Bull (Kings of Mayhem MC 6)

I rode through the afternoon light, hoping the warm breeze coming in off the river would clear away the nostalgia. I wasn’t a man who was a slave to his emotions. Like everything in my life, I kept them in check. But when I felt the slow creep of something dark entering my mind, taking a ride was the perfect fucking elixir. There was nothing like the wind whipping against your body and rushing past your face to clear your head and leave you feeling high.

As I pulled up to the set of lights near the elementary school, something out of the corner of my eye caught my attention. In the parking lot behind the bus stop, three older kids were pushing around a smaller kid. It was your typical middle school shoulder shoving stuff, but experience told me the smaller kid was way out of his league with these guys.

One thing I won’t ever tolerate is an older punk picking on someone smaller than him. Let alone two on one.

Obviously, I belong to a motorcycle club. We thrive as a pack. But I’ll tell you one thing, my club exists as a powerful union. Not a pack of fucking bullies. And you won’t catch us crushing the little guy just because we can. It was a lesson my daddy taught me from an early age. And one I was about to teach these little punks right now.

Because I knew what it felt like to be picked on.

Knew what it was like to feel small and feeble.

When I was a small boy, I used to walk home from school by myself. I used to cut through the watermelon fields and wade through the shallows of the river toward our home near the railroad tracks. Jethro and Camryn Stuber were three years older than me…and mean as fuck. Their older brother, Waylon, was four years older, and even meaner. They thought it was fun to throw stones…and then rocks. Then they thought it was fun to hold me down in the mud and water until I couldn’t breathe. One time, they thought it would be really fun to hold me down until I stopped fighting and became still in the murky water.

Four decades later, I could still feel my lungs burning and my brain crying for oxygen as my world slowly and excruciatingly turned to black. Veronica had found me in the shallows, barely alive. She told me later that she thanked God every single day for saving my life, that if she had come along a few minutes later, I might have died. But I did die in those shallows. Because the boy who woke up from the terrible darkness was different. He knew how it felt to be helpless, how it felt to feel vulnerable and weak, and he promised himself that he wasn’t ever going to feel that way again.

Roaring off the road, I startled all of them when I pulled up with a violent screech of tires.

Two of the punks were smart enough to look scared. They were twins. Identical. Both sharing the same look of panic at my arrival.

The third, a taller kid who was obviously the leader of the pack, looked impressed by me and my bike. He let go of the smaller kid’s t-shirt and puffed out his chest.

“Nice bike, man,” he said with a raise of his chin.

Flattery never got anyone anywhere with me.

“You know who I am, kid?”

“You’re Bull. You’re the president of the Kings of Mayhem.”

“That’s right. And do you know who the Kings of Mayhem are?”

The kid grinned. “They’re bad motherfuckers.”

I nodded. “Yes, we are, indeed, bad motherfuckers. And you know who the meanest, baddest motherfucker of them all is?”

His brow wrinkled. “You?”

“That’s right. Me. And see that kid over there that you’re roughing up—”

“I wasn’t roughing him—”

“Now, don’t go making a liar out of yourself, son. You lie and people get to knowing that they can’t trust you. And in my world, that gets you in some pretty deep shit. Now, like I was saying, see that kid over there whose shirt you had in your fist when I pulled up?”

The kid nodded, his face slowly stiffening with fear.

“He’s a friend of the Kings of Mayhem.”

“He is?”

“Damn straight. And we don’t like our friends being picked on by older kids.”

“I…we didn’t…know.”

“I realize that, son. But now you do.” I took off my glasses, bending down a little to get up close and personal, letting the little shits see my eyes in all their glory, and the kid almost wet himself. “Do I make myself clear? Or do you need me to spell it out for you?”

The kid looked over at his friends who were still staring at me, their eyes wide and mouths open. The smaller kid, the one whom they’d been picking on had backed away, but his big blue eyes were glued to me, watching on intently.