Throttle

by Joe Hill

  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 toward 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 forward, 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 toward 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 tires 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 principle… 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 HONOR ROLL STUDENT!

  Vince pulled even with the dust-streaked tanker. In the cab’s long driver’s-side rearview, 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.

  The window was down. The hand came out. It started to hatch its own bird, then stopped. The driver had just realized the hand that had given him the finger wasn’t empty. It was curled around something. Vince didn’t give him time to think about it, and he never saw the trucker’s face. All he saw was the tattoo, DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR. A good thought, and how often did you get a chance to give someone exactly what they wanted?

  Vince caught the ring in his teeth, pulled it, heard the fizz of some chemical reaction starting, and tossed Little Boy in through the window. It didn’t have to be a fancy half-court shot, not even a lousy pull-up jumper. Just a lob. He was a magician, opening his hands to set free a dove where a moment before there had been a wadded-up handkerchief.

  Now you take me out, Vince thought. Let’s finish this thing right.

  But the truck swerved away from him. Vince was sure it would have come swerving back if there had been time. That swerve was only reflex, Laughlin trying to get away from a thrown object. But it was enough to save his life, because Little Boy did its thing before the driver could course-correct and drive Vince Adamson off the road.

  The cab lit up in a vast white flash, as if God Himself had bent down to take a snapshot. Instead of swerving back to the left, LAUGHLIN veered away to the right, first back into the lane of Route 6 bound for Show Low, then beyond. The tractor flayed the guardrail on the right-hand side of the road, striking up a sheet of copper sparks, a shower of fire, a thousand Catherine wheels going off at once. Vince thought madly of July 4th, Race a child again and sitting in his lap to watch the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air: sky flares shining in his child’s delighted, inky eyes.

  Then the truck crunched through the guardrail, shredding it as if it were tinfoil. LAUGHLIN nosed over a twenty-foot embankment, into
a ravine filled with sand and tumbleweeds. The wheels caught. The truck slewed. The big tanker rammed forward into the back of the cab. Vince had shot beyond that point before he could brake to a stop, but Lemmy saw it all: saw the cab and the tanker form a V and then split apart; saw the tanker roll first and the cab a second or two after; saw the tanker burst open and then blow. It went up in a fireball and a greasy pillar of black smoke. The cab rolled past it, over and over, the cube shape turning into a senseless crumple of maroon that sparked hot shards of sun where bare metal had split out in prongs and hooks.

  It landed with the driver’s window up to the sky, about eighty feet away from the pillar of fire that had been its cargo. By then Vince was running back along his own skid mark. He saw the figure that tried to pull itself through the misshapen window. The face turned toward him, except there was no face, only a mask of blood. The driver emerged to the waist before collapsing back inside. One tanned arm—the one with the tattoo—stuck up like a submarine’s periscope. The hand dangled limp on the wrist.

  Vince stopped at Lemmy’s bike, gasping for breath. For a moment he thought he was going to pass out, but he leaned over, put his hands on his knees, and presently felt a little better.

  “You got him, Cap.” Lemmy’s voice was hoarse with emotion.

  “We better make sure,” Vince said. Although the stiff periscope arm and the hand dangling limp at the end of it suggested that would just be a formality.

  “Why not?” Lemmy said. “I gotta take a piss, anyway.”

  “You’re not pissing on him, dead or alive,” Vince said.

  There was an approaching roar: Race’s Harley. He pulled up in a showy skid stop, killed the engine, and got off. His face, although dusty, glowed with delight and triumph. Vince hadn’t seen Race look that way since the kid was twelve. He had won a dirt-track race in a quarter-midget Vince had built for him, a yellow torpedo with a souped-up Briggs & Stratton engine. Race had come leaping from the cockpit with that exact same expression on his face, right after taking the checkered flag.

  He threw his arms around Vince and hugged him. “You did it! You did it, Dad! You cooked his fucking ass!”

  For a moment Vince allowed the hug. Because it had been so long. And because this was his spoiled son’s better angel. Everybody had one; even at his age, and after all he had seen, Vince believed that. So for a moment he allowed the hug, and relished the warmth of his son’s body, and promised himself he would remember it.

  Then he put his hands against Race’s chest and pushed him away. Hard. Race stumbled backward on his custom snakeskin boots, the expression of love and triumph fading—

  No, not fading. Merging. Becoming the look Vince had come to know so well: distrust and dislike. Quit, why don’t you? That’s not dislike and never was.

  No, not dislike. Hate, bright and glowing.

  All squared away, sir, and fuck you.

  “What was her name?” Vince asked.

  “What?”

  “Her name, John.” He hadn’t called Race by his actual name in years, and there was no one to hear it now but them. Lemmy was sliding down the soft earth of the embankment, toward the crushed metal ball that had been LAUGHLIN’s cab, letting them have this tender father-son moment in privacy.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Pure scorn. But when Vince reached out and tore off those fucking mirror shades, he saw the truth in John “Race” Adamson’s eyes. He knew what this was about. Vince was coming in five-by, as they used to say in Nam. Did they still say that in Iraq, he wondered, or had it gone the way of Morse code?

  “What do you want to do now, John? Go on to Show Low? Roust Clarke’s sister for money that isn’t there?”

  “It could be there.” Sulking now. He gathered himself. “It is there. I know Clarke. He trusted that whore.”

  “And The Tribe? Just… what? Forget them? Dean and Ellis and all the others? Doc?”

