Those were the twilight years of motor sports, of course, and if I grieved to see them go, I was glad I’d gotten in soon enough to see them at all. Sponsorship was way down and so were ratings. Things had gotten a lot like it was in the beginning, when a man with a car didn’t have to have a twenty-million-dollar team to buy his place on pit row. He could earn it, the way Jack did, with his smile and his talent. He breathed new life into a dying sport, same as Ali had done for boxing. You couldn’t tap a newsfeed back then without Lightning Jack smiling out at you. I can see him now, the way he was before a race, that unearthly calm he had about him. “Let’s ride, Gus,” he always said as he strapped himself into the cockpit, and for a while the ride was a wild one, like an out-of-control elevator hurtling to the top. You’d have thought the other drivers would have hated him, but Jack was funny like that, incandescent as the lightning bolt he’d painted down the hood of his midnight-black Dragon. He lit a room up, and people loved him for it. But even that wasn’t enough to save us.
By then the soup we all took in with each breath was so thick that in some of the bigger cities—Tokyo and L.A., for instance—people wore surgical masks every time they stepped out the door. Electric vehicles had never caught on—they’d never solved the battery thing—and though public transportation had skyrocketed, plenty of people still gassed up to go. There’s just something about a gasoline motor, the sense of contained deviltry in it, pistons hammering as gas explodes—actually explodes—in the cylinder and drives the crankshaft like a dervish in his finest hour. Meanwhile, the Feds down in Washington steadily whittled away at drivers’ rights. It wasn’t much more than window-dressing really. Peak oil had taken hold and the flow dried to a trickle. By the time Jack crashed coming out of the third turn in the last Daytona, there just about wasn’t anyplace left where a man could wind a motor out anymore.
When NASCAR disbanded, Jack’s team broke up, too. Me and Joe Hauser and Lola—the finest jack man I ever saw—stuck around for a while. Jack was glad to have us. We wanted to drive, even if it meant running thousand-dollar drags in the middle of the Birmingham night. Amateurs all around us, and Jack ate them up like candy hearts, so charismatic that they didn’t mind watching him fold away their money. Jack was all about winning even then. But a time came when even Joe and Lola and I began to drift. The last of the street gas began to run out, for one thing. First it was a night or two between races; then it was a week or a month or more. Plus, there was the competition. A man can only go so long stealing lunch money before his conscience begins to nag him.
Jack fell into a funk. He took to drink, thickened up around the middle. I got to where I had to get away from it all. Before you knew it, I had a straight job, working on hydraulic lifters in Montgomery. Joe Hauser drifted out west and started pushing paper for an insurance company. Lola—the only one of us with a college degree—landed a position as an executive at a fiber-optic plant, and before you know it she was running the place.
Then the NRA’s dirty bomb put the quietus to D.C. The New Feds relocated to Buffalo, but by the time they got themselves organized, it was too late. Insurgencies had begun to break out like a bad case of the clap. States’ rights and all that. I’m talking secession, the seizure of all military assets by right of eminent domain, and vigorous defense of self-declared borders. A dozen other special-interest groups followed the NRA into terrorism.
Jack, with his usual prescience, had seen the way things were headed. He showed up at the hydraulic plant one afternoon and took me to lunch. It was the kind of Alabama day where just breathing you sweat through your shirt. When we got into the air-conditioned diner, I heaved a sigh of relief. “Goddamn, but you’re a sight for sore eyes, Jack,” I said, and for a moment I couldn’t do much more than stare at him. He was his old self, sinewy and lean behind a pair of aviator glasses, his unruly mop of hair close cropped.
“It’s good to see you, too, Gus,” he said. “Hell, not a minute goes by I don’t think about you and the old days.”
“Good times,” I said, and for a moment we were silent in contemplation.
An icy-cold Coca-Cola appeared—you could see the glass sweating it was so cold—and then a couple of menus. I ordered a burger and fries without hardly noticing the lady serving us. Jack and I chatted in a desultory way about past times as we ate.
