[Sequoia]

by Adrian Dawson

  Why? Because I’m an idiot. There’s a trend.

  And, while we’re stacking up the reasons why I’m an idiot (present tense), we should also add that as I pulled out of the lot at KRT, headed south along Alameda and kicked myself in every way possible for being an idiot, I never actually looked very closely at the traffic which surrounded me. In front, behind, around. Most specifically, behind. I never really looked and therefore I never really saw that, as I pulled out, two identical silver mo’cycles pulled out from the side of the road some way behind me; keeping just far enough behind to reduce suspicion whilst remaining just close enough to see - and then take - every turn I did.

  I never saw them.

  You know why.

  * * * * *

  Fifteen minutes into the drive I was still lost in thought. No tears yet, but they’d come - you just see if they didn’t. I was looking at the road, but not really seeing it. Looking at the cars which swarmed along with me but not really seeing them. Looking at the world and barely even comprehending that it was even still there.

  Then something flashed in my peripheral. I barely saw that either. It flashed again and yes, I saw it this time, but I ignored it. It flashed for a third time. By this time I knew it was a text-only message and, given that they only flash in your glasses three times before acknowledging that you have not adjusted your retinal focus and go away, that’s the point at which I should have simply ignored it for a third time. Yes, I was wearing the glasses; they’re photochromic and it was sunny. That’s not a betrayal, that’s just… I dunno… avoiding unnecessary glare. But I didn’t ignore it. Even though it came up as “>Sender Unknown<“ (and not only do I hate those with a passion, they are supposed to be filtered out of my network) I read it and, foolishly it seems, I instinctively reacted to it.

  >Look to your right.<

  Passing through a busy junction I looked right, taking eyes that were never fully on the road in the first place off the road completely. Just for a moment. Not the whole road, you understand, just my bit of road. What I saw when I turned, I saw too late. A woman in her early twenties, good-looking, driving fast toward me in a blue electric sports saloon. The thing was that she, like me, wasn’t even looking at the road. At any bit of road. She also seemed to be looking right, at the buildings. Good looking but not, it seemed, good at looking. Which is why she was completely missing the red light I suspected was right ahead of her and heading straight for me. The warning system built into the car, which normally has such a sweet feminine voice, barked a prophetic warning about an ‘oncoming threat’. I should have accelerated out of it but instead, foolishly, I braked. I’m an idiot, remember. I was still moving fast when she smashed hard into the back of my pride and joy, instantly turning the rear end into a very complex jigsaw of carbon fibre and sending the vehicle into a neck-breaking spin, figuratively speaking. It happened in what seemed like milliseconds.

  The car stopped dead: me in it, both of us facing the wrong way.

  All around… carnage ensued.

  The first thing I noticed was that a lot of cars seemed to be crashing, along with pedestrians all turning in unison to look. Cars and pedestrians which were nowhere near the mess the young girl and I had managed to craft from previously intact vehicles. It was as though everyone, just for a moment, had gone completely mad.

  The next thing I saw, sitting at the wheel of the car, shaking like a leaf and trying to take in exactly what had just happened, worried me a whole lot more…

  The first of the silver cycles hit the young girl’s car at some considerable speed, instantly crushing its front forks into the main body and sending the rider - via a vector we scientists like to call ‘translational momentum’ - flying over the vehicle itself like a ‘my first biker’ doll thrown away by a spoilt child who craved a ‘my first superman’ instead. He smashed hard against a solid concrete wall. Hard enough to shatter a huge chunk of his helmet clean off, hard enough to contort his limp body in ways that Twister and sex can only dream of achieving and way too hard to ever survive. In my opinion.

  At least, not for long.

