Step by agonizing step, they fought up the embankment. Twice, Walter slipped, his knees slamming into the rocks, but he refused to let her go. He hauled her to the passenger side of his truck, threw open the door, and pushed her inside. He scrambled around to the driver’s seat, cranked the engine, and blasted the heat.
He stripped off his own dry flannel coat and wrapped it around her shivering legs, leaving himself in nothing but a damp cotton shirt. Throwing the truck into gear, he sped toward the county hospital, driving faster than he had in twenty years, praying to a God he hadn't spoken to since Eleanor's funeral.
When they reached the emergency room doors, Walter laid on the horn. Nurses rushed out with a gurney. As they lifted the girl out of the truck, the heavy leather jacket she had been clinging to slipped from her grasp and fell into a puddle.
Walter picked it up. It was soaking wet and incredibly heavy. As he turned it over to fold it, the hospital lights illuminated the back of the vest. Stitched across the leather was a massive, intricate patch: A grinning skull wrapped in heavy iron chains. Above it, in a rocker, were the words IRON WRAITHS MC.
Walter recognized it instantly. It was the insignia of the most feared outlaw motorcycle club in the Midwest.
He didn't care. He sat in the freezing waiting room for four hours, dripping water onto the linoleum, clutching the leather vest. Finally, a doctor emerged. He looked at Walter with a mixture of awe and respect.
"She’s going to make it, Mr. Briggs," the doctor said quietly. "Her name is Maya. Her core temp was dropping fast. If you had driven past her... she’d be dead. You saved her life tonight."
Exhausted, aching down to the marrow of his bones, Walter simply nodded. He left the leather vest with the nurses, walked out to his truck, and drove home into the breaking dawn. He fell into bed and immediately blacked out.
At 4:47 AM the following morning, Walter was jolted awake by a sound he had never heard before.
It started as a low, physical tremor that rattled the teacups in his cupboards and vibrated through the floorboards. It grew louder, swelling into a deafening, thunderous roar that sounded like a squadron of bombers landing in his front yard.
Walter’s heart seized. He threw on his bathrobe, his hands shaking so violently he could barely tie the belt. He patted his chest to ensure Eleanor’s photo was there, grabbed his walking cane, and limped out to the front porch.
He froze.
The darkness of his valley had been eradicated. Eight hundred headlights pierced the pre-dawn fog. Rolling up his long, muddy dirt road, filling his yard, lining his broken fences, and completely surrounding his farmhouse was an ocean of motorcycles.
It was a tidal wave of chrome, black leather, and roaring V-twin engines. They packed the property side-by-side, their exhaust pipes blowing thick clouds of steam into the cold air.
Then, as if controlled by a single invisible conductor, the engines were killed simultaneously. The sudden silence that fell over the farm was heavier and more terrifying than the noise.
Walter stood on his sagging porch, utterly alone, facing hundreds of hardened outlaws. He thought, for a fleeting moment, that they had come to finish whatever business the girl had been involved in. He braced himself, lifting his chin, determined to die standing up.
From the front of the pack, a single rider dismounted from a massive, custom black cruiser. He was a mountain of a man, standing six-foot-four, with a thick, graying beard and arms entirely covered in prison ink. He wore the President's patch of the Iron Wraiths.
The giant walked up the dirt path. His heavy steel-toed boots thudded against the wooden steps of Walter’s porch. The wood groaned under his weight. He stopped exactly two feet from the trembling old man.