Lane, in the middle of sipping on his drink, paused, turned his eyes to me, noticeably gulped, and turned them back to the club. It occurred to me that he and I hadn’t spoken this frankly in a long, long time; all our interactions since our father’s death had been short-lived or under extreme tension. We hadn’t had the chance to have a quiet moment together without a sense of urgency underlining it.
“There you are.”
We both turned to see Angela walking in, wearing professional attire and some nice black heels. I stepped to the side to let Lane kiss her, and when the kiss lasted for more than just a quick second, I completely stepped away. I didn’t need yet another reminder that the typical dynamic of Lane and me was really me as the third wheel to whoever Lane was dating.
Actually, I needed to step away from the clubhouse entirely. Exhaustion had started to settle in, and I could barely muster the energy to talk to my own brother.
I left, keeping my head low, looking ahead as the sound of conversation, laughter, and condolences slowly faded into the background. By the time I got to my bike, the sounds were so distant that I could not make out individual words. And in a way, I kind of liked it like that; I was one of the few bikers that was both conversational and social and who also enjoyed the serene things in life.
I pushed my kickstand back, revved my engine, and pulled out of the lot just as I saw Phoenix coming out to check on me. I waved to him, telling him there was nothing to worry about, and pulled out.
I had gone on my first motorcycle ride when I was about six years old, and unlike most kids who screamed and laughed and said how awesome it was to be on one, I found it strangely calming. It was a place where one’s concentration could only be on one thing. I didn’t have to worry about other things whenever I got on the bike, whether by riding with my father or driving on my own. I only had to worry about the road ahead of me.
Others got a thrill out of the speed of the road; I got calm out of the simplicity of the road.
At first, I just sort of meandered my way around Springsville and Ashton, not really having a purpose to my direction, just sort of going with the flow of the day. I welcomed the opportunity to be distracted from having gone to a funeral earlier.
But thoughts kept coming back to “the end.” The end of Father Marcellus. The end of my feud with Lane. The end of the feud with the Fallen Saints... or, on the other side of the coin, the end of the Reapers as we knew them and, accordingly, the end of my life.
There was a certain finality that was starting to settle into the collective zeitgeist of the MC community in the area, one that I knew Lane felt and that I had to imagine the Fallen Saints felt, even if they would never admit it. The death of a chaplain was a step too far, a line that, now crossed, could never be undone. And even though I felt more and more at peace with myself, that didn’t mean that I was confident and certain about our war.
Yes, some kind of an end was near. I just didn’t know whose.
Maybe my father knew.
Maybe the very place that I had left earlier today was the place I needed to go back to.Just like how I need to go back to my brother and the Black Reapers in the end.
Halfway between Ashton and Springsville at the time that the thought entered my mind, I gunned my bike back toward the graveyard. When I got there, there was no one, not even an employee of the funeral home, in sight. I silenced my bike and listened to the sounds around me.
Birds chirping, some of the songs of a higher pitch and faster melody than others. A gentle breeze emanating from the west. Distant cars driving, perhaps to the nearby gas station or grocery store.
I thought of all of the club members that we had laid to rest here over the last year and a half. Father Marcellus. Red Raven. My father. Too many members of both the Black and Gray Reapers. This had become less of a graveyard and more of a mass of bodies that had perished far too soon.
And the only one of them that had died a natural death was my father.
It was up to Lane and me to hit “Stop” on all of the early deaths by whatever means necessary.
I got off the bike and started walking toward the tombstone, but halfway there, I paused. I could see my father’s tombstone from where I stood; I recognized it with ease given the number of times that I had been there. But for some reason, I had never taken in the sight that just now hit me.
How many tombstones beyond the Reapers were from the last year and a half?
By what number had these graves multiplied because of the bloodshed since my father’s death?
The personal names, both in and out of the club, were easy. Roger Carter. Shannon Burns. Austin “Red Raven” Smith Senior.
But there were many people who were connected to me that I may not have known as well as them. Other bikers in the Black Reapers and the Gray Reapers. Civilian casualties caught up in our warfare. Hell, as crazy as it was to say, even the Fallen Saints who were good people but, through extraordinarily difficult life circumstances, had just fallen into the wrong circle.
Lane would never have agreed with me about that, but that’s what made me different. I saw the good in darkness; he saw only the darkness.Or that’s what you’ve wanted to believe but haven’t given him credit for.
There was really only one person that I saw as truly irredeemable, one man whom I felt nothing could be done for; even if such a man could find repentance, he had inflicted so much suffering onto the town of Springsville that he deserved nothing less than death.
Lucius Sartor.
It was there, as I mentally pictured this graveyard from two years ago to now, that I realized it wasn’t so much about destroying the Fallen Saints. We’d had it wrong from the start—perhaps even my father had gotten it wrong. It wasn’t about killing the Saints dragged into the abyss, driven by nothing more than fear of consequence from their leader.
It was about killing the devil of this town, about killing the man that was, quite literally, the root of all evil in this town.
That’s what needed to come to an end.
