chase was fucking hot. Pretty badass, too. To top it all off, she’d voiced a main character from one of the best video games of all time. She had a sexy damn voice. And she was single. She had been since her last boyfriend, Devon Gaines, frontman for The Laughing Warriors, had fatally OD’d, not long after Christmas.

  Bart didn’t know if that meant anything for him, but it was probably the best shot he’d ever have. Even if she was still in mourning, he thought he could work that. He could try, anyway.

  “The studio asked somebody to pick them up. This week is supposed to be about them getting a feel for the town. No limos. They’re supposed to blend in.”

  “With the riffraff, yeah. Okay, whatever.”

  “Tanner’s going to want to meet you as soon as possible. And Riley will want to meet Lilli. I know she’s pissed, but—”

  “They cast a tiny teen Barbie to play her. Pissed isn’t quite the word. But we’re both in.” He grinned. “Omen’s babysitting again, right? He can bring ‘em to the clubhouse tonight. They want to see what it’s like to be Horde, we’ll show ‘em.”

  They were having a Friday night party. Bart thought that was a singularly horrible idea. “We really want to start their stay here off like that?”

  Isaac got a look that Bart knew well. It said, I meant what I said, asshole. So he shrugged. Okay, then.

  “Anything else?” Isaac’s tone indicated that if there was anything else, it should be crucially important. Isaac was a good guy and a great President, but he did not have the world’s coolest head. His patience was always short, and where the movie was concerned, it had lapsed some time ago. Bart, whose job it was to keep abreast of that situation, had become a focal point for Isaac’s frustration.

  “Nope. I’m heading to Keyes to finish a tranny job, then I’ll grab the B&B van and get to the Springfield airport.”

  With a terse nod, Isaac stood. “Good. You need backup?” He smirked. His patience might have run out, but his enjoyment at ribbing Bart had not.

  Bart was just going to have to ride the ridicule out. Everybody knew he was into the Hollywood invasion. And fuck, fucking movie stars were coming to town to play them. Peter fucking Gruen was playing him. Tanner motherfucking Stafford was playing Isaac. And Riley Chase, last year’s Sexiest Woman Alive, was playing Lilli. Come on! How could he be the only one who thought this was cool?

  But he was. Everybody else was either suspicious about the movie, or contemptuous, or both. He was totally alone in his enthusiasm, and he was getting buried in heaps of shit. It wasn’t the first time. There were a few things that separated Bart from the rest of the Horde. His love of gaming, his collection of comic books and science fiction and fantasy books, his lack of interest in football (he liked soccer and rugby), his college degree, and the fact that Signal Bend was not his hometown.

  He was the black sheep, for sure. But he was essential, and he held his own. He could hack almost anything, fix just about any engine ever made, build almost anything out of metal and rubber, and ride faster and surer than anyone save Isaac and Len.

  And he had blood on his hands, just like the rest.

  ~oOo~

  The morning’s conversation with Isaac ate at Bart a little while he worked. He knew he had the respect of his President and the whole club. He’d proven himself handily, and he knew it. Fuck, he’d pretty much saved Lilli, finding her and then getting the Horde into the building she was being held in. From a hundred miles away. He was good. But he still felt just a step outside the circle.

  He wasn’t truly an outsider, even though he hadn’t been raised here. His father had been, and his grandparents had lived here until they died, within days of each other. His father had joined the Navy right out of high school and had never moved back home. Bart’s family—parents, brother, sister, and him—had moved around a lot, finally settling in Kansas City after his father left the service, when Bart was in middle school. From the time he was twelve until his second year of college, Bart had spent summers in Signal Bend, helping out on the farm. In high school and college, he’d hung around the clubhouse. He knew these guys. And they knew him. Wyatt had taught him to ride, and Hav had helped him rebuild an old shovelhead. His first Harley. He didn’t ride that beauty now, but sometimes he’d go out into the bay it was stored in and pet it a little. His baby.

  After he graduated from the University of Kansas, he’d gotten a straight job in K.C., writing code. Living at home with his folks. He’d fucking hated it. God, he’d hated it. He’d hated the people, he’d hated how everything was covered in grey carpet, he’d hated it all. All of it. He’d never been so miserable in his entire fucking life.

  One day, about a year into that hell, while he was sitting in a staff meeting, not listening to some midlevel fuck droning on about some midlevel policy change, wondering how the universe had managed to allow writing fucking code, which to Bart had always been like having a magic key to everything, to be so unbelievably boring, he heard the roar of a Harley. They were seven stories up and locked behind a bank of stiflingly grey windows, the kind that didn’t open so you couldn’t throw yourself out, but he could hear that roar like the bike was in the room with him. Nothing else sounded like a Harley. When he was younger, he’d dallied briefly with the European racing bikes, the Ducatis and BMWs, but then he’d found somebody online offering the dismembered bones of a ’67 Harley Electro Glide for $200. He’d hauled the parts to Signal Bend that summer, the summer right before his senior year of high school, and Hav had helped him build it. It was Harleys from then on.

  Which was good, because the Horde didn’t ride anything but.

  On that grey day in that grey room, hearing that bright, fiery, ferocious sound, that red-hot sound, Bart just stood up and walked out. He said nothing. He went to his workstation and grabbed his coat and nothing else, and he walked out, knowing full well that he was fucking any chance he’d have to get another straight job like this. And he didn’t care. The next morning, he was on his shovelhead, all the belongings he cared about in his studded leather saddlebags or in the pack on his back. He headed for Signal Bend. Hav sponsored him, and he was a Prospect within the week. That was seven years ago. With the exception of a 15-month stint inside for computer fraud, he’d been settled in Signal Bend and with the Horde since.

  So he wasn’t an outsider. But he wasn’t quite one of them, either. He hadn’t experienced the deep decline of the town in any direct way. He’d known his folks were keeping his grandparents afloat, and he knew most of the farmland his Gramps had owned had been sold off to an agricorp, but not until Gramps was too infir
m to work it. So he’d been no more than a witness to the losses, not a victim. That, if nothing else, set him apart. He wasn’t fighting for his home the way everybody else was.

  But until the shootout that had garnered so much attention from outside the town, no one had treated him like he was not fully one of them. In fact, going to prison for the club tended to have a cementing effect—which was good, because his blood family had more or less washed their hands of him over that. When the town was in decline, he was just one of the guys. He had skills the others didn’t, and he had interests they considered “citified,” but he felt like he fit in pretty well.

  It was the resurgence of the town that had drawn the distinction most clearly. He lived in the twenty-first century. Signal Bend had been stuck somewhere around 1960. In the past two years, they’d been yanked forward into the present. And Bart had done a lot of the yanking. Or, more accurately, the Horde had done the yanking, but with Bart’s ideas, for the most part. The things Bart knew about and could do set him in stark relief, even to Isaac, who was pretty tech savvy, all things considered.

  It had all started with his Kickstarter idea. After the fallout, when they were trying to get back on their feet, it had been Bart’s idea to use Kickstarter to capitalize on the town’s renown. It had been huge success, pulling in a lot of money to fund repairs to the town. But a lot of the Horde, even while they were approving the idea, thought it ran against the grain of the club and the town. Maybe they were right. They probably were. But change was necessary. It was that or continue dying. The Kickstarter and the movie were making the public’s attention do something good for the town. Even if it also meant that they had to run things in new and unfamiliar ways.

  Even if it meant welcoming strangers to shop in their stores and stay in their bed and breakfast and eat at their restaurants. Even if it meant letting Hollywood people come in and make a movie about the worst and best day in the town’s long history.