I blinked into the bright daylight and heard the metal doors clang shut behind me. I looked around the empty parking lot, not sure what I had been expecting, but it hadn’t been this.

Five years of my life was gone, eaten up in California’s prison system because of my ties to the Blood Soldiers Motorcycle Club. Five years for running drugs over the border to our Mexican soldiers, five years for a few pounds of cocaine and it seemed like it had all been for nothing.

Shit, here I was, free at last…and not a single one of my club brothers had bothered to show up to give me a fucking ride.

I threw my duffel bag over one shoulder and started to hoof it towards the single bus stop at the end of the lot, the heat bearing down on me and my leather jacket starting to feel a little like a prison itself.

I hadn’t changed much over the past five years, at least not outwardly. My jeans still fit me snug, my boots were dry but wearable, the shirt I’d been wearing was a little tight, but the leather club jacket still clung to me like a glove.

I was surprised the prison allowed me to have it back, part of my parole conditions were to avoid fraternizing with any organized crime, but I guess on the books we were simply a bunch of guys who shared a similar interest in tinkering on our bikes.

Which reminded me, I needed to find out what the fuck had happened to mine. I felt half naked without a rumbling Harley between my thighs.

I heard a car backfire and fought the urge to drop down, thinking it was gunfire. Life inside would do that to you though, if your cell mates weren’t trying to shank you, your fellow prisoners were trying to take you down to prove they were tough, and if that wasn’t the case then the guards were making shit up to have a chance to shoot, club or beat you down.

I heard the tell-tale sound of metal on cement as the car cruised slowly up behind me. I turned around and found a mid-seventies boat of a Ford cruiser, rusted and dented, with a tailpipe hanging off. The source of the noise.

It backfired again and sputtered to a halt next to me.

The driver’s door opened with a pained groan of dented metal and out hopped the last person I thought I’d have to deal with today.

Lenny Simone, the club’s bookie, the boss’s cousin, and basically kind of a slime ball who couldn’t be trusted as far as you could throw him.

And even though I had about a foot of height on him, I wouldn’t be throwing him far, he had a couple hundred pounds on me, all of it fat from his love of overindulging in booze and greasy food.

“Hatch Malone,” he wheezed as he limped up to me. “As I live and breathe.”

“Lenny,” I replied, looking down at him. “So you’re my welcoming committee?”

“Shit, son, you have been locked away from information, haven’t you? We have a lot to talk about, but get in…this place makes me nervous.”

I climbed into the passenger seat, watched as Lenny heaved his bulk behind the steering wheel and pressed down on the gas, making the old car lurch ahead with another loud bang and a belch of blue smoke.

“What happened to your Range Rover?” I asked as we hit the highway. It would be a couple hour’s drive and I wasn’t looking forward to it in this thing.

“Gone,” he replied and glanced over at me nervously. “It’s all gone, Hatch. All of it.”

“What do you mean? Birdie was up to see me a few months ago and said nothing.”

“It was more than a few months, dude. You must have lost track of time. The last year has been fucking brutal. We got swarmed by the Nuggets and El Toro. They joined up and have taken us down, one by one until it’s me and a couple others…that’s it. We’re it,” he said, blurting it all out in a flood of words.

“What the fuck are you talking about? Nuggets? El Toro? Those guys are bullshit, how did they get one over on us? This is a joke, isn’t it?”

“No joke, they’ve been plotting for years and finally made their move. It started with a raid on our clubhouse down in Central City.”

“The strip club?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. Those fuckers came in at closing and mowed down every damned one of us. The girls too.”

“Jesus,” I replied, my rage starting to grow at the thought of somebody gunning down my brothers and the strippers who worked for the Blood Soldiers.

“That wasn’t even the worst of it,” Lenny said, his voice choking with emotion as he kept his eyes straight ahead on the road. “They continued like that, one by one, club by club, until they hit us here. Rocky’s place.”

“The hideout? Are you fucking kidding me? Why didn’t they defend themselves?”

“They tried,” he said, taking a huge, shaky breath. “It was six months ago, Hatch. Just six months. There were so many of them, they brought up a bunch of fucks from Mexico and even more from up in Nevada. Both gangs joined up together and hit us with all they had. We didn’t stand a chance, Hatch, we lost big time.”

I took it all in, his words and what it meant. It meant I wasn’t going to be stepping back into the life I’d left behind…and that my future was suddenly uncertain.

I listened to him talk as he drove, it seemed therapeutic for him somehow, and I formulated my plan.

I would leave while I could, get out while I still had a chance. Head to another city, another state, use the skills I’d picked up in the prison woodwork shop to start a business of my own.

I would always be a Blood Soldier at heart, but until I could figure out a way to take down the bastards who had done this and revive the club, I was just a man, an ex con, and a drifter looking for a home.