by Amber Stuart
Kicking down hard on the pedal to start it, I tried a second time, then a third, while my companion just watched me do it, unmoving. When the engine finally roared to life, he stepped back a little, his face not quite showing alarm, but his eyes slightly wider than they had been. He stared at the bike as if it were some kind of animal.
I noticed his eyes looked brown now.
Shaking that off, too, I frowned.
"Are you coming?" I said. "Last chance. I'm grateful for the help, yeah. But not grateful enough to spend a night in jail with you."
After another delay, that one shorter, he seemed to make up his mind.
"Yes. I will come."
I just stood there, balancing the bike while he walked up to me and it cautiously. When he got close enough, he threw a leg carefully over the seat behind me. I already knew he wasn't clumsy... or slow... so I figured it had to be fear I saw on his symmetrical face.
Funny it would come up now. Apparently, facing off with angry sociopaths didn’t bother this guy, or running from a bunch of cops holding guns, but he was afraid of motorcycles.
"Ever ridden before?" I said, knowing the answer.
A pause.
"No."
Nodding, I pushed down the passenger foot-stands with my boot toes, then pointed at them with my free hand as I started putting on my gloves. "Put your feet on those. And hold onto me. Try not to move around too much, especially on turns. If you can, lean if you feel me leaning... it helps to balance the bike. If you can't, just try to be still, okay?"
Another pause.
"Yes."
Then he did exactly as I'd instructed, placing his feet on the footrests with almost painstaking deliberateness. Once he had, he moved closer to me and laid his hands carefully on my hips. I glanced back at him a last time, grinning a little after pushing up the Enfield’s kickstand with my heel. I revved the engine a little to make sure it was warm.
"Ready?"
Another pause.
"Yes."
Snorting a faint laugh, I pushed down the visor on my helmet and gripped the handlebars, taking my feet off the ground as I cruised the bike out onto Jackson. I was about to hit the accelerator and get us the heck out of there, when the guy's grip on my waist suddenly grew so tight it forced me to suck in a breath.
Wincing from his iron-like fingers, I turned my head, restraining myself from hitting him in the face with the back of my helmet to get him to let go.
"Hey!” I said. “What the hell, man?"
"Do not go that way," he said.
“Let go of me, alright? Now. I know where I’m going...”
He continued to stare straight ahead, as if I hadn't spoken.
When I saw the look growing in his now black-colored eyes, I shifted my gaze to follow his, pushing the weird thing with his eye color to the back of my mind a third time. Facing forward, I scanned the dark road ahead. I couldn’t see much; the corridor was darker than usual due to a burnt-out streetlight a few down from where I'd parked.
Really, all I had to go on was the headlight on the Enfield, and the other guy’s stare.
So yeah, I didn’t see them at first.
When they walked closer, I began to make out the distinct forms, but still didn’t have any idea what their presence meant. They wore the same kind of weird, dark, Batman-like costumes as my friend on the back of the Enfield, so they blended into the shadows between the buildings.
Once they stopped walking to stare back at me and my friend, they also appeared to be almost entirely motionless. Like, statue motionless.
None of them spoke, or looked away from us where we sat on the bike.
"What the hell?" I muttered.
It hadn't been a question I really expected an answer to.
My new friend answered it anyway.
"Malek," he said, his voice suddenly harsher, more foreign-sounding. He resumed speaking in that smoother cadence when he next spoke. "They are here for me. They think this is their world. They do not understand why I am here."
I looked at him again, unable to make heads or tails of what he’d just said.
Pursing my lips when I saw his eyes, which now appeared a dark red color under the nearest street lamp, I shook it off.
"Are these your friends, man?” I said. “Is that what you're saying?"
"No," he said. "They are not friends."
"So do I blow past them, or––"
"It is too late," he told me.
"Too late?" I said, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck abruptly rise. "Too late for what?"
"I am very, very sorry," he said, his words close to resigned.
That time, I really didn’t see what was coming at all.
4
BIKES, LOCKS AND BAD GOODBYES
THERE WAS A sharp, blinding flash of light.
Blue-white in color, it lit the darkness of the surrounding street, seeming to skim over the top of my bike to impact the street lamp behind us.
It happened so fast, I didn't have time to suck in a breath, much less yell.
Glancing back at the sound of screeching metal, I gaped up at the lamp post, feeling like I’d suddenly been transported inside a cartoon.
The tall pole was already falling, fast enough that I gunned the engine instinctively, even though it was falling in the other direction. When I did it, I moved us closer to our attackers before it occurred to me to question whether that was such a good idea, either.
I didn't have time to think about that for long.
The guy sitting behind me let go of my hips all at once. Before I could turn, he leaned forward with force, grabbing hold of the grips on my bike's handlebars.
Shoving my fingers aside––again, before I really comprehended what he was doing––he wrenched control of the bike away from me altogether. In seconds, I found myself slammed down against the gas tank of my own damned motorcycle, trapped under a chest and arms that suddenly felt dense enough and immovable enough to be made out of metal.
