“Nothing,” Marty said, starting the motor. “He died.”
He drove up out of the wash, back through the hole in the fence, and sped off down the highway, both of them listening to the tires humming against the asphalt. Susan tried the radio. There was no music, just a lot of news. Bad news about civil unrest and the state government’s inability to do much of anything about it. People were being urged to stay in their homes and off the highways.
Nineteen
They hadn’t driven very far before Marty spotted the first of the motorcycles coming over the horizon in the rearview mirror. They were still a few miles back but gaining.
“This isn’t our day, Sue.”
“What?” she said, whipping her head around. “Mongols?”
“Gotta be,” he said, hitting the brakes and pulling quickly off the highway.
“What are you doing, for God’s sake?”
He climbed into the back. “Drive, Sue! Drive as fast you feel safe.”
“But… Marty!” She climbed behind the wheel and shifted into drive, pulling back onto the highway as he prepared to fire the carbine out through the back window. “Marty, I don’t know if I can do this!”
“We’ll talk about it later!”
He watched the Harleys closing on them gradually, dodging in and out of the traffic. They flew past a stopped state trooper’s car. The red and blue strobes on the roof were flashing wildly but there was no trooper to be seen anywhere.
“Marty, they’re getting closer.”
“I’m watching them,” he said, holding the lead driver in the sights of the carbine. “I have to let them get close enough to hit them.”
“I think they’ve got guns!”
“Of course they’ve got guns!” he said, unable to help laughing at the pure insanity of the moment. “‘I think they’ve got guns.’”
“Shut up, Marty! Who are you, Mel Gibson now?”
“Don’t make me laugh, Susan. I have to shoot these guys and I’m trying not to piss my pants back here.”
She swerved wildly to miss a stalled car in the fast lane. “Holy Christ!” she said in terror. “I almost plowed right into that fucking thing!”
“Watch the road, not the mirror!”
There were about forty bikes behind them now, and Marty was aiming for the belly of the lead rider. The guy wasn’t a fat, sweaty, bearded hog as he had expected most of them to be. He looked more like Arnold Schwarzenegger from one of the Terminator movies, and he was driving one-handed, gripping a shotgun like a cowboy on horseback.
Marty fired the first round, shattering the rear window and causing Susan to scream and swerve inside the lane.
The biker began weaving to throw off Marty’s aim, blasting off a round of buckshot that was ineffective at that range. Marty fired again and shattered the headlight. His third shot struck the biker in the chest and the man lost control immediately, dropping the shotgun and fighting to keep from crashing, but he was doomed. The bike went down and flipped over on top of him. One of the bikes coming up ran him over and crashed. Another rider tried to dodge the first bike but clipped the handlebars and flipped over, his bike virtually disintegrating as it slammed into a bridge abutment.
“Got three in one shot!” Marty said.
“I heard three shots,” Susan muttered, checking her speed, not trusting herself to drive much over seventy.
Surprised to discover a gunner in the Jeep, the rest of the Mongols dropped back, shouting back and forth, trying to decide how best to handle this new development.
Marty fired again and hit one of them in the head. A lucky shot, but the rider flew right off the back and his bike continued on for nearly fifty feet without him before heading down into the median and flipping over. The rest of the riders slowed way down after that and allowed the distance between them and the Jeep to increase greatly.
“They’re letting us go. You did it, Marty!”
“I doubt it,” he said, sensing what they were up to. “They’re not turning back. They’ll probably try to shadow us all the way to Mesa.”
“So what do we do?”
“Find a place to get off the highway. Drive cross-country through the desert like Joe told us.”
“I don’t know. What if we get stuck or have a breakdown?”
“And what if these maniacs follow us all the way to my house?”
They continued for another ten miles, the bikers hanging back about a mile or so in the slow lane, letting the faster traffic pass them on the left. Another state trooper streaked by going the other way, lights flashing, but they didn’t think for a minute that he would be any help, and the bikers certainly didn’t seem too shaken up over him.
“Okay,” Marty said, remaining in the backseat. “I know this area. About five miles ahead there’s a rest stop. Pull in and we’ll switch.”
“They’ll be right on top of us by the time we get back on the road.”
“We’re not getting back on the road,” he said. “We’re going over land where those bikes won’t be able to stay with us.”
They passed the sign for the rest stop and a mile later exited the highway. Susan sped up the ramp into an area where military vehicles were gathered. There were armed soldiers wandering all over the place, and a bunch of them aimed their rifles at the Jeep, ready to blast it apart.
“Oh, shit!” she said, getting on the brakes and slowing just in time. She cut the wheel and rolled into a parking spot, then got out and ran toward the soldiers, who were watching her as if she were crazy.
“We’re being chased!” she shouted, pointing back at the ramp. “Bikers are trying to kill us!”
The soldiers looked toward the ramp and stood waiting to see. Within fifty seconds the Mongols came rolling into the rest area smelling blood, but the moment they saw the soldiers they put the coal to the fire and roared right on through toward the exit.
“Shoot them!” Susan was shouting. “You’re letting them get away!”
The troops watched as the last of the bikes rumbled through, and then stood looking at her.
“Why didn’t you shoot them, for Christ’s sake? You could’ve gotten every damn one of them!”
Marty took her by the arm and walked her back to the Jeep. “Sorry, guys,” he said over his shoulder. “It’s been a rough day.” Then to Susan, in a lower voice, “Your breast is showing!”
“Oh, shit,” she said, grabbing at the shirt to cover herself.
“We’ll just hang here for a minute,” he said. “I can get us to Mesa without the highway now.”
“Maybe we can get these guys to escort us,” she said, getting back into the Jeep on the passenger side.
“Susan, they’re not our personal bodyguard. They’re men with guns and they just got a pretty good look at your tit.”
“It’s not a ‘tit,’” she said thinly. “It’s a breast.”
He chuckled wearily. “Do you know how stupid you sound?”
A couple of troops came up to the Jeep.
“What’s going on?” a tall sergeant asked. His name tag read FLYNN.
“We were attacked on the road,” Marty said, wishing he’d hidden the carbine lying across the backseat. “Those bikers murdered our friend and his wife earlier today. They just tried to do the same to us.”
The sergeant stood looking at him, noticing the weapon in the back. “Where did you get that?”
“It belonged to a friend,” Susan said. “This is his Jeep.”
The sergeant stooped so he could get a better look at her. “Are you injured?”
“No, but Marty is. He’s got a stab wound in his shoulder and a gash to his head.”