Chapter 4: STEEL

Chapter Four

STEEL

I ’m a hot fucking mess when I roll into Globe, Arizona, home of the Midnight SS. The small town wasn’t always packed to the gills with racist shitbags. I spend an insanely large amount of time making my way down the old Route 66 highway and getting drunk in every bar to get all the information possible.

It helps to be a conversationalist. It’s one of the ways I’m better than my twin brother. He’s a brooding alcoholic. I’m the chatty kind. It makes me better with women, better with people in general and so far, it’s paying off.

Only thing is, the shit I’m learning about these Midnight SS motherfuckers makes me want to stay far away from them.

When you’re dealing with folks like that, you want to strike first but striking first means risking time in prison. Time away from my brother. He already looks so much younger than me. He might be leaner, with less muscle on his frame, but prison aged me more than I thought it would. I don’t want to go back.

The pressure pushes on the back of my head with total agony. I wait until midnight to scope out the Midnight SS clubhouse. I take my bike to a safe house pre-arranged by Magnum. The car he leaves me to tail the wannabe Nazis seems like a trap. A bright red Chevy Silverado. Seriously? It’s what I have and I trust Magnum, so I take the truck. Red? He could have at least found a silver one…

I blast the air conditioning, but it barely seems effective against the Arizona heat. I know the entire family loves it out here, but I want the winds to blow me out across Route 66 all the way to Santa Monica. Somewhere with ocean breeze and bikinis. Fuck this heat.

My conversations with various folks in the know in various bars across the country helps me to find the clubhouse. Bikers talk to bikers and I know how to play my cards. I talk felon shit with other felons, biker shit with bikers. You get the point. Everyone has their thing and you find out where to meet ‘em and keep ‘em until you get the information you need.

I know the Midnight SS clubhouse is off U.S. 60, about fifteen miles off-road in the middle of the desert. How you find your point depends on who you believe. I have my pick of the finest drunks in Texas… I leave their differing opinions up to a coin flip and head West off the highway.

There might be guards around the clubhouse tonight, although I was assured the Midnight SS are so secretive, they don’t bother with guards. Not enough folks know of their existence. Yet, if they do exist, and if they do have any power, they know of ours. I don’t like how that makes me feel.

Just when we got peace, I don’t want to start a war. I want to lay my father’s memory to rest. I want Hunter to raise his family. Shit, I have some catching up to do unless I want my twin brother to be the one who gets every damn thing in this life while I have nothing.

The winds need to change.

I turn off the headlights and try to get the engine as quiet as possible as I roll my way across the barely-marked roads towards the clubhouse. I suspect my coin flip has me pointed in the right direction because of the tire tracks pressed into the dirt.

This could just be a popular place for dirt bikes, but the hair on the back of my neck raises with the raw instinct that suggests I’m approaching something dark and dangerous. The first thing I notice, even before the Midnight SS club house, is a large towering something rising out of the desert.

Two willow trees. Big willow trees with large boughs. Every last inch of my body drips in sweat. I drive the truck behind one of the willow trees and park it there between the tree and the clubhouse. If there was anyone around, they would have shot me by now. Shit, this is Arizona. Anyone could shoot me.

I reach for my gun and hop out of the truck. Send the felon on the suicide mission… Who gives a fuck if he makes it out alive, right? I can’t complain. I don’t care if I make it out alive either.

The clubhouse is a lot cleaner than you would expect. No graffiti, even if you would expect a place like this left unguarded out in the desert to pick up a few tags. I suppose folks are too smart to fuck this clubhouse up if they even know it exists. I wish I felt safer because of my pistol, but it’s just so fucking hot that I can’t help but feel this low-level irritation.

It’s not just the beads of sweat dripping down my neck. The air is thick, wet, and that makes it hard for it to enter my lungs. I stuff down the feeling I have that some shit could pop off at any minute. It would be pretty damn hard for any living thing to avoid detection out here – something I should take note of in case the folks who own this place come back.

But how often do bikers really use their clubhouse?

After scanning the building for a security system, I find nothing. What I notice outside the clubhouse ends up being plenty to send a chill down my spine. The willow trees aren’t as benign as I thought. When I get closer to them, they smell bad and I notice blood at the foot and nooses hanging from the boughs. Two nooses from each large bough of the tree, each one about six feet apart.