  The second rider, although only a fraction of a second behind his friend, managed to swerve and slide, coming off his own bike in the process. The bike shot forward, passing within inches of the rear of the young girl’s sedan and then hit the wall almost as hard as the first guy had. Unlike his friend, however, and thanks in no small part to the fact that our old friend friction acts better on anti-skid road surfaces than it does on once-fresh air, Rider Two unwittingly used most of his body to slow to a stop long before the wall broke any of his bones. Unlike my own personal experience, this all seemed to happen in slow motion, as though it took minutes and I could have ordered myself some popcorn in the meantime and sat back to watch. Within a few seconds, however, he was up on his feet and, like the funny looking blue guy towards the end of Star Wars IX, he walked over to his friend, presumably to see if he was alright. Arriving at the crumpled body, he took a quiet moment to assess the situation, crouching low and carefully looking the injured man over. I saw Rider One twitch a little and move his head very slightly. He may have been a lost cause or he may not. It swiftly became moot. Rider Two stood, slowly removed a handgun from inside his jacket, aimed it full at Rider One’s chest, and pulled the trigger. Twice. Then he put one in the face, just to be sure. It shattered what was left of his visor, punched a hole out the back of his helmet and blood splattered as if he had just pricked a helmet-shaped balloon of red paint. Rider One slumped. Permanently.

  Without pausing for breath, Rider Two turned and headed for me.

  And, by me, I don’t mean the stunning (and stunned) looking girl in the sedan who was sitting as fixated as me behind her own wheel just twenty feet to my right. And nor do I mean any one of the dazed and confused pedestrians milling in and around the cars and the road. No, I meant me, and I know he was heading for me because he locked eyes with me the whole way, placing the gun directly along the invisible line that ran from his eyes to mine as he approached.

  It had never occurred to me that anyone had been chasing after me. Why the hell would it?

  >Go! Drive!<

  The glasses again. Warning me. Instinct kicked in and, though I was still shaking, I didn’t need telling twice. I floored the accelerator and, sparking a collapsed rear fender in my wake, did my best to steer the Oldmobile through the mass of crashed, stopped and confused cars which seemed to infect every lane like feeding bacteria. Rider Two started firing at the car in a rhythmic stream of ‘phut, phut’ sounds, causing me to duck. Instinct again. I could hear bullets whizzing past and/or hitting the bodywork and soft-top of the car, along with piercing screams and general mayhem. Whilst I didn’t care to look up and check, I also heard one or two dull, spongy thuds and rasping groans from my right as I passed, leading me to suspect that some people had been hit. Innocent people. People like me.

  I kept my foot (and my head) down. As best I could.

  Once I was a way off, by which I mean ‘through a decent number of gridlocked cars’, and the thuds and phuts around me seemed to lessen, I sat up and checked the rear-view, something I should have done a long time ago… i.e. before the crash. In it, though it was not easy to see clearly as the mount had been jarred off-kilter by the impact, I’m fairly sure I saw Rider Two lowering the gun and hurrying back in the direction of his slewed bike.

  I didn’t have any idea what the fuck was going on. Not one clue. My heart was pumping so hard I could feel it pulsing in my temples and I was slowly becoming scared. Very scared. More god-damned scared than I have ever been in my life. It grew and grew until it became my blood. So I just kept driving; getting my ass as far away from the carnage as I possibly could. As fast as I possibly could.

  Someone was trying to kill me. Stupid as that sounds, even now, I was not even prepared to question it for a second. Whatever else was going on in the madness which surrounded me right then, that one fact was a given.

  Someone. Was.
Trying. To. Kill. Me.

  What the fuck have I ever done to deserve that?

  You know what? If you know me well, have ever dated me or have so much as met me even once in my late teens, please refrain from answering that.

  For the next few miles, pretty much all the way out of the downtown area, all I can say is that whoever was guiding me via the messages knew their shit, and it helped. I wasn’t getting constant messages, but every time something I didn’t see loomed toward me, a message seemed to kick in. “>Left.<“ “>Brake.<“ It got to the point where I was actually annoyed when they weren’t there to help. There was a period of about two minutes where I got absolutely nothing, and I could really have done with it right about then as I was getting lost and having to rely on my own skills. Of which I have remarkably few. It was like they were too busy to help. Plus, every time I did get a message it didn’t help that quite a few other cars, and indeed pedestrians, seemed to go a little out of whack too, like some kind of inherited mass hysteria.

