Page 21 of Thunder

I'm doing it alone at the tail end of a morning that already took more out of me than I let on to anybody.

Phantom's got the whole club stretched thin watching for a silver truck that hasn't shown again, and every hand on this ranch is doing the work of two.

I'll be damned if the Sergeant at Arms is the one man standing around holding a cane while his brothers sweat.

So, I've got the gate up on my shoulder, and a hinge pin in my teeth and my weight braced wrong.

All of it fucking wrong, and I know it is even as I'm doing it.

I set my feet to lift the last inch.

And my hip goes.

It doesn't hurt at first.

That's the trick of it, the cruel little mercy of it, the leg just quits, the way a rope quits, all at once with no warning, the muscle around that hunk of bullet fragment deciding it's done taking orders.

One second I'm holding sixty pounds of steel gate at shoulder height.

The next my left leg isn't under me, and the gate's coming down, and I'm coming down with it.

I get a hand out.

Catch the corral rail.

It's the only reason the gate doesn't take my foot off, because I get enough of a twist on it to send it crashing sideways into the dirt instead of straight down onto my boot.

Then I'm down on one knee in the dust with my bad leg splayed out useless behind me and the pain arriving all at once now, roaring up from the hip like the fragment's caught fire.

I don't make a sound.

Twenty years of getting hurt taught me that much.

But I'm down, I'm all the way down.

I can't get up, and for one long ugly second I understand exactly how far I've fallen from the man I was—a man who used to put other men on the ground and now can't get himself off it.

Then I hear the truck door.

Of course.

Of fucking course she's here.

The one person on this whole ranch I'd have crawled into the barn to keep from seeing this, and here she comes at a dead run across the lot with her braid flying and her face gone white, and there's nothing I can do about it because I'm on my knees in the dirt like a shot horse.

"Thunder—" She hits the ground beside me, hands already on me, on my shoulder, my arm. "Don't move. Don't you move, let me look at you⁠—"

"I'm fine."

"You're on the damn ground."

"I'm restin'."

"You aren’t resting, you—" Her voice cracks, and she stops, and her hands are shaking where they've got hold of my arm, and I clock that even through the roar in my hip.

She's scared.

Not annoyed, not exasperated.