Read Detour to Apocalypse: A Rot Rods Serial, Part One for Free Online

back, breath coming involuntarily into his lungs. They inflated and closed, pushing out dead air that he didn’t need. He stumbled and sank down to his knees. Roscoe glanced up, staring into the cold eyes of Townsend Mars.
    The cult leader patted Roscoe’s head. “War, my son. Soon.” He kicked Roscoe and knocked him down.
    Roscoe struck the cement. The crystal remained wedged inside him, fused into his skin, pinning him to the ground. Betty and Angel shouted his name, but they sounded far away. He kept breathing and his eyes closed. Everything became fuzzy and indistinct.
    Roscoe slipped away.
    He fell into the memories of the man he once was. These flashbacks were nothing new, Roscoe had learned sometime last year, after old faces from the past had come back to try and take over La Cruz. But now, he lived them again. He was Carmine Vitale, a Sicilian-born hood with an aptitude for motors and murder. He’d come to America as a kid, grew up a punk, and ran errands for hoodlums in Boyle Heights and Bunker Hill until he got pinched and went to fight the war in Sicily. After killing Nazis and fascist Italians for a year or two, the military let him go and he became a full time button man. Vitale would never have stopped―if he hadn’t fallen in love with the Don’s wife. They made a plan to steal her husband’s money and split. He just had to do one more job.
    It was a hit on a small time gambler who owed too much money and needed to be turned into an example. But the gambler’s mother was a fortuneteller, a
strega
from the Old Country. Carmine killed her son in front of her and she cursed him―making his body as dead as his soul. The next day, he got another job in La Cruz. Two of the don’s torpedoes took him there. That’s when he realized that the Don had found out the truth about his wife and his top shooter. He was the target now. He pulled a weapon, but the torpedoes gunned him down and left him in a ditch on the road. Carmine died with their last words ringing in his ears: “He’s got a roscoe!” Hours later, Roscoe found himself awake, and shambled down the road until Angel crashed into him. The Captain had taken him in. He’d worked with them ever since.
    Roscoe didn’t like to remember his old life. All of his villainies―his sadism, his rage, his love of carnage―came floating back and infected him once again. Roscoe considered himself his own person, free of Carmine Vitale and the past. He hated being reminded that wasn’t true. But the crystal staff did its job. Roscoe drifted through the memories until he found the pure and endless sleep that had been denied to him earlier.

    When consciousness finally came, Roscoe found himself lying on his bed in his room. His strength seeped back, and when he looked to the nightstand, he found a thick submarine sandwich and a bottle of Coke waiting for him. He glanced down at his chest. Someone had removed his shirt and tied a set of clean bandages over the wound. Roscoe gave them a pat. He could feel the gaping hole in his chest, but it wasn’t particularly bad. He grabbed the sandwich and gobbled it down before he stood and got dressed. A quick glance at the window revealed that it was morning, but he didn’t know how long he had been out. Roscoe slid on his leather jacket and licked mustard from his fingers, then hit the stairs and went to check up on his friends.
    As he expected, they were in the kitchen, along with Major Raskin and Special Agent Pruitt. The Captain sat at the end of the table with a map of the surrounding area. Felix stood next to him, looking it over. Wooster grilled eggs, while Betty and Angel flipped through a set of thick door-stopper books. They had bandaged their wounds from the battle outside the sheriff’s office. Snowball sat on his cushioned bed in the corner, biting a Milk-Bone nearly in half. All of them looked up when Roscoe walked in.
    Angel hurried to Roscoe’s side. “How you doing, man? All recovered?”
    “It was