Avenging Angels MC-Book 1

The town of Haven had been initially founded and homesteaded by a mountain man by the name of Jacob McCandles. He had come to this region in the late 1800′s to hunt and trap, unlike many of the men who were looking for gold.

He hadn’t come on a wagon train, he had come with a horse and a pack of mules packed with as many supplies as they could carry that he figured he would need to sustain him until he got himself set up. Then he just wanted to live off of the land, to be free of the confines of “civilization”.

His original homestead had been higher up on the mountain but when his original cabin had partially burned during a fire that had been started by a lightning strike followed by a really hard winter, he had finally moved lower down on the mountain for the shelter needed to survive the harsh winter weather.

His wife was a Chinook Indian maiden that he “met” purely by accident when he had been out hunting one day when he heard a scream. He ran as fast as he could go and when he reached the crest of the hill he saw a big black bear clawing at something hidden inside what appeared to be a small cave that had a large log covering the entrance.

The bear kept jumping on the log with its front legs, trying to either move the log or crush it and Jacob could hear a terrified woman’s voice screaming for what he assumed was help, even though he couldn’t tell what she was actually saying.

Jacob sited down his gun barrel and fired at the back of the bear’s head, catching it at the base of the bear’s skull, dropping it on the spot. He ran down the hill and found the terrified young woman alive but bleeding like mad from where the bear had clawed her on her back. He didn’t have any of the supplies he would need to stop the bleeding or to wrap her wounds with him.

Fortunately she passed out when she saw him so even though he had to pull on her legs at first, he finally managed to get her free of the cave through the small opening. He picked her up and carried her back to his small one bedroom cabin over a mile away. It took several weeks of his tender attention to her wounds for her to heal. By then, winter had started and they were soon snowed in.

When he had first seen her face, something in his heart had jumped and his natural protective instincts kicked in but something about her told him she was going to be someone very special in his life.

Thankfully she had stayed unconscious while he cleaned her wound and stitched her shoulder. From what he could tell and judging by the spilled basket on the ground near the tree, she must have been turning when the bear caught her unaware when she had been gathering pine cones very near the mouth of the “cave” which was more like where the ground had washed away from under the two big trees that sat on the crest of an old creek bed, creating a natural little cave.

Thankfully, the huge nearby tree that had fallen in front of it, probably during the last big rain judging by the roots that were exposed on the end of it. The small washed out area had offered her just enough temporary protection from the bear. If he had not come along when he did, the bear would have eventually broken all of the roots of the two trees and dug her out.

She had slept for two whole days before she finally began to stir. When she had finally become aware of her surroundings, her eyes had opened wide and she just stared at him as he sat, working on the hide of the very bear that had hurt her as he strapped it to the frame he had built to hold it.

Jacob had watched over her for the rest of the first day and all of the next before he hiked back to where he had found her and took care of the bear’s hide. He gutted the animal and found that some of the meat had spoiled but most of it was still good meat, so he skinned it and left the entrails and the spoiled portions on the ground then quartered the rest of the animal before carrying it back to the cabin. He had hung the meat in the root cellar he had dug when he first arrived in the area.

He had learned fast that sleeping out in the open was a really bad idea. Bears. Wolves. Mountain lions. But what had made him the most nervous were the snakes. He could see the big animals coming and defend himself but one morning he had woken up to find a large rattler curled up on the blanket on top of his leg. He had laid still for over 3 hours, afraid to move, before it had finally slithered away, chasing after a mouse.

The woman had slept a lot over the course of the next week, waking only long enough to relieve herself in a bucket he sat next to the bed and then he would carry it outside to empty it, rinse it out and put it near the bed again so that if she needed it, it was readily available.

He made sure she drank plenty of fresh clean water from the stream near his cabin and he fed her soup that had not only the meat from the bear but also the vegetables he had grown in his small garden. He had to keep traps set all the way around his garden to keep the local wildlife like rabbits, squirrels and deer from eating all of his vegetables. They also supplied him with easy meals that he didn’t have to go far to collect.

The first snow hit after she had been there for about two weeks and had lasted for over 4 months. At one point, Jacob had to dig his way out the front door to get to the root cellar for more food supplies.

During this time, she had slowly taught him some words in Chinook and he taught her some English and while they couldn’t really carry on much of a “conversation”, they did make themselves understood.

