We hurried to do so, even as gunfire came down on us. I took a second to look around once we had all gotten into position. One prospect had gotten shot and was wounded badly, though it was unclear if he was injured critically. Steele had blood on his shoulder, but he didn’t even seem affected by it. For now, we had enough to work with.
But the fact that they had thrown a fucking grenade…
Yeah, this was a real war. This wasn’t just two neighborhood rivals quarreling anymore. This was a war within US borders.
The fog of war started to creep in as everything seemed to blur together. We’d set up a sort of bunker at the entrance of the neighborhood, but that merely limited the gunfire to about 180 degrees’ worth of vision instead of a full circle. Did the most recent rounds come from the left? The right? The house at the far end? What type of guns were they using? What was the next step we could get to? How did we know there wasn’t an ambush coming?
“What’s the plan, Brock?” Mason yelled over the chaos. “We gotta pick a side and move in!”
“To the left!” Brock yelled. “That house has the least fire coming from it!”
We don’t know that. We need more people. More weapons. More experience. We haven’t been caught up in something quite likethis.
“You sure!” Mason yelled. “Seems to me we need to take out more of their targets!”
“Just do what you—”
A whoosh sound disrupted all of us. Half a second before the explosion followed, I knew what had just happened.
The Bandits had fired a fucking rocket-propelled grenade. RPG. As in, the type of shit that most people only saw in video games.
Mason’s bike exploded. He staggered to the ground, bleeding. The rest of us were fucking lucky to be alive. The next RPG round, if there was one—and we had to assume there would be another one—would kill one of the officers.
Whoever this fucking King character was, he had fucking connections. And his connections were making this a fucking rout.
“Brock!” I yelled. “We’re badly outnumbered and in a bad spot. We have to retreat!”
“No!”
“Brock!”
It wasn’t me who had yelled.
“Zack’s right. We have no fucking chance right now.”
It was fuckingConnor.The guy most prone to fighting and going to the very bloody end. The one who had killed a teenager to kill a Bandit.
If he was saying to fucking retreat, we should have done so before they fired the RPG.
“Shit!” Brock yelled, but we all knew he already knew. “Retreat! Retreat!”
Another RPG fired, hitting a prospect’s bike. This time, the rider of said bike did not survive, and it was not a clean death.
Connor lifted Mason onto his bike and drove the fuck out of there. The rest of us laid down some suppressing fire, got on our bikes, and sped like fucking maniacs. I literally felt a bullet whiz by my head, missing by mere inches. Had I leaned forward or moved out a second earlier, I would be a dead fucking man.
We got on the road and sped as fast as we could, fleeing to fight another day. And it would have to be another day—tonight, thinking we had a chance to kill them, we’d nearly gotten ourselves killed. We did not have the manpower to compete with a King-backed organization.
We needed something of equal force to fight back.
When we got back to the clubhouse, just about damn near everyone could barely stand once they got off their bikes. The adrenaline had pushed all of us well past where we’d normally go, and the comedown was painful. Brock and Steele got everyone into the clubhouse, including Mason, who looked fine but probably needed medical attention. At least he was standing on his own two feet.
But we’d seen two prospects explode. A third was not with us, and we assumed that he was dead. That was the best case for him, honestly—I didn’t want to imagine what sort of fucking torture that guy would go through if he lived.
“Jesus Christ,” Garrett said. “We got fucking annihilated.”
“No shit!” Brock snapped. He took a second to calm himself down. “We underestimated them. We fucked up bad. I take the blame on this one.”
“No,” Steele said. “We all take the blame here. We’re a brotherhood through good and bad times.”
