Page 38 of Biker's Enemy

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 bikes 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…

Twenty

CASH

She acts like nothing happened between us.