Hitting the accelerator, my passenger-cum-driver blazed down Jackson Street as soon as he’d wrestled control of the bike from me. Without slowing, he darted between two of the black-clad forms, even as another of those blue flashes came at us, faster that time.
I ducked, again instinctively, feeling the blast sear my face with heat as it cruised past, even though it had to be at least a yard wide of the bike. Given the range, it struck me to wonder if they’d fired more in warning than an attempt to kill either of us... or if perhaps they were just really lousy shots. Neither thought reassured me much.
That time, the blue flash impacted the wall of a building to our right.
I glimpsed the explosion where it hit, saw flames and black smoke shoot out from where I crouched against the bike’s tank. When I tried to look back to see more after we passed, my friend-cum-abductor’s body blocked most of my view.
I found myself holding on for dear life, gripping the handlebars closer to the central shaft, probably for psychological reasons as much as anything. I couldn’t move, so there was zero chance that I’d fall off the bike unless he crashed into something. For now, my stomach and chest lay flat to the gas tank. I had to fight just to breathe, leaning over with my face not far from the ignition and keys as my strange friend drove from behind and around me.
My feet had mysteriously left the foot pedals, too, although I didn’t remember him kicking me off those. I found myself holding my legs uncomfortably higher than usual, not sure where to put them to keep from burning my legs.
I glimpsed the metro station disappearing on our left just before he took us right again, so that we drove parallel to the train tracks. He turned again before I could really get my bearings in terms of street names and whatnot... then he was going so fast I gasped a little, in spite of myself.
I knew the Enfield could cruise, of course.
I’d tested that engine a few times myself, usually in farming areas where I
was less likely to get photographed or pinched. My brother went all-out in his ill-gotten gains, probably in another of his attempts to win me over, or to apologize for having ripped me off again, after I bailed him out of one mess or another.
Or, he might simply have been feeling more expansive than usual.
Either way, he got me one of those custom-built Egli Super-Bullets, so it wasn't your average Enfield. Jake boasted it could outrun a cop, even in Italy.
The boast might not have been idle.
I knew the engine came equipped with an aluminum cylinder, US-sourced piston, larger valves in a redesigned cylinder head, longer stroke crankshaft, special main bearings, dry clutch, timing belt primary drive and 36 millimeter Keihin flat-slide carburetors. The thing had a 624 cc engine, fed via an electric pump and probably had output of over forty horsepower, which was yeah, better than decent for a bike of that size.
I’d never tested my brother’s claim literally, though.
The next time I could make out where we were, the bike was flying south on 12th Avenue, doing somewhere very comfortably past the neighborhood of 100 mph.
The engine alternately purred and growled under me as he navigated through the sparse traffic like some kind of speed racer, his body motionless over where I lay. I hadn't even seen us cross the freeway, but we must have, maybe on Yesler, and now he headed like a bat out of hell towards Dearborn. He took us on the freeway onramp still going around sixty, leaning into the turn like a pro as it coiled us around to join the main traffic on Highway 5 going north.
My eyes bled tears during most of that trip, where he might have been going as much as 180, or even 200 mph. I did feel the bike slow and glimpsed the turn when he took the offramp for 520 East, towards Bellevue. I thought he’d take us over the floating bridge on Lake Washington, but instead he got off the freeway again, that time heading east and then south towards Washington Park.
I didn’t have much time to think about where he might be taking me when he veered us off the main road in an even tighter turn, bring us directly into the park itself.
From there, he took us on a few other twists and turns, until we drove alongside a golf course. Since I don’t really know the north end of the park all that well, I’d lost my bearings almost entirely by then. He accelerated again, even as I thought it, cruising us past the main building and clubhouse. He gunned it for another half-mile or so where the trees blurred, but I was elbowing him now, trying to yell at him over the wind.
"Hey, man... stop!" I said. "Stop! We're seriously out of danger now, okay?"
I didn't have to see his face to know he disagreed.
"Hey!" I said, elbowing him in the chest again. "Hey! Stop, man! Stop, okay?"
Again, he ignored me.
He took us onto the golf course itself, driving along one of the golf cart paths until we were pretty far into the green and well away from the main road. After a few more stretches where he gunned the motor again, he slowed the bike for real, right around the time I could see a small pond growing larger up ahead, not far from a strand of trees and a longer lawn of green grass that sparkled under the moonlight where a sheen of water covered it.
I didn't dare fight him for real until he finally stopped the bike.
He pulled up on the grass, knocking down the kick-stand and killing the engine of the Enfield as neatly as if he'd parked a thing a hundred times before. Lowering his feet to the grass, he knocked the bike back onto its kickstand, sitting up in the same motion.
I sat up pretty much the instant he did.
I still had to fight to choke down oxygen, and I still gripped the bike’s handlebars in both of my hands, but I couldn’t help letting out a gasp of relief when his weight no longer pinned me to the gas tank. I had the helmet off my head a few seconds later, and then I was practically screaming at him.
"What was that?" The words burst out of me. "What the hell was that? Seriously. I mean... are you mental?"