  It was starting to freak me out. That, and having been shot at, of course.

  Mainly the shot at thing.

  So throughout the manic drive, and “whenever I felt it safe to do so”, I kept checking my rear-view, praying that I did not see Rider Guy Two coming up behind me. I didn’t want to pray if I’m honest and even prayed that somehow that itself could be rectified. As is often the case when you’re me, that was the one prayer that ultimately went answered. About five or six minutes in, he appeared again, weaving in and out of the traffic which trailed behind me with no shortage of skill. The kind I lacked.

  So I didn’t have to pray any more. Excellent.

  The car refused to shut the hell up, repeatedly barking ‘oncoming threat’ warnings at me in what seemed to be an increasingly irate voice and I have to say, she had a point. Somehow I avoided everything. Or they, at the last minute, avoided me. Amounts to the same thing in my book.

  I checked the rear-view again, sweating. Rider Guy wasn’t there, so I turned my head and checked the driver’s side door mirror instead.

  Shit.

  He was accelerating his bike along the sidewalk, weaving through scattering pedestrians like a squirt of detergent through oil, undertaking the other cars with far more ease than the road would have afforded him and raising his arm again, the gun held firm within it. A moment later he started shooting again. Wildly. Repeatedly. I have no idea if anything hit the car this time, I was way past listening or caring. All I knew for sure was that nothing had actually hit me - not yet - and that really was the way I was trying to make it stay. In vain, it would appear, because however hard I pushed the gas, the bike had a clear edge and I stood very little chance of getting away. I knew that, even if I didn’t want to actually admit it. Little by little he was getting dangerously close. Womp rat close.

  At this point we were heading north through what I think was Glendale. The road was clearer than downtown, but not by much. Even so, when I saw the lights go to red ahead I knew in an instant that I was going to drive through them, come what may. I would dodge if I could, weave if I could or die if I had to. I sure as hell wasn’t stopping the car.

  Having backed off the gas slightly for a truck in my lane I pushed the pedal flat again and clenched the wheel tight, everything crossed but my fingers. I pulled around the truck and tucked myself back into the lane to avoid an oncoming pickup. As the car nigh-on screamed at me to grow the hell up, the truck I’d overtaken sounded his horn and flashed his lights but it was, after all, a truck and I was soon opening up a gap. It was just a shame, I figured, that Rider Two couldn’t have been driving a god-damned truck.

  Then, as I approached the lights, the glasses flashed again.

  >Brake. Hard.<

  With about thirty feet to go… I did. I had to trust them. True, they (whoever they were) had pretty much caused the first accident, but they had also gotten me out of the place when I needed to and done quite a few things to keep me the happier side of being dead in the interim. At that precise moment, if they had said “>Get naked.<” I would have been tossing clothes out of the car like a spring-breaker heading into Florida.

  Despite the city-wide sticky road surfaces, the ones that apparently cost CitiCorp over $300,000,000 in funds and that are supposed to have placed an end to cars ever skidding, the car skidded. Quite some distance. About thirty feet and one inch if I had to take a guess. From my right at the lights an LACitibus, clearly having been travelling at some considerable speed itself, came skidding directly in front of the car, its wheels also locked solid and smoke billowing in its wake. It screeched like a cat in a vice and the Oldmobile, not averse to screeching some kind of desperate retort, came to a stop about one inch too late. Presumably out of a degree of consideration for both symmetry and the overall aesthetics of the car, the bus then proceeded to rip the front fender off for me as well and drag it away. Had I not braked, the Oldmobile would have been side-swiped in a full-on crash I don’t think for one second I would have walked away from.

