Road Rage

by Paul Tomlinson

  “I never actually used the word ‘legitimate’,” Floyd said.

  “An illegal liquor run...” I mused. “This might be more fun than I thought. Do you think we’ll have to outrun the Highway Patrol?”

  “Almost certainly,” he said.

  “Excellent! Let’s go to it!”

  The song had ended and Bobby-Ray was reading the news bulletin. He didn’t have a team of journalists backing him up – his sources were local people who called in with the latest gossip.

  “First reports of the day are just rolling in, starting with a warehouse theft over in beautiful downtown Roslyn.”

  Bobby-Ray was being ironic. I was seeing nothing close to beautiful outside my window.

  “Thieves broke into Honest Herb’s warehouse in the early hours of this morning and made off with twelve hundred cases of bourbon whiskey. By my reckoning that’s over seven thousand litres of good quality sour mash. Someone out there is planning one heck of a party.

  “If you see a black and rust-coloured eighteen-wheeler out there this morning, the police in Lizard County would be mighty pleased to hear from you. And if you happen to know where that party is being held, you give me a call. Meanwhile, over in Clearwater...”

  “Hey, Floyd, did you hear that?” I didn’t need to ask. He heard everything. Even when he wasn’t supposed to.

  “There must be a mistake,” Floyd said.

  “Cast your mind back,” I said, knowing he had total recall. “Did Mister Flint ever actually say that the whiskey we were picking up was his legal property?”

  “He did not,” Floyd said.

  “We just stole twelve-hundred cases of whiskey,” I said. “Today is getting better and better!”

  “You’re now a wanted felon. Again,” Floyd said. “Keep your eyes peeled for Smokey.”

  According to Floyd, ‘Smokey’ was historical trucker slang meaning a police officer. Not that anyone cares. But he was right that every cop and his sidekick would be looking for us today. There’d be a car chase starting just around the next bend, I felt certain. This whole thing had turned out much better than I expected.

  “Do we carry on to New Grimsby?” I asked.

  “We do if we want the fifteen thousand dollars,” Floyd said.

  “Flint lied to us about the whiskey. What if he also lied about paying for it?” I said.

  “Then we find another buyer when we get there,” Floyd said.

  This didn’t quite qualify as a plan as such, but it did give us options.

  “Either way, we’ve got to get out of Lizard County,” I said. “And fast.”

  Chapter Ten

  The ‘highway’ east of Roslyn was basically a rutted track. The dirt was red and it looked like the road got very muddy during the rainy season. During the dry season, which is about nine-tenths of the year in these parts, all that mud dries out and much of it turns to dust. A light breeze will stir up swirling brick-red dust devils. The passing of an eighteen-wheel truck stirs up the dirt like a hurricane. I was a mile behind Floyd and it was like driving through a thick red fog.

  “Smokey alert,” Floyd warned me over the radio. He was monitoring their broadcasts. Floyd had military-grade software that allowed him to break most common forms of encryption.

  The police cars appeared from nowhere. There were three of them.

  “How did they get on to us so quickly?” I asked.

  “We’re not difficult to spot,” Floyd said.

  This was true. If they had drones in the air the truck was an obvious target even without the great plume of red dust it was kicking up. You could probably see that from space.

  “Do you think they accept bribes?” I asked, putting my foot down as Floyd floored it.

  “Would you like to stop and ask?” he said.

  “They’re local cops,” I said. “We just have to make it across the county line.”

  “Twenty miles to go,” Floyd said.

  The truck and trailer were heaving around like a toy boat in a storm. This rutted track did not deserve to be called a highway.

  “I’ll drop back and distract them, you keep going,” I said.

  “Ten-Four.”

  Floyd and the truck disappeared into the dust cloud. Maybe I could use the poor visibility to my advantage. I glanced at the map on the dashboard screen to get an overview of the local area. It wasn’t big on places of interest. There was the highway. And nothing else. The rest was scrubland and spikey desert trees.

