The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror

by Stephen Jones

  Race’s Harley slipped behind a low swell of hill. The truck disappeared after it and then there was only blowing dust. Vince tried to catch his flying thoughts and put them in some coherent order. If his memory was right again – he knew it was asking a lot of it; he hadn’t been this way in a couple of years – then the spur-road ran through Cumba before veering back to rejoin Highway 6 about nine miles ahead. If Race could stay in front—

  Except.

  Except, unless things had changed, the road went to hardpan dirt beyond Cumba, and was apt to drift across sandy at this time of year. The truck would do okay, but a motorcycle . . .

  The chances of Race surviving the last four miles of that nine-mile run weren’t good. The chances of him dumping the Deuce and being run over were, on the other hand, excellent.

  Images of Race tried to crowd his mind. Race on his Big Wheels: the Kindergarten warrior. Race staring at him from the back seat of the GTO, the Popsicle melting, his eyes bright with hate, the lower lip quivering. Race at eighteen, wearing a uniform and a fuck-you smile, both present and accounted for and all squared away.

  Last of all came the image of Race dead on the hardpan, a smashed doll with only his leathers holding him together.

  Vince swept the pictures away. They were no help. The cops wouldn’t be, either. There were no cops, not in Cumba. If someone saw the semi chasing the bike, he might call the State Police, but the closest one was apt to be in Show Low, drinking java and eating pie and flirting with the waitress while Travis Tritt played on the Rock-Ola.

  There was only them. But that was nothing new.

  He thrust his hand to the right, then made a fist and patted the air with it. The other three swung over to the side behind him, engines clobbering, the air over their straight-pipes shimmering.

  Lemmy pulled up beside him, his face haggard and cheesy-yellow. “He didn’t see the tail-light signal!” he shouted.

  “Didn’t see or didn’t understand!” Vince yelled back. He was trembling. Maybe it was just the bike throbbing under him. “Comes to the same! Time for Little Boy!”

  For a moment Lemmy didn’t understand. Then he twisted around, and yanked the straps on his right-hand saddlebag. No fancy plastic hardcase for Lemmy. Lemmy was old school all the way.

  While he was rooting, there was a sudden, gunning roar. That was Roy. Roy had had enough. He wheeled around and shot back east, his shadow now running before him, a scrawny black gantry-man. On the back of his leather vest was a hideous joke: NO RETREAT NO SURRENDER.

  “Come back, Klowes, you dickwad!” Peaches bellowed. His hand slipped from his clutch. The Beezer, still in gear, lurched forward almost over Vince’s foot, passed high-octane gas, and stalled. Peaches was almost hurled off, but didn’t seem to notice. He was still looking back. He shook his fist; his scant grey hair whirled around his long, narrow skull. “ Come back you chicken-shit DICKWAAAAD!”

  Roy didn’t come back. Roy didn’t even look back.

  Peaches turned to Vince. Tears streamed down cheeks sun-flayed by a million rides and ten million beers. In that moment he looked older than the desert he stood on.

  “You’re stronger’n me, Vince, but I got me a bigger asshole. You rip his head off; I’ll be in charge of shittin’ down his neck.”

  “Hurry up!” Vince shouted at Lemmy. “Hurry up, goddamn you!”

  Just when he thought Lemmy was going to come up empty, his old running buddy straightened with Little Boy in his gloved hand.

  The Tribe did not ride with guns. Outlaw motorheads like them never did. They all had records, and any cop in Nevada would be delighted to put one of them away for thirty years on a gun charge. One, or all of them. They carried knives, but knives were no good in this situation; witness what had happened to Roy’s machete, which had turned out as useless as the man himself. Except when it came to killing stoned little girls in high school sweaters, that was.

  Little Boy, however, while not strictly legal, was not a gun. And the one cop who’d looked at it (“while searching for drugs” – the pigs were always doing that, it was what they lived for) had given Lemmy a skate when Lemmy explained it was more reliable than a road-flare if you broke down at night. Maybe the cop knew what he was looking at, maybe not, but he knew that Lemmy was a veteran. Not just from Lemmy’s veteran’s licence plate, which could have been stolen, but because the cop had been a vet himself. “Au Shau Valley, where the shit smells sweeter,” he’d said, and they had both laughed and even ended up bumping fists.