"Malek," he said, his voice sounding as strange as before.
He sounded worried.
At first I thought the worry was because I had half a mind to deck him.
But he cleared that up, too, with his next set of words.
“...They will follow," he said. "I must go. I must... report back. This is not expected. My handlers will expect a report... I should not be here...”
He hesitated, looking at me a few beats longer, as if unsure what to do with me. He rubbed the center of his chest with one hand, then looked down at it, too, as if confused by something there. The expression on his face came close to pain, but I didn’t understand it.
“The lock,” he said. “Can you feel it? How did you get in my lock?”
I stared at him, not sure if those were real questions.
The pained look remained on his face, but he looked away.
"You will be safe,” he said at the end of that pause. His voice was flat once more, but I heard a decision in there, somewhere. “They will not bother you. If I go now, my signal will disappear. They will know I have gone. They will leave you alone...”
My mind spun briefly around his words.
Once more, I came up almost totally blank.
"Go?" I said finally. “...Go where?"
I stared around the field where we stood as he climbed off the back of the bike. I couldn’t help noticing that he moved as fluidly as he had when he'd escaped through that window in the abandoned office building.
"Are you really meeting someone out here?” I said. “Now?” Pausing as my mind tried to wrap itself around that last part, I blinked at him again. “What did you mean before... you said handlers, right?' Are you a spook?"
The thought scared me a little, truthfully.
Then again, it also maybe explained a lot.
Maybe the whole concept seemed less foreign to me, too, because of my ex-special forces, on-again, off-again, sort-of boyfriend, Gantry.
Although, unlike Gantry, this guy clearly had some kind of social-interaction disorder, like Apserger's or something. That had to limit his ability to blend, right?
Still, I could tell that wasn’t what bothered me about the guy.
It was something else. Something more personal, maybe.
Of course, with the way he moved, this guy being an assassin wasn’t totally out of the realm of possibility, either. Either way, if he was a spook, I had serious doubts he hailed from the same America the Beautiful as me and Gantry.
Climbing off the bike, I found myself following him before I'd thought about what I intended. When he continued walking purposefully away from me, heading for the line of trees past the pond, I sped my feet to catch up with him.
"Hey!" I called out, taking two steps for every one of his. "Hey! Where are you going? Seriously. If you’re really worried about those guys chasing us, I can take you somewhere safe, you know? Somewhere with four walls... a roof?"
He didn't slow his pace, but that time, after the requisite pause, he answered me.
"You cannot follow. I am sorry."
"Follow? Follow where? Hey... I need some answers here, man...”
"I must go back to Udael."
"Udael?” I wracked my brain, but it didn’t sound familiar. There’re a ton of small towns in Washington State alone I don’t know, so that didn’t mean much, really.
“Where's that?" I said.
He turned to look at me, but only briefly.
Right about then, I noticed we’d reached the edges of what looked like a really big campfire pit, only without the fire.
I only really looked down as he crossed the line of boulder-like stones.
No wood or scorch marks broke the grassy lawn, and I didn’t see any ash, just a rough circle of sparkling white pieces of what looked like granite. They were large, each about the size of a basketball.
He walked right into the middle of that stone ring, and only then did he turn back to look at me. His symmetrical face remained smooth as
he met my gaze, but the feeling I got off what I saw there came closest to regret.
He was breathing harder, his chest moving the fabric of that thick, black suit.
“You cannot come with me,” he said.
I paused at that, weirdly put off by his words.
"You must go," he said, his voice firm. "Go back."
"Go?” I glanced at the Enfield. “Go back where?"
He waited a beat, as if thinking.
"Go back to somewhere not here," he suggested then.
I shook my head, feeling my jaw harden. "No,” I said. “...No. Not until you tell me something. Who were those guys? What the hell was that blue flame thingy they did? They knocked out a danged lamp post... I saw that thing fall. You know how hard that is, without some kind of bazooka? And that shot didn’t make a sound...”
I’d been walking forward that whole time, thinking aloud as I spoke.
He held up a hand.
I stopped unthinkingly when he did. Then it struck me as strange, that he’d halted my movements right as I was in the process of crossing the line of white stones. It felt almost like being pushed. Really, like being pushed in the middle of the chest.
"Stop!" he said.
The word came out harsh, a near-command.
I found myself rubbing that spot in the middle of my chest, just like he’d done.
“What’s wrong with me?” I said. “What’s wrong with my chest?”
His voice grew even more insistent, almost fearful when I frowned at him.
"Do not come inside the circle!” he said. “You must not be here! It would be bad for you, if you got caught in the shift field... I cannot protect you, I am sorry. The connection... it will go away once I am gone. It will not harm you...”
“What connection?” I said, halting a second time when he held up his hand, but frustrated by that pain in my chest. “The what field, man?”
“Humans cannot survive the shift,” he said. “It is why they send the morph.”
I frowned at him, as much confused by my own feelings as I was by him. Why was I still here? Why hadn’t I just walked away when I got my bike back from him? Called Gantry or Irene? Instead I lingered there, watching him.