He had been calling her “Winter” since he had found her, because that’s when he had found her. He couldn’t figure out at first what she was trying to say when she would point to herself and say “Kloshe”. Then she would point at him. That’s when he finally figured out that she was trying to tell him her name and wanted to know his. “Jacob” he told her. “Jacob McCandles”

She had struggled with it at first and when she would call for him it sounded more like “Jay-cup” but he didn’t care. By the time spring rolled around, Kloshe had captured his heart.

And apparently, he had captured hers because when the snow cleared some of the men from her tribe had come onto his land, hunting and had seen her and Jacob. This was his second year here and the first time he’d had any contact with any of the local Indians, so when they showed up on his homestead and took him captive, he prayed all the way to where they camped, that they were friendly and would not think that he was the one who had hurt her. Kloshe protected Jacob, showed the braves her wound and explained that Jacob had saved her, killed the bear and then nursed her back to health.

Her father had not been happy about it at first but then Jacob offered him the bear skin from the one he had killed when he saved the man’s daughter, her father welcomed him by hugging him and Jacob had finally breathed a sigh of relief.

They had been amazed that he had killed such a large bear by himself and that the skin was not full of holes. Guns were unknown to them so killing such a large predator wasn’t normally accomplished by just one man. That and his size of 7′ 4" might have made the braves think twice about fighting with him one on one plus the fact that he had saved her, finally put Jacob in good standing with the tribe and he was slowly welcomed into the tribe as her man.

Jacob hadn’t been real sure of what was happening at first but had been very happy when he realized that the ceremony they’d had meant that Kloshe was now his wife when she took his hand and led him to her sleeping quarters.

They had raised 4 big healthy boys out of the stone and log cabin that had started out as just one room but had eventually turned into a larger 2 and then 3 bedroom stone and log structure that stood for years until it was hit by lightning and burned the log portions.

Instead of rebuilding there, they decided to move lower down the mountain and they built on more level land where the town of Haven currently stands. Life had definitely been easier because the winters were not as fierce but the stone foundation of the original homestead was so well built that it is still standing on the mountain, over 150 years later.

Their original homestead in Haven was 200 acres but over time, portions had been sold or were being leased out by the remaining McCandle heirs, “the McCandles boys”.

No fences had ever been necessary until some other mountain men began to settle in the area on the quest to find gold because they had heard they might find it in the rivers and streams in the area. Unfortunately for those men, no significant amount of gold was ever found much above what is now the California state line in their area.

From their sons, they produced a large clan but most of the children moved away, headed for bigger and better things over time to cities all over the country. Some branches did not have male children so the name began to die out. “Old Man Cirus McCandles” had been the only one left and was the father of the only son still currently living in Haven full time, Amos McCandles.

Ripley (Riggs), William (Mack), Asher (Trunk) and Amos, had worked for their father’s log hauling company since they had been old enough to drive.

All of the “McCandles boys” had ridden motorbikes from the time they were teenagers but when Apollo’s dad, Logger, had come to town riding a big Harley, the McCandles boys fell in love with the bike.

Back then, Haven, the small town where they had grown up, was barely more than a widening in the road at the bottom of the logging road. It was the “staging area” where the loggers stock piled the trees they had chopped down and got them ready to be hauled down to the saw mill. That was where the loggers had set up their “base camp” and where the McCandles had set up their warehouses and trucking “yard” that kept the town going and growing.

Slowly a small town that didn’t really consist of too much had grown up that was basically the homes of the people who lived there along with a general store, a small post office, a branch of a bank, and several small businesses, like Millie’s dress shop and Aunt Nita’s diner, just to name a few, but it was growing more and more every year. A lot of people worked out of their homes or commuted to Portland.

Unfortunately Haven didn’t have much in the way of “entertainment” and the only housing had been what the long term loggers built to live in during their “down time” during the winter. Some of them were very nice, well built, spacious homes but some of them were barely cabins that didn’t survive long.

None of the “McCandles boys” were big drinkers and the one bar in town was the only place for adult men to hang out but mixing booze and testosterone meant fights were bound to happen. Cirus McCandles put a stop to that early on with all of his sons! None of them could afford new Harley’s right off the bat so they had found them second hand and worked on restoring them until they had them purring like kittens. Logger taught them so much!

