CHAPTER 1
I’m Neon. That’s what they call me on the street, in the clubhouse, and on the bylines of the books I write.

I’ve penned over five hundred novels, spinning tales of modern America, of concrete jungles, neon lights, and the heavy, metallic truth of the highway.

But I’ve never written a fiction as wild, as raw, or as violently unpredictable as the reality of what happened on a scorching Tuesday afternoon in the Mojave Desert.

We were burying Dutch.

Dutch wasn’t just a friend. He was the Vice President of our charter.

A mountain of a man with fists like anvils and a mind sharp enough to play chess with the devil and win.

He was the kind of guy who commanded a room just by leaning against the doorframe.

When Dutch spoke, you listened. When Dutch rode, you followed.

And now, Dutch was in a box.

The official story from the county coroner was a single-vehicle accident.

They said his front tire blew out on a tight curve up on Highway 138, sending his custom Harley Panhead over the embankment and into the jagged rocks below.

Closed casket. Tragic loss. Case closed.

But in our world, things are rarely that simple.

The air that morning felt heavy, thicker than the dry desert heat had any right to be.

Over three hundred bikes were lined up outside the Desert View Cemetery in Barstow.

The rumble of the V-twin engines was a physical force, a low, guttural vibration that rattled the fillings in your teeth and vibrated right through your combat boots.

It was a sea of black leather, denim, and patches. Brothers from all over the West Coast had ridden in to pay their respects.

The exhaust fumes mixed with the smell of dry sagebrush and melting asphalt.

I stood near the front, my cut heavy on my shoulders.

The President of our charter, a gray-bearded titan named ‘Bones,’ stood beside me.

His eyes were hidden behind dark aviators, but his jaw was clenched so tight I thought his teeth might shatter.

We watched as six of our biggest brothers hoisted the heavy mahogany casket off the hearse and carried it toward the open grave.

The silence that fell over the crowd was absolute.

Three hundred rough, dangerous men, entirely silent.

The only sounds were the crunch of boots on the gravel and the distant, lonely whistle of a freight train cutting across the desert floor.

The preacher, a retired brother who had found God somewhere between a federal penitentiary and a hospital bed, stepped up to the podium.

He opened his Bible, the pages fluttering in the hot, dry wind.

“We gather here today under the endless sky,” the preacher began, his voice carrying a gravelly weight, “to say farewell to a man who lived his life a quarter-mile at a time. A brother. A leader.”

I kept my eyes on the casket.

The polished wood gleamed in the harsh afternoon sun.

Our charter’s colors were draped perfectly over the top.

It felt surreal. Dutch was immortal. Or at least, we thought he was.

As the preacher droned on, I noticed a cloud of dust kicking up down the long, dirt access road leading into the cemetery.

Someone was coming in hot. Way too hot for a funeral.

I nudged Bones. He gave a microscopic nod.

He had seen it too.

The Sergeant at Arms, a massive enforcer we called ‘Tank,’ subtly signaled a few of the prospects to go check it out.

But before they could even reach the perimeter, the vehicle came tearing through the wrought-iron gates.

It was a beat-up, faded silver 1998 Honda Civic.

The front bumper was held on by duct tape, and the radiator was hissing violently.

The car slammed on the brakes, skidding sideways in the loose gravel and coming to a halt barely twenty yards from the gathered crowd.

The squeal of the brakes was like nails on a chalkboard, ripping through the solemn silence of the funeral.

Every head turned. Hands instinctively went to waistbands.

In our line of work, a sudden, erratic arrival usually meant a rival crew or a drive-by.

But no guns emerged from the windows.

Instead, the driver’s side door was kicked open with a violent, desperate force.

A girl stumbled out.

She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two.

She was wearing a torn, oversized denim jacket, faded black jeans, and scuffed combat boots.

Her blonde hair was a tangled, sweaty mess plastered to her forehead.

But it was her face that made my blood run cold.

She was pale – chalk white, like she had seen a ghost, or worse, like she was running from one.

She had a fresh, dark purple bruise blooming across her left cheekbone, and a split lip that was still leaking a thin trail of blood down her chin.

Her eyes were wild. Frantic. They were the eyes of a cornered animal.

“Dutch!” she screamed, her voice cracking with a raw, agonizing desperation.

