The Pick-up Chapter Fourteen The Lost and Left Behind
The Pick-up Chapter 14 The Lost and Left Behind
(c) 2025 by the Entangled Pair
Chapter 14 – Interlude: The Lost and the Left Behind - A work in progress
Before the bridge dissolved, before wings and clouds, there was asphalt. There was always asphalt. When there was nothing else, there was asphalt, solid or not. Lucky could never quite untether from that fact. Or get away from the smell.
Seattle was behind him, but he didn’t leave alone. At every tavern, every back lot, every oil-stained parking place where word traveled faster than a wrench spun, the old names surfaced again like oil streaks on a mudpuddle.
They were the Unwashed Unwanted. The Uninvited. The ones who were never asked, but always arrived. Almost always with beer and good bud.
They weren’t heroes. They weren’t even antiheroes. They were just a collection of misfits too stubborn to die quietly, clinging to their machines like they were life rafts in a flood no one else could see.
In their minds they were Legend. Outlaws on the eternal highway, carving their names in smoke and dust. In reality? Just another pack of scruffy, road-worn riders, engines knocking, clutch cables fraying, rent overdue, and cops waiting at the county line.
And yet… the air around them had subtly shifted. Reality rippled, just a little, like the heat rising off the asphalt.
The current members:
* Lucky Logger, the reluctant captain. One time USMC recon, now just a man with a patched jacket and a beat-up scoot and the most beautiful old lady in this world.
* Ogre, towering seven feet of misplaced myth, almost too tall for his chopper, but too loyal to leave behind.
* Silver Tom, bulk spilling over his “Fat Bob,” always muttering obscure sci-fi references nobody caught.
* Rojo, ginger beard, half-Irish grin, Ogre’s shadow and best friend.
* Sorin, the mechanic from Oregon, with a van full of tools and a dog named Mateo who had more sense than all of them.
* Vince the suicidal Basket Case, Ogre’s half-brother. Riding like he wanted to die but hadn’t yet figured out how to do it. But he gave it the old college try.
The .25 caliber semiautomatic bullet pierced the scalp above the right ear, then skidded up over the skull, exiting above the left ear.
It looked to the three witnesses like it had gone straight through. All three gained their feet and two of them started to flee. But not his girlfriend. She stared at him in wide eyed, horrified, fascination until he took a half step toward her. Then she fainted, dead away.
The bullet didn't knock him out or concuss him. It didn't bleed more than a few drops trickling down from the exit wound. The entrance had been cauterized by the muzzle flash, and the smell of burnt hair slowly filled the room. He sat down in the brown fabric captain's chair in front of the fireplace and lit a cigarete. Then he shook his head, snubbed it out and lit a joint from the box on on the side table.
"Can't do nuthin right" he mumbled with a humorless grin, just as his girl pushed up from the floor and used the chair to pull herself up to settle in beside him. She gave him a sidelong glance before saying "Better luck next time.", like she meant it. She was pissed! Then she exhaled the breath she had been holding, and leaned in to kiss him.
* Dale “Dammit” Hobbs, kung-fu black belt from Odessa, whose luck ran about as sour as his temper.
They rode south, not knowing why, not knowing where. Just that something was pulling. And by the time the road bent toward California, they weren’t just chasing Lucky’s lead. They were caught in the same strange gravity that would soon bend all reality sideways. The Road to Nowhere beckoned still.
---
That night, around the fire, Russ told his story. He didn’t tell it loud. He didn’t tell it for sympathy. He told it like a man who’d muttered it a thousand times in the privacy of his own head, trying to get truth from a very old lie.
> “I followed Christ’s teachings. Still do. But don’t call me a Christian.
>
> You want my prayer? It goes like this: Jesus, save me from your followers.”
The others chuckled, a few too hard, but Russ didn’t crack a smile. His eyes stayed fixed on the coals, as if the embers were spelling back memories.
He spoke of Omak, of being dragged from catechism to confirmation, five baptisms before sixteen. Always told Jesus would fill the space inside him. Always left empty.
He spoke of the Mormons, the structure, the sense. Still no Christ.
He spoke of hanging the shingle of the Universal Life Church, half for the tax dodge, half for the joke. But it was the Gypsy Jokers who made him their “chaplain” during the Summer of Love. Weddings. Funerals. Drug overdoses. The kind of ministry no seminary ever taught. He survived. He thrived.
And still...
> “It seems I know his name. But he doesn’t know mine.”
Silence after that. The kind that rings out long enough to sting.
And maybe that’s when the fire flickered strange. Maybe that’s when the line between camp smoke and dragon’s breath blurred. Maybe that’s when Talon’s shadow reached down and the asphalt beneath their wheels thinned to nothing.
The old story became part of the new one, and the caravan lifted.
---
[Interlude Continued]
They weren’t heroes. They weren’t even antiheroes. They were just a collection of men too stubborn to die quietly, clinging to their machines like they were life rafts in a flood no one else could see.
In their own minds? Legends. Outlaws on the eternal highway, carving their names in smoke and dust. In reality? Just another pack of road-worn riders, engines knocking, clutch cables fraying, rent overdue, and cops waiting at the county line.
And yet… the air around them had already shifted. Reality rippled, just a little, like the heat rising off the asphalt.
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