Bronwen rolls over and stretches before getting to her feet. She’d spent a good five hours sleeping in the sun of this field just south of the Wyoming state border and now felt fully refreshed. She wandered down the incline she’d slept on to a rickety old red barn that she’d parked the Norton in, legs all in a jumble as she strode down the hill. She is still so tired.

To her amusement, a large brown cow is licking the salt off the tires of her bike as it rests peacefully on the planks of the barn floor. She lights up a smoke and watches it for a while. When it finally looks up at her, it startles, knocking over the Norton in its clunky escape. She leans over and hauls the bike back up. A new scratch runs top to bottom on the once glossy black gas tank. That bovine was going to get the grenade treatment if it ever came back.

Scrutinizing the scratch closely, she hears sirens in the distance. Glancing back at the highway she notices a flood of State Troopers scream by, lit up and in a hurry. More bad feelings settled uncomfortably in her gut. Bronwen fires up the bike and drives slowly back up to the highway, trailing her feet in the long grass, thinking and wondering about all the things she still can’t quite puzzle together.

Well, she did blow that guys brains out. Maybe they were looking for her? Nah. He was a waste of space. They’d give her a metal if they tracked that back to her. Once on the highway, she cruises to the next town, stops to eat breakfast, and quietly drops her fork when she scans the small byline on the third page of the newspaper.

“Dead? What the hell?” She’d hated the bitch, but not that much. The picture in the paper of the crime scene was not lusciously pretty, nor coy, but rather, a red-head, hair clotted with blood and visceral debris.

Reading now four states away, the headline read, “police are seeking the following parties for questioning: Bronwen O’Connor…”

“Bloody hell,” she snorts, eggs flying across the table. “Well, that’s just fucking great. Shane ye stupid idiot, what the fuck….?”

Where the fuck was he? She kept stopping to call home and see if he’d pick up. No dice, just the same lame answering machine message, time after time,

                “Heyyyyy, I know, right...? Too bad son, because I never give a .. *BEEP*….”

It was starting to make her blood boil, so she’d stopped calling. She called Sean Starr, and reluctantly called Brett and Johnny Lukas. As she’d suspected, they were doing generally stupid shit, and just giggled over the phone deliriously, all while swearing up and down that they didn’t really know where he was. Seth was her last chance, and he picked up after the second ring.

                “Do ye remember where the funeral was?” Bron asked bluntly.

                “Err….” He mumbled something unintelligible and yawned, “Montana? Does that make sense? I don’t remember much, just the ol’ family ‘duck and cover’ stratagem. They’re so wholesome, even in mourning—it weirds me out.”

                Bronwen sighed and hung up the phone. This was just ridiculous.

She sits down on a curb at the gas station and thinks for a while, nursing a cigarette and taking the odd draw off her flask. He had never been the kind of guy a girl could keep tabs on. It bothered her that she felt so compelled to do so right now—that she was worried about him. He was not typically the type that had to be worried about, so much as worried for, and never had been. The pull was just too strong, insinuated something was wrong, but she started thinking in a negative spin. What if she just had heartburn or something (could she honestly justify driving five states for heartburn? She should have picked cancer for this distance, earned some fucking cash along the way). How could she explain that to him if she magically appeared at the funeral of a dead woman she had never met? So stupid. Even worse, the fight was tomorrow, and she was feeling strung out. Less control in the ring, and more violent—she could get kicked out of the match because she’d forget to reign in and not fudge ring rules. That Russian was overlooking the match, but she had learned a long time ago not to expect favors from the stoic expression Annika wore around most of the time.

The worst idea borne into fruition is the last one—a distraction? Normally she would not credit Walsh for much brilliance, but admittedly, she did wonder briefly if he didn’t have a point about Shane winning at any cost. She furrows her brow and leans over to wrap her arms over her knees, continuing to assess the situation. Shane was a lot of things, often hard to fathom or make any logical sense of—her mind reeled against this constantly, despite the irrationality that guided most of her leisure time activities (or did her leisure time activities guide her irrationality? She was sure at least that if she ever stopped smoking weed, her temper would raise three or four notches in volatility).  Walsh too though, was no model of understanding, wisdom or knowledge either, just a petty douche playing a high roller to hide some nasties in his inner workings.

As she sat there and meditates a little longer in the sun, she rolls a joint slowly with one hand, tenderly curling the paper with her fingers and the heel of her palm, holding her forehead with her other hand and yawning.  She lights it and takes a few tokes and leans back to stretch. Bronwen is vaguely aware in her initial buzz that someone is sneaking up behind her. Snapping her hands back down, she jumps up and comes face to face with three State Troopers, all with weapons drawn. Colt .45’s. She groans.

“What’s the deal?” she asks cautiously, holding her hands cautiously midway in the air. The joint is still burning between her finger and thumb, and she drops it, watches the gazes of the State Troopers follow the streak of ash and illegal substance to its landing in the dirt.

“I …have cancer,” she says awkwardly, “it’s wholesome government grown pain management.”