The sound of it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

She didn’t freeze when she saw the wall of three hundred terrifying, leather-clad bikers staring her down.

Instead, she put her head down and charged.

“Whoa, hold up there, sweetheart,” Tank barked, stepping directly into her path.

He was six-foot-four and weighed two hundred and eighty pounds.

Hitting him was like hitting a brick wall.

But the girl didn’t even slow down.

She slammed into Tank’s chest, bouncing off him, but instantly recovered, clawing, scratching, and fighting like a rabid wolverine.

“Let me through! You don’t understand!” she shrieked, swinging wildly.

Her knuckles clipped Tank’s jaw.

It didn’t hurt him, but it pissed him off.

Two other brothers, ‘Snake’ and ‘Ironhead,’ stepped in, grabbing her arms to restrain her.

“Calm down, crazy bitch!” Snake yelled, struggling to keep a grip on her flailing limbs.

But panic gives people superhuman strength.

She twisted, dropping her weight, and bit down hard on Snake’s forearm.

He cursed, loosening his grip for a fraction of a second.

That was all she needed.

She slipped out of her denim jacket, leaving it in Ironhead’s hands, and sprinted straight for the open grave.

She was fast. Too fast.

She broke through the inner circle of the mourners.

Bones yelled an order, but it was too late.

The girl reached the front and launched herself at the mahogany casket.

She didn’t just lean on it; she slammed into it with her entire body weight.

Her fists hammered against the polished wood in a frantic, terrifying rhythm.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“He didn’t die! He didn’t die!” she screamed, tears cutting tracks through the dust on her face. “You’re burying the wrong truth! You’re burying it with him!”

The impact rocked the casket.

The heavy wooden box groaned, shifting dangerously on the aluminum lowering device suspended over the six-foot hole.

The brass latches on the side of the casket, which apparently hadn’t been secured properly by the terrified funeral directors, snapped.

The entire cemetery erupted into chaos.

Brothers were yelling. The preacher had backed away, clutching his Bible.

Tank and three others finally swarmed the girl, taking her down to the ground.

She fought them every inch of the way, kicking up clouds of red dirt, screaming Dutch’s name until her voice was completely hoarse.

“Get her the hell out of here!” Bones roared, his voice cutting through the noise like a gunshot. “Take her to the clubhouse. Tie her to a chair if you have to. I want to know who sent her.”

As they dragged the thrashing, sobbing girl away, I stepped closer to the grave to check the casket.

It had slid off-center.

And the lid… the lid was sitting crooked.

The impact had jolted it open just an inch.

I stood there, looking down at the dark, narrow slit.

A heavy, suffocating feeling settled in my chest.

Something was wrong. The air felt charged with static electricity.

Bones walked up next to me, breathing heavy.

“Push it back in place, Neon,” he muttered, adjusting his sunglasses. “Let’s get him in the ground before this turns into a circus.”

I reached out, resting my hands on the smooth, hot wood of the lid.

I intended to push it closed, to snap the latch back in place.

But my novelist instinct – the part of my brain that notices the details, that looks for the story beneath the surface – stopped me.

Through the one-inch gap, I didn’t smell the sickeningly sweet odor of embalming fluid.

I smelled copper. Old, dried blood.

“Hold on,” I whispered.

“What is it?” Bones asked, his tone impatient.

Without answering, I gripped the edge of the lid and pulled it back.

The heavy wood slid open with a soft, mournful creak.

Several brothers behind me gasped.

I just stared.

Dutch was in there. He looked terrible.

The morticians had done their best, but the left side of his face was a jigsaw puzzle of wax and heavy makeup, trying to hide the catastrophic trauma of the crash.

He was wearing his colors, his massive hands crossed over his chest.

But it wasn’t Dutch’s face that made my heart stop.

It was what he was holding.

Tucked directly under his rigid, cold hands, resting against his leather vest, was a thick manila envelope.

It hadn’t been put there by the mortician. It was filthy.

The bottom half of the envelope was soaked in dark, dried, crusty blood.

And scrawled across the front, in thick, black sharpie, were two words:

FOR NEON.

Bones let out a low, dangerous breath. “What the hell is that?”

My hands were shaking. I reached into the silk-lined coffin.

The air inside was ice cold.