“You and Lola ever have anything together?” I asked at one point. I’d often thought about trying my hand with her myself—she’d have probably shot me down like a clay pigeon—only I feared horning in on Jack’s territory, and I would never do a thing like that.
“Lola?” he said. “She was too important to the organization.”
After that, the conversation turned in other directions. We were both melancholy by then, anyway. We missed the track, the stink of exhaust and the sizzle of anticipation as we took the pavement, the burst of activity whenever Jack slipped in to the pit. I ran the fastest crew on the circuit—I can’t tell you how many times other drivers tried to poach my guys—but every time we rolled out onto the asphalt, we strove to shave a tenth of a second off our time. In a close race, a tenth of a second can make the difference between winning and losing.
So we chewed over what we’d been doing in the year or two since we’d last seen each other. I didn’t have much to share. I worked at the hydraulics plant eight hours a day and saw a lady named Mary occasionally, but neither one of us really had our hearts in it. Jack didn’t have much to say either. He’d spent a long time in that funk and then he’d pulled himself together, stopped drinking, hit the gym. I thought the conversation had hit that lull that old friends who’ve grown apart so often do, when they find themselves staring at each other across the gulf time has opened up between them. It saddened me. I didn’t have many close friends in those days, and I hadn’t realized how much I missed the easy camaraderie that grows up between men bound together in a common enterprise.
“How come you got yourself together like that?” I asked just to break the silence, and Jack got quiet all over again. He looked me over, and I recalled the first time we met, the way he’d studied me, like he was getting ready to surrender some serious change for a hunk of rolling iron, and he wanted to make sure he liked what he was seeing. I realize now that he was wondering whether he could trust me, and I’m glad he decided he could. Things would have gone differently if he’d chosen otherwise, and I might have been a happier man now, but it would have hurt something awful to know that Lightning Jack hadn’t trusted in our friendship.
He didn’t answer me. Not directly, anyway. What he said was, “Real tragedy what happened in Washington, wasn’t it?”
I allowed it was, though I hadn’t been especially fond of the party that was in power at the time. Nor the one that wasn’t, either, if it came to that.
“This is only beginning,” he said. He leaned forward, lowering his voice. “The whole thing’s going to come apart, Gus. Wait and see. Nothing but spit and baling wire ever held this country together anyway. If it were a car, it would be a jalopy, sure.”
I allowed that this was true, as well—with the caveat that, all due respect, it didn’t take any genius to see it. “Hell, Jack, Georgia’s already gone and you hear the same rumbling right here in Montgomery.”
“Sure,” he said, and now he leaned back, flung one arm across the back of the booth, and grinned. I thought our waitress, who was just then delivering the check, might go into heat. When she was gone, he ticked the rest of the secession risks off on his fingers. He finished up with California and the Midwestern Alliance and said, “You know what that means.”
“War.”
“That’s right. And a hell of a big one, too.”
“Best thing you can do is keep your head down when the shooting starts.”
“I got a different perspective,” Jack said. “The way I figure it, the New Feds are going to win this thing. I reckon at least half the military are going to stay loyal. You’re going to see pockets of resistance to just abou
t every insurgency that springs up, and soon enough Buffalo will be coordinating them. And the New Feds have the codes to the nukes. It’s going to be a hair-raising ten years, but I think we have a window of opportunity here.”
“Opportunity for what? To get our heads blown off?”
“We run that risk no matter what. There’s no keeping out of the fray.”
“So what do you have in mind?”
“Tell me, come war, what’s the most valuable commodity on earth?”
“I don’t know. Those nukes, I guess.”
“Weapon of last resort, unless a terrorist gets ahold of one. The New Feds are going to try to keep it conventional—and you can’t fight a conventional war without—”
“Oil,” I said.
