Chapter 30 – Isaac
Chapter Thirty
Isaac
We ride for eight days until we’re out in the desert where the Iron Frontier MC club house stands.
We didn’t spill that bastard Scum’s blood for nothing.
I’m part of the two man scout team with Christian Shaw.
This is his first ride as a patched-in member of the club and I can tell he’s nervous, even if we’re unlikely to get discovered or shot to death out here.
We have to go out on foot to get close to the club house undetected, but by the time we’re there, they have a party in full swing and we have plenty of opportunity to gather the information that we need to destroy them completely.
Christian has a camera with a big lens. He’s a little on the strange side.
Masculine in all those ways but with black nail polish on his finger nails.
Tattoos on his knuckles say DARK SIDE. Weird kid for twenty-one.
He takes pictures of all the bikes and as many people as he can from our position on a big rock we find several hundred yards away.
I’m surprised they don’t have snipers up here.
But they don’t expect anyone to know where this is – or to be dumb enough to come out here to a club house with a bunch of ex-DHS agents turned rogue bikers armed to the teeth.
This little paramilitary won’t be easy for us to take down.
Christian’s camera shutters a few more times.
I hate how the sound makes me nervous, like my heart can’t take it anymore when it’s really no big deal… Just a camera.
“Can you quit that?” I hiss, tapping on the sides of my pants for my Zyn’s. We don’t want to smoke out here and alert anyone to our scent.
“Sorry,” Christian mumbles. “Got Tylee this time.”
That explains his most recent furious series of camera clicks.
“Show me that.”
I have to work really hard not to snatch the camera out of his hands. Christian leans over, using those scratched up, tattooed fingers to work his device. I see the shock of red hair in the photo before I recognize the details of her features. Holy shit.
“What the fuck happened to her?” I mutter.
It looks like somebody beat the shit out of my ex-wife.
I wish I could say the sight of her brought me any type of pleasure or emotion at all.
I got the divorce papers signed and a free pass to move on with my life.
My only attachment to Tylee is the fact that I don’t want the kids to grow up motherless.
I want some vain hope that one day she will grow the hell up and have a relationship with them.
Maybe we were right for each other when we were both kids, but now that we’re grown up…
My stomach tightens in a knot. She shouldn’t be here when our kids are halfway across the country lying in someone else’s home.
They should have their mother to care for them.
As much as I want to hurt Tylee, maybe Wyatt is right that we are better off punishing her for what she’s done.
Christian and I take more pictures. We leave after the last biker goes home, taking turns sleeping on the ground in shifts. Christian is a good kid even if he dresses strangely like all the younger men his age. He’s still a Barbarian and like the rest of the Shaw boys, he enjoys a good game.
In the morning, he places a hundred dollar bet that taking their club house will be easy – that they’ll never see it coming. I shake his hands and agree to Christian’s terms, but I can’t say for sure that he’s right.
Things get quiet when you’re preparing for war.
I wish that I had a promise I could leave with Gabby and the kids.
Each of us takes multiple weapons and we review the plan like football players before the Super Bowl.
The details of what happens aren’t exactly important, except to say that the Iron Frontier MC never saw our attack coming.
We learned a lot from the explosion that took out Harlan Shaw, my uncle, and the rest of the family.
We’ve also learned a lot from waging wars of our own throughout the years.
The club may have started as a ragtag bunch of veterans’ sons, but we held onto the truth that our fathers were preparing us for war, expecting it would come some day, even when we could never truly understand.
Everybody has something worth laying down their life for in the end.
For me, it’s the kids and Gabby. Tylee lost the privilege of my protection when she walked into that snake’s nest and chose the other side.
Our army for taking their clubhouse involves twenty of our members, almost everybody involved in the club who could afford to be here.
Judging from the pictures Christian Shaw took, there are about thirty members of the clubhouse at the meeting and around half of them brought their old ladies along – which includes Tylee Shaw.
No kids, which makes our job easier, but we don’t know the status of the women.
How much power do they have within this group and did they all choose to be there the way Tylee did.
Southpaw threatened us within an inch of our lives – no killing women.
Zeb asked what we ought to do if there were any accidents and that led to a near nuclear meltdown from Southpaw.
He’s the boss, and I support his motives here, so I’ll do my very best not to take down any innocents with our weapons.
Late into the night, we spread out into our positions.
Each of us hikes out to the spot on foot.
We’ll leave with their rides, not ours. Gideon and Ruger Blackwood lead the sniper team which includes Zebulon Blackwood and Christian, who isn’t a bad shot even if he never served in the army.
His flavor of gambling includes lots of sharpshooting, so he’s a solid makeshift sniper.
My ground team consists of Hollingsworth boys – Cody, Deacon, and a young Grayson Hollingsworth, hoping to prove himself and get patched in this summer.
He doesn’t look like much of a natural fighter but he’s tall with red hair and plays football like several of his family members, so I arm him with a baseball bat on top of his weapons, giving him strict instructions to round up the women in the spot where we suspect the clubhouse has a windowless back bathroom – perfect for snorting coke and storing ten or so biker chicks.
The fight isn’t simple – but it’s bloody and long. I think about Gabby when I can afford to let myself think. Gideon and Zebulon killed the sentries. The bodies went down pretty quickly. Everything happened pretty quickly after that. Gunfire. Screaming.
Three men almost get away from us, but in the end we have twelve bodies lined up in the middle of their clubhouse floor. I have to count them all to see how many we got and then we’ll have to take their patches and identify the bodies after that.
All I can think about as we work is my old lady at home. Property of Ghost. Gabrielle. There’s nothing she’ll have to worry about when I’m done here, but first the work has to get done.