Inside the tire shop, Louis suddenly raised a hand, signaling everyone to be quiet.
"Did any of you hear that?"
The next second, the aluminum roll-up door twisted violently, buckled inward, and then blew off its tracks as if it had been hit by a raging elephant. It flew straight into Louis before he could react, and the impact shattered his skull. Brain matter and blood sprayed across the floor.
Harsh sunlight poured in through the opening, making everyone inside squint and wince. Through the glare, they could only make out a tall man stepping through the doorway with a cigar clenched in his teeth.
"Motherfucker!"
One of the gunmen jerked his rifle up and tried to fire.
The next instant, his rifle was smashed into a U-shape by a single punch.
At the same time, three bloody holes opened in his body.
Logan showed no intention of dodging. After the first shots rang out, he did not even bother transforming into Ghost Rider.
Bullets slammed into him, punching through his organs, but the wounds sealed almost immediately after the rounds passed through. Bullets that struck bone ricocheted back out and ended up hitting the men behind him.
He grabbed one gunman by the ankle and hurled him across the shop into two others. Then he planted both hands on the side door of the Dodge Ram and yanked.
The heavy vehicle flipped like a rolling press. The three men tangled together beneath it were crushed into a pulpy mess against the wall. The whole building shook from the impact.
The Dodge Ram had taken some damage, but the frame was still intact. Logan tore the jammed door clean off the vehicle.
Benny raised a pistol with trembling hands and aimed at Logan. His face had gone paper-white, sweat ran down his cheeks, and his teeth clicked uncontrollably.
He never got the chance to pull the trigger.
Logan seized his wrist and squeezed.
Bone, flesh, and the pistol itself collapsed together into a mangled wreck of blood and broken parts.
Benny stared at his hand in horrified disbelief, as if it had already been packed into a dumpling wrapper.
Then he screamed.
Logan answered by slashing once.
Benny's head, skull and all, split apart into several jagged pieces.
Logan spotted the girl still alive. She was staring at him with wide, frightened eyes.
"You're safe now."
He dragged on the cigar, taking a lungful deep enough to kill a lesser man outright, then exhaled a thick cloud of smoke.
Without waiting for a reply, the weathered older man turned and walked out.
Next, he had the Reyes Group to deal with.
They were entrenched along the U.S.-Mexico border, running drugs like a well-oiled machine. Logan was certain they had bought off plenty of crooked cops to keep the route open.
Unfortunately, despite the Reyes Group's infamous reputation, almost nobody knew where their real nest was.
Compared to the FBI and the DEA, it was their fellow drug lord, Marta, who wanted them dead even more.
The three bosses themselves spent most of their time in Juárez, Mexico. They rarely crossed into Texas. Instead, they ran the entire criminal network remotely, controlling 147 mules, more than a hundred hidden cells, and over ten thousand members.
Logan was still a one-man war.
Even after recovering his memories, he was still the same blunt instrument he had always been.
From his point of view, he had signed a labor contract with no end date. The devil was not going to give him a vacation anyway, and eternal pursuit of the wicked was still better than slaughtering innocents.
The souls of the guilty belonged in hell to begin with. He was only stepping on the gas a little early.
And the contract he had signed had already been burned into his mind. Drex had been generous enough to ensure he would never lose his memories again and had granted him true immortality. As long as the Black Hole Dimension existed, Logan would keep coming back.
There was even a reward system for collecting more souls.
The reason Logan had become so driven was simple. Drex had promised that if he delivered one hundred million sinful souls, Silver Fox, Carla, would be brought back to life.
For the Logan who had recovered his memories, that was impossible to refuse. It made him almost desperate.
The Reyes Group was not easy prey. When the DEA and CIA had launched operations against them, they had both moved with caution. A massive power was shielding the organization, and if even a single part of the procedure was illegal, the entire operation would be shut down.
That was also tied to the Reyes Group's generous "political donations." If crime were truly wiped out, what would the gentlemen upstairs live on?
Drex watched Logan's path of destruction with quiet approval.
The Ghost Riders he had chosen were proving to be very efficient. Aside from Johnny Blaze, they were all decisive killers, direct and relentless.
Frank was the steadiest and most effective of them all. Drex even considered rewarding him by resurrecting his wife and daughter.
Though that might make Frank lose a little of his edge.
Honestly, the best place to harvest sinful souls was a prison. The Ghost Riders seemed to avoid prisons by default, probably because they considered prisoners already punished by law and in the middle of redemption.
Outside a town near Mexico City, the infrastructure was predictably awful. Once you got out of the city, there were only about ten kilometers of proper road left. After that, it was dirt.
Dust surged into the sky as the vehicle rolled on. Outside the windows stretched an endless wilderness broken only by clusters of saxaul trees.
Up ahead, a settlement appeared on the horizon. The buildings were dilapidated, the road was blocked off, and a few harsh-looking Latino men stood beside the barricade, their faces hard and unfriendly.
They were all members of the Reyes Group, guarding the only route leading to one of their most important production sites.
"What are you here for?" they asked in Spanish.
The driver answered in Spanish too, but Logan had already lost patience. In the soul radar, every one of these men was stained with sin.
He tore the vehicle open and lunged at them.
His Adamantium claws raked across one man's throat.
The man's eyes bulged wide. He barely had time to make a small choking sound before his head flew off.
The others had not even processed what happened before Logan was already inside their ranks. His Adamantium claws extended to a full meter, and in just a few brutal motions he shredded them apart.
Then he glanced back at the terrified driver.
"Go!"
Logan moved on.
The driver did not argue. He slammed the vehicle into reverse and got the hell out of there.
This road led straight to one of the Reyes Group's drug production bases, one of the most important places in their entire network.