He entertained the thought he might follow her a ways, if she pulled off before the Bulls did. He was curious what was under that helmet and that armored jacket.
Letting his mind play around with that thought, Rad settled in for the last leg of this long ride.
~oOo~
Fifteen minutes later, all thoughts of how that ass might feel in his hands were gone.
Rad saw it all happen.
The road lay before him like a ribbon, rising just enough to clear the view, like standing at the bottom of an amphitheater and looking up into the seats. About a mile ahead, maybe a little less, with the last of the sun glinting off their cladding, he could still make out the bright green and red flashes of the Kawa pair, heading up the rise of the road.
Hot Ass had almost caught up to them; she was about three or four cars behind.
A fuckwit in some kind of cage—Rad could name most bikes at some distance, but cages these days all looked the same to him—was starting to get ragey in the thickening traffic on this spring Sunday evening. Rad had seen him do the move drivers did where they shoved themselves into a space barely as long as their cage, then tailgated until they could shove themselves in front of a vehicle in the next lane, like that video game with the frog. That was dangerous shit, especially for bikers, because there was no way the asshole driving like that was paying attention to anything but the slimmest hint that there was room in the next lane. If that.
Noting that driver make that fucked-up move three times in succession, Rad had his antennae up. The road was still full of bikers, but the traffic had broken them up some. Few drivers understood that it was bad form to break into a riding formation. They figured if the bikes weren’t all grouped in a knot, they could slide in.
They could, technically. There might be room, technically. But they shouldn’t. They should let the bikes keep together. The best kind of drivers would slow down or pull over, in fact. But pretty much the only drivers who did that were also riders.
If you rode, you knew it was up to you to look out for your own head. Nobody else was going to bother.
Rad had just about enough time to wish there were a way to send a warning up ahead, because those kids on the sport bikes were riding too comfortably, like they believed that everybody on the road with them understood that they had a right to be there.
He wasn’t surprised, therefore, when the rager shoved his cage into the lane and took both Kawas out.
What happened next, however, shocked the shit out of him.
The green Kawa went airborne, its riders flying pell-mell, and the red bike laid down, spinning wildly backward, into traffic. Rad didn’t see either rider part from the bike, but they must have.
The rager’s cage spun forward and stopped facing the median.
“Don’t do it, jackoff,” Rad muttered as he quickly, instinctively maneuvered out of the way of the continuing crash.
He pulled to the shoulder, sensing every bike around him doing the same, and brought his Dyna into the median as the chain reaction went on. Trained to pay attention to his surroundings, he listened and watched. He lost count at ten collisions—they were overlapping each other too much to distinguish—but they were nowhere near done.
The wrecks up at the front were bad—fatally bad. He had every expectation that he’d get up there and find the young bikers in mangled pieces. As the reaction rippled down the line, it finally petered out at fender benders not far ahead of where he and the rest of the Bulls—and another twenty or so patches from other clubs—had come to rest in the median.
Screams and moans already undulated in the air.
The cage that had started all this mess was gone—the rager had bolted. As Rad had suspected he would.
Nearly as one, every biker stood his bike on the shoulder or laid it in the grassy median and ran forward to offer their help. It would take some time for emergency crews to get to the scene, through the mess of traffic and the crumpled snarl of involved vehicles.
Rad saw the little silver sportster on its side in the middle of the interstate, its rider lying prone not far from it. He ran there first.
As he neared, he felt a charge of relief when the rider worked her way to a seated position. She pulled off her black helmet and showed short blonde hair.
Rad skidded to a stop at her side, then dropped to his knees. “You okay?”
CHAPTER TWO
Willa groaned and tried to get her bearings. The world spun and shrieked around her.
“Hey!” a voice at her side demanded, and fingers snapped before her face. “You okay, darlin’?”
Okay? Was she okay? Why wouldn’t she be? Where was she?
With a sudden blast of sensation, the world came into focus. She was sitting on the pavement. Her head hurt, and her right side ached like someone had been beating her with a bat. Screams and moans and bright, metallic chaos shook the air around her—air that smelled of gasoline and hot rubber. Her helmet was in her lap.
Her helmet. The side was scraped and gouged, and that brought the scene home and woke her up.
Fuck, she’d been riding home. On US-75. That asshole in the silver Aerostar.
She looked around. Her bike was several feet away, and she could see from here that it was fucked. The front wheel tipped drunkenly upward—the fork was bent. And a puddle of fluid was growing around the body.
Fingers snapped in front of her face again, and she knocked the offending hand away. “I’m okay, I’m okay.”
“You sure? You took a hell of a drop.” A hand took firm hold of her elbow, and Willa finally looked up to see who the hell was in her business.