At first they were just a bunch of overgrown teenagers out riding and having fun in their off hours. Drinking, fighting and fucking random women were their favorite passtimes. They had somewhat started a club, using an old unused barn on the back of the McCandles land as a place to work on their bikes.

Eventually, they had reinforced the second floor and built “rooms” where they could crash out when they got too drunk to drive or they wanted some privacy with random women that would come around and “hang out”, but it was mostly just a place for them to hang out, drink, play cards and talk about girls. Then Logger met Darla and she became his world. It wasn’t long after they got married that Darla got pregnant.

Then Mack met Krista and Mack had described it like being run over by a big rig but it didn’t hurt. To them there was no doubt that they were meant to be together so they married right away.

Darla delivered their son in the middle of a huge snowstorm that had hit the west coast in early December and had named him Abraham Lee after two men that Logger had always highly respected. President Abraham Lincoln and General Robert E. Lee.

A year later, Mack and Krista found out they were expecting.

During that year, Trunk had run into a girl he had known when they were very young but had not noticed her “in that way” before until that day at the store when he went for beer and she had been there buying something for her mother for dinner.

They had taken one look at each other and Trunk had described it as running into a chest high tree branch at full speed in the dark but instead of it hurting, it had been like someone had stolen all of the air out of Delaney’s Grocery & Textile.

Anita Brighton was 5′9", with soft brown hair streaked with blonde highlights from being in the sun so much but it was her light brown eyes and full kissable lips that had captured Asher’s (Trunk) attention. They had smiled at each other and a year later they were married.

Riggs had to admit that the women were very attractive but because they had been claimed by his brothers, two by blood, one by loyalty as a club brother, he became restless after that and started driving trucks more and more. Being the oldest, his father had depended on him heavily and Riggs knew how to run every aspect of their trucking business but he hated the management side of things and just wanted to drive. Being confined inside an office, looking at the same four walls every day was just not for him.

He told everyone that it was because he fell in love with the freedom of the open road and wouldn’t admit it to anyone but he was jealous of the men who were finding their women when most women were afraid of his size, even though Trunk was bigger in most respects. He never said anything because while he had all of the brothers around and he was rarely ever alone, he was lonely.

But because of the way “Old man McCandles” ran things, most of the outgoing shipments were logs or lumber that the mill produced and Riggs would do long hauls but he always came back once he dropped the load he was carrying, usually empty.

The MC the boys had started wasn’t really formed as an official club yet but more like a bunch of guys that just got together to ride their bikes in their free time but their numbers were steadily growing.

Darla had “Little Abe”, and Krista was expecting. Things had been good for the club, which was growing but things for the McCandles trucking business was changing.

When the feds had shown up on the mountain and informed them that “clear cutting” was no longer allowed, “Old man McCandles” knew he was going to have to either change how they did business or just sell out. To all of their minds, the second option wasn’t even an option. There weren’t enough trees to keep the mill going so it closed down which meant the trucking company didn’t have the transportation income of moving those goods.

Cirus was getting old and his health was declining so he turned the company over to his sons. The “boys” got together and that’s when the decision was made to build more warehouses and to become a transportation company exclusively.

Then Krista gave birth to Mason James McCandles and Mack was over the moon happy. Then when “little Abe” was almost 2 years old, Darla got pregnant again. Logger had to spend more time with her because not only was their son only 2 years old but Darla’s pregnancy wasn’t as easy this time and she had several scares with some heavy bleeding throughout her pregnancy.

“Little Abe”, as Apollo was called back then, used to spend a lot of time with Mack and Krista, who had just had their first son, Mason, or Nita and Asher (Trunk).

Then Amos met Clara! She caused a lot of turmoil in the family because she was adamant that Amos distance himself from the “motorcycle gang” or she was going to break their engagement.

Clara was getting pressure from her father about being involved with Amos to begin with and had her convinced that Amos’ “gang” was supplying local residents with the drugs that her mother was addicted to.

Six months before their wedding, Clara’s mother OD’ed, sealing Clara’s hate for the club in stone. She refused to believe that other than one or two shipments of weed into Canada back when they had first started the club, they had nothing to do with drugs and had not had anything to do with whoever was currently running drugs in the area.

