The Barefoot Bandit Mga Nobela at Kwento

Buck naked and carrying a set of strategically-placed bongo drums. I blink twice, stopping short as my neighbor casually walks toward me in bare feet. Carrying bongos. Naked. Totally and completely naked, the bongos strategically covering the goods. He’s definitely not a retiree. Nope. Not at all. He’s young and fit and…

I could barely hold the heavy wooden handle, so I had to do all the work with my left arm. But the worst pain was not on my back or in my hand. It was on my chest. Just below my collarbone, the number '84' was burned deep into my pale skin. The burn mark was swollen, red, and getting infected from the dirty mine water. It pulsed with a hot, sick feeling of its own. I swung again. "Work faster, feral," a rough voice said next to me. It was a big, scarred man named Barek. He was a prisoner sent here for stealing from the Blackwood army. Even though he was a criminal, he still thought he was better than me.

I stand on the pavement in Paris with the printout in my bag and three futures assembling themselves somewhere inside me and I start laughing, the real kind, the helpless kind, and my mother starts laughing too, and we stand there, her in San Diego and me on a pavement in the eleventh arrondissement, laughing at the absolute enormity of my life. I go home, open my laptop, and start a new document titled, simply, Bellamy Inc. If I am building something, I am building it all for three.

“ ‘The three bandits’ are a group of rouges you can call upon when you want to eliminate a target but don’t want to get your hands dirty. Most Alphas want to eliminate them ourselves since they cause so much destruction in their way but nothing has been done about them because there is no proof left behind that they are the ones that did it and two they have never been caught to even integrate. The fact that you guys even saw them before they attacked and lived to tell the tale is impressive.” Alpha Alex finished staring straight at us. We were seated around the kitchen table waiting for supper and Alpha Alex waisted no time in telling us what was happening.

I followed Reaper's gaze. Idling at the very edge of the jungle treeline, acting as a heavily armed escort for the weary scavengers behind them, was a pack of about fifty outlaw bikers. They didn't ride sleek hover-tech. They rode massive, ear-splitting combustion choppers, rusted and spiked for wasteland warfare. Even from the top of the wall, I could see the patches on their heavy leather cuts. They bore a single, jagged word stitched in crimson: Revers. At the head of the column sat their leader on a monstrous, elongated chopper. Across his rusted gas tank, a brutal, unforgiving motto had been spray-painted in thick white letters: Blood on the asphalt.

I knew fuck all about that shit and the sheep weren't given to such things, not that I would ask them, I'm not that fucking clueless. "That run we were supposed to make, I'm gonna need you and the boys to take point on that, shouldn't be too much trouble, I'm sure you can handle it just fine without me." "The cartel?" Or so they like to call themselves. What they were are a bunch of lowlifes who'd watched fucking Scarface once too often and thought they were fucking gangsters. They were a motley crew of fuck-ups made up mostly of ex-criminals who thought they got a bad rap, not because they were innocent but because they'd been caught.

Voices echoed from the main space—low, tense. We crept forward. Kelly’s voice cut through first: thick Irish accent, impatient. “He said midnight. It’s twelve-oh-five. Where the fuck is he?” Another man muttered something I couldn’t catch. Luca signaled: hold. Then—movement on the catwalk above us. One of our roof guys whispered in comms: “Sniper nest. One man, armed. He’s scanning the floor.” My gut tightened. Before I could react, Alessio’s hand shot out—pointing silently.

I looked again to my left and right, checking for an alternate path perhaps through the trees, but everywhere I looked were more frightening men. "Well, what do we have here?" The man in front of us said with a devilish smirk. He was tall and had blonde hair that reached further past his shoulders than mine did. The moonlight was all that lit our way but it was enough to see that the man was covered in dirt, both on his clothes and on his face. Bandits. These men lived out here in the woods to rob people. All that Derek and I had on us was a bundle of turmeric root, what could they want from us? "I brought the lady here for you," Derek said from behind me to the men ahead of us.

I'd gotten my sister through college, like I had planned, but this life wasn't that easy to get rid of. "Rage." "Okay," I sighed. "Let's just go and scope the scene." Dante frowned. "And kill somebody," I mumbled. *** The bass from the bar in front of us thumped hard and rattled the blacked out windows. A bodyguard dressed in black guarded the door, his hands interlaced in front of him, but I knew under those sunglasses he watched everyone that walked by. The bar wasn't my style, but I knew Denver liked to pick hole in the wall places to hide. Dante let out a long whistle beside me. "Looks like it's pretty guarded. What's the plan?"

Heavy, waiting silence. I cut the engine. Gravel cracked under my boots as I swung off the bike, the cold air hitting me full in the face. I’d been riding since dawn, crossing state lines twice for a shipment that didn’t want to move, and now that I was home, I couldn’t shake the strange feeling that the world had changed a little while I was gone. The door to the clubhouse creaked open before I reached it. Bishop filled the frame, his face half-buried in shadow. He didn’t grin the way he usually did when he saw me, he just gave a slow nod.