Free Lamp Riders: A Jinn Motorcycle Gang Novella by Augusta Hill

1
    V iento Frio was a monstrosity of arrogance and capitalist greed, a sign that rich men thought they could conquer whatever they pleased. Lacking any humility, someone had thought to bring supermarkets and lawns to the middle of the Mojave Desert, ignoring the screaming winds and blistering sun that made the surroundings look like Mars. Like many things that sound good in the boardroom, the feasibility of the project should have been questioned from the very beginning. However, it never was.
    A small group of tacky buildings had quickly been propped up by questionable contractors, and a few naive souls had been lured away from busy Southern California to come move to the ‘up –and-coming community’. There had even been a half-hearted attempt to make a public swimming pool for residents to cool off in when the temperature hit one hundred and twenty degrees. Just as quickly as it sprouted, however, the project was abandoned. The developers quickly ran away to easier places to work, like Florida, and time all but stopped for the brave souls who had tried to tame the desert. The town began the same slow wither into madness that affects everyone who stays too long in the summer sun.
    Celia’s parents had been two of the hapless souls led to the promised land of Viento Frio. Tired of the stifling congestion and greed of Los Angeles, they had drifted across the barren wastelands towards a small tin trailer to call their own. Soon after came their small convenience store, another trailer parked in front of their first, that was stocked with all the necessities a small, barely functioning town would need. Last of all came Celia, the first and only child born in Viento Frio.
    Short of stature with long black hair and mahogany eyes, Celia had been raised like a rattler in the sands. Dry wind and scalding heat did not faze her, nor did the bitterness that comes from a bleak desert winter. However, for all her blustering, she was kind-hearted underneath, with a devotion to doing the right thing. Thus it seemed fated that Celia was the one to stand in the eye of the coming storm, to face head-on the greatest threat that her forgotten desert town had ever seen.
    To tell more would be to get ahead of the story, however. For Celia did not know anything of magic or fate at first. She began the fateful day that changed everything like any other, covered in dust and vainly trying to wrestle boxes of huge soda onto a shelf.
    The trailer her parents had turned into a convenience store over twenty years before was cramped and hot, but Celia had been proudly running it herself ever since she graduated from high school two years before. It was filled with items that no one ever bought, as the couple dozen regular customers never needed more than cigarettes, coffee, and cheap sunglasses. The unusually high meth consumption of the town prevented most inhabitants from having the inclination or money to buy much else. However, since the next closest store was over two hours away, Celia’s parents liked the idea of being prepared in case anyone had an emergency. So, the shelves groaned under cans of baby formula, blankets, guides to venomous snakes, and other assorted, useless goods.
    As Celia managed to shove the heavy case of soda onto a low shelf at the back of the shop, she felt a familiar vibration coming through the thin floor. Soon the roar of motorcycles engines could be heard as they came down the lonely freeway, filling the still air with noise and chaos. What had begun as only low rumbling began to coalesce into a distinctive, steady buzz outside of her store. The trailer shook as the motorcycles turned from the road onto the dry patch of ground that served as the store’s parking lot.
    A hive had arrived.
    She liked to call biker gangs, or motorcycle clubs as the more organized groups tried to tell her, hives, because the way the engines rumbled and the bikers swirled along the road reminded her of bees. She never told them that