  Little Boy was an M84 stun grenade, more popularly known as a flash-bang. Lemmy had been carrying it in his saddlebag for maybe five years, always saying it would come in handy some day when the other guys – Vince included – ribbed him about it.

  Some day had turned out to be today.

  “Will this old sonofabitch still work?” Vince shouted as he hung Little Boy over his handlebars by the strap. It didn’t look like a grenade. It looked like a combination Thermos bottle and aerosol can. The only grenade-y thing about it was the pull-ring duct-taped to the side.

  “ I don’t know! I don’t even know how you can—”

  Vince had no time to discuss logistics. He only had a vague idea of what the logistics might be, anyway. “ I have to ride! That fuck’s gonna come out on the other end of the Cumba road! I mean to be there when he does!”

  “And if Race ain’t in front of him?” Lemmy asked. They had been shouting until now, all jacked up on adrenaline. It was almost a surprise to hear a nearly normal tone of voice.

  “One way or the other,” Vince said. “You don’t have to come. Either of you. I’ll understand if you want to turn back. He’s my boy.”

  “Maybe so,” Peaches said, “but it’s our Tribe. Was, anyway.” He jumped down on the Beezer’s kick, and the hot engine rumbled to life. “I’ll ride witcha, Cap.”

  Lemmy just nodded and pointed at the road.

  Vince took off.

  It wasn’t as far as he’d thought: seven miles instead of nine. They met no cars or trucks. The road was deserted, traffic maybe avoiding it because of the construction back the way they had come. Vince snapped constant glances to his left. For a while he saw red dust rising, the truck dragging half the desert along in its slipstream. Then he lost sight even of its dust, the Cumba spur dropping well out of sight behind hills with eroded, chalky sides.

  Little Boy swung back and forth on its strap. Army surplus. Will this old sonofabitch still work? he’d asked Lemmy, and now realized he could have asked the same question of himself. How long since he had been tested this way, running dead out, throttle to the max? How long since the whole world came down to only two choices, live pretty or die laughing? And how had his own son, who looked so cool in his new leathers and his mirrored sunglasses, missed such an elementary equation?

  Live pretty or die laughing, but don’t you run. Don’t you fucking run.

  Maybe Little Boy would work, maybe it wouldn’t, but Vince knew he was going to take his shot, and it made him giddy. If the guy was buttoned up in his cab, it was a lost cause in any case. But he hadn’t been buttoned up back at the diner. Back there, his hand had been lolling out against the side of the truck. And later, hadn’t he waved them ahead from that same open window? Sure. Sure he had.

  Seven miles. Five minutes, give or take. Long enough for a lot of memories of his son, whose father had taught him to change oil but never to bait a hook; to gap plugs but never how you told a coin from the Denver mint from one that had been struck in San Francisco. Time to think how Race had pushed for this stupid meth deal, and how Vince had gone along even though he knew it was stupid, because it seemed he had something to make up for. Only the time for make-up calls was past. As Vince tore along at eighty-five, bending as low as he could get to cut the wind resistance, a terrible thought crossed his mind, one he inwardly recoiled from but could not blot out – that maybe it would be better for all concerned if LAUGHLIN did succeed in running his son down. It wasn’t the image of Ra
ce lifting a shovel into the air and then bringing it down on a helpless man’s head, in a spoiled rage over lost money, although that was bad enough. It was something more. It was the fixed, empty look on the kid’s face right before he steered his bike the wrong way, on to the Cumba road. For himself, Vince had not been able to stop looking back at the Tribe, the whole way down the canyon, as some were run down and the others struggled to stay ahead of the big machine. Whereas Race had seemed incapable of turning that stiff neck of his. There was nothing behind him that he needed to see. Maybe never had been.

  There came a loud ka-pow at Vince’s back, and a yell he heard even over the wind and the steady blat of the Vulcan’s engine: “Mutha-FUCK!” He looked in the rear-view mirror and saw Peaches falling back. Smoke was boiling from between his pipe-stem legs, and oil slicked the road behind him in a fan shape that widened as his ride slowed. The Beez had finally blown its head-gasket. A wonder it hadn’t happened sooner.

