Braaaappp…
The sticker on the back of Jeremiah’s old green metal fleck ping pong ball helmet said: Loud pipes save lives. As he pulled it off the display shelf at the back of the shop, he hoped they would. Austin and Jynx huddled, cowering behind a few of the workbenches. He crossed to the shed, fumbling through his keys as he sauntered across the lot. He popped the padlock and rolled open the shed door without flipping on the overhead lights. He swept the tarp away from the Mantis with a magician’s flare, unleashing a miniature dust storm.
“What are you doing, Jeremiah?”
Jeremiah hung his helmet off the handlebars, easing the bike across the lot towards the side gate. The chain made a soft ticking noise, like a roller coaster car whispering towards the top of the first big drop. With all the feds parked out front, he was only going to get one shot.
“I’m gonna even the odds,” he said, grabbing a pair of leather gloves off the workbench as he pushed the mantis past. He tossed his shop keys to Austin, nodding towards the gate.
“Jynx, the minute I start this thing up, I want you to hit the green button for the front bay doors.”
“But they’ll come in!”
Jeremiah shook his head. “I’m expecting to pull a few of them off, I just need a head start.” He slid into his leather armor, zipping up the wrists and stretching into it like a second skin. “The minute I’m gone I want you both to play a little game of hide-and-seek with anyone who breaches. Get back in the wrecks, and Austin, as soon as it’s clear, take her through the hole in the back corner of the fence and get yourselves gone.”
Austin nodded, empty-eyed, but attentive.
“But Jeremiah…” Jynx watched him pull on his helmet, clean the dust from his goggles, and pull them down to hang around his neck. He ran a quick preflight check on the Mantis, popping the cap to double-check his gas level. “…what if they catch you?”
Jeremiah opened the choke and plugged the key into the ignition. He smirked subtly, running his hand along the metal-fleck green tank as he zipped up his jacket. “Not this time.” He flicked his shop rag at the seat to knock the dust off. “Just get gone. If I can lose them, I’ll meet you back at the clubhouse.”
Jynx nodded.
Straddling the bike, Jeremiah pulled on his gloves and adjusted his goggles. He nodded at Austin, standing ready to open the gate. Reaching for the seat pommel he pressed a leather gloved thumb at a spot right at the edge of the leather, popping a kill switch for the head and taillights. He turned the key. His console glowed soft blue. He nodded at Austin.
“Crash and burn,” Austin said, rolling the gate aside as quietly as he could.
Jeremiah gave Jynx the thumbs up. She hit the garage door buttons and dashed back towards the wrecks. Austin slapped Jeremiah’s helmet as he darted back to follow Jynx. Jeremiah squeezed the clutch, popped it down to first, and hit the starter in a deft choreography of man and machine becoming one. The Mantis sputtered to life and then roared as Jeremiah rolled on the throttle. The repair bays echoed an unholy peal of thunder without lightning. The fed’s spotlights filled the three bays to find a dented white Honda, a black-on-black government Crown Vic, and an empty bay. There was no visible source for the noise. The thunder crashed louder, amplified in the concrete walls. The agents ducked behind armored fenders and bulletproof glass windows; pistols were drawn to defend against an invisible enemy.
Gunning the engine a few times was as good a warm-up as the Mantis was going to get. Jeremiah popped the clutch, roaring out through the side gate and rolling easy onto the interstate with a phantom rooster tail of dust kicking up behind a quickly vanishing dark object. A few hundred yards up the highway, trumpet pipe still screaming in second gear, he hit the switch to turn on the lights and a mirage beacon appeared in the distance. The Feds stomped accelerators, white-knuckling their steering wheels to catch up.
This early in the evening, there would still be traffic along the interstate, and locals on the side streets. He might be able to lose them in the backstreets, but he was fairly sure that leading a high-speed stampede of Feds through the neighborhoods might be decidedly bad for his reputation with the locals. On a dirt bike, he could take them up into the wash and lose them in the boulders, but the Mantis wasn’t built for that sort of off-road. She was a desert flat racing machine, custom designed for the salt flat dust bowl of the open valley.
Taking the soft curve to where the speed limit hit 65, Jeremiah counted headlights in the rearview. Even with the mirror rattling, he counted at least a half dozen sets of red and blues running just a few hundred yards back. He was just over seventy, running easily in fourth. With no moon to speak of, the salt flats were a vast dark emptiness, domed in stars and the sawtooth black hills some fifty miles distant. If he could get them out there, he could open the throttle and possibly lose them in the void if he killed the running lights. He pulled his bandana up to cover his nose and mouth. Rolling on a little more throttle, the trumpet pipe roared as he pushed eighty towards his dusty exit for the dry lakebed.