  I slid to a stop on the dirt and reversed off the road a little way, stopping at right-angles to it. The dust cloud swirling around me was so thick I couldn’t see anything in any direction. I turned on the Trekker’s proximity sensors. The radar didn’t extend very far beyond the car but I didn’t need it to. I smashed my foot down on the ‘go’ pedal as soon as the sensors bleeped.

  I misjudged it. Instead of hitting the side of the police car, I missed the cruiser and shot right across in front of them. I had a brief glimpse of the startled faces of the two cops and they probably had a glimpse of me shouting ‘Oh, squit!’

  The driver of the cruiser jammed on the brakes – an instinctive move that he didn’t have time to think about. They slewed across the road and came to rest. I kept going, the Trekker bouncing over the scrubland beside the highway.

  There was a crash behind me as a second cruiser slammed into the stationary one. The dust had already swallowed them up so I had no idea how badly either was damaged.

  I’d lost sight of the highway and was bumping over the uneven ground now. The Trekker’s heavy-duty suspension springs were creaking and squeaking and my brain was in danger of being scrambled in my skull. I kept my tongue well back from my teeth – I didn’t want a piece of it dropping into my lap.

  The Trekker shot up a hidden rise and all four wheels left the ground. If I’d been going any faster I’d probably have flipped end over end. The impact when the car came down almost sent my ass up to meet my ears. I slowed, trying to get an idea where the police cruisers were. I flipped on the rear-view camera. All I could see was swirling dust.

  Something big passed over the top of the Trekker and I ducked and braked. It took me a second to realise that the dark shape was the underside of a car. I’d thought it was a search drone. The police cruiser sailed through the air, tilting a little to the left, and crashed into the branches of a big old Joshua tree that loomed out of the cloud to catch them. The tree bent but decided it wasn’t going to let them go and the car came to rest in it. I wanted to stop and snap a picture – no one would ever believe a police car ended up in a tree. But I still had at least one more cruiser to deal with. I hoped Floyd was fast coming up on the county line and would be across it soon.

  I pulled around the newly-decorated Joshua tree and peered at the dashboard screen to see if the other car was coming after me. There’s a reason why they tell you not to let yourself be distracted by your dashboard screen.

  “Ravine!” a voice in my head yelled. A split-second decision was needed – brake suddenly or plough onwards. I kept going. I got a quick look at the dry stream bed less than ten feet below as I sailed into the air. Luckily it was more of a gully than a gorge. The Trekker’s wheels bounced down on the other side. They scrabbled briefly but then dug into the dirt and propelled me forwards.

  A quick look at the screen showed me a police cruiser approaching the gap. The driver must have lost his nerve at the last moment. The front of the bonnet dipped down suddenly and the car all-but disappeared. It came to rest nose-down in the gully. I could just see the rear end of it and the red glow of the taillights.

  I called the map back up on the screen and made my way back towards the highway.

  Two of the police cars were out of action, I knew that for sure. The third one was almost certainly damaged but it might still come after us. Hopefully, it wouldn’t overtake me before I reached the county line. The Trekker bounced back up onto the highway and I could see Floyd’s dust cloud not too far ahead. The hig
hway was paved here and there was marginally less dust.

  “Is that you back there, Robin Hood?” Floyd asked.

  “Affirmative,” I said. “Two neutralised and one delayed – we should have a clear run.”

  “Copy that. Five miles to the county border,” Floyd said.

  Yes! We were almost home free. I couldn’t even see the car behind us – just a cloud of dust about a mile back and getting closer.

  Bobby-Ray broadcast a report on our ‘daring escape’ less than an hour later. He had video from a witness at the scene.

  “...When the dust settled, this was the sight that greeted first responders. No, your eyes are not deceiving you, that is a police car up in a tree.” The camera pulled back so that the Joshua tree and the other car nose-down in the ditch were both in the shot. “The police were evidently hunting high and low for the thieves. Jasper Jessup was one of the first on the scene.”