“You got it.” He aimed a finger at me and dropped the hammer. Bang. “Just try firing up an Abrams tank on a Sears DieHard,” he said, grinning that cocky grin of his, “and you’ll see what I mean. The New Feds are already moving convoys of tankers down the old interstates. It’s only a matter of time before someone picks one off.”
“You’re a crazy man. Let’s say—just for the sake of argument—you can manage it. Who are you going to sell it to?”
“Anyone who wants it. Insurgents. Gearheads hungry to fire up their old iron. Hell, I’ll ransom it back to the Feds. I don’t care. I’m an amoral son of a bitch, Gus. I just want to drive.”
“How do you plan to pull it off?”
He leaned forward and sketched it out for me, and I saw then that he was a madman. But something in his voice made me keep listening—the lure of the open road maybe or the hunger to feel a car come to life under my hands one more time. Maybe it was money and maybe it was love for Jack himself. A crew chief lives in the shadow of his wheelman, after all. Comforts him and cossets him and makes sure his car is purring like a kitten every time he takes the pavement. So yeah, I listened. Most of us never can say why we do the things we do. Oh, we can count out reasons like we count out change, but those are just rationalizations. We’re mysteries to ourselves. That’s the one true thing I know, so in the end I can’t say why I did it. I can say only that I started off by telling him no. I thanked him for lunch and sent him packing, to pitch his crazy scheme to someone else—Joe maybe, or Lola. Anybody but me, brother. Hydraulics were the thing for me, and when the war came I’d follow my own advice—keep my head down and hope the draft board needed a gearhead more than another grunt.
Three months later, Alabama seceded from the union. I got my draft notice from the Citizens’ Militia two months after that. I didn’t make the appointment, though. I called Jack up and skipped town instead. He met me at the gate to tell me he’d pulled the crew back together. “Welcome home, brother,” he said, clapping me on the back. “Let’s ride.”
Our first job was a disaster. The gunners in the crow’s nests took one of our chase cars straight out of the game, spinning it off to the shoulder, where it slammed into a guardrail. A minute later it was moving again, but by then it was too late. The action had moved on. It limped to the rendezvous point, where we learned that the man in the turret—Vance Tyler, my gas man for a good half-dozen years—had caught a faceful of lead. Worse yet was the swingman, Paul Harrison. He’d worked behind the pit wall, wrangling air hose, and I think it was that more than anything else that caused him to volunteer to make the leap. He’d always longed to work the dangerous side of the wall. He miscalculated his jump and rolled up under the truck. The tires thundered over him, unwinding him like a ball of twine as Jack peeled away toward the exit.
Jack and I both took it hard. When we sheltered up at an abandoned garage, Jack told me he’d never matched speeds with the tanker. Paul hadn’t had a clean shot at the running board. “Bullshit,” Lola said later.
“Sure,” I said. “Doesn’t help me any, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Vance,” I said.
“Well, don’t cry about it,” she told me. “Armor up.”
We disassembled the gun turrets and rolled home under cover of darkness, just another band of gearheads testing the night air. We weren’t hot, not yet.
While Jack calmed our client, my crew and I went to work on the cars. The biggest challenge was balancing speed and weight. Jack was used to hitting 200 on the straightaways of a fast track like Daytona, and that was with restrictor plates. The question was how to maintain that kind of velocity on a vehicle that weighed considerably more than 3,300 pounds.
“That’s the wrong question,” Lola insisted.
“Then, what’s the right one?” I demanded one day in the garage. I’d been complaining about the weight and drag of the aluminum armor we’d begun bolting to the Dragon’s exterior.
“How to achieve your objective,” she said. “Speed is not your objective.”
“Then what is it?”
“You want to snatch a forty-ton vehicle off the highway. What do you think it is?”
