by LeRoy Clary
I remembered that and more. So, instead of running away to hide in our tunnel, I went the other way. Sure enough, a pair of large motorcycles sat at the edge of the blacktop, hidden from us by the house. One was rakish, pinkish-purple around the edges, like it glowed, what I’d call a crotch-rocket. Low and overpowered. The other was huge, painted glossy black and trimmed in chrome. It had a windshield and saddlebags with a leather fringe. The muffler was as big around as my upper arm. Behind the seat for the driver was a higher one for a passenger.
I took it all in within seconds and made my decision. The seven shots would bring more bikers hunting us. They would follow our footprints in the snow if we went that way. The bike was our answer to escape.
Before Harry the Hog bought his big bike, he’d ridden around the neighborhood on a little Japanese dirt bike. I’d been almost sixteen and he had talked me into riding it, laughing hysterically when I fell and left part of my skin on the road. But after a few more tries, I managed to stay upright. That summer, I must have ridden a hundred miles on his little bike in our yard and street.
No, I’d never been on a large one such as the one that faced me now. I’d never ridden any other motorcycle beside his, and that only for one summer. But the bike ahead beckoned. It called to me.
With Sue at my heels, I leaped on, my thumb found the starter-button, and nothing happened. I looked down and saw the ignition key dangling from a fob of some sort. After turning the key, I calmed myself, squeezed the clutch with my left hand and touched the starter again. The engine softly growled to life.
Sue leaped on behind me. I tapped the floorplate a few times with my toe and let the clutch out slowly. We moved forward and turned away from the center of town. My feet insisted on skidding along the pavement as we turned, but when pointed straight ahead, and as I gained confidence, my right hand twisting the throttle, we accelerated smoothly, and I put my feet where they belonged.
I felt Sue twist around behind me and in other circumstances may have wondered what she was doing, but the motorcycle was huge, and I was busy trying to control it on the patches of snow that covered the road in shaded places. The engine pushed us through the snow as if it didn’t exist, but the slightest turn of the handlebars threatened to crash us. I fought to keep the bike going directly down the center of the road.
A pop of sound told me what kind of a noise a thirty-two semi-automatic makes. Sue had fired her gun. Then she did it again. My eyes found the rearview mirror. In it, I saw the three bikers that were probably investigating the earlier shooting.
They had seen us. She fired again.
One bike swerved and fell, the rider rolled in the snow. A second pulled up to check on the first. Only one continued in our direction. I had no illusions about Sue having hit the biker that fell, not with a two-inch barrel from the back of a bouncing motorcycle. It was more likely the rider had seen the muzzle flash and it had scared him enough that he tried to turn too fast on the slick roadway. That told me he was also a pretender, as far from being a bad-ass biker as my cousin was. The one that stopped to help was no better. In doing so, he allowed his prey to escape. And the third one hadn’t accelerated to catch us, despite me riding in third gear about twenty-five miles an hour until finding the right sequence to shift into the next higher gear.
The road we followed was closed ahead with barricades, probably closed each winter when the snow fell and got too deep to plow since nobody lived up there. So, I slowed, downshifted, and turned slightly. The wheels found the right shoulder, then slowed more as I made a U-turn.
When the bike threatened to fall to one side, I walked it forward on my tiptoes and stopped when straight again. Now I faced the third biker, still coming at me—but slowly. I pulled my Glock and held it in both hands like they teach the cops to do in the movies.
He saw my action and instantly understood my intention. I squeezed off a shot. He twisted his handlebars in one direction, then the other to try and recover his balance. I fired again, to upset him more, if not to hit him. He was maybe fifty yards away when he lost all control.
