10. Crash
CRASH
The county line marker leans the same way it’s leaned my whole life, green paint, half eaten by rust.
More than two dozen bikes idle here in the dark.
Trapper is one of them. Saber posted him on the clubhouse gate tonight, but he left another prospect holding it and rode straight here instead. Nobody sent for the prospect. Nobody sends him back, either.
Saber stands at the front with Joker’s tablet propped on Razor’s tank, drone footage frozen on the screen. Nitro’s compound is forty minutes north of this marker, deep in Warriors’ territory. Joker flew over it twice this week, but he’s been scoping it out for years.
Chain-link fence, two gates, a main building, a row of trailers along the east fence. We know where they sleep. We know where they keep the guns.
Tonight, we stop knowing things and start ending them.
Saber hasn’t said a word to me that isn’t an order since this morning. Fine. I’ll take orders. I’ll take the silence. I’ll take another punch if he’s got one left over, as long as he lets me ride at his shoulder when we go through that gate.
“Duke’s team takes the south gate,” Saber says. “Scar and his guys hold the north fence. Razor swings the trucks behind the trailers. Viper—”
His phone lights up in his cut.
He’d never answer it here, this close to go-time, except the screen says Acorn, and he is leading the caravan to the safehouse.
Saber puts the phone to his ear. “Talk.”
I’m close enough to catch the sound coming through, not the words. Doesn’t matter. Saber’s face does the translating. Something is wrong.
“Say that again,” he says.
Acorn says it again.
“Which car?” His eyes land on me, and my body goes numb.
“Cassidy,” I say.
He doesn’t answer. He’s listening, jaw locked, phone crushed against his ear.
“Truck came off the shoulder,” he repeats for the rest of us.
“T-boned Cassidy’s car. Second truck blocked her.
Two men pulled her out before the brothers could get turned around, and they lost them on the dirt roads.
” He listens another second, then says. “Acorn says they weren’t targeting her.
They hit the middle of the column and took whoever was in reach.
” He’s pacing. “Whoever was in reach was Cassidy. Everyone else made it to the safehouse. All the women and children.”
I put a hand on my tank, for balance, and the metal is the only thing grounding me.
They took her. The Crimson Warriors took her.
“Jinx.” Saber snaps his fingers. “The trackers. Everyone got one before they rolled out, right?”
Jinx already has his phone out, thumb flying, pulling up Cassidy’s tracker. We crowd in. The screen is a map, mostly empty desert, and one green dot.
The dot is moving north. Back roads, but every turn it takes bends it toward the same destination, and all of us standing around that screen know the address.
“They’re taking her to the Warriors’ compound,” Joker says.
“They’re taking her to the place we’re about to burn down,” Razor says around his cigarette.
“We cut them off,” I say.
“On which road?” Razor doesn’t even look up. “They’re threading dirt tracks we don’t have eyes on. We pick wrong, we’re an hour out of position, and they’re behind a fence. We pick right, and it’s a gunfight with her in the middle of it.”
He’s right. I hate him for being right.
“Glad she listened,” Jinx says quietly. “I told everyone to put the trackers in their pockets, not their bags.”
Good girl.
Saber stares at the dot. The compound is forty minutes up the road. The staging point Razor scouted for tonight sits five minutes south of its fence.
Once that dot stops moving, his sister will be five minutes from where we’ll be standing.
Five minutes. And we have to let them take her through that gate first, because the only thing worse than her inside that compound is a gunfight on an open road with her in the truck.
“They don’t know we’re coming tonight,” Duke says. “She’s leverage. They’ll want her breathing.”
Saber gives his orders. “Nothing changes. We’re attacking the Warriors’ compound exactly as planned.” He tells everyone what their specific job is.
“What about Cassidy?” Duke asks.
“Crash and I will get Cassidy.” Saber pulls his Glock, checks it, holsters it. “We go in four minutes before the rest of you. We get her. Then you all follow your orders.”
He turns to me last. This morning, he ripped me off her bed and told me I don’t have love in me. Now, he looks at me a long second.
“You really love her?” he asks.
“I do.”
He nods once. It’s not forgiveness, but acceptance. “Let’s go get her.”
Saber swings a leg over his bike.
We ride north with headlights dark. At the staging point, Saber and I kill our engines and walk the bikes the last quarter mile to a ditch before continuing on foot.
The compound is bright against the dark, floodlights on the main building, music from somewhere, men’s laughter.
Saber and I belly up a low ridge of rock-hard dirt east of the fence. Below us, the row of trailers—five of them propped on cinder blocks.