What they still did, at the time, was run guns and Clara had a problem with that because of the danger it would place Amos in.

It was during a huge fight one night that Amos found out why she was condemning the club and when she admitted that a prospect had told her things about “club business”, trying to seduce her, to get her to go with him instead of Amos. In reality he had done it only because he wanted to be able to brag in town that he had stolen a woman from one of the “McCandles boys”.

The prospect had “embellished” the story and claimed that the shipment had included some drugs, which had been a lie! It had caused a major rift in their relationship, nearly ending it before they even got started. That’s when she had given him the ultimatum of her or the club. He had to choose.

Amos wasn’t an official member of the club yet but he went to talk to Logger and asked to have a meeting to include all of the club, including the prospects, without telling him what was going on at first. But knowing Amos wouldn’t be making this request without good reason, he granted it and called the meeting for that very evening.

Amos stood up in front of everyone and explained what was going on, about Clara’s ultimatum, and called out the prospect, a guy about the same age as Amos.

At first, everyone thought it was just going to be a fight between rivals fighting over a woman until Amos dropped the bomb, revealing that the prospect had disclosed “club business” to Clara, in detail.

Amos proved that he was telling the truth because he was able to give details about a run the club had done and that Amos could not have known because he was not a club member and the guy knew his fate was sealed.

He was the first one to have to “run the gauntlet” but it set the rules about keeping club business among club members restricted to what they now call “Church” in place and prospects were not allowed to know anything beforehand about anything that would be considered club business.

The “rat” was deemed a danger to the club and he had not made it through the line of men that formed the gauntlet, especially the “McCandles boys”. Normally, Amos would not have been included in the gauntlet but because of what had gone down, he was allowed to be first in line and even his blood brothers had been impressed by the hit he had made causing the prospect to have to stumble through the rest of the line. Logger had been the one to deliver the death blow to the man’s temple.

The title of the “McCandles Boys” was a total joke. All of them were larger than most of the men in all of Haven, even among the loggers that worked for their father.

Riggs was 7 feet tall and “well muscled”. Mack had only been an inch shorter at 6 ft 11 inches and he was “very well muscled”. But it was Trunk who towered over them and was bigger in body mass.

Trunk had been 7 foot 3 inches and was massively muscled. He had chosen to work heavily with the loggers but also drove a truck when needed or there was a shipment to be delivered to a local area. He was a soft spoken gentle man with a heart of gold and was loved by all, none more than his wife, “Nita”.

Amos was the smallest of the four but he was still 6 feet 8 inches tall, 280 lbs and well muscled, so he wasn’t a small man. He had tried everything he could think of to get Clara to change her mind about the club but she had held firm. He had to choose, her or the club. It had been a really hard choice but he had finally chosen her but explained to her what she was doing to him.

“Clara, I love you with every ounce of my being but you are killing a part of me that is always going to resent that you have placed this condition on me. My brothers have always been a huge part of my life and I feel like you are asking me to stop associating with them which I will tell you right now, don’t even ask me for that because I might as well kill myself now because losing them would kill me.

You just don’t understand how close we are and I pray I never regret this decision.” There had been many disagreements and arguments about the club over the years but they had hung on to their love for each other and had raised 4 kids together, two boys and two girls.

About a year after Amos and Clara married, Mrs. McCandles, “the boys” mother, passed away quietly in her sleep one night. It was like someone had blown out “Old Man McCandles” life light. His health had been declining for a while but the loss of his beloved wife broke his heart so much that he just didn’t seem to care about anything anymore. He was there when his boys finally got the trucking company set up to do more than just haul logs and things were running smoothly but he died not long after that.

“The McCandles Boys” got together and decided to turn the running of the trucking business over to Amos. The rest of them just continued to drive at least part time as they built up the club. They all held shares of the business but left the running of it up to him and he had made a success of it, with his brother’s help.

Riggs had been doing long hauls for a while but he came home for his father’s funeral and stayed to make sure Amos could handle things on his own. Then he hit the road as an independent trucker.

After that, he would come home once or twice a year unless he was already in the area. Sometimes he couldn’t stay for more than a day or two but sometimes he would stay for a week or so, to rest and get caught up with everything that was happening “at home”.

