Chapter 1
GHOST
I took off like a bat out of fucking hell. Anything to get away from the memories that clogged my mind like a bad artery. No one was going to scream for help and not get it. Not on my watch.
Not ever again.
However, I wasn’t the first one out to the screaming voice.
“HEEEEEEELP!”
Cap jumped out a fucking window in the living room and took off. Brutus wasn’t too far behind me. Wrecker looked like he stumbled out of a fucking rave, his hand shoved down his pants. His hair jutted out every which way.
I didn’t know what the fuck that was about.
“Ranger! Do you have her!?” Cap called out.
My eyes tracked the world in front of me. Doc raced out of his place and into my vision from the left, carrying his doctor’s bag in tow. I watched him drop to his knees while Ranger scooped someone into his arms, and it tugged me over toward them.
“Is she breathing?” I asked.
“Of course she’s fucking breathing. Can’t you see her?!” Ranger snapped.
I furrowed my brow as I looked down at him. I’d never heard him like that before. “Just need confirmation.”
“You can get confirmation with your fucking eyes, Ghost!”
“Can you get her to look at me?” Doc asked. “She’s bleeding, and I—”
“They’re going to kill me,” the woman choked out, sobbing against Ranger’s chest.
She was alive. She was talking. She was breathing. Which meant we had bigger fish to fry.
I mindlessly patted Ranger’s shoulder as I stepped away from the cacophony.
Second issue.
Where the hell did this woman come from?
“There,” Cap said as he came over to my side, “do you see it?”
Oh, I fucking saw it all right.
A plume of dust.
“Got it,” I said as I sprinted toward my bike.
“Take a goddamn buddy with you, Ghost!” Cap bellowed.
I didn’t have time to snag someone. I threw my leg over my bike and didn’t even bother with my helmet as I kept my eyes locked with that dust cloud traveling away from us. It didn’t take a genius to know there was a vehicle out here.
Someone chased her to us.
The rumble of my engine vibrated between my legs before I took off. With one hand on the bars, commanding my bike, I used my teeth to pull my leather glove off my fucking hand. I shoved it into my pocket, pulling out my cell phone, and managed to navigate to the camera.
Time to get some footage for Ranger.
“Come oooon,” I growled.
I started the footage anyway, even though I didn’t have the vehicle in sight. I pointed the camera down at the dirt and dust, hoping that my camera would catch some tire tracks. I slowly panned it around, showcasing the kick-up of dust.
A kick-up I couldn’t quite catch up with.
“Jesus Christ, the fuck are they driving?” I asked breathlessly.
I mounted my cell phone onto a little bar mount that I made myself. I hated the feeling of my cell phone crushing up against my body as I was driving, so it was just a way to get it out of my pocket while keeping it safe and in my purview.
But it seemed to serve very well as a camera mount.
“All right, you fuckers,” I growled as I reached down and flipped a switch on my bike, “time to catch the fuck up.”
Sure, Cap looked down on us modding our bikes. I didn’t care, though. Sometimes the extra speed and agility came in handy. Sometimes someone just needed a little bit more of a giddy-up to accomplish whatever the fuck it was they needed to accomplish.
Cap was just a stick in the mud sometimes.
My bike lurched forward, forcing me to grip the handlebars tighter just to stay on.
I leaned forward, getting out of the way of the wind that threatened to carry me right off the back of my fucking bike.
I revved my engine. I wanted them to know I was coming.
I wanted them to know that I wouldn’t fucking stop until I had their goddamn license plate on this video for Ranger to take to town.
But fucking hell, I couldn’t catch up.
“The fuck?” I asked breathlessly.
No matter what I did, no matter what setting I toggled, I couldn’t catch up to the vehicle. The best that I got were a few tire tracks that I hoped my camera caught.
Which wasn’t good.
Because that meant whoever I was chasing?
They had a modified vehicle as well.
And it was obvious that they were in a car.
“Fuck!” I bellowed as I zoomed through the latest kick-up of dust.
I came out the other side, my head on a swivel as I waved my hand in front of my face. The grit of the dirt and grime got into my eyes, but I forced them to stay open.
I wouldn’t lose again.
I couldn’t.
We weren’t safe.
I panted for air as my bike came to a stop.
I sat there, listening out for any sort of sound, but there was nothing.
Some birds chirped in the distance. The sun battered down against my shoulders.
The dust storm the vehicle had kicked up finally settled around me, leaving me with scratchy eyes and memories that wouldn’t go away no matter what I did.
“LIEUTENANT!”