A man sits on the steps of the middle one, rifle across his knees, halfway through a beer.
I check the tracker app on my phone. The green dot is inside that trailer.
She is twenty yards from me, behind one drunk guard and a sheet-metal door.
“One on the steps,” Saber breathes. “One on the corner of the fence, north. See him?”
“Got him.”
My phone buzzes once against my chest.
Duke: In position.
It’s time to go get my girl.
We come down the slope in the dark. Saber takes the fence corner, gets behind the guard, and puts a knife in him. The body goes down without a sound.
The man on the steps tips his beer back, oblivious.
I cross the last thirty feet while his head is tilted back, and I kill him with my knife before he ever sees me. He folds sideways off the steps into the dirt. I take his rifle and set it down out of reach.
Saber materializes at the other side of the door. He holds up a fist. Wait.
Through the thin metal skin of the trailer, we hear a man’s voice. “Keep crying, sweetheart. Nobody out here but coyotes.”
Then she says, “When my brother gets here, I’m going to tell him to kill you first.”
My knees nearly give out with the relief of hearing her, and Saber smiles.
I know the same thought is in both our heads: That’s our girl.
Saber drops his fist and kicks the trailer door off its hinges.
Two men are inside. The first one turns toward the door, and Saber shoots him dead.
The second grabs Cassidy. She’s zip-tied to a kitchenette chair, blood dried down her temple. He grabs a fistful of her hair, and his pistol is half-raised toward her head.
I shoot him through the shoulder of his gun arm. He drops the pistol, and my second shot kills him.
“Crash,” Cassidy calls out to me.
I leave the man where he is.
Saber is already cutting the zip ties. She comes up out of the chair, and there’s one second where she doesn’t know which of us to go to, her brother or me.
Saber steps back. She comes to me.
She hits my chest, and my arms close around her, and her fists twist into the back of my cut.
“You came,” she says into my chest.
“I’m making you my Old Lady,” I whisper. “Figured I should keep you alive long enough to let you know.”
A sound comes out—half laugh, half sob.
Then the south gate explodes, right on schedule. The whole compound erupts—engines, gunfire, and men yelling names. The war we came to finish has officially started.
“Move,” Saber says from the door. “Celebrate the reunion later.”
We leave the trailer and run the fence line with her between us.
The Crimson Warriors are losing. That’s visible from here. Warriors are pinned between Duke’s team and Razor’s trucks. The main building’s floodlights are shot out. A bike lies on its side, burning.
A bullet flies past us and sparks off the chain-link fence. I put Cassidy against my left side, fence side, my body between her and the lot. Saber kills the shooter at forty feet without breaking stride.
We’re twenty yards from the gap in the east fence when the main building’s side door bangs open and a wiry figure comes out, silver goatee catching the firelight, a pistol in each hand.
Nitro. The Prez of the Crimson Warriors. Running for the trucks. Running from his own war.
Saber aims at him, but there are too many brothers in his line of fire. I won’t let go of Cassidy’s hand to draw my gun. Nitro is going to reach the trucks.
Then a single shot comes from the shadows by the trailers, and Nitro falls in the open lot. Dead before he hits the dirt.
Trapper steps out of the shadows, rifle still raised, checking left and right for more threats.
“TRAPPER,” Joker’s voice bellows from somewhere in the smoke, disbelieving, delighted, already telling the story. “PROSPECT JUST KILLED NITRO.”
Saber stops. Looks at the body in the lot. Then at the kid who has swept our floors for three years and just ended the war.
“That kid is getting patched,” Saber says, to nobody, to everybody.
The gunfire slows, then stops before we reach the bikes.
Duke’s voice comes over the radio with the count.
Every brother is alive. Two are wounded, but they’ll make it.
Most of the Warriors are dead, including Nitro.
The ones who aren’t dead surrendered, and they’re face down in the dirt with zip ties on their wrists.
At the ditch, I get on my bike.
Cassidy climbs on behind me without asking her brother’s permission, arms around my waist, palms flat against my stomach, chin hooked over my shoulder.
I turn my head and kiss her. In front of God, the burning compound, and her brother.
When I open my eyes, Saber is astride his bike ten feet away, watching us, and I brace for whatever shit he’s about to say.
He just looks tired. Tired and relieved down to the bone. He shakes his head at the pair of us, one slow time, like we’re a problem he’s decided he can live with.
“Let’s get home,” he says, and fires his engine.
Twenty-six bikes come up off the desert floor behind him, and the woman I love tightens her arms around me. We ride back toward Ash Valley with the fire shrinking in the mirrors until the dark takes it.
It’s over.