Killing him and the others was not in my playbook. I replaced the gun in my holster and twisted the accelerator. The bike leaped ahead, gained speed, heading right past him and back into town. The bike we rode made very little noise. We blew past all three bikers that had chased us and reached the edge of town where there were tracks from motorcycles everywhere in the four-inch deep snow. Most bikes were parked in a ragged row outside a community center or something similar. A few men were lounging outside, and as one, they turned to look at us. One bearded biker raised a beer in silent salute as we accelerated past. Two or three shouted insults or whatever. None shot at us.
We kept riding.
In the rearview, none mounted up and chased us. My suspicion was that they were too drunk or doing their best to get there. They didn’t care about us. We hadn’t done any harm to them individually, and they didn’t yet know about the ones we killed or caused to crash.
Sue shouted in my ear, “I used to live right up ahead.”
“Want to stop?”
There was a slight delay before she shook her head. I felt the shake, but she didn’t say anything out loud. I understood. If she had said yes, I’d have tried to talk her out of it. Instead, I increased our speed.
The depth of the snow became less as we rode away from town until there were more bare patches on the road than snow. No vehicle had passed this way in a day or two because there were no tire tracks. We zipped past a few cars and trucks, all abandoned, half of them burned. At one place, a man either heard or saw us at the last moment and reached for a nearby rifle. By the time he raised it, we were out of range. He acted more like he was willing to protect himself than that he wanted to shoot us.
Sue shouted in my ear, her voice laughing. “This is how to make a ten-to-twenty-day trip in an hour.”
She was right. That fact hadn’t dawned on me, but she was giving me full credit. It hadn’t been my intent to ride all the way to Everett, and it still wasn’t, but the bike made very little noise and as long as we kept the speed up, we were past people before they knew we were even in the area. A person with a good rifle and a scope could probably shoot at us if the shot was hurried, but why should they? We were not doing them any harm, in fact, we were trying our best to get away. Besides, shooting at us would reveal their location to others.
We rode on dry pavement as the elevation dropped and I studied the bike between my legs. We had plenty of gas. It almost drove itself, riding soft and smooth. Someone had chopped down a couple of trees across the road ahead, but I steered the bike around one end without hardly slowing or seeing anybody. Later, there were two small groups of people, one in an RV parked beside the road, and another had pitched a tent beside it. A woman waved.
That told me things hadn’t deteriorated as much as I had expected. Not yet. One old man waved in a friendly manner as we cruised past another wide spot where a small tent had been pitched.
The North Fork of the Stillaguamish River ran along the left side of the highway. I only knew that because of a road sign. After passing through three or four communities too small for stop signs or red lights, we topped a slight rise and ahead of us flowed the river. Sandbars marked every wide turn, and the water was clear enough to see the rocks on the bottom.
We’d already traveled half of the fifty miles I’d estimated to reach Everett. Right ahead was Arlington, the town where I’d lived. Like Sue, I would avoid my old house. After that came Marysville, then Everett. Before going on, I wanted to examine the maps in detail. Make plans. Operating without plans simply felt wrong, especially after my impulsive theft of the motorcycle.
On our right were empty fields and farms, one after the other. However, on the left side of the road was the river, and across that was forest for a far as I could see. A dirt road went down to the water and I turned on impulse. A quarter-mile took us to a slight slope, and a sandbar made of fist-sized rocks. We slowed and b
umped over them until we reached the water’s edge.
The river was only twenty feet wide, and less than a foot deep. I got off, and Sue did the same. I kept the bike in first gear while steadying it and working the throttle to move ahead. Sue leaped to the other side and helped me balance it until we reached the other side, then we moved into the forest and along a trail barely wide enough to fit the big bike.
I turned the engine off, leaned the bike against an alder tree, and we faced each other. She grinned. I grinned back and sighed. My heart hadn’t slowed since Sue had raced from inside the garage clutching the maps.
As I said to her earlier, I’m a planner. I like to know what’s happening next. Shooting two men, followed by a gunfight with three more, stealing a motorcycle and riding it through a town controlled by Hells Angles, or whatever new motorcycle club it had been, was not my style. Yet, we’d already moved half the distance to our objective in an hour instead of five or ten days where every day meant increased lawlessness and more roving bands of desperately hungry people.