  Rider Guy was not so lucky. Fortunately. Coming up at me on the sidewalk, with only one hand on the bars, he had been completely unable to brake when the bus came screaming into view. With the merest glance to the side he was off the sidewalk, into the traffic and then he was gone, slammed by the full force of ten tonnes of rolling steel and removed from my peripheral vision in an instant. Then, to add insult to what was no doubt already critical injury, a split second later he and his bike were crushed flat against a delivery van which had stopped dead in the middle of the road just before the bus had chosen to use it as its backup braking system.

  I heard the crunch. A fatal crash never sounded so good.

  Still shaking I took a moment, leaned back in the seat and sighed. I may even have smiled.

  And yet, sitting in a battered car with blood running down my face, I still doubted it was over. Not yet.

  Lo and behold: it wasn’t. A couple of seconds later the truck I’d overtaken, also skidding on the worse-than-useless road covering, slammed hard into the back of my car. It smashed hard, shoving the car into both the cross lane and the oncoming traffic. The car’s on-board warning system now went positively apoplectic. How nothing else managed to hit me, I really don’t know, but it didn’t. Every other vehicle was already hard on the brakes, presumably from seeing the incident with the bus. Whilst it was close, very close, they somehow managed to bunch up around me without further incident.

  Incident to me, I mean. They crashed into each other big time.

  * * * * *

  Two hundred miles further north and not a million (or even a hundred) miles from where Rachael and I had visited Big Red, at the side of a lush and beautiful forest, I stood at the edge of a small lake north of Sunday Peak and realised just how far from over this all was. Bruised and bloodied, I watched as my former pride and joy - the battered Oldmobile - rolled gracefully from the edge of the small cliff edge, tumbled downward and splashed hard into the water below. It floated for around a minute or so, desperately trying to stay buoyant as the soft-top inflated against the rising waters like a swimming aid. Eventually, it realised the futility of its own actions and gave the vehicular equivalent of a shrug, disappearing softly into the icy-clear depths.

  Whoever the unknown sender of the messages was, they were right, again. Very soon whoever was trying to kill me, for I doubted that this particular family tree stopped at the two mo’cyclists, was going to realise that of the three people involved in today’s earlier tussle I was (by some miracle) the only one still breathing. They would then logically begin looking toward locating the car and, if they found the car from any one of a thousand trackable diagnostic mechanisms, they would subsequently find me. Expensive as the car had been - and in the pre-Rachael days when it had been designed only to impress the fairer sex, it had been ridiculously expensive - I really didn’t want that.

  The instructions had been blunt and to the point:

  >Car is dead. Sink it.<

&nb
sp; Like Rachael before it, I had to do what was best. I had to somehow let it go.

  The final instructions were more cryptic:

  >Glasses. cPad. Toss them and walk. Four miles due north. Cabin.<

  The glasses and the pad were obvious because, yes… they too were trackable. Easily. The cabin thing was more obscure. Reluctantly, and not entirely convinced that I was doing something bearing even a vague resemblance to the right thing, I did exactly as they said and walked. Four miles due north, stumbling through undergrowth, climbing escarpments, crossing streams and shitting myself again that some thin-face ‘Uranus’ would come strolling out from behind a tree, nonchalant smoking a cigar whilst carrying an empty stomach and a knowing smile.

  Almost two hours later and with the sun beginning to set, I emerged broken, bleeding, aching, scared and confused from the forest almost exactly four miles north to find… a cabin. The only semblance of any building I had seen along the entire journey. Someone had known for sure that it had been there all along, it was just that that someone was not me.

  Overgrown, ramshackle and run down, it looked as though it had been abandoned. The roof was corrugated, though corrugated ‘what’ was anybody’s guess and it appeared to have tried to set a record for most diverse wood groups used in a single construction project. It not only looked uninhabited but also uninhabitable, but it was a cabin. Of sorts. The outside was littered with junk, from three old trucks (neither of which looked like they ran) to pots and pans, a steel bathtub, an old satellite dish, chopped logs and copious amounts of… like, I said… junk. Around the cabin itself, at almost equally spaced intervals, were a number of rusty old oil drums which were probably drained empty of anything remotely valuable many, many years ago.