Page 63 of Resilience

Eight chuckled. “That remains to be seen. Excuse the lack of fanfare. This ain’t the way we do things, but shit’s upside down right now, and we need you in the know. Monty, get up here.”

Monty worked his way through the cluster of Bulls and came to the side of Sam’s bed. “Hey, man,” he said to Sam.

A flash of memory went past Sam’s eyes—Monty on the ground, unconscious and bleeding. “Hey. You good?”

“Yeah.” Monty touched the back of his head gingerly. “Somebody tried to use my head for a baseball, but I’m alright.”

“Yeah, okay,” Eight said with a burst of impatience. “Let’s get to business.”

Sam tried to understand what was going on. Were he and Monty in trouble? Everybody who’d talked to him said he’d done well. But the whole club was in here, looking ... weird.

Monty seemed just as confused as he was.

“Montgomery Pickett and Samuel Spellman,” Eight growled. “The club has voted and unanimously agreed. Welcome to the mother charter of the Brazen Bulls MC.”

Somber applause broke out in Sam’s hospital room, and it was the weirdest sound Sam had heard in his life. He understood what had just happened, but also, he didn’t understand it at all. Here he was in a hospital bed, with a gash in his neck and holes in his arm and shoulder, thinking maybe he’d made a mistake signing on to prospect, maybe he wasn’t cut out for this life, and now Fitz was handing him a patch and a bottom rocker.

Looking up at Monty, he saw he still wasn’t alone in his stunned confusion.

A thought occurred to Sam, and he said it before considering whether he should. “Wait—you said it was unanimous? Is Uncle Gun awake?”

“No,” Mav answered. “He’s still out, and we can’t wait for him to wake up. But I’ve had his proxy for years. And I knew his vote on this anyway. If Gun had his way, every one of our sons would wear the Bull.”

Gun’s own son, Aidan, wasn’t a Bull and had no interest in being one. He was playing baseball for the University of Oklahoma. If Mav wasn’t exaggerating, Gun must have been hurt and disappointed that his son had chosen a different path. But Sam couldn’t picture Gun disappointed in either of his kids.

The club came up, one by one, to congratulate Sam and Monty. Their prospect days were over. They were Bulls.

His dad waited until the end, then leaned over the bed, took Sam’s face in both hands, and said, “I’m fucking proud of you, son.”

Sam barely managed a nod in response. He was a Bull. He was a Bull.

Did he deserve to be?

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~oOo~

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A few hours later, Sam sat in a wheelchair at the front of the hospital’s small chapel. His neck throbbed and his head pounded, he wasn’t far from passing out, but he was too distracted by what was going on to heed his physical discomforts.

Both charters of the Brazen Bulls MC were gathered in this room, the only place in the hospital where so many people could be together and speak without fear that an outsider might be listening.

The Bulls here looked pretty rough. In addition to Sam’s injuries, and the thick row of stitches across the back of Monty’s head, Geno’s right arm was in a complicated looking cast-brace thing. The rest of the Nevada charter and the Tulsa run crew, all of whom had been in that firefight, looked dirty and rumpled and generally knocked around, days later. He didn’t think even one of them had left the hospital for a proper rest or even a shower.

And then there was Gunner, who was still in a coma in the ICU. Sam now knew that Gun been in surgery for a long time, and something had gone wrong during the complicated procedure. That, not the actual bullets that had severed his spine and done mischief to several organs, was why he was comatose. The actual bullets were why he would probably never walk again.

All that because he’d turned his back on the fight to save Sam. The guilt Sam felt for that was a greater pain than any caused by his wounds.

Big Ben Haddon was dead, and maybe that, too, was on Sam. He remembered seeing Gun and Ben side-by-side in cover. It was the last thing he remembered before night sky and Athena. Had Gun left Ben exposed as well as himself? All because he was worried about Sam?

Setting aside worries and regrets he could do nothing about, Sam tried to focus on the meeting. He was a Bull now, and despite his inner turmoil, he wanted—needed—to be worthy of the patch.

After that odd, brief ‘ceremony’ to welcome him and Monty to the table, Eight and Mav—he had to remember to stop calling them ‘Uncle’ like a little kid now—had briefed them both about what the fuck was going on. Now Sam knew that the cargo they’d transported to Laughlin had been four anti-tank guided missile launchers. Each one with a street value of more than half a million dollars.

Dad hadn’t expressly told him what the club business was until Sam had told him he wanted to prospect, but all the kids—the older ones, anyway—knew the Bulls ran guns for the Volkovs. It was just a thing you figured out, being part of such a big family where everybody worked the same job and partied together, too. Kids got forgotten when there was a lot going on. Didn’t even have to eavesdrop, just had to be present at a party and wait for the booze to kick in.

However, Sam’s idea of ‘running guns’ had been vanloads of shit like Cooper had come down from the loft with during the attack: 9mms and AKs, and ammo and mods for them. Not fucking anti-tank missile launchers. Not actual artillery on its way to Mexico and the Águila drug cartel.

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