We’d also abandoned our food, sleeping bags, and everything else we owned in the mine tunnels. The river provided plenty of cold water to drink.
Some things were looking better. Others not.
CHAPTER SIX
“That was amazing,” Sue told me, her face flushed from excitement and windburn. She sounded like a cheerleader at a local high school after a football game. She punched my upper arm. “You were a stud!”
“Me?” I laughed with relief and humor. At the same time, the idea of a fourteen-year-old girl calling me a stud was not missed. I’d be careful to keep any personal feelings of romance between us shut down. But even that stray thought couldn’t interfere with my elation. “What about you? I saw three of the motorcycle gang after us and didn’t know what to do. But you were like a cowboy in an old-time western that spun around on his horse and began firing at the posse.”
“Did you see that first one dump his bike?” Her laughter tinkled like the sound of the water rushing past.
My question was more serious. “Did you see any evidence you hit him or his bike?”
“He reacted to being shot at, I think.”
I thought so, too. I undid the flap on the leather saddlebag nearest to me. We hadn’t had time to see what we had stolen. Inside were dirty tee-shirts, hats, scratched sunglasses, and three pairs of heavy gloves for riding motorcycles. The other saddle-bag held two bottles of red wine, a few rolled-up girlie magazines and a pair of heavy boots that wouldn’t fit either of us.
I tossed the boots aside. The wine looked good. There was no cork-remover and breaking the neck of the bottle and chugging was not my style. Instead, I decided to save it for later and said, “You still got the maps?”
Sue pulled them from inside her jacket, where she had stuffed them safely away. She hadn’t had time to examine them in her snatch-and-grab at the garage. The first was a highway map of Colorado. The next was a street map for Salt Lake City. The last was a recreational map for Washington State, showing all the campgrounds, boat launches, and fishing lakes. It also showed the cities and towns, and we quickly found approximately where we were.
My finger traced possible routes to reach Everett and I thought about the quickest ways to reach it. It didn’t look good, despite us having traveled about half the distance. Everett was on the coast of Puget Sound, but to get there from our location, we had two choices. One way was to travel across several miles of swampy land to the north, with only two roads. Any lookout posted would see us long before we reached him, and both roads were natural choke-points, sure to be watched.
Another way was to come from the east and cross the flat Snohomish River Valley and the wide river Sue had mentioned. That way presented much the same problem as the other routes to the north. Traveling off the main roads was possible until reaching the river. It was not a small one like the Sauk that we could wade across, but one that steamships had probably used in the old days. There was no way to get the motorcycle across except for using one of the few bridges, something local gangs would recognize instantly as a place to ambush travelers. All roads and bridges into the city were probably blockaded by now.
Traveling south of Everett to enter from that side took us into more densely populated areas, guaranteed to be at least as dangerous. I said, “Well, I can get us to the edge of the city, but still have no idea of how to get through it unless you have a pilot’s license and know where to get a plane.”
Her finger traced another possible route through the center of the city. “This way, we could use the bike to go a hundred miles an hour and be down to the docks in a few minutes.”
It was my turn to point. “If I was there and wanted to rob or block people, I’d set it up at the bridge here . . . and here.” My finger moved around the map. “Maybe overturn a semi to block it totally. Side to side. Put a few guards with rifles there.” My finger continued to slide over the map. “And here. And here. And on the main streets in the city roadblocks, snipers, and ambushes can be anywhere. Nobody is going to come to their neighborhoods and take their food and women—but they are also searching for easy access to weapons, women, and food.”
Her face was paler than normal. “Maybe we should just wait here until they fight some more and kill each other off.”
“In a month, there will probably a single victor or gang ruling over each area with hundreds of soldiers reporting to him or her, all armed with the best weapons they can find and ready to fight the neighboring armies. Only the most dangerous fighters will still be alive. Those less skilled or careless will die. It will be worse than the chaos there now because it will be organized chaos. I don’t think we want to meet that person or group.”