  “They’re dead.” He eyed his father. “Too slow. And most of them too old.” You too, the cool eyes said.

  Lemmy was on his way back, his boots puffing up dust. He had something in his hand.

  “What was her name?” Vince repeated. “Clarke’s girlfriend. What was her name?”

  “Fuck’s it matter?” He paused then, struggling to win Vince back, his expression coming as close as it ever did to pleading. “Jesus. Leave it, why don’t you? We won. We showed him.”

  “You knew Clarke. Knew him in Fallujah, knew him back here in The World. You were tight. If you knew him, you knew her. What was her name?”

  “Janey. Joanie. Something like that.”

  Vince slapped him. Race blinked, startled. Dropped for a moment back to being ten years old. But just for a moment. In another instant the hating look returned: a sick, curdled glare.

  “He heard us talking back there in that diner parking lot. The trucker,” Vince said. Patiently. As if speaking to the child this young man had once been. The young man he had risked his life to save. Ah, but that had been instinct, and he wouldn’t have changed it. It was the one good thing in all this horror. This filth. Not that he had been the only one operating on filial instinct. “He knew he couldn’t take us there, but he couldn’t let us go, either. So he waited. Bided his time. Let us get ahead of him.”

  “I have no clue what you’re talking about!” Very forceful. Only he was lying, and they both knew it.

  “He knew the road and went after us where the terrain favored him. Like any good soldier.”

  Yes. And then had pursued them with a single-minded purpose, regardless of the almost certain cost to himself. Laughlin had settled on death before dishonor. Vince knew nothing about him, but felt suddenly that he liked him better than his own son. Such a thing should not have been possible, but there it was.

  “You’re fucked in the head,” Race said.

  “I don’t think so. For all we know, he was going to see her when we crossed his path at the diner. It’s what a father might do for a kid he loved. Arrange things so he could look in, every now and then. See if she might even want a ride out. Take a chance on something besides the pipe and the rock.”

  Lemmy rejoined them. “Dead,” he said.

  Vince nodded.

  “This was on the visor.” He handed it to Vince. Vince didn’t want to look at it, but he did. It was a snapshot of a smiling girl with her hair in a ponytail. She wore a Corman High Varsity sweatshirt, the same one she had died in. She was sitting on the front bumper of LAUGHLIN, her back resting against the silver grille. She was wearing her daddy’s camo cap turned around backward and mock-saluting and struggling not to grin. Saluting who? Laughlin himself, of course. Laughlin had been holding the camera.

  “Her name was Jackie Laughlin,” Race said. “And she’s dead, too, so fuck her.”

  Lemmy started forward, ready to pull Race off his bike and feed him his teeth, but Vince held him back with a look. Then he shifted his gaze back to his boy.

  “Ride on, son,” he said. “Keep the shiny side up.”

  Race looked at him, not understanding.

  “But don’t stop in Show Low, because I intend to let the cops know a certain little whore might need protection. I’ll tell them some nut killed her brother, and she might be next.”

  “And what are you going to tell them when they ask how you happened to come by that information?”

  “Everything,” Vince said, his voice calm. Serene even. “Better get moving. Ride on. It’s what you do best. Keeping ahead of that truck on the Cumba road… that was something. I’ll give you that. You got a gift for hightailing it. Not much else, but you got that. So hightail your ass out of here.”

  Race looked at him, unsure and suddenly frightened. But that wouldn’t last. He’d get his fuck-you back. It was all he had: some fuck-you attitude, a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and a fast bike.

  “Dad—”

  “Better go on, son,” Lemmy said. “Someone will have seen that smoke by now. There’ll be Staties here soon.”


  Race smiled. When he did, a single tear spilled from his left eye and cut a track through the dust on his face. “Just a couple of old chickenshits,” he said.

  He went back to his bike. The chains across the insteps of his snakeskin boots jingled… a little foolishly, Vince thought.

  Race swung his leg over the seat, started his Harley, and drove away west, toward Show Low. Vince did not expect him to look back and was not disappointed.

  They watched him. After a while, Lemmy said, “You want to go, Cap?”

  “No place to go, man. I think I might just sit here for a bit, side of the road.”

  “Well,” Lemmy said. “If you want. I guess I could sit some myself.”

  They went to the side of the road and sat down cross-legged like old Indians with no blankets to sell and watched the tanker burn in the desert, piling black oil smoke into the blue, unforgiving sky. Some of it drifted back their way, reeking and greasy.

  “We can move,” Vince said. “If you don’t like the smell.”

  Lemmy tipped his head back and inhaled deeply, like a man considering the bouquet of a pricey wine.

  “No, I don’t mind it. Smells like Vietnam.”

  Vince nodded.

  “Makes me think of them old days,” Lemmy said. “When we were almost as fast as we believed we were.”

  Vince nodded again. “Live pretty—”

  “Yep. Or die laughin’.”

  They said nothing more after that, just sat there, waiting, Vince with the girl’s picture in his hand. Every once in a while, he glanced at it, turning it in the sun, considering how young she looked, and how happy.

  But mostly he watched the fire.

  About the Authors

  Joe Hill is the New York Times bestselling author of Horns and Heart-Shaped Box and the prizewinning story collection 20th Century Ghosts. He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of an ongoing comic book series Locke & Key. You can learn more at www.joehillfiction.com and follow him on Twitter, where he goes by the inspired handle of @joe_hill.