I read about the Smoke Out, put on annually by the Horse Backstreet Choppers magazine crew, on Bikernet. People always spoke of it in an almost cultish manner. An event where old school chopperheads appeared in mass out of nowhere like zombies right out of “Night of the Living Dead”, until they had taken over the village of Salsbury, North Carolina.

For years it was an east coast phenomenon as if the old school zombies couldn’t survive the dusty, arid atmosphere of the southwestern desert, so we remained safe from the annual invasion, but 2006 would be different. It would be the year that a new strain of Old School Zombies would emerge to take over the small Arizona town of Cottonwood, and it would never be the same.

They rumbled and rolled in from all over the west, California, Oregon, Washington, Texas et al, on a Friday afternoon that was as gray and damp as my grandmother’s basement. I parked and assumed, if I acted like them, I would blend in and I wouldn’t be discovered.

On to Page 2...