  Peaches waved them on . . . not that Vince would have stopped. Because in a way, the question of whether Race was redeemable was moot. Vince himself was not redeemable; none of them was. He remembered an Arizona cop who’d once pulled them over and said, “Well, look what the road puked up.” And that was what they were: road-puke. But those bodies back there had, until this afternoon, been his running buddies, the only thing he had of any value in the world. They had been Vince’s brothers in a way, and Race was his son, and you couldn’t drive a man’s family to earth and expect to live. You couldn’t leave them butchered and expect to ride away. If LAUGHLIN didn’t know that, he would.

  Soon.

  Lemmy couldn’t keep up with the Tojo Mojo El Rojo. He fell further and further behind. That was all right. Vince was just glad Lemmy still had his six.

  Up ahead, a sign: WATCH FOR LEFT-ENTERING TRAFFIC. The road coming out of Cumba. It was hardpan dirt, as he had feared. Vince slowed, then stopped, turned off the Vulcan’s engine.

  Lemmy pulled up beside. There was no guardrail here. Here in this one place, where 6 rejoined the Cumba road, the highway was level with the desert, although not far ahead it began to climb away from the floodplain once more, turning into the cattle chute again.

  “Now we wait,” Lemmy said, switching his engine off as well.

  Vince nodded. He wished he still smoked. He told himself that either Race was still shiny-side-up and in front of the truck, or he wasn’t. It was beyond his control. It was true, but it didn’t help.

  “Maybe he’ll find a place to turn off in Cumba,” Lemmy said. “An alley or somethin’ where the truck can’t go.”

  “I don’t think so. Cumba is nothing. A gas station and I think a couple houses, all stuck right on the side of a fucking hill. That’s bad road. At least for Race. No easy way off it.” He didn’t even try to tell Lemmy about Race’s blank, locked-down expression, a look that said he wasn’t seeing anything except the road right in front of his bike. Cumba would be a blur and flash that he only registered after it was well behind him.

  “Maybe—” Lemmy began, but Vince held up his hand, silencing him. They cocked their heads to the left.

  They heard the truck first, and Vince felt his heart sink. Then, buried in its roar, the bellow of another motor. There was no mistaking the distinctive blast of a Harley running full out.

  “He made it!” Lemmy yelled, and raised his hand for a high-five. Vince wouldn’t give it. Bad luck. And besides, the kid still had to make the turn back on to 6. If he was going to dump, it would be there.

  A minute ticked by. The sound of the engines grew louder. A second minute, and now they could see dust rising over the nearest hills. Then, in a notch between the two closest hills, they saw a flash of sun on chrome. There was just time to glimpse Race, bent almost flat over his handlebars, long hair streaming out behind, and then he was gone again. A second after he disappeared – surely no more – the truck flashed through the notch, stacks shooting smoke. LAUGHLIN on the side was no longer visible; it had been buried beneath a layer of dust.

  Vince hit the Vulcan’s starter and the engine bammed to life. He gunned the throttle and the frame vibrated.

  “Luck, Cap,” Lemmy said.

  Vince opened his mouth to reply, but in that moment, emotion, intense and unexpected, choked off his wind. So instead of speaking, he gave Lemmy a brief, grateful nod, before taking off. Lemmy followed. As always, Lemmy had his six.

  Vince’s mind turned into a computer, trying to figure speed versus distance. It had to be timed just right. He rolled towards the intersection at fifty, dropped it to forty, then twisted the throttle again as Race appeared, the bike swerving around a tumbleweed, actually going airborne on a couple of bumps. The truck was no more than thirty feet behind. When Race neared the “Y” where the Cumba bypass once more joined the main road, he slowed. He had to slow. The instant he did, LAUGHLIN vaulted forwards, eating up the distance between them.

  “Jam that motherfuck!” Vince screamed, knowing Race couldn’t hear over the bellow of the truck. He screamed it again anyway: “JAM that motherfuck! Don’t slow down!”

  The trucker planned to slam the Harley in the rear wheel, spinning it out. Race’s bike hit the crotch of the intersection and surged, Race leaning far to the left, holding the handlebars only with the tips of his fingers. He looked like a trick rider on a trained mustang. The truck missed the rear fender, its blunt nose lunging into thin air that had held a Harley’s back wheel only a tenth of a second before . . . but at first Vince thought Race was going to lose it anyway, just spin out.

