MoonFall by A.G. Wyatt

them clever, but it wouldn’t have been smart to utter them out loud.
    “Nothing,” he mumbled.
    “What you doing with my bikes?” Blood Dog crossed the cell to loom over Noah, even as the key rattled again in the door of the cell, locking them in together.
    “Your bikes?” Noah looked around in confusion. What in high hell was this guy talking about?
    “My bikes.” A finger fat as salami pointed at the old magazine Noah had discarded to get into bed. Now that he paid more attention, he saw that its once glossy pages were covered with pictures of bikes, some of them tearing down highways under men in leather jackets and neatly kept beards, others sitting in studio imitations of workshops underneath young women with less facial hair and a lot less clothes.
    “Sorry.” Noah rolled out of his bunk and bent down to scoop up the magazine. As he moved his tired and battered muscles screamed in protest, stiffening up so that instead of bending down into a neat crouch he sprawled on the concrete, landings on top of Blood Dog’s magazine and further crumpling the already old and fragile pages.
    “You think you’re funny?” Blood dog growled, in a tone that made it clear what he thought of funny people, and that it was a thought funny people would regret. “You some kind of wise guy?”
    A booted foot nudged hard at Noah’s arm, making him wince as it knocked against his bruises. The intensity of Blood Dog’s presence filled the space of the already enclosed cell, closing him into an ever smaller fraction of the room. A room whose concrete floor now filled most of his vision, the wall occupying the rest only inches from his face, the door closed and locked and not to open until who knows when. It was all way too much. His heart was pounding like it might burst any moment, the whole space drawing in closer and closer and closer.
    He closed his eyes, took a series of deep breaths.
    “What you doing now wise guy?” Blood Dog nudged him harder with his foot. Noah winced. “Working up some more funny, huh?”
    “No funny,” Noah managed to say.
    He pushed himself up onto all fours, then onto his knees. Then he opened his eyes and picked up the magazine, held it up towards Blood Dog.
    “I’m real sorry,” he said. “We’ve clearly got off to a bad start here. My name’s Noah, they’ve put me in here to–”  
    “My bikes.” Blood Dog snatched the magazine, stepped back so he could look at it in a better light. Noah took the opportunity to hurriedly get to his feet.
    “Sorry about that,” he said. “I didn’t know they were your bikes. If I had, I’d obviously have shown them more respect, on account of how they’re mighty fine bikes and you’re… Well, you’re you.”
    Blood Dog scowled again.
    “What’s that mean?” he said. “What have you heard?”
    “Nothing.” Noah backed up against the bunks as Blood Dog once again towered over him. This close he could see the tattoos in more detail despite the poor light in the cell. There was the red dog emblazoned across one cheek and an Italian flag on the other. The word ‘HATE’ in gothic letters down one side of his neck, and an automatic pistol on the opposite side, a trail of empty shell casings cascading from it down onto his shoulder and what looked like it might be the start of a dead body sprawled across his chest. And though Noah couldn’t make them out with their owner glaring down at him, it was clear that the tattoos carried on across the top of Blood Dog’s head.
    What kind of lunatic got a tattoo of a dead body? And not a good tattoo either, from what Noah could see.
    “Let me tell you what you haven’t heard.” Blood Dog was so close that the stink of decay and old cigarettes washed across Noah on the thug’s hot breath. “I ain’t from around here. I’m from up where they make proper gangsters, see? And down here, around you faggoty-ass rednecks, that makes me the boss, the fucking don of all you raggedy little douchebags