Chapter 17 Dean
Dean
The sun hadn’t even cleared the ridge, but the shelter’s parking lot was already crawling with ghosts—old smoke, twitching yellow tape, the stink of wet cinderblock and melted plastic.
I stood by the melted rim of a water bowl, the toes of my boots just inside the shadow of the ruined roofline, watching the ash swirl on the morning breeze.
The wind kept wanting to change direction, pushing the stink of death back into my face no matter which way I turned.
It was a trick I couldn’t escape, a reminder that what I wanted didn’t matter.
Somewhere behind me, Emily was talking to the arson investigator, her voice soft but direct.
Sergeant paced at her side, every muscle primed for orders.
The dog never took her eyes off the line of burned-out crates stacked against the chain link.
I kept my back turned, letting her have this one small victory.
If I caught her eye, we’d both shatter in front of an audience.
The silence didn’t last. It came apart in a roar of engines, the kind of noise that makes your skin vibrate, and your teeth ache.
Damron came in first, the head of the snake, his Dyna idling with a predator’s patience.
He rolled up slow, boots steady on the ground, and for a second, I could see the kid he must have been before war and whiskey sanded him down to bare nerves.
Behind him, the club stacked up in perfect formation—thirty bikes, all patched, their headlights slicing through the morning haze like the searchlights at a prison break.
The Bloody Scythes made a circle, a wall of chrome and black, boxing out the rest of the world.
Every single member wore their cut zipped and buckled, faces hard and unshaven, hair slicked back or shaved clean.
There were even a couple of the old-timers, their arms folded and their eyes glittering, here to see what the next generation would do with the world.
The prospects took up the rear, two to a bike, watching everything and saying nothing.
Damron killed his engine and let the silence catch up. For a beat, nothing moved but the smoke from the ruin, spiraling upward in lazy, accusing ribbons.
He didn’t look at me. He looked at the shelter, what was left of it, and then at Emily, who was still talking to the investigator with a kind of defiant hope. Then he looked at the club, his voice flat as the desert floor.
“No more waiting,” he said. “We hit the Sultans now.”
The words dropped like a hammer. Nitro, sitting two bikes over, grinned so wide it split his face. Augustine flexed his gloved fingers, already hungry for what came next. Seneca cracked his neck, like he’d been holding tension for days.
Damron swung a leg off his bike and strode into the center of the circle.
He pulled a rolled-up paper from his vest and dropped it onto the gravel.
It was a map, the kind you print from the shitty desktop at the back of the pawn shop—big X in red marker, hand-drawn notes around the edges.
He knelt, spread it out with one thick hand, and stabbed a finger at the circled address.
“The Sultan clubhouse,” he said. “We know who’s inside. We know who’s running the show. We go in, we finish it. No survivors except the ones who can carry a warning.”
There was a low ripple of approval, the kind of sound that means more than yelling. Brick spat on the ground, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Gordo rolled his shoulders, checked his gun twice in the space of a minute.
I stepped into the circle, eyes on the map, but the only thing I could see was Emily’s shadow behind Damron.
She wasn’t crying, but her face was carved from grief and sleep deprivation.
Her arms were folded, and Sergeant was pressed so tight to her calf it looked like the two of them might fuse into a single creature.
Damron saw my hesitation, and he met my gaze. “You ready?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
He looked past me, then jerked his chin at Emily. “She’s not coming.”
I didn’t answer. I turned, walked to where she stood, and waited for her to say whatever she’d rehearsed. Her eyes tracked me like I was a wild animal—something to be pitied, but not trusted.
“I want to go,” she said. The words were small but clear. “I’m not sitting this out.”
I shook my head. “You stay here where it’s safe.”
Emily’s hands were white-knuckled on Sergeant’s collar. “There’s nothing safe about leaving me behind. You think the Sultans are the only monsters left in this town?”
She was right, but that didn’t matter. “I can’t protect you if you’re in the line of fire,” I said. “You know how this goes. It’s not a movie. There’s no glory in it.”
