(Sven)

“About time you two showed up” Barron said stepping off of his bike.

“Loverboy Swede here was just putting his moves on a townie girl, don’t put the blame on me.”

“I think she might be a little better than a townie Sauly boy” I replied turning my bike off.

“Yeah well I didn’t talk to her so I wouldn’t actually know.”

“Will you both get your heads together, we got a job to do” Barron said walking over to us.

We were out in the middle of nowhere, there were forests completely surrounding us and the only way out was the road we just rode in on. If we hadn’t already found two other labs in the forests around here I would have thought that this was a dead end, Barron knows what he’s doing though.

“There’s a house deep in those woods, that’s why this place was such a bitch to find. They only have a few lights on so you can’t see it from all the way out here but I know the chemical smell of a lab anywhere. I don’t know how many guys are in there but I do know that I’ve been scoping this place for two days and not one person has stepped out.”

Barron was a big guy, bigger than me even, so it always amazed me how he was able to sneak around without ever getting his head blown off by the meth cooks who were always high on their own supply. He even tuned his ride to be just a bit quieter, a chopper ain’t exactly the best thing to use when you’re trying to sneak up on someone but he made it work.

He kept his hair buzzed unlike Saul and I who preferred to just keep it on the shorter side. Barron used to have long hair down to his shoulders but he cut it off when he got into a fight with another Freedom Rider member and the guy was able to grab a full handful of his hair and use it against him. Barron said he’d never let someone get the better of him like that again.

He took a duffle bag from off of the back of his bike and tossed it towards us. The familiar sound of guns hitting and clanking together reminded me just how real our job for the club was.

Freedom Riders always sent groups of three to do stuff like this, they nicknamed us Minutemen because we were supposed to be able to hitch up and roll out at a minute’s notice and do the job that no one else wanted to do or was even qualified for.

Saul opened the duffel bag up and handed me a pistol, reminding me that I still had the pistol that I stole from the guy who attacked Emma. I would have to ditch it somewhere, one of the first rules of being a Minuteman is never using a registered firearm, no matter whose it was you’d get caught one way or another. Cops aren’t as dumb as we make them out to be. We only ever bought guns for a specific job and we almost never held onto them afterwards just in case we got pinched. With the house being so deep in the woods I doubt the cops would be a problem here.

“To think I could have my lips wrapped around that cutie in her bed, feeling up that body of hers and making her moan my name” I said making sure the gun was loaded properly.

“You probably don’t even remember her name loverboy” Saul said chuckling.

“It’s Emma, it’s gonna be stuck in my mind after I whisper it into her ear when I’m on top of her. Oh Emma! Ohhh Emma!” I fake moaned jokingly, giving Saul a chuckle.

Barron grabbed me firmly by the shoulders “hey, I don’t want you thinking about tits and ass right now. I need you to focus, when we’re done this you can run buck wild for all I care but I’m not trying to take a bullet from some meth head in the middle of nowhere because you’re thinking about this townie girl.”

I brushed him off “how many times have we done this before? In and out job, I’m ready.” I wish that was the truth, truth is a man never gets used to doing something like this. You just learn to have a few drinks before the main event to make sure you don’t pussy out. With all that happened at the bar with Emma I only had one drink in me. Not even enough for a buzz.

“Any of you guys got a drink? You know how I am with this shit” I said. Barron took an opened vodka bottle out from one of his motorcycle bags and handed it to me. I quickly downed about three of four shots worth, just enough to get a buzz going. When you’re buzzed you fear death a lot less, not to mention pulling the trigger becomes that much easier. Anyone who’s done this before will tell you that the alertness tradeoff was more than worth it.

Before we got Saul we had this 20 something year old kid who ended up pussying out on us during a raid, I ended up with a bullet in my arm because of him. If he had just had a drink maybe he’d still be in the Freedom Riders, running away is unforgivable.

I was starting to get tired of being a minuteman but as of right now it was the only way for me to stay in the Freedom Riders, and I didn’t want to leave the brotherhood. Especially when my father was a member before me and his father before him.

“Alright boys” Barron said loading up his rifle. “Let’s clean up this mess.”

Saul took out three masks from the duffle bag and handed them to us. Classic goalie masks to hide our faces just in case anyone made a break for it and got out of there, last thing we needed was for these fucks to know our faces.

I looked at mine before putting it on, classic bone white with a blue stripe right down the center. Thing was so old it was probably a collector’s item, I might just hang onto this.

I reached into the bag and pulled out a sledge hammer, always needed one just in case we had to bust a door down. We started walking into the woods as we put our masks on, the sounds of crickets and cicadas masked our footsteps. I gripped my pistol tight in one hand and the sledgehammer in the other, ready for anything that was about to come our way. As we followed Baron the smell of the meth cook got worse and worse, even through the thick scent from the pine trees there was no denying that stench.

“Like cat pee and paint thinner” I said. “Every time it's gotta smell like cat pee and paint thinner, you’d think they’d throw some cinnamon or nutmeg in there just to make that shit smell tolerable.”

We finally came across a house, a two story piece of trash that looked like it could fall over at any moment.

“Alright boys you know how this thing goes, you take the inside and I’ll support you from the outside” Barron said taking position on top of a hill.

“Why does he always get the outside job?” Saul said taking position behind me.

I knocked on the door and a few seconds later we heard some scatter brained moron on the other side.

“Yeah! Who the hell is that?”

“Aim for the door handle” Saul whispered to me.

I nodded back to him and wound up the sledgehammer like a baseball bat. I cocked it to swing it as hard as I could, like I’ve done so many times before, like my dad and grandfather used to do.

“Learn to pay your debts asshole!”