The leering ape in the Bulls patch—a broad, bearded beast in black shades. The setting sun washed him in backlight and made him seem like some kind of wacked-out angel come to take her home.
Willa had been on her way back from the Big Texas Heart Ride, Rally, & Show in Houston, which had turned into something like a Randall family reunion. Willa didn’t go home to West Texas anymore—ever—but they’d all decided that the rally in Houston was far enough to be safe. Her whole family rode—parents, brothers, sister. It had been a very good weekend.
Living in Tulsa the past couple of years, she knew the Brazen Bulls by reputation. They weren’t really the kind of bikers she wanted to commune with.
But she’d enjoyed riding back surrounded by patches from all sorts of clubs, and she’d enjoyed the attention she’d gotten from a few—like this guy. She always felt like a badass astride her Harley, and getting appreciation from actual badasses stroked her ego just right.
It could be a problem, her enjoyment of that appreciation. Except that she had learned some lessons, and she was a good student.
She pulled her elbow from his grip, but he grabbed her again. “Let’s get you out of the road. Can you stand?”
“Jesus! I said I’m okay!” Why was she was snapping at this guy? He was trying to help. He didn’t seem particularly offended, however. “Sorry. Yeah, I can stand.”
She let him help her to her feet—ow, shit. Her right knee buckled, and her Bull angel caught her around the waist with his free arm.
“I’m okay, I’m okay.”
He barked a harsh laugh. “I don’t think you know what that word means.”
She put weight on her leg again, and it held—not broken. Her knee was hurt, maybe a strained ACL or MCL. The pain was too widespread to tell. But she could hold herself up on it.
The scene around them had taken on its full dimension, and she saw an arm—just an arm, its meat spilling out around a spear of white bone, lying in a pool of blood.
Willa finally really looked, sent out her attention beyond her own pain and confusion and looked.
US-75 was the picture of the apocalypse. Cars filled the macadam from shoulder to median, turned every which way. Those closest were crumpled together in Picasso-esque shapes and spewing vapor and fluid—and smoke. The acrid tang of mechanical smoke wafted over the scene. Willa saw no flames, bu
t they couldn’t be far off.
People wandered aimlessly, bloody and rumpled, moaning and crying. Some were screaming.
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah,” the Bull said. “If you’re really okay, I want to get you to the shoulder. I need to help out. Paramedics are gonna have a time gettin’ through this shitshow, and people are hurt bad.”
He tried to urge her toward the side, but she resisted. “No. I really am okay—shaken up, and sore, but okay. I need to help. I’m a nurse.”
A Labor & Delivery nurse, but she’d done her time in the ER, too.
Dark eyebrows came up over black sunglasses. “Yeah? You feelin’ up to help?”
All around, people were helping. Not everyone—some were standing, stunned; others were obviously hurt and wandering around like extras in a George Romero flick. But lots of people were helping, too, and lots of them were wearing kuttes.
Willa saw a woman standing at the side of a crushed compact, screaming and yanking on a door handle. She hadn’t been noticed yet. Setting her hands on the beefy forearms of her personal Good Samaritan, Willa pushed him back.
She saw the patches on the front of his leather kutte. Two strips of white with black western lettering on the left side, one atop the other: Sergeant at Arms above Tested and True. On the right, another similar flash, in cursive lettering: Radical. She guessed that for his road name. Below that, a long white diamond Willa knew, with a simple symbol in the center: 1%.
Just in case anyone was unclear on whether the Brazen Bulls were an outlaw club.
She shook her attention from his broad chest and said, “Somebody’s trapped in that car.”
Radical the Bull turned in the direction of her nod, then nodded himself and headed that way. Willa followed, getting better control of her limp, and the pain that made it, with every step.
As they reached the remains of the little red Nissan, sirens finally began to wail.
~oOo~
The young man in the Nissan was obviously dead. He’d been sitting in the front passenger seat, and his body stopped below the seat belt, where the back wall of the engine compartment had severed him. The driver, another man, likely also dead, was almost entirely buried under the engine. All that showed was half his head, and a crew cut that had been grey before it had been dyed in blood.
The woman continued shrieking incoherently. While Radical went to the driver’s side to try to force the door open, Willa got her arms around her and forced her away from the car. She didn’t need to stand there in sight of the gory remains of people who were important to her.
When she had the woman turned from that tableau of death, Willa took hold of her face and tried to make her focus. “Your head is bleeding, honey. Let me see your eyes.”
“It’s his birthday! It’s his birthday!” the woman wailed. “His birthday!”
Willa cast her eyes back to the ruins of the little car. She supposed one of those men would have the same date for birth and death on his grave marker.