My fingers brushed against Dutch’s stiff knuckles as I grabbed the envelope.

It felt heavy. Dense.

I pulled it out into the blinding desert sun.

The crowd of bikers had gone dead silent again.

Three hundred pairs of eyes were burning holes into the back of my head.

I looked down at the envelope. My name. Dutch’s blood.

I ripped the sealed flap open.

Inside, there was a stack of photographs and a single, handwritten letter on a piece of yellow legal pad paper.

The handwriting was erratic, rushed. Dutch’s handwriting.

I pulled the letter out.

Neon, it read.

If you’re reading this, I’m already in the dirt. But it wasn’t the road that took me. They found out about the shipment. They found out about the desert run. The girl – Chloe – she has the ledger. If they get to her, the whole club burns. All of us. Federal RICO, life sentences across the board. The Cartel isn’t just cutting ties; they are coming to slaughter the entire West Coast charter. Tonight. At the clubhouse. You have hours.

I stopped reading. My lungs felt like they had collapsed.

I looked at the first photograph.

It was a picture of our clubhouse in Oakland.

But it was taken through the crosshairs of a sniper scope.

The next photo was of Bones’ house.

The next was of my apartment.

I looked up. Bones was staring at me, waiting.

The silence in the cemetery was deafening.

“What does it say, brother?” Bones asked, his voice low, a dangerous edge creeping into it.

I slowly turned to look at the President of our charter.

I didn’t hand him the letter. I didn’t need to.

I looked past him, to Tank, who was standing by the vans with the bruised, bleeding girl who had just tried to warn us.

“Bones,” I said, my voice completely steady, completely devoid of emotion. “Leave the coffin open.”

Bones frowned. “What?”

“Leave it open,” I repeated, looking out over the sea of three hundred heavily armed, lethal men who thought today was just about mourning. “Because we are about to fill a lot more boxes by midnight.”

I held up the blood-soaked letter.

“Get on the encrypted comms,” I ordered, bypassing the President’s authority in a way that would usually get a man killed.

But right now, the rules were gone.

“Call Oakland. Call Vegas. Call Reno. Sound the alarm.”

“What alarm?” Tank yelled from the back.

“All of them,” I yelled back, the reality of the situation finally setting fire to my veins. “I want every full-patch member on the West Coast armed and moving within fifteen minutes. We’re going to war.”

CHAPTER 2
The roar that erupted from the crowd wasn’t of anger, but of a grim, united purpose.

Three hundred men moved as one, stripping off their vests, pulling out phones, and barking orders.

The funeral directors, still pale and trembling, were shoved aside.

The ground was left open, Dutch’s coffin half-exposed, as a symbol of unfinished business.

Bones, recovering from his initial shock, clapped me hard on the shoulder. “You’re damn right, Neon. Full alert. Every brother. Now.”

Tank, with Chloe still struggling in his grip, had dragged her over to me. Her eyes, though still wild, now held a flicker of desperate hope.

“She tried to tell you,” Tank grumbled, still annoyed by the bite mark on his arm. “Said Dutch was working on something big.”

I knelt before Chloe, ignoring the blood and dirt. “What’s your name again, girl?”

“Chloe,” she whispered, her voice hoarse. “Dutch told me to find you. Only you.”

I held up the envelope. “He did. He gave you the ledger?”

She nodded, tears welling again. “Yes. It’s in my car. Under the passenger seat. Hidden.”

I sent two prospects, ‘Roadie’ and ‘Hammer,’ to retrieve it. They were back in minutes, carrying a tattered, leather-bound book.

It looked innocent, like a dusty old journal.

But I knew better. This was the fuse.

Bones looked at the photographs of our homes, then at Chloe, a flicker of understanding dawning in his eyes.

“You said the Cartel, Dutch wrote,” Bones stated, his voice tight. “What exactly did Dutch do?”

Chloe took a shaky breath, her eyes darting nervously between our faces. “Dutch was intercepting their shipments. Not just drugs, but weapons. High-grade stuff, flowing through the desert right under your noses.”

“He was playing a dangerous game,” I muttered, flipping through the ledger.

It wasn’t just numbers. It was names, dates, routes, coded messages, and even bank accounts.

This wasn’t just a threat to our club; this was enough to bring down a major international crime syndicate.

