I Hid the Fugitive Biker in My Cabin

Chapter 4

Caleb

My vision failed in flashes of gray static that spread across everything in broken waves. With every step I forced myself to take, the soft snow and thick mud of the forest felt like living quicksand, determined to swallow me whole. The freezing mountain air tore at my lungs with every ragged breath, but the heat radiating from my left shoulder was the real hell. Hot blood. Too much blood, constantly soaking the torn fabric and sliding down my side in a warm, continuous trail.

Move, damn it. Move.

The sound of gunshots still echoed inside my skull, mixed with the screech of twisted metal and the sharp screams that had taken over the road. It had all started hours earlier, during the transfer. Me and the other inmates were being moved from one prison to another in a heavily escorted convoy. The escape plan had been discussed in cautious whispers for weeks among a small group of prisoners. It was risky, almost suicidal in its conception, but staying behind those bars was starting to feel like a worse sentence than death itself.

Then everything went violently out of control.

I remembered the brutal impact that threw every body around inside the vehicle. I remembered the transport van tipping heavily onto its side. I remembered the glass shattering in a sudden rain of glittering shards. I remembered the mixed, sharp smell of spilled fuel and fresh blood. After that moment, there were only disconnected flashes. Bodies scattered among the wreckage. Screams cutting through the night. Distant sirens approaching. And then the darkness closing in.

From the fragments I could still piece together, I was the only one who had managed to escape the transport vehicle alive. Maybe the others had died in the crash itself. Maybe they had been shot in the chaos that followed. I didn’t know and couldn’t afford to think about it for long. All I knew for certain was that somehow I had dragged myself out of the twisted metal before the final shots stopped.

But that brief glimpse of freedom lasted almost nothing.

Some of the officers had survived the crash. Injured, bleeding, and just as desperate as I was, they advanced through the forest right behind me. I ran with no real direction, guided only by the raw animal instinct to stay alive. Then the shooting started again.

One of the bullets tore through my shoulder with a red-hot punch. Another passed so close I felt the scorching heat of the ammunition ripping the air right beside my head. Still, I kept running, stumbling heavily between low branches and hidden rocks, while the dense forest slowly swallowed the sounds of the pursuit right behind me.

I wandered for a long stretch of time after that, half-conscious, trying to find any kind of shelter that could keep me hidden until dawn.

The last clear memory I held was of falling over and over, each step feeling heavier than the last, until the combined weight of pain and constant blood loss began to erase the edges of the world around me.

My right hand stayed pressed hard against the wound along my ribs. My fingers were filthy with dirt and already stiff against the torn fabric of the jacket. One of the bullets had only grazed the flesh, but the other… the other remained lodged deep inside, burning like a living coal with every movement I made. The old scars that covered my back and arms — reminders of old fights and the rituals of the old motorcycle gang from years ago — seemed to pulse in the same rhythm as this new agony.

The fog began to clear slightly when I finally reached a small clearing at the top of the hill. My legs simply gave out under my weight. I collapsed heavily onto my knees. The impact against the frozen ground tore a low, animalistic growl from the back of my throat as my teeth clenched hard.

I was at the absolute limit of what my body could still endure. If I lost consciousness out here in the open, the bears or the wolves would find me and finish what the cold had started long before dawn. Or Kane, along with Jax and Colt, would show up to finish the job personally. They must already know about the escape. News traveled fast in the underworld.

It was in that moment that I spotted the light.

It was faint and unsteady, but completely unmistakable against the darkness. An isolated property, built in the middle of nowhere. A rustic cabin of wood and stone.

I forced what little consciousness I still had left to focus on that structure. There were no police cars nearby. No suspicious movement of any kind. Just the silhouette of a single person visible through the glass, lit by the glow of a fireplace. A woman. She seemed to be holding her head in her hands, frustrated with something on the bright screen in front of her.

I tried to take another step forward, but my right foot caught hard on an exposed root. I fell heavily onto the ground of the backyard, snapping several dry branches under my weight. The sharp crack that cut through the silence of the night sounded exactly like a warning shot.

I held my breath and pressed my body against the damp earth, watching the window with what little focus I had left. The woman froze immediately inside. She stood up slowly from the chair, turned off the indoor light, and pressed her face against the glass, trying to see into the darkness out here.

I stayed hidden in the deep shadows of the trees, though I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay on my feet much longer. I started dragging myself sideways across the frozen ground, using only my elbows, ignoring the new wave of agony that rose through my abdomen and shoulder with every movement. My body finally collided against the rough boards of a smaller structure at the edge of the yard. An old wooden shed.

I grabbed the door latch with fingers that trembled violently. It was locked with an old, heavy padlock. Damn.

A muffled groan of pure exhaustion and pain escaped my lips before I could hold it back. I let my back slide down the dark wooden wall of the shed until I sat on the cold, wet ground. My eyes felt like they weighed a ton. The deep cold was beginning to defeat the dying heat of my own blood.

I looked one last time toward the main cabin. The woman’s silhouette remained pressed against the glass. She seemed to sense that there was something out here in the darkness.

Stay away, I thought, even though a primitive and desperate part of me wanted nothing more than to see her come out. If she called the police, or if Kane and his men found her first, I would be dead before I saw the dawn. If she simply got scared and hid inside, I would freeze right here in her backyard before the sun rose.

I closed my eyes for a single second. My breath escaped my mouth in short puffs of white vapor that vanished almost instantly into the night. Either way, my life now rested entirely in the hands of a complete stranger.