She carefully folded the map and placed it in the saddlebag where it would remain dry. A glanced at the sky told us rain was probable. She pulled the shirt, hats, and gloves from the saddlebags. “It’s going to be cold sleeping out here.”
It was late afternoon and while I felt we could continue and reach the suburbs of Everett today, I saw no way to get through it to reach the docks, even if we managed to enter the city. Sleeping on our indecision seemed the best idea. Maybe a solution would come in a dream.
A voice in the direction of the river softly called to us, “Hey, you in there on the motorcycle.”
I pulled my twenty-two, thinking that if there was only one person, a softer shot might prevent him from warning others in the nearby area of where we were. If he wanted to fight, I was ready for that too. With the gun in hand, I moved a few steps closer to the voice in the thick underbrush and answered with a growl that I hoped made me sound big and mean, “What do you want?”
“No trouble. I live across the river on the hillside. I saw you two come in here.”
“What do you want?” I repeated, lowering my voice even more while thinking that if he intended to do us harm, alerting us to him being close was not the best way.
He answered in a friendly sort of way, if a little cautious, “I fished the river this morning and caught a small salmon. I cooked it a while ago and am setting the pan out here with half the fish in it. It’s too much for me and no sense in letting it spoil.”
“Why?” I asked suspiciously.
“Too much murdering and killing going on. As if the flu wasn’t enough, it’s like everyone is intent on killing the few still healthy and alive. Just leave the pan and I’ll get it in the morning if you please.” The accent was faintly Norwegian or Swedish, like most of the people of the northwest. The voice also sounded old and opinionated.
Nobody had so much as offered me a crumb since the flu struck, but I’d had maybe ten guns pointed at me in the last two weeks, most in the last few days, so I understood his comment and agreed with it. There was too much killing happening. Even Sue had centered a rifle on my chest, and there may have been others I hadn’t even seen. Now, from nowhere, a man offered food and asked for nothing in return.
Sue said, “I’ll go get it.”
“No. Leave it sit for a while. Just to be safe. It may be bait.”
“Flies will get it. And ants and God knows what else.”
“That old man might have a partner sitting on the side of the hill with a scope on a rifle. He could put a bullet through your left eye if he wanted from that distance.”
“He sounded sincere. And nice.”
I scowled at her. “Are you willing to bet your life for a piece of fish for dinner?”
The twenty-two remained in my hand as I worked my way to the left, where a stand of vines and thorns hid me. The sun was setting, and the pan was in the open. There was no sight of him. Apparently, the man hadn’t wanted to get too close to us, either. It was fifty steps away. Only a madman would try to get it and he’d used the higher brush at the edge of the river to cover his retreat. However, I was hungry.
I sprinted from cover, moving most of the distance in a few seconds, zigged, and snatched the handle of the pan as I raced past where it sat. A zag and then another zig carried me safely into the dense foliage.
Sue was panting and her face stark white. She hissed at me like an angry snake, “I thought you said it was too dangerous.”
“You were hungry,” I said lamely.
“And what would have happened to me if you’d died out there?”
I averted my eyes as my hand reached for the fish, a slab that filled the frying pan from side to side. It was not hot but had been cooked with a few spices and tasted as good as any fish in history. Sue accepted a piece of fish and continued to stare daggers at me that I couldn’t avoid, especially since I knew she was not only pissed at me but correct for doing so. It had been a stupid reaction on my part.
Stupid is a word I found myself using a lot lately. Not only for me but for others. If people didn’t die from the flu, they do for something that was generally stupid—like delivering a pan full of fish to travelers armed with guns. Or travelers who took the bait from traps shaped like frying pans. Talking to strangers had become a life-threatening choice. Not talking to them, the same. Silence or avoidance could be taken as secretiveness and passive aggression.