Ride or Die

Chapter 1

After all - a little trouble never hurt nobody. Right?

Rust Springs was a town of no real consequence. Beloved and safe by some of the two thousand residents who called it home still. It remained of not much importance to the minds of those lucky rare few who had bit the bullet, upped, and moved away.

The reason for its dryly ironic namesake was a tiny little trickle of a stream whereby on its banks settlers planted russet leafed trees. Ones that looked barely alive and always dead. The whole town was shaded and built in the slanted shadows of the less than uninspiring brown foliage. A beige and boring history of the town still sustained it into its lifelessness and sailed it towards an unremarkable future.

A flat sprawl of a town no one ever came too, and hardly anyone who settled here bothered to leave. Hope wasn't a commodity viable enough to visit this town.

People tidied themselves neatly away into their safe little homes and never asked for any trouble. The quaint humdrum of normal local life cycles on unendingly for those trapped. Time passed so slowly it hardly felt like it moved on at all.

The darkest reason the town was kept on a schedule of its own; it was all due to the leather clad outlaws who owned every boring inch of it. The Hell Hounds. Leathered men who wore rough patches on their jackets who roared through its roads on bikes. Uncaring of disturbing the citizens crushed under their thumbs. The infamous deadly seven. Blasting through streets like black clad doomed horsemen. Rust Springs was the purgatory over which they smugly ruled.

Every business in town owed them money whether they liked it or not. A monthly bribe to keep the wolves from scratching at the doors. If you left obeyed and coughed up the payment, you'd remain unbothered by them. People knew by now better than to ask what happened to those fools who didn't pay. Horrible rumours circulated of those who'd been plucked out their homes and were never seen again.

No one possessed the bravery to stand up to the gang. Not even you. One of the comfortably trapped. Numb to it all.

Like many of the young; You'd only heard rumours. Passed between your small circle of friends. Ever since you were old enough to walk you'd been told by your Grandma of the evils of the men that towered over your hometown. Their shadows casting longer shadows than a grizzly's over everyone. And twice as frightening.

You don't talk to the men on bikes. You never even look at them. When they blaze through town all noise and hell fury. You close the blinds and you damn sure look the other way. Mind your business and they'll leave you be.

You lived blindly under the dark leather raincloud of their influence like everyone else you knew. Never questioning it. You grew, born, bred and evolved into a woman in this tiny and hopeless place. Slotted right into the hum-drum place carved out for you.

You graduated Rust Springs High with adequate grades and started on Saturday jobs as fairly fresh-faced a kid as you could be and now here you were somewhere beyond your mid-twenties, volunteering at the animal shelter. Picking up the odd shift here and there at the Rusty Spoon diner.

Your days of work bookended by the home care you provided for your rheumatoid riddled grandparents who you lived with. It kept you busy enough wiping down and bussing tables in your embarrassing pink diner uniform, or at the animal shelter with all the adorable pets who were just as caged up as you were.

Your life circled the same chores over and over, year in year out. You raked leaves in the front and back yard. Helped grandma clean and dust your meagre, but cosy home. You cooked dinners and went to get groceries from the tiny store in the town square. You borrowed the same few warped old horror books from the community library. Talked to the same neighbours, and lived within your meagre means.