3. Chapter 3 - Legion
I jolt awake, sunshine streamin' over my face through a crack in the blind, and for one long, stupid second I don't know where I am, or what I owe, or who's comin' for me, and it's the closest thing to bliss I got left.
Then it all comes back.
Not slow—all of it at once.
The whole fuckin' weight of it, droppin' down on my chest like a brandin' iron blazin' red hot.
I sit up slow, every muscle in my back protestin', and I look around at what's supposed to be a goddamn perimeter.
A dozen men. All of 'em slumped against walls or stretched out flat, rifles cradled to their chests like they're holdin' babies, every last one of 'em caked in that red Badlands dirt that gets into everything—your skin, your teeth, the creases of your knuckles.
It don't wash out. Nothin' about this place washes out.
And every single one of 'em is sleepin'.
I let out a breath through my nose, real slow, and look at the ceiling, and then look back at them, and then look at the door.
So much for standin' watch.
So much for security.
So much for any of it.
So much for the siege too.
Which is weird.
I don't even decide to do it. I'm already movin', already got my boot on the leg of the nearest chair, and I shove it hard enough that the man sittin' in it goes sideways and hits the concrete floor with a grunt that echoes off the walls.
"Wake the fuck up!"
My voice comes out low and mean. It fills the room the way a sound fills a silo—all at once, no escape from it.
And every last one of 'em wakes up stupid.
That's the only word for it. Stupid.
Men lurching upright with their eyes still sealed half-shut, grabbin' for rifles they already got, rackin' rounds into guns that are already chambered, spinnin' around lookin' for a threat that isn't here.
Somebody shouts.
Somebody else drops a fuckin' shotgun.
The whole sorry display lasts maybe ten seconds and it feels like watchin' a bar fight between ghosts—all noise, no direction, none of it meaning a goddamn thing.
I just stand there in the middle of it, jaw tight, lettin' 'em sort themselves out.
Keep your mouth shut, Legion. Just let 'em get there.
"Calm down," I say, pressin' my palms out towards 'em. "Nobody's here. We're fine. Ya'll just fell the fuck asleep."
Includin' me.
Which every man in the room already knows, and to their credit, not a single one of 'em says it out loud. Probably 'cause they're smart. Probably 'cause they know what my face looks like when I'm already half-disgusted with myself and don't need the help.
I look around the room. Take stock. Chains has got one boot on, one boot off, and he's standin' there blinking like a man who's forgotten what light is.
Ratchet's got grease still on his hands from whatever he was doin' before he went horizontal.
Diesel's just... lookin' at his phone. Starin' at it like it said somethin' in a language he's not sure he speaks anymore.
"What fuckin' time is it?" I ask him.
He looks like shit. Hell, everyone looks like shit, but Diesel's eyes are so goddamn bloodshot they look like road maps to nowhere. He shakes his head. Blinks once, slow, like maybe the number's gonna change if he gives it a second.
"Well?" I ask again.
"It says… six pm." He pauses. Rubs the back of his neck. "But I'm not real sure what day it is."
Somebody laughs. Short and quiet, like they caught themselves doin' it.
"What the hell do you mean?"
Diesel looks at me all serious. "I think it's six pm the next day."
"How is that possible." It's not even a question the way I say it. It's just words fallin' out of my mouth while my brain's still catchin' up.
I walk over to the window and yank on the blinds. They clatter. Let in a blade of grey-gold light that cuts across the floor like a judgment, and I squint through the gap at the world outside.
There's nothin' out there.
Well—not nothin'. There's Crow, leanin' against the gate post with his rifle hugged to his chest, head tipped forward, asleep on his feet like a goddamn horse. The whole compound behind him is still. Dust hangin' in the air the way it does when nothin's moved it for hours.
I stare at that stillness for a long second. Let it register.
"How could it be quiet for two fuckin' days." I let the blind go. It rattles back. "The FBI has to know their people are dead. And if they don't know they're dead, they at least know they're missin'. That's the same thing in a fed's mind—missin' and dead, that's the same goddamn drawer."
I turn back around and look at all of 'em. All these faces. Brothers, yeah, but right now they're just a room full of men who don't have answers, and I'm lookin' at each one of 'em the way you look at a hand of cards you already know is bad.