Not long after that first gauntlet was run, Logger and his “executive staff”, as they became known, got together and the original “house rules” were put in place and everyone took an oath to follow them.

Then Darla went into premature labor and gave birth to their daughter early and everyone was very worried about them. Logger was beside himself, worried about not only his baby girl, who would have been the club’s first princess and the apple of his eye but he was worried about his wife. Especially when less than a week after she was born, the baby died due to a heart valve that had not formed properly and Darla was beside herself with grief.

Logger was at a loss of what to do because Darla withdrew into herself and basically just gave up. She had to be kept sedated for a while but even when they finally sent her home from the hospital, she couldn’t seem to function. Logger realized that she could barely stand to look at Abe because he was too much of a reminder of the baby girl she had wanted so badly but she had lost.

Darla would just sit in the rocker in their daughters bedroom, look out the window and cry. She got hooked on the pain pills and what Logger didn’t know was that she was drinking too. She had basically almost stopped taking care of her son but because he had to not only work to earn their support money but he was also the president of the yet unnamed club, so he had hired babysitters to stay with them while he was at work.

Abe was barely 3 years old when Logger had come home one day to find him outside “playing” in the dirt all alone, claiming to be hungry, and was filthy dirty. When Logger and Abe entered the house, they found Darla dead on the couch. She had just given up, taken everything that was left in the medicine cabinet and went to sleep.

Logger had been lost for a while and finally realized what his wife had been going through as he fought to keep from diving into a bottle himself. “Little Abe” was the center of his world now and he tried his best to care for him himself but he couldn’t work and stay home with him and he quickly learned that he couldn’t leave Abe unattended.

After a few close calls, Logger was afraid that Abe might wander away from the house they had built in Haven before Abe had been born.

Abe had proven to be an escape artist and was constantly getting outside because he hated being cooped up in the house. Logger was constantly worried about him getting lost in the woods or worse, getting attacked by wild animals.

After one particularly harrowing experience where Logger had thought Abe was napping and he was trying to get caught up on somethings around the house, he got the fright of his life when he had gone to check on him and found his bed and room empty.

When he heard a wolf howl not far from the house and then looked out the window to see his 3 year old son looking for the “doggie”, he realized that he needed someone to watch over Abe more than he could do by himself. He just couldn’t take care of his son, the house and land and still work to bring in the income they needed to not only maintain what they had but to set up the MC.

He had spent over two months after Darla’s funeral commuting back and forth between his house and the clubhouse, trying to be a father to his son and a leader for the club that still didn’t have a name. Paying babysitters was not only expensive but some of them weren’t at all reliable.

Everything came to a head when, after he had spent the better part of that day doing laundry and fighting the depression that being in the house made him feel, he finally decided that enough was enough. He had packed his and Abe’s clothes in a bag, put Abe in his truck and took him down to the clubhouse, which at the time had been an old farm house that the guys had pooled their money and bought to call “Their clubhouse” but still hadn’t decided on a club name yet. It was about half way between Haven and Portland.

He talked to both Krista and Anita about watching over his son for a while. There may not have been any question that while Logger was definitely his dominant father figure in Abe’s life, it was Anita and Krista that were his mother figures. He just had a LOT of uncles that helped raise him!

Anita had been a godsend during that time. She kept Abe more than anyone, especially as Krista had her own child to raise. Abe was 5 and Mason had just turned 3 when the dynamic of the club changed one night. They had been coming back from a particularly profitable gun drop, when they had stopped in a bar for a drink on their way home. They ended up saving a woman from getting beaten up in the bar by her husband who’d had too much to drink.

They gave him an attitude adjustment and when she told them that this was not the first time he had done that to her and that she wanted out permanently, they took her home to get her kids from the babysitter who had been very concerned about her ever since the husband had made her go with him.

The babysitter told Logger that this was not the first time she had been called on at the last minute to watch over their children like that and that every time she came the next day to check on her and the kids, her friend would be covered in bruises and the kids were “spooked”.

The woman had helped her to pack the children’s bags and she collected whatever they needed and they got her back to her family in South Dakota.

They may have been funding themselves by being a 1% club, but that didn’t last long after that incident. They had done a couple of major deals that took them up into Canada and Alaska, but after that, there had only been small shipments of guns and small weed shipments, just to keep the bills paid while they worked hard to establish other forms of income to support themselves.