Radical met her eyes and shook his head, indicating that he hadn’t gotten the door open. No matter—the driver had to have been killed when the engine landed on him. Someone must have hailed the biker just then, because his head swung around to look over his shoulder. He met her eyes once more, then trotted off, probably toward someone he could actually help.
Willa focused on her patient. She needed to help this woman calm down, at least enough for triage. “What’s your name, honey?”
That question often pulled people back from the brink, as if the brain was so hardwired to its own name that, with any awareness at all, it couldn’t remain insensible to someone’s interest in it. The woman—she was young, maybe still in her teens, no older than early twenties, Willa guessed—cut off her wails with a sniff. “A-A-Allison.”
“Hi, Allison. I’m Willa.”
Blood creased in Allison’s forehead as she frowned. “Will?”
“Willa. But lots of people call me Will, too. You can, if you want.” She dropped a hand and picked up Allison’s wrist, checking her pulse—rapid but strong.
“My dad calls me Al. It’s his birthday.”
The driver, then. Willa couldn’t let her go down that mental chute again; she needed her to keep her attention away from the car. “How old are you, Allison?”
For a second or two, Allison only stared, slack-jawed, her focus far away. With a blink, she came back. “Nineteen. Jarod is twenty-one.”
“Jarod?”
“My brother. I can’t get them out.” She started to turn her head back toward the Nissan, but Willa took hold again and kept her facing away from the car. “Help is coming, Allison. Just stay with me, okay? Tell me how you’re feeling.” As she asked, she studied the girl’s eyes. They didn’t hold focus very well, but they were working in tandem, and that was good.
“My head hurts.”
A paramedic in a blue uniform trotted up to them, a field pack on his shoulder. Willa worked at one of the biggest hospitals in Tulsa, so she knew some of the emergency personnel in the city, but not this guy.
“You two need assistance?”
“Allison here is a little disoriented. I think she took a good crack to the head. Two males DOS in the Nissan.” She hoped the girl didn’t know that DOS meant ‘Dead on Scene.’
At her choice of acronym, the medic gave her a sharp look. “You a pro?”
“I’m a nurse at Tulsa County.”
As the medic took hold of Allison’s hand, he said, “Looks like you took some hurt, too.” He nodded at Willa’s right side.
Willa looked down. The arm of her leather jacket was shredded, and her leather pants were torn. She saw blood peeking through the tattered edges of the tears.
“I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
Willa fucking hated to be a patient, but even if her first reaction hadn’t always been to avoid medical attention, on this day, in this scene, she was legitimately low on the triage list. Alert, oriented, ambulatory. She was okay. “I’m sure. I can help. What can I do?”
Before the medic could answer, an explosion shook the ground.
~oOo~
Northbound US-75 was shut down for five hours. Emergency crews from as far off as Oklahoma City were on scene most of that time, trying to control the chaos caused by a fuckhead with road rage—who’d left the scene of his destruction.
So much chaos and destruction.
Eleven people dead, including three of the bikers who’d been hit first. Twenty-three hospitalized, including the fourth biker, who’d lost one leg for sure and possibly both. Almost forty with injuries treated on scene, not including Willa, whose leg was thumping, but she’d declined attention for it. She still had three days of her vacation left; she’d intended to spend it puttering in her garden and doing some work on the house, but instead, she’d wrap her knee, pop a Percocet or two, and lie on the sofa with a book.
By the time the fires were out and all the bodies of the dead and injured had been transported from the scene, while the wrecker crews began taking charge, Willa was seated on the rear bumper of a paramedic truck, drinking a cup of watery rescue coffee and focusing on how the fuck she was going to get home, so she had something to think about that wasn’t blood and death and hurt.
She could ask one of the cops—or hell, she could get a ride with this paramedic team, likely. Chase—the medic who’d helped her with Allison—was showing signs of interest in her, anyway.
But she wasn’t interested back, and she didn’t feel like deflecting any puppy-dog charm. He seemed like he’d be the puppy-dog type. Id est: not her type.
“Hey, darlin’.” The big Bull came around the rear fender of the truck. It was full dark, but the night seemed strangely bright, illuminated by the red, white, and blue lightning of a multitude of emergency flashers. And the yellow pulses of the lights on the wreckers.
She’d noticed the bikers—not just Bulls, but lots of patches—working tirelessly with the emergency crews, follow
ing their lead, doing what they could to help. Eventually, enough crews had made the scene that they’d pushed civilian assistance off, but most of the bikers still helped, checking on the people in the median.
“Hey. Radical, right?”
His grin snaked up one side of his face. That lopsided glide was the kind of expression that said two things about a man: first, that he was used to women being into him, and second, that he thought all those swoony women were as amusing as they were convenient.
Crash (The Brazen Bulls MC Book 1) Page 2
