Night of Thunder

Most, seeing trees or cliff rushing at them, will overcorrect, and when they do that the laws of physics, immutable and merciless, mandate a roll. The roll is death. The neck and its thin stalk of spine can’t take the g-force and sunder under the extreme vibration. Cessation of consciousness and life signs is immediate, and whether the wreck is in flames or not, further body trauma, broken bones, sundered blood-bearing organs, whatever, is immaterial. She didn’t know that the Sinnerman, with his experience in automotive assassination, had presumed she would yank the wheel for life, guaranteeing death, and was surprised as she rode the bump out, got soft control, and then accelerated, half on road, half on gravel, to escape his predation.

He hit her again, in the rear-third of the accelerating Volvo, knocking her fishtailing off the road in a screech of dust. But she didn’t panic at the wheel and hard-spin it this time either (sure death), but instead let it spin free and find its own proper vector as she scooted just ahead of him. He pulled himself left, drew off, set up for another thump, this one better aimed.

Nikki was not scared. Fright is imagination combined with anticipation combined with dread, and none of those conditions described her. Instead, she accepted instantaneously that she was in a fight to the death with a trained, experienced killer, and she didn’t waste any concentration on the unfairness of it all. Instead, she pushed the pedal so hard to the floor of the car that she felt the beginning of g-force, though of course the Volvo 240 with its 200-horsepower six-cylinder was no match for the muscled-up Chrysler barn-burner under her antagonist’s foot. But as he struggled to find an angle, she put surprising space between the vehicles and yet was astute enough to see in supertime a turn approaching. So now she finally braked, softly turning into a power slide that would get her around the turn at the best angle and set her up for another dead-on acceleration the hell out of there, if such a thing were possible, and it probably wasn’t.

Damn, she was good! As she control-skidded around the turn in a whine of rubber fighting for purchase of asphalt, Brother Richard saw his opening and, instead of veering outside of her, he bravely cut inside to begin his surge. His professional-quality cornering, as opposed to her gifted amateur approach, won him the inside where she didn’t expect him to be. As she tried to float back into the proper lane, he revved beyond redline, closed that off from her, and delivered his blow to the front fender of her right-hand side, not so much a thud as a nudge to push her out of equilibrium. But now, damnit, she figured this one out too, and jammed hard on her brakes, pumping the wheel as she skidded left.

The world spun before Nikki, racing across her windshield, pure abstraction in the cone of the one headlamp that still burned, and she nursed the brake pedal with a delicate foot while merely making suggestions to the wheel, which kept her in a semblance of control as she stopped, alas, to find herself one-eightied in the other direction. She was now facing the dangerous rising linkage of switchbacks up Iron Mountain that she’d just survived. So she punched it hard, jammed on the brakes as he came by her a third time (how had he gotten around so fast!), somehow got through a reverse right-hand, backing turn at a speed at which such a maneuver should never be conceived of, much less attempted, and again punched hard.

But he beat her, somehow, to possession of the road, and this time he hit her, rode her hard right. He turned, and she saw his face in the glare of the dash, its plainness, its evenness of feature, its dull symmetry, its almost generic quality, like the father of Dick in a Dick and Jane; it burned into her mind. And then she was off the road, out of control among the trees, and the world was jerking left and right, hard as the car slammed against or glanced off the trees. She felt her neck screaming, her head flopping this way and that, and then she hit, and everything stopped.

TWO

It happened so fast, two weeks. His hair went straight to winter from summer, with no autumnal pause. It didn’t thin, it didn’t fall out, it just veered off to dull gray. He looked ancient, or so he thought.

It was a memory that did it. He had recently had an actual sword fight to the death-in the twenty-first century, in one of the most modern cities on earth-with a Japanese gentleman of infinitely superior skill and talent. Yet he had won. He had killed the other man, left him cut through the middle in a mushy field of sherbet snow, turned magenta by the man’s own blood.

Bob thought often: Why did I win? I had no right to win. I was…so lucky. I was so goddamned lucky. It was like a worm, gnawing at his heart. You lucky bastard. Why did I luck out and that guy end up guts out in the snow?