What the fuck? I take my phone out and use the flash to get pictures to send to Wyatt. When the flash goes off, I can see brown splatter on the tree trunks. Blood. It has to be blood. I shove my phone in my pocket and walk back to the clubhouse. My breathing sounds heavier. It could just be the heat, but something about those trees makes my blood run cold.

You get a heightened sense of danger when you’re in prison. I can smell a fight based on the noise levels at breakfast. I could always sense when to keep my shoes close.

I can tell something bad happened here. Bad shit happens here on a regular basis. The doors and windows are all latched, but I find a weakness in an unlatched basement window. It would be much easier for Hunter to fit through than me…

I did everything in my power to keep bulky muscle on my body in prison. Without guns, without my family, I needed my body to be my primary source of protection. I left with only three scars from fights. One long scar on the left side of my torso, one on my right leg, and another on the back of my neck.

The scars don’t bother me because they just add another way I’m different from Hunter. We would always fight over who was tougher and usually, Hunter would win. After prison, that has most likely changed. I might even be the quiet one now… at least when I’m not drunk off my ass.

I have to suck my belly in and scrape my shoulder to slide into the Midnight SS clubhouse basement. I land in something sticky and have to stop myself from letting out a very unmanly yelp…

Something ain’t right here.

I almost swear, but I just stabilize myself against the wall instead because… I’m pretty fucking sure I’m hearing something. It’s dark. Too dark for me to see now that I’m blocked from the moonlight outside. I hold my breath. The noise gets louder. It’s not just rats running around the basement, although I hear the familiar sound of their nasty fucking paws…

I hear breathing.

Slow. Human breathing.

I grab my pistol. Adrenaline courses through me so fucking fast, my night vision improves almost instantly. I can at least see movement. Three small figures that must be rats or mice running across the basement floor and then a large lump. The source of the human breathing.

Did you even load the pistol, you stupid motherfucker?

I can taste blood on the back of my tongue.

I don’t like this.

“Put your hands up, or I’ll blow your fucking head off,” I growl with false confidence.

I keep my gun trained on the woman curled up beneath a couple blankets and making some desperate effort to hide herself behind three kegs of beer. She makes a terrified yelping noise and then sits up, drawing her knees to her chest. I can tell that she’s a grown woman, but this little thing is damn petite.

“What are you?” I ask her. “Some type of Nazi whore?”

She makes another yelping sound and sticks her hands up in the air. Immediate surrender. Judging by the way her ass is shaking and looking at my gun, she’s never been in a situation like this before. Even with the moonlight, it’s too dim for me to get a good look at her.

Her skin is dark, but her eyes look all Chinese. I don’t think she’s an Indian. They have a particular way about them that seems completely absent here. This woman is something else entirely, but I don’t know what. Her hair has the same texture as Juliette’s… thick and bushy. But she can’t be black with eyes like that.

She has to be some type of Asian or Indian.

Her whimpering and surrender don’t mean she’s entirely innocent. For all I know, it could all be an act. After all, I found her here hiding in some Nazi compound in the middle of the desert. It would be stupid as hell to let my guard down.

“Stop crying and stand up.”

She cries harder. Christ. I don’t want this woman getting under my skin, but there’s something about watching one of them cry that has always melted me. This place is too fucking creepy for me to chill.

“I said stand up.”

When she stands up, I get a good look at her, not like I get much information from looking at her. Keeping my gun trained on her, I use the flashlight I brought to scan her from head to toe. It’s not just so I can get a better idea of her ethnic origins — although I want to know if she has any relation to Oske, or someone else we have problems with.

A woman this color can’t be welcome out here. But she’s not a cop. She doesn’t have the smell on her.

“What are you doing out here?”

She doesn’t answer. It’s so fucking quiet that I hear a coyote howl. Scares the fucking crap out of me.

“I asked you a question. Don’t make me put you in the ground.”

“I don’t know where I am,” she says with a shaky voice. Shaky, but sexy. I keep the gun trained on her even if she has a voice that could make my dick hard under any other circumstances. “My car broke down. I tried to find somewhere before sundown but there were these —

Christ. She breaks down crying again and I struggle to keep my shit together. The more time we stand around having emotions, the more danger we’re both in. Unless this bitch is the danger. All 5-fucking-feet of her.

“Stop crying,” I growl. “What did you see? Tell me.”

“T-they had a man…” she says, sobbing uncontrollably and then nearly falling over. I almost think it’s a ploy, but I see her headed straight for the ground with no chance of bracing herself so I catch her — against my better judgment. Shit. She’s really unconscious. Scared out of her fucking mind.