One of the officers snorts and gestures for her to step forward. He roughly grabs her arms and cuffs them, starts steering her towards the cruiser. She looks back at the Norton.

“Aww….ye gotta know some kid is going to steal that shotgun,” she moans. The officer reaches up to push her head down into the car, and she sticks out a foot to prevent herself from being pushed in. Another officer joins in, and she gets to the point where both feet are on either side of the door as she twists and turns.

“You shouldn’t be resisting arrest miss,” one officer grunts, “you’re just making it worse for yourself.”

Fuck Walsh and his stupid ideas. It was a bad seed, and she shouldn’t have even considered it. It was enough to be in the fight. If she started looking past that, she’d end up just like him, where it was secondary. A living, where the urge for blood sport didn’t flow through him in every waking moment like a blessed disease. Something had to be wrong, and this was sure not a portent of all her previously unpaid speeding tickets. She had to stay and wait it out until something happened and she found him, dead or alive.

They’d once had coffee together in a coffee shop, and he’d told her old stories about other bits of his life. He’d done some crazy shit, and at the time she’d been listening to him, she had arrived at a startling epiphany.

“This’ll weird ye out mate, but I bet I will be the one who finds your corpse one day.”

He’d laughed and thrown a creamer at her, “well shit man, if that’s not love, I don’t know what is.”  

She pushes off the car like some perverse sort of amphibian, and the sudden slack catches the cops off guard, but not before she’s plowed into both of them and knocked them both to the ground. She quickly pops to her feet and faces the cop that is left standing as he fumbles for his gun and his radio simultaneously, forming a terrible fuck up of a reaction to her standing there fully cuffed and advancing on him.

“Can ye uncuff me there sir?” She asks kindly, sidling up to him as he drops his radio to level the gun at her.

“C’mon,” she purrs, “ye probably haven’t even had to use that thing before, eh? No sense in using it to mess up such a pretty face, is there?”

“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to get into the car,” he stutters. She gets close enough that she can reach out and hook a foot behind his knee and bring him down. When he hits the ground, the gun goes off, and she hears as loud bang. She straddles the cop and fishes the handcuff keys out of his ridiculous utility belt. The other two troopers are getting to their feet by this point, and it is with one desperate last turn of the jingling keys that she gets one cuff off and stands up and steps into clocking the first trooper with the loose cuff, pulling the gun from the hand of the other trooper as she slices  along between the two.

She trips. Days on the road and exhaustion reach up and simultaneously snap her into the ground like an American gator going after chicken.

 She fucking trips, and the gun fires into the ground, ricochets, and slices into the meat of her shoulder about an inch in on her left bicep, as she hits the ground. She crumples a little from the impact, but pushes herself up with her remaining arm and scrambles to her feet, starts running in a crazy tilt towards the nearest cruiser with flashing lights. Shots ring out as she jumps behind the wheel and jams the car into gear, peeling out of the parking lot.

Behind her in the settling dust is the smoldering carcass of the Norton, flames slickly covering the blackened frame, the shot gun lying in the dirt, slowly being imprisoned in the melting rubber of the blown out tires.

“All right, better get going while the getting is good…” she muttered as the horizon of the north stretched out before her.  

Sean…what is that old saying that always comes to mind when I think of you…whores hustle, and the hustlers whore? You’re so ecstatic over Christian Cage’s miraculous appearance to save your skin, and you merely glanced over his intentions. People like you, constantly will be abused, I’m sorry to say. You’re a sucker and a fool who obviously needs a serious kick to your shit, upstairs and downstairs. No seriously, stop having sex with random strangers or you’ll get syphilis, I’m not kidding.

In all seriousness, it’s not just a delusion you seem to be seeking reconciliation of, it’s a lifestyle. You just haven’t realized it yet. When I look into your eyes, I can see what you vainly try to gloss over. I see you stumbling in the darkness of the mansion residing in your brain, fumbling  for a foothold, a hand hold, a grip on anything, on life…and you can’t fucking find it. You’ve been disconnected—even worse, you’re in denial of disconnect.  Part of me wants to fool you like you’ve been fooled all along, and say, “hey baby, you win this title, you’ll get it all back—everything—all that you’re looking for. You’ll be ok.”

I’ve seen junkies do the same thing. A little boost here and there, but the big score…well that’s wonderland. That shit will be so good it will last forever, they’ll never have to score again….Sooner or later though, the baby’s gonna cry too much, the wife’s going to nag too much, and the next thing you know, you’re knocking over a 7-11 again, starting from scratch for another fix.

Wake the fuck up. A hit is a hit is a hit…your face hitting ringside, regardless of the status of the fight, is the same fucking thing as that needle sinking into a vein…it will never be over. It will never be a big enough score to “fix” anything, much less your broken watch of a mind and ego.

You won’t wake up though, will you? You refuse.  I know it. You know it. Your retardo man-slave of a lawyer knows it.  If anything, you will be even further eviscerated. Maybe you should just tap out now, save us some grief. It’s bad enough to go toe to toe with Shane, much less have you around to scar for life because you simply don’t know when to quit.

I will be the death of your delusion.