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Hopping off the asphalt, the alkaline sand stacked up in deep, windblown drifts that only appeared solid. Carried by the momentum his back tire swam in it, spinning and kicking up an ultrafine cloud for a landmark. For just a brief moment, he half expected to eat shit. He tensed but kept it upright, rolling on the throttle and avoiding the brakes. Clinging tighter to the tank he shimmied with the Mantis frame as it thrashed through the chaparral shrubs and creosote bushes and struck on hardpan finally, jerking back into acceleration. Confident that the feds would find a way to follow him out there, he reached down and flipped the kill switch for the head and taillights, vanishing himself again.
Rolling on the throttle without dropping a gear, Jeremiah redlined it, feeling the easy speed. The suspension rattled the frame, his right mirror rattling loose and dropping limp, but he was satisfied to glance back and see the headlights and red and blue rockers pursuing him out onto the flats. Deciding that he had at least an extra twenty to thirty miles of open flats if he gunned it north, he arched gently toward the farthest point in the valley. He stomped it into sixth gear and flicked back the red plastic cover on the Nitrous toggle switch. In theory, the system worked. Although he had never highway-tested it, he had dry-tested it, and he had been reasonably satisfied with the result. Second-stage nitrous explosions were a real thing, and out on the flats, hitting the engine with a full 150 horsepower dose could blow the carburetor to shrapnel and send him skidding across the dry lakebed at over a hundred miles per hour, probably pulverizing every bone in his flaming body. Drag racers wore Kevlar suits for that sort of thing. Denim and leather weren’t going to protect him from an explosion of high-octane and illegal gas additives. Worse, if his rear wheel lost traction and spun out, he would high side and rag doll across a hundred yards of the open valley, turning every bone in his body into paste -- like every Evel Knievel ending rolled into one lumpy flesh bag of pulverized bone. As much as he wanted to lose them on the straightaway, he didn’t see that happening. There weren’t a lot of standing structures to roll the bike behind, and besides, there was a decent chance that Jynx and Austin were going to need him if they managed to get off the lot.
At over a hundred and twenty, he still wasn’t losing the tail. They might have infrared sensors or night vision or something. They might just be chasing the rooster's tail of his dust. In the remaining rearview he watched the jagged lights dancing. It was impossible to tell how far away they were, but he knew that he was running out of time and runway. They were on his turf out here, though. He had managed to put some distance between them, what felt fast to him would have been light speed to them, careening across the unencumbered desert afraid of imagined phantom pitfalls in the emptiness. He knew the smooth flat plane of the open hardpan like only a local boy could. Running the track without the nitrous, even over a hundred miles per hour, gave him a chance to get his bearings for the legitimate speed trial, the race back into the action. He was sure that he had at the very least bought the tough guy club enough time to escape, hopefully. He was confident that if he made it back to the old clubhouse, they could all hunker down until the situation figured itself out. Whether the stormtroopers got their little flying saucer or not, Jeremiah didn’t care. He just didn’t want to go back to jail. This time he would be tried as an adult, with a prior record of doing the same thing that got him into juvie in the first place. The judge wasn’t going to be going easy on him.
The dark line at the horizon grew larger. Giving himself a hundred yards to turn the Mantis around, he downshifted, compression breaking to prevent a dry skid. As he dropped it into first he hit the gas to spin the back tire and swing the rear end around in a stunning sweep of fine alkaline dust. The engine idled easy, pipes warm, tires warm, he gunned the engine once to hear the trumpet pipes roar. Lit only by the dim blue light of the speedometer, the call of the wild came from a space of almost absolute darkness. He brushed the fine dust from his goggles with the sleeve of his jacket and eyed the halogen glare of the approaching Kevlar-clad legion, listening to the Mantis idle eagerly.
“Red rover, red rover, send Stringbean on over.” He gunned the throttle and popped it into gear, the front tire hopping off the hardpan for a few feet before he rapid-fired through gears, straight at them. With his headlight off, he was invisible to them, but as they spread out before him, a frenetic string of starburst pearls spilled across the desert, adorned in flashing red and blue. Even as a heat signature, he would be a solid white-hot dot on the horizon imperceptibly growing larger as he rushed towards them. Charging at each other, he didn’t have much time. They were undoubtedly hauling ass, and the lights got bigger by the second. Still in fourth gear, he hit the first Nitrous plate. He felt the tail squirm as the horsepower kicked in and clung tighter to the Mantis, even as he loosened up to absorb the vibration. Glancing down at the carburetors he expected to see flames and bent butterfly valve covers, but all he saw was the pale dust cloud kicked up by his fat front tire. The headlights, spotlights, and swirling reds and blues loomed a large light wall ahead of him as he pressed the second button, triggering the second nitrous plate. The Mantis absorbed the second boost without even a shimmy. Glancing down, even briefly, he saw the needle stop bouncing as it hit the pin at over a hundred and fifty and still accelerating. At the very last moment, just before their headlights struck him, he toggled the brights and hit the switch hidden in the seat. A brilliant white light manifested fifty yards and just a few seconds before it bisected the armored phalanx. The Feds jerked their steering wheels, ramming fenders, slamming brakes, and kicking up an explosive dust storm as String Bean and the Mantis barreled full speed in the opposite direction.
