The three trucks barreled south with engines growling like they had unfinished business.

The bridge was nothing but ash behind them, a black smear over the river, smoke trailing into a sky the color of a bruise.

Lachlan rode in the back of the second truck with his boots braced on the frame, a rifle balanced across his knees.

Wind cut past hard enough to sting his eyes, carrying heat from burned barricades and the faint, sweet stench of cooked meat from whatever was left behind. But it didn’t bother him at all.

The road ahead wasn’t really a road anymore—just two ruts through dirt and weeds where someone bigger had come through before them.

It wound along the river, always keeping the water in sight, sometimes close enough to throw a rock into, sometimes barely a silver line through the trees.

The river itself never shut up. It roared and foamed and ripped entire trees loose like it didn’t care the world was ending. Maybe it didn’t.

Alexei drove the lead truck with his usual too-quiet focus, hands steady on the wheel like the ice in his veins made him built for it.

Zubair took the second one, shoulders relaxed but eyes everywhere, heat clinging to him like even the engine knew better than to give him trouble.

Lachlan watched the tree line instead of the road.

Movement lived out there. Not the stupid zombies—they’d faded back, keeping their distance now like predators recognizing something bigger on the food chain—but other things.

More than once, sunlight caught on metal somewhere in the distance.

Scouts.

Lachlan spat over the side and checked his magazine without looking down.

"Two o’clock," Elias called from the passenger seat of the first truck, voice carrying just enough over the engine. "Single rider. Watching, not moving."

Lachlan leaned out far enough to spot him—a figure on a stripped-down dirt bike at the edge of the trees, red cloth tied around his arm, rifle across his back. He wasn’t trying to hide.

Cartel colors.

The rider watched them long enough to be sure they saw him, then turned the bike and disappeared into the trees.

"Letting the rest know we’re coming," Lachlan muttered.

Sera sat in her own truck across from him, one wrist flopped over the wheel of the truck with Luci pressed against her side like a shadow with teeth.

She didn’t appear to be worried. She didn’t ask for confirmation. She didn’t ask for anything.

Just rested her free hand on the dire wolf’s head and kept her eyes forward, unreadable as the horizon.

Another rider appeared fifteen minutes later. Different bike. Same red cloth. Same slow turn back into the trees the moment he was sure they’d been seen.

Alexei’s knuckles tapped the wheel once, the closest he got to showing irritation.

"Counting us," Elias said flatly.

"Let ’em," Lachlan replied. He smiled without humor and checked the rifle’s sight again. "They’ll run out of fingers before we run out of bullets."

The third rider didn’t bother waiting. He paced them for nearly a mile, close enough that Lachlan could make out the shape of his goggles, before vanishing into a stand of blackened pine.

The air changed after that.

The trees thinned.

The ground turned to hardpan, flat and ugly, nothing but sunburned dirt and the occasional dead fence line stretching toward nothing. No birds. No sound but the trucks and the river.

Then Lachlan saw the first real sign they were getting close.

A shape leaned half-collapsed against the sky—an old billboard frame stripped of its advertisement and replaced with welded scrap metal. Words cut into it with a torch read:

TURN BACK. LAST WARNING.

Below it, three bodies hung by their ankles, sun-cracked and half-eaten by things that didn’t mind rotten meat.

Lachlan grinned around a dry throat. "Subtle."

"Direct," Elias corrected.

Neither of them suggested turning back.

Another mile. Another sign. This one fresher.

TOLL OR TEETH. YOUR CHOICE.

The road funneled them after that, trees on one side, river on the other, no way to swing wide without getting wet or lost. Perfect ground for an ambush.

Which was exactly why Lachlan’s grip on the rifle got looser instead of tighter.

Because if the cartel wanted a toll, they’d have to ask real nice.

And even then... Lachlan wasn’t known to give up what belonged to him.

Luckily, all the supplies were put in Sera’s space the moment they we out of eyesight of the bridge.

The first roadblock showed half a mile later—two trucks sideways across the dirt, steel plates welded over the tires, the gaps between them stacked with sandbags.

Red cloth snapped from poles hammered into the ground.

Cartel men sat on the barricade like crows on a fence, rifles across their knees, eyes hidden behind goggles and masks made from welded scrap.

Behind them, more men waited in the beds of pickup trucks mounted with what looked like heavy machine guns salvaged from some forgotten armory.

And beyond all of it—on the far side of the barricade, across a stretch of cracked earth—Lachlan saw buildings.

Dozens of them.

They rose out of the flat land like a rust-bitten city, walls patched with steel, windows covered with mesh and bars. Smoke curled from barrel fires scattered through the streets.

A radio tower leaned at the center, draped with more red cloth.

And at the highest point, above a building larger than the rest, a banner painted with a black jawbone on red snapped hard in the wind.

The Palace.

Cartel territory.

A man stepped onto the barricade wearing a coat made from something’s hide, too heavy for the heat, shoulders broad enough to carry it anyway.

His goggles were mirrored.

A red scarf covered everything else.

He lifted one arm, and all the engines around him cut out.

The sudden quiet rang louder than the river.

Lachlan felt every rifle behind those sandbags find its mark on their trucks.

The man didn’t yell. His voice carried anyway.

"Ninety percent of your supplies. All three trucks. And the woman."

Lachlan grinned slow enough to show teeth. "Now, that’s not very nice. How are we supposed to survive if we give you everything?"

The man’s head tilted. "Or you don’t leave at all."

The wind shoved dust between them, snapping the banners against the poles, carrying heat off Zubair where he leaned forward in the driver’s seat like the air itself had one chance to get out of his way.

Luci’s growl rumbled low against Sera’s thigh.

She didn’t tell him to stop.

Alexei’s voice carried from the lead truck, calm as ice breaking off a riverbank. "You boys really might want to rethink that last part."