Chloe explained Dutch’s plan. He’d been feeding the Cartel bad intel, diverting their assets, then hitting their real shipments from the shadows. He’d done it for months, building up this ledger, waiting for the right moment.

“He planned to expose them, all of them,” Chloe explained, her voice gaining strength. “He wanted to cut off their West Coast operations entirely. And he needed the club to back him when the time came.”

The implication hung heavy in the air. Dutch wasn’t just a victim; he was a warrior, fighting a ghost war we didn’t even know we were in.

But then, a chilling detail. “He also told me to tell you,” Chloe added, her voice barely a whisper, “that there’s a snake in your own garden.”

My head snapped up. Bones’ jaw tightened.

“What snake?” I demanded.

“He said the Cartel knew about the desert run because someone gave them the information. Someone close to him. Someone who knew his movements.”

This was the first twist. A mole. It had to be.

We had no time to process it. The comms were buzzing with reports.

Oakland was mobilizing, bikers peeling out of driveways and clubhouses. Vegas and Reno charters were already on the move, a tidal wave of steel and thunder headed our way.

The desert wind whipped around us as we packed up. The solemn funeral had become a war council.

Bones pointed at the ledger. “This thing. How did Dutch get all this?”

Chloe hesitated, then spoke, her voice laced with pain. “He had a contact. Someone inside the Cartel’s operation. A woman. She was trying to get out.”

“Dutch was playing with fire,” Bones said, his voice grim. “He put the entire club on the line without telling us.”

“He wanted to protect you,” Chloe countered, tears returning. “He knew if he brought it to the table, some would argue against it. He wanted undeniable proof first.”

CHAPTER 3
The next few hours were a blur of frantic activity.

We left Barstow like a storm, a long column of bikes splitting the desert highway.

Bones, Tank, and I led the charge, with Chloe wedged between Tank and Ironhead in a club van, guarded like the crown jewels.

Our destination was the main Oakland clubhouse. That’s where the Cartel’s primary attack would land.

As we rode, the intelligence came flooding in. The Cartel was indeed assembling.

They were moving hit squads, not just against the clubhouse, but against key members’ homes, just as Dutch’s photos had shown.

Their plan was a systematic decapitation of our leadership.

“They’re not just hitting us, Neon,” Bones growled over the comms. “They’re trying to wipe us out, make an example.”

The rage was palpable, a collective growl echoing across the desert.

The thought of a mole burned at the back of my mind. Who would betray Dutch? Who would betray us all?

We arrived in Oakland as dusk painted the sky in shades of bruised purple and orange.

The clubhouse was a fortress. Barricades were up, windows reinforced, and brothers were positioned on every rooftop and at every vantage point.

The streets around our territory were empty, an eerie calm before the storm.

Soon, the thrum of engines announced the arrival of the other charters.

Vegas, Reno, Sacramento – a flood of black leather and chrome.

Over a thousand Angels, just as Dutch’s letter predicted, had assembled.

The sight was breathtaking, a testament to the unbreakable bond of our brotherhood.

Bones called an immediate war council. Chloe, despite her injuries and exhaustion, was brought in.

She detailed the Cartel’s known tactics, their internal structure, and the names of their key enforcers.

The ledger, spread across the table, was a roadmap to their destruction.

Then, the second twist began to unfold. As Chloe listed names, Tank suddenly slammed his fist on the table.

“Hold on!” he roared. “That name… Elias. That’s Bones’ nephew.”

A hush fell over the room. Elias, Bones’ sister’s kid, had been a prospect a few years back.

He’d washed out, couldn’t handle the lifestyle, and had disappeared a year or so ago.

Bones’ face was a mask of stone. “Elias?” he repeated, his voice dangerously low. “He wouldn’t be involved with something like this.”

But Chloe shook her head, her eyes filled with pain. “Dutch said Elias was the one. He was caught trying to steal from a Cartel shipment, and they turned him. Blackmailed him into being their inside man.”

The betrayal hit us harder than any bullet. A nephew. A former prospect.

This was the snake in the garden. Elias, desperate and weak, had given the Cartel the intel on Dutch.

Bones rose slowly, his eyes fixed on the ledger. “He sealed Dutch’s fate,” he whispered, a tremor in his voice.