She took a breath, set her jaw. “Then teach me how. If you’re so sure I can’t handle myself, show me what to do.”
For a second, I almost relented. I almost wanted to see her let loose, to see what happened when the leash finally snapped. But Damron’s voice cut through the static.
“Prospects,” he called. Two of them—kids, barely old enough to buy their own bullets—ran forward, backs straight, eyes wide. “You keep her safe. You don’t let anyone through. If she tells you to jump, you ask how high, and if anyone comes for her, you put them down.”
They nodded in unison, like wind-up soldiers. Emily looked at them, then at me, betrayal bright in her eyes. “So that’s it? I’m just some other thing to be guarded?”
I didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t a right answer. I put my hand on her shoulder, let the weight of it anchor her to the moment. “You’re not a thing. You’re my reason for surviving this.”
She tried to shake me off, but I held fast. “Don’t die,” she said, voice cracking. “Don’t you fucking dare.”
I kissed her then, hard, letting the anger and the terror and the need crash together in the space between our mouths. She gripped my arms like she was trying to bruise the words into my bones. I let her. I wanted to carry the mark.
When I pulled away, she didn’t follow. She just stared at the ground, jaw working like she was chewing through steel. Sergeant whined, but didn’t move.
I walked back to the circle, head down, every muscle wound tight. Nitro clapped me on the back, grinned like a death row inmate with a pardon in hand. “Let’s fuck ’em up,” he said.
Damron waited until every man was mounted, every gun checked, every pocket stuffed with extra clips and last cigarettes. Then he looked at me, a question and a promise at the same time.
“You’re point,” he said. He left our group for a moment and said something to the Chief of Police. The man nodded. We didn’t necessarily own Los Alamos, but law enforcement had no qualms about letting us settle a score, relieving their man of the chances of dying.
I took the lead, Nitro on my left, Augustine and Seneca close behind, the rest of the club a rolling wall behind us. The sun was barely a smear on the horizon, the sky still gunmetal gray, but the engines lit up the world like a parade for the damned.
I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to see what I was leaving behind.
As we peeled out of the lot, I heard Emily’s voice, lost in the thunder of thirty bikes starting at once. I didn’t catch the words, but I knew what she meant.
She was telling me to come home.
The last thing I saw before the curve swallowed the shelter was her silhouette against the cinderblock ruin, Sergeant at her side, the two prospects standing just behind. She didn’t wave. She didn’t move. She just watched, eyes steady, until the smoke swallowed us both.
***
The Sultan clubhouse crouched at the far edge of town, its stucco blistered and peeling, the neon sign above the door stuttering “OPEN” with only the O and P illuminated.
The place looked like it had been designed for failure: dirt lot, broken bottle glass crusting the curb, windows blacked out with the kind of paint you buy by the five-gallon bucket from a hardware store that doesn’t ask for ID.
Someone had tried to pretty it up once—fake palm trees, a cement fountain in the shape of a naked lady—but the palm trees were dead and the fountain had been used as a urinal for so long you could smell it through the truck windows.
We circled up a quarter mile out, in the lot behind a payday loan shack, where the sun couldn’t quite reach.
Damron did a final headcount, then split the crew into two teams—one to breach, one to sweep the perimeter.
Nitro got the breach, and he grinned as if he had just won the lottery.
Augustine took point on the perimeter sweep, his twin pistols tucked under his cut and his face already set in the calm, bored look of a man who preferred violence as a last resort but had no problem making it a first.
Seneca rode with me. He checked his blade, then checked it again, the edge catching the slant of light as he flicked it in and out of the sheath.
I’d seen him cut through hog hide at the last cookout, but I’d never seen him use it on a person.
I didn’t doubt he’d do it with the same focus and efficiency.
Damron looked at me, one eyebrow cocked. “You know what you’re doing?” he said, not a question, more a challenge.
“Yeah,” I said, hand steady on the butt of my gun. My mouth was dry, but my head was clear—crystal, the way it only got when everything else had been burned away.
He grunted approval, then jerked his chin at the rest. “Two minutes,” he said. “Let’s make it loud.”