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him now was what made him live.  The wind whipping past him was the air in his lungs.  He would die before he gave this up again.
     
    The ride back to Absolution, his hometown, the home of the Priests, took a couple of hours.  It was too short.  As much as Samuel wanted to do and experience on this, his first day of liberty, he wanted to stay on his bike and chase the sunset.  He needed that freedom, but being home was freedom in its own way and it would have to do for the present.  He knew that the following day would find him astride his bike, the blacktop flying away beneath his wheels.  The regime in prison had been based on physical labor, with the intention that a bone deep muscular tiredness would control inmates as much as anything else.  That meant that the majority of the inmates spent a lot of time in the open air, but Samuel didn’t recall one minute of one day of his sentence when the air had tasted quite this good.  Simply being on the other side of that razor wire-topped wall gave it a different flavor.
     
    As they entered the town limits, he slowed.  His brothers, riding in formation behind him, slowed too.  The town had been around since the 1700’s.  It had its own schools, hospital and a mall.  It wasn’t such a big place, but it wasn’t such a small place, either.  There were a couple of other MCs in the state, above the bands of weekend warriors, but they all recognized the Priests as the guiding light.   Samuel took note, as best he could as they passed, of the more significant changes that had taken place while he’d been incarcerated.  He needed to get to know the town again, to find his hook back into its nervous system.  In the six years he’d been gone the town had expanded a little, pushing its limits out with clean, fresh new buildings.  Along with the homes came businesses. 
     
    The Priests provided a degree of protection to the businesses in Absolution.  The town had its own police department, but the club picked up the slack on a lot of the minor crimes and some of the larger ones, too.  Whenever something was deemed too small to warrant an officer’s full attention, something like a bad seed’s continual shoplifting habit, the MC would step in and straighten the kid out where repeated cautioning by officers had failed.  In cases where there was little to no evidence and no chance of any conviction, but everyone knew who was really behind it, the MC would take up the enforcement while the legal system was hogtied by due process.  For continued access to this insurance policy, the businesses paid a percentage to the club.  Terry’s twice monthly reports to Samuel had assured him that the new businesses were just as grateful for the club’s continued interest in the town’s well being as the more established ones.
     
    Samuel’s father had joined the Marine Corp straight out of high school, barely taking the time to marry his school sweetheart first.  The war in Vietnam was heating up and Samuel’s daddy had been desperate for the opportunity to fight for his country.  Samuel had been born in 1962, almost exactly nine months after the wedding.  When his father had eventually returned from Asia, Samuel had still been too young to remember much, but his mother had told him that his father was not the carefree boy who’d set off with stars and stripes in his eyes.  When Maxwell Carter had come home he had struggled to settle into domestic rigidity with his wife and child.  Samuel knew now that his father’s state of mind would be labeled Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and treated with a bunch of pills and therapy.  At the time, Claire Carter, well used to coping on her own with a house to run and a small child, hadn’t been quite so bothered by Max’s absences when he’d acquired a motorcycle and taken to riding around the southern states with his buddies from the Corps, but she had asked that he find a way to bring money into the household.