My Apocalypse Biker (Wild Apocalypse Protectors #5)

Chapter 1 Iris

one

Iris

I press a damp cloth to her forehead and watch her small chest rise and fall too fast. The rhythm is shallow, desperate, like her body's fighting a war it can't win. Ten years old and fighting for her life.

"Mama?" Her voice is thin, cracked with fever. "It hurts."

"I know, baby. I know." I brush sweat-soaked hair from her face. Her skin is dry and burning, and the infection is spreading faster than she can fight. "You're going to be okay."

I wish it wasn’t a lie.

Three days ago, a splinter. A goddamn splinter from helping rebuild the chicken coop.

She was so proud of herself for contributing, for being useful—my little helper who wants to be a medic someday, just like me.

I pulled the splinter out that night, cleaned the wound with antiseptic we've been hoarding since year one, applied antibiotic ointment. Did everything right.

But the bacteria was already in her bloodstream by then, multiplying faster than our weak medications could fight. Now the redness has spread up her arm like fire through dry grass, and her blood is turning poisonous.

Sepsis. I've seen it before. Watched two settlers die from it last winter, and they were strong adults reduced to shaking, delirious husks within days.

The medications in my supply closet, the dregs of what we've scavenged over four years, are meant for ear infections and bronchitis.

Not this. Not my daughter's blood turning toxic.

I check my watch. Without IV antibiotics, Allie will be dead.

Dr. Nowak, our settlement's doctor, appears in the doorway. His face tells me everything before he speaks. The gray pallor, the way he won't quite meet my eyes. He's been practicing medicine in the apocalypse long enough to recognize a lost cause.

"The fever's not responding," I say before he can deliver the verdict.

"No. It's not." He's a good man, Dr. Nowak. Former veterinarian who became our only option when the real doctors died or fled. "Iris, I'm sorry. We've done everything we can with what we have."

"There has to be something else."

He hesitates before speaking, as if wondering if he even should say what he was about to say.

"Fort Nelson General might have what we need.

The pharmacy there was heavy security before the outbreak.

Might still be stocked." He pauses, and I hear the death sentence in his hesitation.

"But that's two hundred miles through zombie territory.

No convoy would take that risk for one person. "

"I know." I've already mapped the route in my head. Already calculated the odds. Already decided they don't matter.

The last three days, I've asked everyone. Every trader who came through our gates. Every survivor with connections beyond our walls. Begged, bargained, offered everything I own: my medical skills, my scavenged supplies, my body if it came to that.

The answer is always the same: too dangerous, too far, no one will risk seven lives for one child.

I understand. In the apocalypse, the math is brutal and unforgiving. You don't throw away multiple lives for a single maybe.

But the math doesn't apply when it's your child dying in front of you.

Someone mentioned a courier had arrived earlier today. A lone man who runs the most dangerous routes on a motorcycle—fast, reckless, willing to go where convoys won't. Iron Wolves tattoos, they said. Former gang member who went solo two years back.

My stomach turned at the name. The Iron Wolves destroyed Clearwater Settlement before it was rebuilt. Murdered families in their beds. Burned homes with people still inside. They became the boogeyman story we tell to scare children into staying inside the walls.

Monsters.

But monsters are all I have left.

I lean down and press my lips to Allie's burning forehead. Her skin is papery, hot as sun-baked stone. "I'll be right back, baby. I'm going to find help."

Her eyes flutter. "Promise?"

"I promise."

I grab my medic bag and run for the south gate.

The biker is exactly where they said he'd be, checking his motorcycle near the trading post. The bike is a modified Honda Shadow, low and mean, with reinforced saddlebags and a frame built for survival. The kind of machine that says I go where others won't come back from.

He’s tall, muscular, and has tattoos that crawl from his knuckles up past his collar, disappearing into a jaw dark with stubble. The Iron Wolves insignia sits stark on his neck, a snarling wolf head surrounded by flames.

Every instinct screams at me to walk away. To find another option. Any other option.

But there is no other option.

I square my shoulders and approach.

"I need your help."

He doesn't look up from adjusting his bike's chain. "Not interested." His voice is low, rough, like gravel scraping stone. Not unfriendly, just indifferent. Like I'm a fly buzzing near his ear.

"My daughter is dying. Bacterial infection in her blood. I need you to take me to Fort Nelson General Hospital. Two hundred miles."

"Still not interested."

"I can pay."

"Lady, I don't do passenger runs." Now he looks up, and I see his eyes for the first time. Gray, cold, with a distance in them that speaks to walls built thick and high. "Bike's built for speed, not extra weight."

I should accept this. Should thank him for his time and walk away with my dignity intact.

Instead, my voice breaks. "Then just tell me the safest route. I'll follow on foot."

Those gray eyes study my medic bag, my shaking hands, the desperation I can't hide. Then, I catch a flicker of something human beneath all that ice.

"You'll be dead in twenty miles."

"Then my daughter and I die together."

The words hang between us. His jaw tightens. His hands still on the bike.

"How old?"

"Ten."

The silence stretches long enough that I hear my own heartbeat. His gaze drops to his forearm, where faded ink forms letters I can't quite read.

When he speaks again, his voice is different. Lower. Rougher. Like the words cost him something.

"Get what you need. We leave in ten minutes." He meets my eyes, and what I see there isn't coldness anymore. It's something far more complicated—old pain, barely contained. "But if you slow me down, if you panic, if you do anything that puts the mission at risk, I'm leaving you behind. Understood?"

"Understood."

I don't trust him. Don't like him. Don't care about either of those things.

Allie is dying, and this tattooed stranger is my only hope.