Chapter 3 - Smoke on the Ridge
By late afternoon, the rolling hills of Kentucky rose around us like green graves, choked with thick undergrowth and rusted farm machinery left to rot in the rain.
We had split the club as planned, leaving twenty bikes twenty miles back to create a loud, visible footprint on the main interstate, while Grady, Jesse, and three trusted riders escorted my van through the winding logging trails of the Daniel Boone National Forest. The canopy overhead was so dense it turned the daylight into a bruised twilight, the air smelling of wet pine and old decay.
Amos had fallen asleep, his head slumped against the padded headrest of the medical chair, his breathing shallow and rattling.
“How much longer?” Jesse asked through the passenger window as I slowed the van down to navigate a washed-out timber bridge.
“According to the map, about thirty miles,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the muddy ruts ahead. “How’s your rear flank?”
Before Jesse could answer, the radio crackled to life with a burst of static. Grady’s voice came through, choppy and clipped.
“Hammer, we got company. A black Ford pickup just blew past our tail-end riders at eighty miles an hour. No plates. They’re matching your heading.”
I glanced in the side mirror. Nothing but empty road and a wall of ferns.
“Can you turn back and box them in?” I asked into the mic.
“Negative,” Grady’s voice snapped back, punctuated by the angry bark of a V-twin engine revving in the background. “They’ve got three more trucks coming up from the forestry access road behind us. They aren't just following us, Hammer. They knew we were coming.”
A sharp rapping on the passenger window made me flinch. It was Jesse, pointing frantically toward the tree line up ahead.
Through the windshield, a massive felled oak tree lay directly across the narrow dirt road, its branches stripped clean like the bones of an animal. Parked right beside it was a late-model black truck with tinted windows, its engine idling, blocking our only way forward.
I slammed on the brakes, sending gravel spraying against the undercarriage.
“Get down!” I yelled, throwing the van into park.
From the bed of the black truck, two men stood up. Both wore heavy canvas hunting jackets, and both carried semi-automatic rifles leveled straight at our windshield.
“Don't move!” Jesse screamed, reaching for the door handle.
“Stay inside!” I roared, grabbing his shoulder with a grip like a vise.
The driver’s side door of the black truck swung open, and a tall man with a jagged scar running from his ear down to his collarbone stepped out. He adjusted his baseball cap, spat a wad of tobacco onto the hood of his truck, and walked slowly toward my window, his boots sinking into the wet mud.
He tapped a heavy silver ring against my glass.
May you like
“End of the line, grandad,” the man called out, smiling without any warmth in his eyes. “Turn that van around right now, or we start cutting tires—starting with the ones on your neck.”
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