That was the mistake, if it could be called a mistake: staying late. By the time he stepped out of the building into the afternoon heat, the schoolyard had mostly emptied. The buses were gone. The bike racks stood in a thin row of shade, and near them, leaning against the fence with his arms crossed, was Brad, with Kevin on one side and Tyler on the other, the three of them arranged like a wall across the path Leon usually took. Brad had smiled when he saw Leon, and it was not a smile at all, it was a baring of teeth, and he had said, "Well, look who stayed late, freak," and Leon had not waited to hear the rest. He had turned and run, and Kevin had laughed, and Tyler had shouted something about Leon's shoes, and the chase had begun before Leon had time to think about where it would go.
His route home from school cut through the edge of the industrial park because it was shorter than the main road, and on most days it was fine, because on most days Brad was busy elsewhere, or Leon timed it right, or the park was not quite so empty. Today his timing had been wrong. He had stayed late to finish a worksheet, and the halls had emptied, and by the time he stepped out into the afternoon heat, Brad was already waiting near the bike racks with Kevin and Tyler on either side of him like bookends. Leon had seen them and run without thinking, and now here he was, deep in the part of town where the map in his head ran out.
The sun hammered down on the asphalt. The air smelled of hot tar and diesel and the faint chemical tang of the warehouses, and the dust kicked up by his shoes coated his tongue. He tried to breathe through his nose and could not. He tried to swallow and his throat was too dry. Somewhere behind him, Kevin laughed, a short, eager sound, and Tyler said something Leon could not make out, and Brad shouted again, closer this time, and Leon understood with a cold, clear certainty that he had perhaps thirty seconds before they reached him. Thirty seconds, and then hands on his shoulders, and then the ground, and then whatever Brad decided to do with a boy who could not fight back.
Ahead, the road bent. Leon knew the bend. Beyond it, there was an alleyway, narrow and choked with weeds and discarded pallets, a place where the warehouse workers sometimes stacked broken things and forgot them. It was not a good hiding place. It was not much of anything. But it was a turn, and a turn was a chance, and a chance was all he had left. He put everything he had into his legs, felt his sneakers slip once on a patch of gravel, caught himself, and ran on, and as the alley mouth came up on his right, he took the sharp turn into it without breaking stride, plunging into the green shadows of the weeds and the leaning towers of pallets, his heart in his mouth and the voices of the boys behind him rising to a shout.
The alley was worse than Leon had hoped and better than he had feared, which is to say it was a narrow throat of a place with weeds as high as his waist and pallets stacked in leaning, splintered piles that narrowed the way until he had to turn sideways in places to get through. The weeds whipped at his shins. A pallet edge caught his shirt and tore it with a soft rip. The smell changed, from hot asphalt to damp earth and rotting wood and something green and sharp, like crushed stems. His feet pounded on dirt now, not pavement, and the dirt was soft enough to slow him and hard enough, in patches, to jar his ankles. Behind him, the sounds of pursuit funneled into the alley too: feet, breath, a pallet crashing over, Kevin swearing as he tripped, Brad's voice, nearer and more furious than before.
Leon burst out of the far end of the alley and skidded to a halt so hard his sneakers squealed on the concrete. He had run straight toward the end of the line. Looming before him was a towering chain-link fence topped with curling rusted razor wire, and behind it sat a sprawling, fortress-like compound. It was an old mechanics garage that had been heavily modified, its walls patched and reinforced, its windows blacked out so thoroughly that they looked like holes cut into the building. Security cameras panned methodically from the corners, small dark eyes sweeping the yard in slow, patient arcs. And painted on the massive reinforced steel doors was the iconic, terrifying winged death's head logo, and arched above it in red and white lettering that left no room for misunderstanding, the words HELLS ANGELS MC.
Every kid in Oildale knew about the clubhouse. It was the subject of whispered urban legends in the school cafeteria, traded in low voices over lunch trays: stories about what happened inside, about who went in and who did not come out, about bikes that shook the ground and men who did not answer to anyone. Parents locked their car doors when they drove past it. To the town, it was a den of outlaws, a place where the police rarely ventured without backup, a place decent people crossed the street to avoid. Leon had walked past it once, months ago, holding his breath the whole time, and he had never forgotten the feeling of the fence and the black windows and the cameras turning, slow as owls, to watch him pass.