They had run-ins with some of the local outlaw clubs that tried to move into Haven but were run out without help from local law enforcement, which at the time was only 4 men that rotated shifts to give the coverage needed for the approximately 500 residents that lived in Haven at the time.

Slowly, Logger and the McCandles formed the MC and young men, which they all were at the time, began joining them. Even though they had not established themselves with a club name yet, their club grew fast and they were mostly running guns to keep themselves up and running as they began to build the current clubhouse on land purchased as a group. Riggs had been home the first few days of the build and had helped put the first of the massive logs in place for the clubhouse.

At first, they hadn’t intended for it to be anything more than an MC but then one night they had run into some guys at a bar on the outskirts of Portland who were talking about selling women to be sex slaves in the booth next to theirs.

Logger, Mack, Riggs (who was home at the time), Trunk, Jokes and Wheeler, their executive committee at the time, found that repulsive and after holding church, everyone agreed and they began cleaning up their territory from being overrun by outlaw biker gangs that were terrorizing small businesses and individuals, on the outskirts of Portland and some of the small towns, like Haven, around the area.

When they found out a small farm had been overrun and turned into a “halfway station” for a human trafficking operation, they went in guns blazing and ended not only the operation but all of the men who had been present.

They had originally thought that their tactics had gotten a couple of women and even one young man, who had been a victim, killed. They later found out that it hadn’t been their bullets that had killed them but the Vipers, to keep their victims from testifying against them.

One woman they managed to save said that their captors had already raped or tortured the victims to death and that when the AAMC had attacked, the Vipers had turned their guns on them and had begun to shoot the victims.

After they had done that first raid, it seemed that word was beginning to spread and they began getting calls for help, mostly from bar owners or employees when stuff would go down in their establishments that they couldn’t handle on their own and they didn’t want the heat that calling the law would create for them.

It wasn’t long that word spread and calls started coming in from the poorer areas around town too, mostly from women who felt like the cops weren’t doing anything to really help them and they were tired of being beaten on by their husbands or boyfriends who refused to leave them alone. They would always help them but their main focus always was and always has been rescuing people in need of help and ending human trafficking.

That’s when they came up with the club name of “The Avenging Angels MC”. They made it their mission to help those that were being neglected, abused and molested, getting them away from their abusers.

For a long time, they turned the “Perp” over to the law but after having “repeat offenders” getting a slap on the wrists and let out again as soon as they either made bail or got some slick lawyer to get the charges dropped, only to have them go after their victims again to either intimidate them to keep them from testifying against them or for just the pleasure of hurting them, the AAMC would step in and “end the problem”.

Having that happen over and over again, they started handling things on their own by giving “attitude adjustments” and “warnings” that if they didn’t leave the women alone, that the AAMC would be back. It was actually one of their victims that had given Logger and the others the idea for their club name when she had called them “Angels” who had “Avenged” and freed her from a man who had been stalking and then beating her up. She had given each man there a big hug and not long after that she had left town to return to her family in Alabama.

Then one night they had been out cruising through town when a woman ran into the street in front of their bikes, waving her arms frantically. She had fallen to her knees and was begging them for help. Her clothes were all ripped up and it was obvious she had been severely beaten. She kept pointing and telling them “He’s after my kids! Please help me! He’s crazy.”

“Where?” Trunk had asked and she had pointed to a house a couple of doors down from where they were. Just then they heard a girl scream and Trunk took off running, leaving his bike in the middle of the street. Trunk didn’t even slow down as he hit the front door running with his shoulder down. The door splintered as he plowed through it and then he froze for a second. There was a man on top of a child on the floor, his butt pumping up and down like a piston. The man didn’t even slow down when Trunk had busted down the door, he just kept going as if he hadn’t even heard it.

There was an older girl, but not by much, huddled in the corner, crying and hiding her face. It was plain to see by the blood on the back of her legs and down in her crotch that he had already raped her.

Trunk grabbed the man by his throat and yanked him off of the little girl that couldn’t have been more than 6 or 7 years old. She was unconscious and bleeding profusely.

The perp was so high that he didn’t even realize that he was about to die as he just struggled with Trunk, yelling at him, “Let me go and wait your turn! I’m not done yet.”