  He didn’t. His high-speed arc took him all the way to the far side of Route 6, close enough to the bike-killing shoulder to spume up dust, and then he was scat-gone, gunning down Route 6 towards Show Low.

  The truck went out into the desert to make its own turn, rumbling and bouncing, the driver down-shifting through the gears fast enough to make the whole rig shudder, the tyres churning up a fog of dust that turned the blue sky white. It left a trail of deep tracks and crushed sagebrush before regaining the road and once more setting out after Vince’s son.

  Vince twisted the left handgrip and the Vulcan took off. Little Boy swung frantically back and forth on the handlebars. Now came the easy part. It might get him killed, but it would be easy compared to the endless minutes he and Lemmy had waited before hearing Race’s motor mixed in with LAUGHLIN’s.

  His window won’t be open, you know. Not after he just got done running through all that dust.

  That was also out of his control. If the trucker was buttoned up, he’d deal with that when the moment came.

  It wouldn’t be long.

  The truck was doing around sixty. It could go a lot faster, but Vince didn’t mean to let him get all the way through those who-knew-how-many gears of his until the Mack hit warp-speed. He was going to end this now for one of them. Probably for himself, an idea he did not shy from. He would at the least buy Race more time; given a lead, Race could beat the truck to Show Low easily. More than just protecting Race, though, there had to be balance to the scales. Vince had never lost so much so fast, six of The Tribe dead on a stretch of road less than half a mile long. You didn’t do that to a man’s family, he thought again, and drive away.

  Which was, Vince saw at last, maybe LAUGHLIN’s own point, his own primary operating principal . . . the reason he had taken them on, in spite of the ten-to-one odds. He had come at them, not knowing or caring if they were armed, picking them off two and three at a time, even though any one of the bikes he had run down could’ve sent the truck out of control and rolling, first a Mack, and then an oil-stoked fireball. It was madness, but not incomprehensible madness. As Vince swung into the left-hand lane and began to close the final distance, the truck’s ass-end just ahead on his right, he saw something that seemed not only to sum up this terrible day, but to explain it, in simple, perfectly lucid terms. It was a bumper sticker. It was even filthier than the Cumba sign, but still readable.

  PROUD PARENT OF A CORMAN HIGH H
ONOR ROLL STUDENT!

  Vince pulled even with the dust-streaked tanker. In the cab’s long driver’s-side rear-view, he saw something shift. The driver had seen him. In the same second, Vince saw that the window was shut, just as he’d feared.

  The truck began to slide left, crossing the white line with its outside wheels.

  For a moment Vince had a choice: back off or keep going. Then the computer in his head told him the choice was already past; even if he hit the brakes hard enough to risk dumping his ride, the final five feet of the filthy tank would swat him into the guardrail on his left like a fly.

  Instead of backing off he increased speed even as the left lane shrank, the truck forcing him toward that knee-high ribbon of gleaming steel. He yanked the flash-bang from the handlebars, breaking the strap. He tore the duct-tape away from the pull-ring with his teeth, the strap’s shredded end spanking his cheek as he did so. The ring began to clatter against Little Boy’s perforated barrel. The sun was gone. Vince was flying in the truck’s shadow now. The guardrail was less than three feet to his left; the side of the truck three feet to his right and still closing. Vince had reached the plate-hitch between the tanker and the cab. Now he could only see the top of Race’s head; the rest of him was blocked by the truck’s dirty maroon hood. Race was not looking back.

  He didn’t think about the next thing. There was no plan, no strategy. It was just his road-puke self saying fuck you to the world, as he always had. It was, when you came right down to it, The Tribe’s only raison d’être.

  As the truck closed in for the killing side-stroke, and with absolutely nowhere to go, Vince raised his right hand and shot the truck driver the bird.

  He was pulling even with the cab now, the truck bulking to his right like a filthy mesa. It was the cab that would take him out.

  There was movement from inside: that deeply tanned arm with its Marine Corps tattoo. The muscle in the arm bunched as the window slid down into its slot, and Vince realized the cab, which should have swatted him already, was staying where it was. The trucker meant to do it, of course he did, but not until he had replied in kind. Maybe we even served in different units together, Vince thought. In the Au Shau Valley, say, where the shit smells sweeter.