19. Bram #2
I took a knee on the dirt, let the pain settle.
My hands were shaking now, but I kept them low, out of sight.
Maybe I was getting too old for this shit.
I thought about Julie, the way she’d looked at me before we left, a yearning in her eyes for me to return.
I wanted to return. I wanted to finally start my life over with a woman who trusted I could keep her safe.
With a woman I could wake up next to and see her smile on a good day and see her scowl on a bad day.
That was the thing with being a biker’s old lady: there were usually more bad days than good, but what fucking fun it was to survive those bad days.
From this angle, you could see the compound in its entirety. A ruined house, a bullet-scarred garage, a fence that barely held back the world. A dozen men on the ground, none of them mine.
It was a good start.
When the others were done, I got up, checked my side, and walked to the far end of the compound. Sniper and Trace stood by the gate, weapons cradled, both breathing the cold air like they’d just run a marathon.
“You did good,” I said. My voice came out rough, but it didn’t matter.
Sniper nodded, face unreadable. “You’re fucking bleeding, old man. Let me look at it.”
“Touch me, and I’ll take my belt to your ass the way I did when you were a kid,” I said.
Trace looked at me, then away. “I wouldn’t do that. I think he likes that shit.”
“Shut the fuck up, Trace,” Sniper said and walked away
I shrugged. “What the fuck was that all about?”
Trace chuckled. “You don’t want to know. I’m sorry, I know.
Kodiak joined us, wiping his hands on his jeans. “What’s next?”
I looked at the sky, already turning from black to pale blue, then back at the men.
“We hold it,” I said. “We let the others come to us.”
I walked back to the main house. The floor was silent. I checked every room, every closet, every crawlspace. There were no more Scorpions.
I found a quiet corner, sat down, and let myself feel the damage for the first time.
The pain was like a hot stone pressed into my ribs, every heartbeat pulsing a new line of blood into the shirt.
I tore off a strip of curtain and wrapped it around my middle, cinched it tight until my vision spotted.
Then I leaned my head against the cool block wall and listened to the aftermath.
You could hear Trace’s voice outside, shouting orders, telling his crew to strip the guns and dump the bodies in a pile. Kodiak was talking to someone on the radio, giving a casualty report. Rusty sat on the front stoop, face up to the sky, eyes closed, blood drying black on his shoulder and chest.
Sniper found me, eventually. He knelt next to the wall, voice low.
“You all right?”
“Give me a minute,” I said.
He nodded, then sat down next to me, the way he used to when he was a boy, after a fight at school.
“Remember when I broke my hand on that asshole’s face?” he said.
I laughed. It hurt, but I did it anyway. “You cried for two days.”
He grinned. “You told me it was good to feel pain. Said it made the job real.”
I closed my eyes, let the sound of the generator and the crackle of radios wash over me.
“It’s real now, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”
We sat there, two generations of the same bad idea, bleeding together into the new day. Then the shit started again.
Drop Miller bought it crossing the hardpan, right between the main building and the garage.
He’d just checked his mag and was jogging to reinforce the east wall when a Scorpion who’d been playing possum snapped a shotgun up from the dust and fired from less than ten feet away.
The blast caught Miller square in the chest. There was a sound like wet canvas tearing, and he hit the ground so hard it left a crater in the dirt.
His helmet cracked in two at the brow, the visor spinning off into the darkness.
Trace dropped the shooter before the man could pump another round, but Miller was already flat on his back, both boots pointed straight up, gloved hand still gripping his rifle.
I sprinted to him, more out of reflex than hope, and slid in low.
The blast had cored him out—nothing left but muscle memory and a dark stain spreading wide as a horse blanket.
I crouched over Miller for exactly three seconds, saw the Kingman patch still bright on his cut, the eyes glassy but not quite empty. The man had ridden through the night to die here, and that was all there was to say about it.
“Rest,” I muttered. Not a prayer. Just the instruction.
I closed his eyes and stood up.
Rusty limped over to me, his arm packed with a ragged strip of shirt, the flesh beneath already swelling ugly and purple.
He spat, the blood dark in the dust. “You want me to say something?”
I looked at the line of dead, then at the living, then at the desert.
“No,” I said.
Rusty shrugged. “Guess that’s fair.”
Kodiak stood a few feet off, cradling his broken hand to his ribs, face turned to the dawn.
He said, “Scorpions are done.”
I didn’t answer right away. I watched the sunrise burn away the last of the night, then scanned the compound, the horizon, the tangle of wire and broken concrete.
“Not all of them,” I said.
No one had to ask what I meant.
The men set to work stripping the weapons, patching up the wounded, and searching the compound for anything that looked like leverage.
I left them to it. There would be another fight.
There was always another fight. The Colonel was still out there—somewhere just past the edge of this broken place, watching, counting our losses, waiting to finish the job.
My shirt was soaked through on the left side, the blood running off my fingers and onto the ground. I pressed the wound, let the pain keep me anchored.
Trace walked over, face set and raw.
“What now?”
“We clean up,” I said.
I walked the yard, checked every door, every body, every corner where someone could hide.
By the time the sun was up, we had the bodies buried in a shallow trench, the flag snapping overhead, and the blood washed from the stoop. The Kingman and Santa Fe crews sat around the firepit, heads down, faces cut and swollen, but alive.
I stood at the gate, the pain in my ribs a bright, white line, and watched the highway shimmer in the rising heat.
This was our ground now.
But the job wasn’t done.
Not until I had the Colonel’s head in my hands.
I turned to Rusty. “Let’s get ready,” I said. “We’ve got one more to go.”
He grinned, then coughed.
“Boss,” he said. “Next time, try not to bleed out before the fight starts.”
“Where the fuck is he, Rusty. He should have been here.”
My phone buzzed, and I answered, seeing Julie’s number on the screen. She spoke, and the guys watched me, none moving until I ended the call without saying bye.
“He’s at our clubhouse,” Rusty said.
“Fuck,” was all I had.