The irony was stark. Dutch, the man who risked everything to fight a great evil, was brought down by a small, petty betrayal from someone related to our own President.

But the moment for grief was brief. The first sirens wailed in the distance.

The Cartel was here.

CHAPTER 4
The battle was fierce, a brutal symphony of gunfire, revving engines, and the shouts of men.

The Cartel came in waves, heavily armed, confident in their numbers and their intelligence.

But they underestimated the sheer, raw fury of a thousand Hells Angels defending their home and their fallen brother.

The sniper nests Dutch had photographed were taken out by our own sharpshooters, positioned earlier.

The ambush points the Cartel had planned were turned against them.

We fought block by block, street by street, transforming Oakland’s industrial district into a war zone.

Bones, a grizzled general, commanded from the front, his shotgun a blur of motion.

Tank was an unstoppable force, tearing through enemy lines.

I found myself fighting with a cold, calculated rage, thinking of Dutch’s sacrifice, of Chloe’s courage, and of the betrayal.

Chloe, despite her injuries, stayed with us, providing crucial real-time intel about Cartel movements that only someone with her knowledge could possess.

She pointed out weak points in their formations, identified key leaders, and even warned us about booby traps Dutch had discovered.

The fight raged for hours. The Cartel, realizing they were outmatched by our sheer numbers and organized defense, began to falter.

Their coordinated attack dissolved into desperate skirmishes.

As the sun began to rise, painting the smoky sky with hues of red and gold, the last of the Cartel forces retreated, broken and decimated.

We had held our ground. We had won.

But victory came at a cost. Brothers were wounded, some gravely. The clubhouse stood, battered but unbowed.

As the smoke cleared, the grim task of accounting began.

Amidst the chaos, a small team led by Tank had found Elias.

He wasn’t with the Cartel forces. He was hiding in an abandoned warehouse a few blocks away, watching the battle, paralyzed by fear and guilt.

They brought him to Bones. Elias, pale and shaking, confessed everything.

The Cartel had indeed blackmailed him after catching him stealing. They promised him money and safety if he helped them take out Dutch, who they saw as a growing problem.

He didn’t know the full scope of Dutch’s ledger, only that Dutch was disrupting their operations.

Bones, his face etched with sorrow and anger, simply nodded.

There was no shouting, no violence. Just a quiet, devastating understanding.

Elias was handed over to a group of trusted brothers, not for revenge, but to be stripped of his former association, to face the consequences of his actions outside the club’s justice.

He would live, but he would live with the shame and the knowledge of what he had done.

The ledger itself was a goldmine. With Cartel operations crippled and their internal structure exposed, we handed the ledger, carefully redacted to protect club interests while still exposing the Cartel, to an anonymous contact within federal law enforcement.

Dutch’s ultimate goal was realized. The Cartel’s West Coast operations collapsed.

Their leadership was rounded up in a series of raids that made national news, all thanks to the information Dutch had meticulously gathered.

Chloe, the “psycho girl” who slammed Dutch’s coffin, found a new kind of peace.

She had risked everything for Dutch, and in doing so, had helped bring down a criminal empire.

She didn’t join the club, but she became an honorary, trusted ally, a quiet hero in her own right.

The club, though scarred, emerged stronger. We buried Dutch again, this time with full honors, his coffin finally sealed.

But this time, it was a burial not just of a brother, but of a hero.

We learned that day that loyalty runs deeper than blood.

That sometimes, the greatest threats come from within, and the most unexpected saviors can burst into your life in a beat-up Honda Civic.

Dutch’s defiance, his willingness to stand alone against overwhelming evil, taught us a profound lesson.

True courage isn’t about never being afraid, but about facing down that fear for a cause greater than yourself.

It taught us that brotherhood isn’t just about riding together; it’s about protecting each other, even from the truths we don’t want to hear.

The true reward was not just survival, but the reaffirmation of our core values, forged in the crucible of a desert funeral and an urban battlefield.

We learned that sometimes, burying the dead is just the beginning of truly understanding the living.

And that the loudest voices aren’t always the most truthful, but the quiet ones, like Chloe’s, can hold the key to everything.

If this story resonated with you, share it with your friends and hit that like button. Let the world know what brotherhood truly means.