  Jasper’s sweating face was powdered with the red dust and the tan-lines visible under his singlet said he normally wore a tee-shirt. He was filming himself and seemed to be enjoying his few minutes of fame.

  “I never saw so many cop cars in one place before,” he said. “They was skidding around and kicking up dust so you’d think a sand storm had blown in. We get them here sometimes. None of the cops could see a thing and they started running into one another like it was a demolition derby. Squee-it, they should do it over again at the weekend and sell tickets.”

  The officers up in the stranded police car were leaning out of the windows when Jasper approached the tree. The branches were stopping them from opening their doors to get out.

  “Get some help here,” one shouted down, “and stop pointing that scracking camera at us.”

  Jasper looked into the lens grinned and gave a thumbs-up, then the report cut back to Bobby-Ray in his little studio.

  “Police are asking Saphira citizens to report any sightings of the truck, believed to be an old Penwald 1600, which was last seen heading east.”

  “We just crossed into Butterfly County,” Floyd said.

  “Seriously?” I looked around. No butterflies.

  “I don’t make these names up,” he said.

  “Whoo-hoo, we made it!” I said.

  “We made it through day one,” Floyd said.

  I wasn’t going to let this reminder dampen my spirits. “We have to take them one at a time,” I said. “We need to pull off the road for a while.”

  Floyd could carry on driving forever but a twelve-hour stint behind the wheel was about my limit. We found a side road and drove along it until we could no longer be seen from the highway. The road didn’t look like it saw much traffic. We pulled off onto flat ground alongside it and shut the vehicles down. I locked the Trekker and joined Floyd in the cab of the truck.

  I was too tired to think much about food so I popped the top on a can of instantaneous coffee and tore open a foil packet of self-heating tuna pasta that optimistically promised to taste just like ‘momma’ used to make it. It smelled like cat food but after I’d scalded my tongue with the coffee I couldn’t taste it anyway.

  Floyd had pulled up a map on the truck’s dashboard screen and was looking at the whole continent with a thin yellow line showing our route across it. Even zoomed out that far it didn’t look anything like a straight line. It looked like someone had plotted the longest distance between two points. Just past the halfway mark, there was a big curve that looked like a long detour. I pointed my spoon at the space under it.

  “That’s the Badlands?” I said.

  Floyd nodded. “Three hundred square miles of scorched earth and poisonous swamp.”

  “Going around it adds, what, five or six days to our journey?”

  If we drove straight through the Badlands, we could reach New Grimsby quicker. In theory. But the map didn’t show any roads in the Badlands, only a couple of icons – one that meant ‘unsuitable for motor vehicles’ and the other signifying a ‘biohazard’.

  The highway east, Route 9, used to skirt much closer to the Badlands but it had been diverted further north a decade ago when the border zone, the buffer between bad land and good, had been widened ‘in the interest of public safety’.

  There were all sorts of rumours about the Badlands but they all boiled down to the same thing – it was the home of mutants and monsters. No one in their right mind would choose to go there. And anyone who did was unlikely to come out the other side. We had no choice but to drive those extra miles and go around it.

  I asked Floyd to read me a bedtime story and he told me to go and do something that was, sadly, anatomically impossible.

  *

  Day Two. The sky was clear and the sun was bright. My breakfast coffee tasted as grey as it looked and the protein bar was soft without seeming to contain any moisture. I think it was raspberry flavoured. Or maybe sardine. It looked sort of reddish. I promised myself I’d get real food at the first place we came to.

  “There have been more sightings of our friends in the eighteen-wheeler,” Bobby-Ray reported. “And here at K-BOT we’ve received information about them from a source that has asked to remain anonymous.”

  “Who’s been talking about us?” I wondered.

  “The big rig you see on your screen is the property of Quincy & Floyd Trucking, an independent haulage crew operating out of Cicada City. That black tractor unit is a Penwald 1600 and it’s over twenty years old. By my reckoning, it’s just a polish and a paint job away from being a classic. A bit like yours truly.