I shook the phantom voice from my head. No one called me that any longer, I made sure of it. Sometimes it was the only way to prove that something wasn’t real.
I wasn’t a lieutenant any longer.
Lieutenants didn’t get their whole bases killed.
But then, I heard it. The smallest sound off in the distance.
Revving.
Sputtering.
A crack.
Their car backfired.
“Gotcha,” I said with a grin.
I pushed off, not bothering to rev my engine as I followed the sounds. That told me a lot, the fact that they had a modded out car that couldn’t handle what they tried to do. I grinned underneath my mask as I caught a view of tire tracks in the mud.
I was getting closer.
I followed the tire tracks for almost five fucking miles before I heard an engine rev to life. Oh, hell no. They weren’t getting away from me. I was going to lay eyes on that motherfucking vehicle if it was the last thing that I did as a living, breathing man.
“Gotcha!” I exclaimed.
I watched the car, just a little putz-around vehicle, pull out of the shadow of the trees. We rounded around the south side of town, sticking to the state park side of things. That couldn’t have been a coincidence.
“Come oooon, let me see that license plate. Just a little bit.”
I leaned forward on my bike as if that would somehow make it go any faster.
I checked to make sure that my phone was still recording, and then I set my sights on staying behind that car as much as I could.
I knew the second they kicked in the turbochargers.
It was insane to me, putting speed like that on a vehicle where I visibly saw the rust eating away at the back bumper.
These motherfuckers were used to getting away.
I squinted my eyes. I flipped the switch on my bike again. But the instant I started gaining ground, their engine revved and they pulled away from me.
“God fucking damn it, come ooooon,” I growled.
I didn’t get close enough to view the license plate for myself, but I did get close enough to realize that there was some sort of a logo emblazoned onto the side. When they cut a sharp corner and disappeared into the woods, I caught a glimpse of it and took a snapshot for my memory banks.
Who the fuck would put a logo on the side of a shitty car like that?
I sped to the spot in the woods where they had breached, and I found a muddy, watery, dirty, carved-out path that sure as fuck didn’t look natural. I hunched my shoulders, ready to give my bike the time of its fucking life.
Cap’s voice sounded in my head about the buddy system.
“Fuck,” I growled before I wised up and turned myself around.
I wasn’t sure how long it took me to get back to the clubhouse. All I knew was that when I busted through the door, there was only one name coming from my mouth.
“Ranger!” I barked. “Where the--!?”
“Ah!” a woman yelped.
I heard Doc soothing someone. “It’s okay. It’s just Ghost. It’s just one of our guys. It’s okay. You’re fine.”
Ranger stormed out of the fucking kitchen with a look of murder in his eyes. “Ghost, for fuck’s sake, keep your goddamn voice down.”
I quirked an eyebrow and grinned beneath my mask.
Oh, Ranger was trying to fuck that woman.
He was always such a weird one.
“Got a logo from the side of that car,” I said as I handed him my phone, my voice muffled by my mask. “Got a lot more on video, but I can describe the logo to you.”
He wrenched my phone from my hand and glared up at me. “Give me five minutes.”
“Their car was modified, by the way,” I called out after Ranger, stopping him in his tracks. “There’s no way she would have been able to outrun them. And you know what that means.”
I saw his jaw tick, which meant I knew my lesson landed.
There was no way in hell she would have been able to outrun them.
Which meant they let her go on purpose.
“I couldn’t even catch up to them,” I said as I motioned to the phone in his hand, “hence, the recording.”
“What did the logo look like?” he asked, still staring into the kitchen.
Oh, that fucker had it bad.
It made me chuckle, which whipped his head in my direction. “The fuck’s so funny, Ghost?”
“You.”
He snarled as he stormed toward me. “Are you intentionally trying to piss me off?”
“Enough,” Cap said as he poked his head out of the kitchen. “Ranger, we need you in here. She isn’t settling and Doc’s trying to take blood.”
Ranger growled as he shoved my phone into his pocket. “I’ll get this back to you when I unload the footage.”
“Sure you don’t want me to describe the logo to you?”
He marched back into the kitchen. “Not if you’ve got it on camera. If it’s not clear from your footage, I’ll come find you.”
“Fair enough,” I muttered as I watched him disappear.
The whimpering and sniveling of that woman filled the air, and I couldn’t handle it.
“Excuse me,” Ariel said softly as she skirted past me.
“Move,” Amanda said as he rushed past my other side.
I chuckled as the two sisters quickly booked it into the kitchen. Wrecker wasn’t too far behind, looking a little more put together than he was a bit ago when he stumbled outside with his hand down his pants.