Brock looked at me. I nodded in affirmation of Steele. I didn’t have any profound words to say, but Steele was right. The last thing we needed was for the blame game to start, most especially given how vulnerable we were right now. Even if Brock was right as leader to take blame for what had happened, we all needed to take the blame in some sense for what had happened.
But more than brotherhood, we needed practical solutions. We needed to get more resources. We needed more men.
We needed more Reapers.
“Why don’t we call Butch?” I said. “If Cole isn’t around to help—”
“Let me,” Brock said.
He stepped out of the room for a moment, grabbing his phone and presumably going to call Butch. I didn’t know if it would work, and it wasn’t like Butch was an especially communicative person, but the least that we could do was reach out. Without Cole, though Brock was doing his part to keep us afloat, it felt like we were missing a critical supporting element in all of this chaos.
“We got fucking slaughtered,” Garrett said. “Fucking crushed.”
“That’s what happens in battle,” Mason said. “Sometimes you crush, sometimes you get crushed.”
“Two of our prospects just got obliterated! Blown to fucking bits! Did you see the shit I did, Mason?”
“I did, and don’t act like I might not have,” Mason snarled.
It was getting tense. I knew these two had never quite gotten to where they were before Hannah had gotten pregnant, but I’d thought they’d reach the point where they could tolerate each other. This bad situation showed otherwise, and it seemed on the verge of turning ugly really damn fast.
“For someone who claims they saw what I did, you sure seem really fucking chill,” Garrett said. “Maybe you can go have a kid and you can know why I’m concerned.”
“Your kid is my fucking nephew! You don’t think I’m concerned about this!”
“Hey, shut the fuck up!” Steele snapped. “Both of you, damnit! We are not fucking falling apart. Garrett. Get your ass into church and chill out. Mason, stay the fuck here.”
Garrett tried to stop at the bar for some alcohol, but Connor put a firm hand on his shoulder that told him he shouldn’t dare try. Garrett scoffed, tried to make a really bad joke about how a shot of alcohol was worth a pound of medicine, and went into church to chill. Mason sat on the couch.
“They’re not going to be easy to catch in the daylight, either,” Connor said. “My guess is they’re going to go everywhere in pairs or more.”
“And they know that if we drag it out in daylight, the feds are coming,” Steele said.
Honestly, if the feds did come, that was starting to seem like a less and less inappropriate strategy. We’d all almost certainly wind up in jail, but that seemed a far better outcome than being dead. Go to jail for a variety of charges for a few years, get out later, go somewhere else…or make a stand here, remain relatively anonymous, and eventually die.
I couldn’t let myself be that pessimistic. But I also could no longer pretend that the odds were in our favor.
Brock came back inside.
“The hell is Garrett?”
“We sent him into church to cool off,” Steele said.
“For fuck’s sake…”
As best as I could tell, Brock wasn’t mad about Garrett’s reaction, but at the fact that everything seemed to be crumbling around him.
“Bring him back in, would you?”
Steele walked into church, motioned for him to come out, and brought him into the circle around Brock.
“I had no luck reaching Butch,” Brock said. “However, that doesn’t mean that I’m going to just give up on this. I can’t. As long as Cole is in a coma, our line to the Black Reapers in Springsville is cutoff. Which means that we need to go right to the source.”
He looked at Steele and me.
“You two are the ones I would trust most for reach out,” he said. “I have a mission for you two. On Sunday—as I assume they’ll be out and about tomorrow—I need you two to drive to California, explain the situation, and get their help by any means necessary.”
Holy shit. We’re bringing in the original chapter.It seemed…well, if it wasn’t such a desperate time, it would have seemed really damn cool. We were getting the group that had brought Cole to us. We were getting the originals. We were getting the bad motherfuckers.