I land on Diesel because he's the only one in this room whose brain I trust to be runnin' on something besides fumes and wishful thinkin'.
He's got nothin'. I can see it before he even opens his mouth—that flat, honest blankness that on Diesel means he genuinely doesn't know and isn't gonna pretend otherwise. That's the thing about him. He won't dress a nothin' up.
"Maybe…" He shifts his weight, crosses his arms. "Maybe they aren't comin'."
I let that sit for a second. Just let it hang there in the ghost of cigarette smoke and dust-mote air. Because it doesn't make sense. It doesn't fit into any shape I know how to hold.
"How could they not be comin'?" My voice comes out low and flat, which means I'm more unsettled than I'm lettin' on. "I mean—we fuckin' killed thirty-five people. Thirty-five. That's not a missing persons report, that's a goddamn body count."
Someone yawns behind me, big and unhurried.
"They're comin' today then." I say it like it's already done. "Today. Tonight. Both. Don't matter which."
I look around the room and I make sure to look slow, because slow means deliberate, and deliberate means I'm not panicked, and the second these men smell panic on their Pres is the second this whole thing starts to rot from the inside out.
"Everyone up. Ya'll have five minutes. Shower, eat, whatever you gotta do to get your head straight—then back on watch." I pause long enough to let that land. "Every single one of you."
I hold the stare on each face. Not movin' through 'em fast—I go one at a time, and I linger, and I let the silence do the work.
I land on Diesel last. Even him. Especially him, 'cause if I skip him they'll notice and if they notice they'll wonder, and I can't afford wonder right now, I can't afford a single crack in the wall of certain I'm holdin' up with both hands.
"And no one falls asleep this time."
Then I leave and take the stairs two at a time because that's what you do when you give an order—you walk the fuck out, and you don't look back, and you don't hesitate, because hesitation is a question and I don't have time for questions right now.
Not when I've got a timetable, and a body count, and five minutes to get my head right before this whole compound buckles under the weight of what's comin'.
I kick the door open. I kick it closed behind me. Same boot, same motion, no pause in between—just the two sounds of a man who don't have time to use his hands for doors when his hands are already untuckin' his shirt and tearing it over his head before he's even crossed the room.
I'm still caked in blood-red dirt and it's dried hard in the creases of my forearms, packed under my nails, settled into the lines of the fucked-up brand over my heart like it belongs there, like the earth is just claimin' what the fire already marked.
I start the water. I make it burn, and I step in, and I stand there, and I let it work.
The water goes red. Then rust. Then clear.
But the demons inked into my skin—the ones divin' off my shoulder blades, the ones wreakin' hell down my arms, the ones screamin' up through the smoke on my ribs—they don't wash off.
They never do.
They just get clean and keep laughin', same as always, same as they been doin' since the day they got there.
Which is maybe the most honest thing about me.
That the darkest parts just get brighter when I scrub 'em.
So then… after cleanin' up… we wait.
We wait all fuckin' night.
The clubhouse goes quiet in a way it almost never does—not a good quiet, either. This is a different kind. The kind of quiet that has weight to it. The quiet of men who know what they did and are waitin' to find out what it costs.
No one says a word.
I'm standin' near the window at first, watchin' the road through a gap in the boards where the light don't reach me.
Watchin' the dust. Watchin' nothin'. The wind moves through the scrub and I track it the same way I'd track a man, my eyes movin' slow and deliberate across every inch of that flat, dead stretch of road.
Nothin' comes.
I keep watchin' anyway.
No one falls asleep.
I can feel 'em behind me. Diesel against the east wall, arms folded, head up.
Chains in the corner with that glass eye catchin' the low light.
Every man in this room holdin' himself still with both hands, breathin' through his nose, keepin' whatever's crawlin' around inside him locked the hell down.
That's what you do when you're in it.
You don't pace.
You don't fidget.
You just hold.
No one eats, no one pisses, no one yawns, no one complains.
The night leans on us. We lean back.
At nine am on day three I start rethinkin' my plan and I send people into the kitchen to make food.
That's what gets the grumble.
