Page 2 of Biker's Enemy

He normally calms down after breakfast. After he gets a few things done. After he works out his demons for a few hours.

“You weren’t just fucking saying,” he says, rattling the door handle more intentionally this time. “You know I’m keeping your ass safe.”

He rattles the door more aggressively. The sweaty palms and tight throat turn into full blown panic symptoms. I already tried using everything in my bedroom that could be a weapon. But have you ever tried fighting off a 6’5”, 260 lb American soldier? He wins. Every time. It doesn’t matter what weapons I have.

I lick the blue Taki dust off my fingers, but the remnants of salt and cheesy flavor do nothing to bring me the immediate calm I have come to count on.

“You don’t understand how bad it is out there–”

Here we go again.

He blames the government for killing our parents. He thinks they “unleashed the virus” and that our parents’ unfortunate death from the disease that swept across the globe is a government conspiracy by “pedophile elites”. Shortly after they entered the ICU together after their Florida cruise went wrong, Eugene got his discharge.

Their deaths turned him into… this. And I am utterly at his mercy.

Or I was.

Today, I’m tired of being alone. I’m tired of being trapped. I’m tired of the way my body feels from all of this weight gained, lying here in my bedroom staring at a screen while life passes me by just because Eugene is completely fucked up.

“Get away from the door, Eugene.”

He stops rattling the door handle, but I’m not foolish to think that means he’s giving up. We’ve been here before. Too many times.

“Why won’t you let me in, Quin?” he asks as the tone of his voice transforms. He sounds eerily calm and even more terrifying — insincere.

“Just go away, Eugene,” I say, sounding frustrated. “You just need… breakfast.”

You never know the right thing to say when you’re dealing with someone who doesn’t think rationally. I don’t quite understand how he connects the dots in his head.

“You’re right,” he says. “Can you make something for me? My head hurts.”

He complains about these headaches on most days and they seem to affect how he functions with various degrees of severity. I approach the door and almost unlock it. Our last fight ended with me getting cuts all over the backs of my calves, so I’m hesitant to open the door and subject myself to another brutal beating for some perceived slight.

“Promise you won’t do anything crazy?”

The length of time he pauses should give me cause for concern, but I’m too busy managing the stress wrapping all my muscles in tight, impossible knots.

“I promise.”

For all his faults, he has never broken a promise before. I hide the tension I feel with a calm smile on my face. He is too unpredictable for me to show any emotion beyond… this.

“Are you sure?” I ask as my hand hovers over the handle.

“I promise, little sister.”

It has never sounded right for a pale, 6’5” white man to call me his ‘little sister’. Eugene was originally from Ukraine. I remember Klaus saying, “We wanted a white baby in the first place”, when they got the opportunity to adopt. He didn’t care that I was right there.

Neither of them cared about stuff like that. They acted one way in private and completely differently in public. Living like that was hell. It took a lot of time alone to even figure it out. But they were total hypocrites.

“We teach our kids to see beyond race,” my mother said to a group of parents once. “All the stuff is in the past. We don’t need black and white. We just need Jesus.”

And we had a lot of Jesus. Maybe a little too much Jesus judging by some of the deranged prayers I’ve heard coming out of Eugene’s mouth when he should be sleeping. But he’s not talking to himself now and he seems a little more calm, so I remind myself that my body just responds like this out of habit.

He hasn’t killed me yet. I can get through this interaction…

So I open my bedroom door.

And scream.

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