  “Team Quincy, I am told, are currently heading right across the country from Roslyn to New Grimsby and have to deliver their cargo by midday on the fourteenth to claim their prize. We’ll be following their progress all the way – and I for one wish them happy trails.”

  “So much for staying under the radar,” Floyd said.

  I wasn’t comfortable with the publicity either, but there wasn’t much we could do about it.

  We started up the vehicles and headed back towards the highway.

  “Today is going to be a better day,” I said. “I can feel it.”

  “No it isn’t,” Floyd said. He had seen what I hadn’t. There was a police vehicle parked on the side of the road just ahead of us. He slowed the truck to a stop.

  “Same squit, different county,” I said.

  “What do we do?” Floyd asked.

  “Keep driving. Take it slowly and see what he does.”

  The truck crept forward.

  Chapter Eleven

  Floyd edged the truck forward slowly like a cartoon bear tiptoeing past a sleeping dog. I didn’t realise it but I was holding my breath. The cab of the truck passed the parked police vehicle. The trailer made it halfway past. Then the whole truck was in front of it. So far so good.

  I approached at the same slow pace, the Trekker’s engine silent and the tyres making almost no sound on the road surface. I drew parallel with the cruiser and looked across. The cop was looking straight ahead. I wondered if he was asleep behind his sunglasses. He let me get past him and go a hundred yards up the road before he turned on the red and blue flashers. He came up behind me fast.

  The green-and-white cruiser overtook me and shot on past the truck. The cop jammed on his brakes and I think he must have pulled up the handbrake too. The car slid around as it came to a halt so that it blocked both sides of the road. Floyd pulled the truck off the road and I stopped behind him.

  This police cruiser had a gold badge on the door. The cop was a Marshal. He sat in the car watching us while the dust settled around him.

  “Be careful,” I told Floyd, “he doesn’t look like a fully paid-up member of the Friends of Robots League.”

  I bet myself a dollar that the Marshal would use the word tin-job or clanker when he saw Floyd. Assuming he didn’t just shoot him first.

  The Marshal got slowly out of the car and hitched up his pants. He walked slowly towards me. He was a big man and he carried his beer gut with pride. ‘Brew muscle’ my g
randpa used to call it. His uniform looked spotless and the creases up the legs of his pants were razor-sharp. Ex-military, I guessed. He had a pale-coloured Stetson hat with a big gold badge on the front and wore aviator-style sunglasses. I think law enforcement officers all shop from the same catalogue. His fancy leather belt and holster weren’t standard issue and neither were his pointy-toed boots. I’d put money on them being dragon skin.

  I stepped out of the Trekker, making sure to keep my hands where he could see them. I’d been here before. More than once. I heard Floyd climb out of the cab, but he didn’t step around the truck into the road. Maybe he was heeding my advice and staying out of sight.

  “Is there a problem, officer?” I asked. I think there’s a law that you have to say that.

  The Marshal was close enough now that I could read the name on the embroidered patch on his shirt pocket. Dimmock. His complexion was ruddy and the pores looked big enough to poke a finger into. He was chewing some sort of gum that made his teeth pink and he spat it out just before he reached me. I’m sure it was intended as a gesture of contempt. Right back at you, you saggy-assed sack of squit. I smiled so he couldn’t read that thought in my face.

  A movement behind him caught my eye. Floyd was bent over, looking into the open window of the police cruiser. If the Marshal saw him, he’d probably shoot us both.

  The Marshal exposed his stained teeth in a humourless smile. I couldn’t see his eyes – just myself reflected in his lenses. That’s why they wear those things, they think it unnerves you. Sometimes they’re right.

  “You seemed to be in quite a hurry to get out of Lizard County,” he said. He’d obviously been informed about yesterday’s cross-country race.

  “Just trying to keep to our schedule,” I said. “It’s a long drive to New Grimsby.”

  “And Sheriff Pemberton and his boys were just escorting you to make sure you weren’t held up any, is that right?”

  I nodded. “That’s right. He’s one mighty hospitable sheriff, I must say.”