Me, I thought about Vance Tyler and did just as she’d told me to: I armored up. I reckoned that top speed for a loaded tanker couldn’t be more than a 100, 110 miles per hour on a long straightaway, and that without a convoy to slow it down. We had plenty of weight to give. We upgraded to rolled-steel armor and we were still hitting 150. Like I said, there’s not anything I can’t do with an engine if you give me enough time.
Which is enough car talk. I could talk about cars all day long if you let me, but this story is about Lightning Jack, and how he finally went under the running boards himself. The next job—and don’t worry, I’m not going to belabor every one of them, either—went down outside of Baltimore. We scooped the tanker off 70 West and dropped it into Ellicott City. You have to understand, we never held on to the rigs for long. It was all very bang bang. Our job was to acquire and deliver. After that it was the customer’s problem, and what they usually did was put it undercover somewhere quick and drain the tank into an idling fleet of smaller vehicles. But as I said, they could blow the thing sky-high on the spot if they wanted. We didn’t care what they did with it. We were in it for the cash and—this was true especially of Lightning Jack, I think—the thrill of the thing.
And there were plenty of thrills. I took the gunner’s position in Lola’s Spyder after Vance died, so when Jack said, “Let’s ride, Gus,” it had a personal immediacy I’d never felt before. A night job, this was, and in the dark you couldn’t see much more of that car than its taillights. There’s tape of the raid, but the video has the cheap, washed-out quality of CCTV, and in the dark it has no resolution at all. You can see muzzle flash as the team breaks cover, swings in behind the convoy, and takes out the crow’s nests on the last truck in line. There’s some return fire from the truck’s escort vehicles, but most of them are farther up in the convoy, already out of play. There are maybe two bringing up the rear, it’s hard to tell. But none of that can communicate the sheer adrenaline rush of being there. I took out one of the escorts from the gun turret on Lola’s Spyder. The other one rolled and skated down the highway on its roof, throwing up a rooster tail of sparks.
Up ahead, Jack’s car veered in beside the tanker and locked speed. The dark swallowed the swingman—Dean Ford, the front tire changer who’d volunteered after Paul kissed the deck—but I knew he’d made the exchange because the truck began to drift out of true. For ten seconds, twelve at the most, everything hung in the balance. The trailer swung to the left, and the right front wheels of the tractor started to come off the ground. I thought the thing was going to ditch and go skidding across the pavement on its side. Then it righted itself and hit the exit to Ellicott City, the chase cars on its tail. It nailed the street going maybe sixty miles per hour, and that quick it was over. Ten minutes later, Jack makes the exchange with the client, and ten minutes after that, we’re undercover in a bankrupt Toyota dealership on Baltimore Pike.
This is pit work, as exciting in its way as any tanker raid. The objective is to break the cars down as swiftly as possible—you can’t cruise the st
reets in armored vehicles with gun turrets—and get the hell out of Dodge. My crew is fast. We’ve simulated this a thousand times, just like we did in the old days. The turrets come down and roof panels slide into place. Street tires replace sticky ones. Off comes the armor. Everything goes into a chaser van. Fifteen minutes later, we hit the street and branch off onto different routes, running by night to a second rendezvous point, two hundred, maybe three hundred miles away, wherever Jack has us sheltered up until we do it all over again. And there you have it. The anatomy of a job.
If we’d only run the one, everything would have been okay. But there was no chance of that, not now. Jack loved to drive too much. As for me and Lola and the others, we loved the feel of an engine beneath our hands. There were just six of us by then. We doubled up on the road team and in the pits, doing half a dozen jobs each. We were all junkies and road dogs, hardwired for gears and adrenaline. I think that’s what sustained us over the next nine months. I want to emphasize that. Months. You’re reading this, you probably carry around a truckload of myths and misconceptions: that we had a ten- or twelve-year run, maybe, that we pulled off dozens of jobs before Lightning Jack’s last ride. The truth is, we pulled seven tankers off the street in all, four in quick succession before we garaged the cars and laid up in Memphis, safe from the Feds in the heart of the New Confederacy.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Page 23