Neither of us have the privilege of falling unconscious around here.

“Hey,” I snap at her. “Wake up. Wake up and tell me everything you saw.”

I have to shake her pretty hard to get her awake and I start to get scared that I rattle something loose in the pretty woman’s head from shaking her around so hard. But her eyelashes flutter open around those strange Asian-looking eyes.

She braces herself against my chest. The brief contact sends a surge of something dead wrong straight through me. My body tightens and I offer absolutely no resistance when she shoves me away and stumbles back to a position of standing on her own feet.

I don’t have the gun trained on her anymore, which seems to make her a little more relaxed. She doesn’t fight. She doesn’t run. But she looks scared out of her mind.

“I watched them beat two men naked and cut their heads off,” she says. “One of them saw me, but I managed to hide and the others convinced him he’d done too much cocaine but… they’re going to come back. They’re going to find my stupid Jeep and?—

Here we go again… another fucking breakdown. This time, we definitely don’t have time because I hear noises. Engines. She must hear them too because the skinny thing gives me one horrified look and just as senseless as a doe in the highway, she takes off. It’s instinct — but a stupid fucking instinct.

“Hey! Get back here!”

It surprises me that she’s so fast, but we don’t have time for tricks and antics right now. I yell at her to get back here one more time, but she doesn’t fucking listen, so I take off after her. Doesn’t matter how fast she is, I have much longer legs and once I get going, it doesn’t take long to get close to her.

I skid to dead stop when the woman screams and then she flies forward and seemingly disappears off the face of the earth. What the fuck?!

The next scream sounds even louder than the first. If the men on the engines heading our way didn’t hear us before, they sure as shit heard that ear-splitting scream coming out of this woman’s mouth. Fuck. I scan the ground with my flashlight, struggling to get a stable beam of light through my shaking limbs. Too much adrenaline isn’t always a good thing. In the army, they train you how to deal with that rush. In prison, your best bet is giving in to every fucking impulse that comes through your head if you want to survive the mentally ill motherfuckers trying to end your life.

I think like a prisoner, not a soldier. But you don’t have to be a soldier to see a big fucking hole in the ground. I jog to the edge and see her down there screaming her fucking head off and surrounded by two dead bodies.

Bodies that I recognize. Club members. And if I don’t recognize the bodies, I recognize the severed heads. I categorize the dead in my head as I lean over the edge of the hole and reach for the woman stuck inside.

“Grab my hand. Now,” I command her.

The engines get louder and I need to get this woman out of that hole and back to the truck. I don’t have time to react. Even if I have family in that hole. She stumbles over a severed head as she keeps screaming her head off and scratching her way through mud and worse towards the wall of the mass grave.

When I get hold of her hand, it takes no effort to lift her out of the grave, she’s that fucking small. What takes the effort is calming her ass down. Her screaming nearly blows out my eardrums once I get my hands on her and try hugging her close so she can feel that human warmth and calm her ass down.

That doesn’t work.

“You have to calm down,” I growl at her. “CALM. DOWN. My own fucking brothers are in that hole and if you want to survive, you need to listen to me.”

She wraps her arms around my neck. Good. Then she kicks me, almost hitting my balls. Bad. I pinch her hard on the leg for that and she yelps loudly, biting into my shoulder. Doesn’t matter. I have her attention and she’s not screaming her head off. She sinks her teeth into my shoulder as I make every effort possible not to make a sound.

If I have to calm her down, I have to be the source of her calm. Even if this little menace has her teeth deep into my shoulder. I breathe slowly. Waiting for her to catch up. Ignoring the engines growing louder and telling myself it’s just because the desert is so damn empty I can hear them.

You have time.

“Bite me all you want, brat,” I growl at her. “You’re coming with me.”

I drag her to the truck and toss her in the passenger side. She sits back limply staring ahead. Shock. Terror. Some fucked up combination of both. She’s pretty. I hurry around to the other side of the truck and start it up. She looks over at me bewildered and terrified.

“Don’t kill me.”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

She glances at the tattoos on my forearm. Scared. And she finally realizes I’m a biker.

“You can call me Steel.”

“Joslin,” she says. Then her brow furrows. “Is that your real name?”

“It’s the name you need to know.”

I gotta get us out of here before we end up headless in a hole somewhere.

The two of us will have plenty of time to get to know each other…