“Oh yes you are!” Trunk said, venomously and punched the man in the temple with all of his might.

Logger called for an ambulance, which meant the law showed up. Thankfully the officer that showed up helped them to cover the man’s “disappearance”. They found out that the man had broken into the house as the mother and her daughters had been watching a movie on tv. The two girls had seen the man beating up their mother but were too young to realize that he might come after them so they had hidden instead of running. Well, when he was done with their mother, he knocked her out and went “hunting” and found them. The oldest girl was only 8 years old and her little sister was only 6.

The mother had come to and ran out of the house, knowing she was going to need help but none of the neighbors would even open their doors. Instead they turned off their porch lights and acted like they didn’t hear her begging for help for her daughters.

The cop told them that he was a serial rapist that they had been hunting for months who had already done some severe damage to several women and children but this was the first case of a child so young as the small girl on the floor. That was the first case they had fed the perp to the wildlife on the mountain.

Over the years, there had been children born to the club but only Abe and Mason had chosen to stay. Amos had four children but if Clara had her way, they would never have anything to do with the AAMC, at least not directly. Trunk and Anita had tried and tried for children but had not been lucky enough to catch and Anita thought she was barren.

When Abe was 12, Logger met his second wife, Rachel and while Abe respected her as his father’s wife and his step mother, they never really developed a “close” relationship. To him “Aunt Nita” was more like his mom.

The first clubhouse was built with 30 rooms on each floor and there were 3 floors. Then they added the dining hall, the larger kitchen and the main living room. But because Rachel was Logger’s wife, she became the first club queen and she had ruled well, establishing the “women’s rules” and she had also helped to design the current clubhouse, before the expansion. She had ruled the clubwhores with an iron hand, which she had no problem bringing down on them if they got out of line.

There had also been many deaths within the club. The first of the “executive staff” to die had been Sarge’s parents, “Mack” and Krista McCandles, who were killed in the biggest of the gang wars the club had faced when Sarge was only 14.

Also killed in that raid were Chopper’s, the club’s cook, wife, Chloe, Jokes and Wheeler, the club’s SAA and Road Captain and several other members of lesser rank and many of the club’s prospects. Chopper had only been a patched member for about 4 years, having been a rescue himself. He and Chloe had been married for a little over 2 years when he was badly wounded and she had been killed when a couple of rival outlaw gangs attacked the clubhouse.

Nita and Asher “Trunk” McCandles had taken Sarge in and eventually adopted him as their own. A year later, Rocky came to them and he and Trunk had become close because Trunk had been the one to get up with him when Rocky had night terrors. Then, less than a year later, Trunk had been killed in a freak trucking accident and Nita had become extremely depressed. She had taken to her bed for over a month, lost a lot of weight and ended up miscarrying the baby that they hadn’t even known she was carrying.

That was back just before Doc had become part of the club and by the time they got her to the hospital after she started bleeding, it was already too late to save the baby and she almost gave up and died herself.

But Aunt Nita was a fighter, not a quitter. She had spent another month in the hospital, at first suffering from the deep depression she had sunk into, and eventually recovering from the losses of not only her husband but of the son they would have had. After that, all of the “boys” of the club had become her son’s and she was like the mother that some of them had never had or had lost.

When she came home from the hospital, they had worried about her trying to negotiate the stairs so they had put her in one of the rooms on the ground floor and Nita had agreed because she knew she couldn’t sleep in their room anymore. Not without Trunk.

When she was fully physically recovered, because her beloved husband was no longer there, Nita decided she couldn’t live in the clubhouse anymore. She packed up her stuff and moved back to Haven, into the house she had grown up in that she had inherited when her parents had passed away.

Trunk had built them a 3 bedroom home on the outskirts of Haven on land that he had inherited from his father, just as all of the “McCandle’s Boys” had, as well as 5 other smaller cottage/cabins that they had talked about filling with the children they wanted to have. She decided that she just couldn’t live there either. After they had stood empty for so long she decided to rent them out for income but sometimes she “rents” them to the AAMC to help with rescues. To keep herself from going crazy, she opened a diner, the only sitdown place to get a “meat and three” meal in town. It turned out to be not only a personally fulfilling investment but a profitable one as well.