Wayne & Doyle Meet The Sons Of Loki

The fog came in low and wet, swallowing the headlights until the road looked like a pale scar stitched through black timber. Wayne had been driving with the wipers on a losing pace, the rubber smearing mist into gray veils, when the engine note ahead changed-lower, thicker-like a throat clearing in the dark. Doyle leaned forward in the passenger seat, knuckles white on the dash, eyes fixed on the trees. No birds. No wind. Even the gravel under the tires sounded muted, as if the forest had put a hand over its own mouth.

The first time the rumble rolled through the fog, it didn’t echo right. It didn’t bounce; it sank. Wayne felt it in his ribs more than he heard it, a vibration crawling up through the steering column. Somewhere beyond the reach of light, a set of headlights blinked once, then steadied, and the woods went stiller around them. The moon was climbing-thin as a blade behind the mist-turning every drifting strand of fog into something that looked almost solid.

Doyle swallowed. “Missing-rider reports,” he said, like the words were a rope he could hold on to. “Three towns. Same stretch of road. Same silence.”

Wayne kept his hands steady. His mind ran through the details he’d gathered in daylight and tried not to believe at night: men who’d vanished between gas stations, bikes found upright but cold, phones dead with no last call. No tracks where there should have been tracks. No bodies where there should have been bodies. Just a rumor that something rode the backroads at the edge of sight.

“What do you want from them tonight?” Doyle asked, voice roughened by the fog. “An answer? Or proof?”

Wayne glanced at the glove compartment where the silver rounds rode in a taped bundle like contraband prayers. “I want them to stop taking people,” he said. “And I want to see what’s doing the taking.”

A mile later the road dipped, and the trees crowded closer, trunks thick and slick with damp. Wayne slowed to a crawl. The headlights cut forward and met a wall of mist so dense it looked like poured milk. Then, as if someone had decided to turn a key in the world, the fog parted just enough to show silhouettes-bikes lined up on either side of the road, engines idling, exhaust coughing pale clouds into the night.

They weren’t arranged like a roadblock. They were arranged like a circle.

Leather glinted under the neon from a roadside sign half-swallowed by fog. Iron-eyed faces watched from the dark. When one of them shifted, his teeth flashed-white, too even, and sharp enough to make the back of Wayne’s neck tighten. The figures didn’t step forward. They didn’t need to. The woods themselves had narrowed the space between Wayne’s car and the mist that hid the rest.

Doyle’s breath came out slow. “That’s them,” he murmured.

Wayne didn’t argue. He’d seen men who liked to dress for intimidation, men who wore their violence like perfume. This was different. The air smelled wrong-wet fur layered over damp earth, copper clinging to the back of the throat like old blood. It wasn’t coming from anywhere Wayne could point at. It was coming from the circle.

A rider rolled his bike forward by a foot, then stopped, handlebars angled as if he were steering toward Wayne’s windshield with a grin too wide for human lips. “Wayne,” the rider said, voice carrying cleanly through the fog as if the mist had learned to deliver sound where it wanted it. “Doyle.”

Wayne’s stomach didn’t drop so much as lock. “You’ve been listening,” he said.

The rider’s eyes caught the moonlight. Something dark moved behind the pupils, like a storm behind glass. “We’ve been waiting,” he replied. “Folks go missing. Folks get quiet. Folks stop asking questions.”

Doyle shifted in his seat, hand sliding toward the door latch. “You’re not just outlaws,” he said, trying for skepticism that had no place in the copper air. “Who are you?”

The rider tilted his head. “Sons of Loki,” he answered, and the words landed heavy, like a chain tossed on a table. “We ride where the world thins. We take what comes too close.”

Wayne opened his door a crack. Cold mist pressed against his face, slick and clammy. He could smell the leather up close now-oil, sweat, and something feral underneath. “If you want a conversation,” he said, “you picked the wrong night.”

The bikes surged-not forward in a rush, not a charge, but a coordinated tightening. Engines revved, low and hungry. The circle moved with them, wheels whispering on damp gravel, and the forest accepted the motion without a single branch creaking. The unnatural stillness wasn’t quiet like peace. It was quiet like a trap that had already closed.

Doyle’s jaw worked. “They’re herding,” he said.

Wayne nodded once. “They’re not trying to scare us. They’re trying to isolate us.”

A second rider stepped closer to the edge of the road, and the neon from the sign made his face look carved. His teeth flashed again when he smiled. Not a man’s smile. Something that knew how mouths were supposed to be shaped for tearing....