Not the waitin'. Not the two days of holdin' still. Not the silence, not the watchin', not the slow crawl of hours that don't move the way hours are supposed to move.
No. It's the food.
It's the absence of women in a kitchen and every man in this room is feelin' it.
A few minutes later I hear the first one callin' home. Ya OK? Anyone come by? How's the kids… Voice pitched low, tilted toward the wall, like that makes it private. Like I can't hear every word bouncin' off this concrete.
I don't even stop it.
Because I wanna know too.
After that first guy hangs up, the others start callin'. One by one. Quiet and quick, like confession. Same answer comin' back every way around—no one called, no one came, everything's fine.
Each answer lands a little heavier than the last, not because the news is bad but because it ain't.
Because fine is a strange thing to be after all this holdin'.
Diesel calls last. We're sittin' close enough that I can hear Mama Jo when she picks up—that voice she's got, flat and warm at the same time, like scorched earth that still grows somethin'.
She wasn't here when it went down. He told her to stay home. All the women worth a damn were told to stay home, and every single one of them had the sense to listen and the spine to wait without askin' too many questions.
That's its own kind of loyalty. Quiet loyalty. The kind that doesn't get a patch but holds everything together anyway.
And she confirms what all the others said.
Nothing is happenin'.
We eat. We piss. We sit in silence that's neither comfortable or hostile.
Some guys talk a little.
Some of 'em sleep on the couch.
I don't sleep.
The night passes.
The morning passes.
The next two fuckin' days pass like bad debt—slow and ugly and never quite done.
And now I just gotta admit it.
I'm hesitant. But facts are facts and the facts are these—we maybe, possibly, by some grace of a God I don't entirely believe in and some dumb luck I definitely don't deserve… we got away with it.
Or it hasn't started yet.
Which is a thought I stuff down before it gets legs.
By the time that realization starts settin' in, our guard is fully down.
Not lowered—down.
Like a fence that got tired of standin'.
I watch it happen in real time and I don't stop it because I'm tired too, and tired is contagious as hell inside a closed building with too many bodies and not enough air.
People go home. Ones with somewhere to be, anyway.
Dusty's woman shows up—Giselle—and she doesn't ask questions, she just moves straight to the kitchen like she was always comin', like she knew, and within twenty minutes something's on the stove that smells like the opposite of everything the last two days were.
Then Mama Jo is here. And when Mama Jo walks through a door, the whole room recalibrates.
She doesn't announce herself or make a show.
She just sets her bag down and starts runnin' the table, and card games materialize around her the way order always does around a woman like that—naturally, without anyone decidin' to let it happen.
The music starts. Somebody cranks it and nobody tells him to turn it down.
Drinks flow. Real drinks, not the two-finger paranoid-sip kind we been nursin' for two days. The full pour. The fuck-it pour.
And just like that, it's over.
Well.
Probably not. I know that. It's not over. It's just gone quiet.
But we're dumb right now. Dumb and tired and hungry and lookin' for any version of normal we can stand in for five fuckin' minutes.
And it turns out that waitin' for a siege that takes its time showin' up is worse than the actual siege itself—'cause at least the siege is honest. At least the siege shows you its face.
The waitin' just eats you from the inside and never even has the decency to finish the job.
My phone buzzes in my pocket and I already know who it is. I don't wanna look.
But of course I look. I always look. I will always fuckin' look.
It's a simple message, the way they always are. The way she's always been—sayin' the most with the least, layin' down one word like she's placin' a single stone across a river and trustin' me to know where to step.
Hi.
That's it. Just hi. One syllable. Two letters. Nothin' that would mean a goddamn thing to anyone who found this phone, anyone who scrolled through and read it over my shoulder—just hi, just a word so small it barely takes up space on the screen.
But she knows what it means and she knows I know what it means and honest to God, I need that right now.
The clock says nine-thirty.
Two and a half hours to midnight.
I look around at the room—the noise and the pour and the bodies movin' the way bodies move when they finally remember they're still alive—and none of it touches me. None of it gets in. There's a wall between me and all of it now and it is one word tall and two letters wide.
Enough time to shower again.
Enough time to get where I need to be.
With her.