Page 28 of The White Rider
“The Vice President.”
“He has one of those? He sounds familiar. Is that Seth Hadeon?” I asked.
“It is. You know him?” Asher asked.
“Yeah. He was my father’s best friend when I was growing up. He started hitting on me when I was thirteen. He’s a perv and an asshole.”
“Sounds about right. You probably know everyone in his cabinet then,” Dice said.
“Tell them to wait!” Isaiah shrieked. “I’ve got enough on my plate.”
“You’re about to have even more. Something about the Marthas getting kidnapped and a bunch of dead Bubbas. You need to see them.”
“No, I don’t. They are fucking idiots. I’ll have to make another speech.”
“What do you intend on doing?”
“I know exactly who is doing this. They have my daughter, and she’s important. I’m ramping up bullet production and posting more guards at the labs. They’ll hit the labs next. I want everyone who knows how to make ammunition at the factory to maximize production and everyone else guarding my labs. When they hit my labs, I want my daughter taken alive and brought to me.”
“She was always such a pretty thing. Can I have her as my Martha when you’re done with her?” Seth asked.
Asher and Dice growled. Dice’s hand tightened around my shoulder.
“Over my dead body!”
“Leave it, Dice. It’s not going to happen, and this is what we wanted,” Asher said.
I turned around and kissed his forehead.
“They aren’t going to take me. How long are we planning on giving them to build up their stockpile before we hit the warehouse?”
“We can’t give them long, Speedy,” Asher said. “We can’t risk them giving bullets to the Bubbas. It’ll be soon.”
Soon. And that was the first time Asher ever called me by my nickname. Progress.
Chapter 16
I
t was so fucked up my father actually had enough support to run an entire ammunition factory, guard his labs, go out on raids murdering and kidnapping people, and still have people milling about in the center of D.C. How were we supposed to arrest all those people? Was the resistance even that big? The motel they kept taking me to wasn’t some five-star resort with rooms up the ass. I hadn’t been outside, but based on the look of the room and the fact that the Bubbas hadn’t found it, it seemed like some tiny, out-of-the-way place you only stopped at on the way to somewhere better.
I knew we needed bullets for the resistance, but my father was also arming his people for war with the Horsemen. He had no issues using them as human shields. Aeron told me the truth. Their bullets would irritate the Horsemen, but wouldn’t slow them down. They’d kill me, though. I’d never been shot before, and I healed fast, but roller derby was a violent sport, and I’d been injured while competing before. It fucking hurt.
I wasn’t planning this. I wasn’t a planner before all this. I’d set up my tattoo shop by the seat of my pants, and I had help. Most of the time, I knew where I needed to be at a specific time, and I was always there on time, but what happened before and after that was always an adventure.
My idea of adventure before all this was taking the long way somewhere and possibly getting lost in the process. Or seeing a band I hadn’t seen before in a shitty bar on the sketchy side of town. The potential for a bar fight used to be exciting to me.
Man, I used to be stupid like that. Aeron probably thought going into all that was a blast, but I didn’t. I wasn’t bulletproof like he was.
We were moving in on the bullet factory in one day. The angels thought that gave them enough time to arm the resistance, but not restock the Bubbas. They made ammunition every day, but the pickups were only every two days. Asher had the pickup schedule, and they weren’t due yet. I’d been listening in with Dice and Asher. They hadn’t made plans to go to the factory early. The Bubbas were making this too easy.
Listening to them was getting less funny, even with Asher flinging burns at them. Delusional didn’t even come close to the level of crazy I was hearing. My father went out and gave a speech about terrorists taking their women and killing the Bubbas.
It was a really terrible speech, but they ate it up. All he said were that there were terrorists out there who were enemies of America. He threw in something about them beingflag hatingtraitors who killed babies, but he never actually said who they were or what their motivation was. He didn’t explain how a bunch of alleged terrorists did what he couldn’t, like killing every single Rage Head, and developing a vaccine.
It was a bunch of racist nonsense about foreigners not respecting America and assimilating after they moved here. Isaiah threw in nonsense about them not respecting American values and the flag and then a little bit about how they all wanted us to convert to their heathen religion and submit to their communist government.
He hit every single keyword someone who thought everyone with brown skin was a terrorist would eat up without once telling them exactly who they were fighting or why. Asher and Dice were sitting with me while we listened. Everyone talked about Dice and Aeron when they teamed up. All they did was bicker. No one ever said anything about Dice and Asher when they got together.
