“What thoughts do we have? Anyone?”
Axle cleared his throat.
“What if we get the Hovas involved somehow?” he said. “They’re not afraid to get involved with the Saints. They’ll want revenge for what happened.”
“True,” I said.
The more I pondered the idea, the more I liked it. There was just something rich about things coming full circle like that, and I could easily see the Saints not realizing we could play games like that. I also liked the idea of getting the Hovas involved for political purposes—if they felt like they had a chance to enact revenge, then we could form tighter bonds with them, perhaps even sever their business ties to the Saints for good.
“I dunno, man.”
Patriot?
“I keep wondering if they actually will want revenge, man,” he said. “Hovas aren’t exactly known for valuing their lower members. Jerome would slice the throats of ten of his prospects and recruits if it meant making an extra buck for himself.”
“That’s Jerome, though,” Axle said. “The Hovas aren’t some dictatorship. It’s not fucking North Korea. They’ll make a decision, and they’ll make the right one.”
“Even if so, do we really want to pin our hopes of retaliation on another club?” Patriot said. “We never outsourced military operations to militias. Why would we do something similar here?”
That was a much better question than the question of the Hovas being able to help us. Double and triple crossing in the world of clubs wasn’t that uncommon, and it was very possible that if the Hovas had, in fact, been the ones to set us up on the ambush, they could do so again.
“What other ideas do we have?” I said.
I didn’t necessarily think we needed to kill the Hovas idea, but there was no reason to put that plan into play if we had something much better.
“Make a fake peace offering,” Butch said. “And bring them in for eradication. Kill them all on scene.”
It was typical Butch—go for the most violent, most gruesome idea possible. And for what the Saints had done to us over the past couple of years? I was all for it. I didn’t mind in the slightest the idea of getting revenge in that way.
But Father Marcellus shook his head and muttered no.
“The whole point of this plan is to eventually end the violence, correct?” he asked, something everyone in the room nodded to. “The whole point of all of this fighting is that eventually, we will emerge victorious, the Saints will stop fighting or die out, and we can all live in peace. A strategy like that will ensure that we will never live in peace.”
“How?” Butch said. “You kill them all, there’s no war left to be fought.”
“Wrong,” Father Marcellus said. “You can kill out men, but that kind of action will ensure the Saints’ ideology will never die out. You’ll just turn them into martyrs that other would-be members will rally around. It’s one thing to slay an enemy. It’s another to do something so callously evil.”
“You say it like the Saints are a religion.”
“How else do you think Lucius and the others in that club get their members to operate?”
Tensions were rising, but to my surprise, I found myself erring on the side of Marcellus here. We’d be creating a whole sect of fanatics if we didn’t do this right—as weird as it sounded, it was almost like there was an uneasy truce between the Saints and the Reapers that we wouldn’t resort to truly sacrilegious means to kill the other. It’s why we had Brewskis as a mutual hangout spot and why, for now, we could go out in public with our families or loved ones and not suffer consequences.Shannon aside…
But to bring them in for an apparent peace and then ambush them would violate all the unspoken rules of our combat and make things just so much worse. I was not quite as fearful of dying as before, but I still had and likely would have for some time a very healthy fear of dying stupidly.
“If such a strategy fails,” Father Marcellus said. “Actually, even if it succeeds, war will go on forever until everyone dies. And by everyone, I mean everyone in this shop.”
When Father Marcellus spoke, we listened. And when he made strong proclamations like this, we at least took it into consideration.
“Lane?” Butch said.
“I—”
But before I got a single word out, I heard a massive explosion go off outside.
“What the fuck?!?” Butch yelled.
We hurried out the doors of the church, but not before we heard gunshots erupting. We quickly grabbed rifles from just outside the church door and made our way outside, only to find about a dozen Saints firing upon the clubhouse, shooting through the doorway and windows. We spread out to take out the targets.
