Night of Thunder

“You go down and about a mile before the speedway, you’ll hit Groverdale Road. You left-turn on that, follow it to something called Cedarwood Circle. You can cut through somebody’s yard there and you want to find Shady Brooks Drive, it’s not much, but it curls around behind some houses that have probably given their yards up to parking, and that’ll take you alongside the hill before it heads back to the parkway. You may want to leave the road when you’re next to the mountain, as I’m thinking there’s nothing up there except fields and stuff and maybe you can move faster. I’m guessing that’s the only clear way.”

“Got it.”

“You want my body armor?”

“Thanks, officer, I don’t have time.”

“When this is over, I’ll have to cite you for no helmet and driving off roadways.”

“You do that. Mr. Hoover’ll pay the fine.”

“Who?”

“Never mind, son. You get on that squawk box and try and get SWAT where I told you.”

“Yes sir. Good hunting, Special Agent.”

“Thanks.”

With that Bob spurted ahead, trying to ease his way between fleeing citizens, at last finding a fairly clear path between cars on the wrong side of the road. He never got into third gear. Up ahead the disaster played out; it seemed all the squad cars in the world were on the perimeter while the sky above was filled with the lights of orbiting choppers. He became aware of glare against the darkness which could only signify something burning hot, eating up aviation fuel, and that stench seemed in the air as well. He could hear no shots because of the sound of the engine, and now and then a hard-moving foot patrolman would try to wave him down and get him out of there, but the FBI badge made these phantoms depart.

At last he hit Groverdale, which took him down a road lined with modest houses, where each homeowner had turned his land over to parking use. The rate, he saw from the remaining signs, was a hundred dollars a night. Most people had been glad to pay it, and now most of them were in cars, caught in a thermal stew of light, dust, exhaust, cigarette smoke, and body odor, the cars locked bumper-to-bumper. But Bob made pretty good progress just along the edge of the shoulder where the road dissolved into grass and the walkers had moved up a bit, giving him room.

He found himself in a bright cul-de-sac, where the illumination blocked out all sense of what lay beyond. He had a sense, possibly from a new, dead quality to the echoes, possibly from the imposition of a kind of dampness on the sultry air, of a mountain, a huge, green obstacle, close at hand. Between the houses he could see glimpses of NASCAR Village, jiggles of flame, and everywhere, it seemed, emergency service vehicles trying to penetrate the gridlock of wreckage, but hopelessly behind the curve, unaware of what was happening to whom. He thought it was better he had no radio contact with any of this, for the network would have been a crazed blur of garbled facts, glaring misinterpretations, wrong advice, command ego, reluctance. It was like radio traffic during a big attack in that far off fairyland called Vietnam, all but forgotten these days but still the crucible that burned in Bob and made him the man he was.

He cut between two houses, almost put-putting along, riding the throttle grip and clutch grip and the gears between first and second, really defying the bike’s true nature, which was to rush ahead, faster and faster. He skidded, found himself in a backyard where folks clustered around a radio and looked at him fearfully. A shotgun or two seemed to come his direction.

“FBI!” he yelled, holding up the badge. “Which way to the fight?”

A fellow in Bermudas with a beer in one hand and a Remington 870 in the other gestured onward, the direction he was headed.

“You go get ’em,” he screamed. “Let me finish this beer and I’ll be right behind.”

“You’d best sit this one out, sir. You need to protect wife and family and in-laws.”

“Yes sir,” said the guy, settling into a lawn chair. “FBI with a machine gun on a Kawasaki in my back yard. Goddamn, ain’t I seen everything now.”

Bob lurched ahead, through a line of bushes, into another back yard, the bike grinding and chawing through a garden. Threading between houses, he found himself on a still-narrower road-this had to be Shady Brooks Drive, which was really only wide enough for one car, and which was jammed with them, all going the way Bob wasn’t.

But there was room on the shoulder, and he got all the way up into third for a while, at last running free of cars. Then he saw why. The road wound back to the right, toward the parkway, toward NASCAR Village itself, and that small metropolis now blazed like London in the blitz. Something had ramrodded through it, strewing wreckage and ruin everywhere.

But Bob saw clearly that proceeding in this direction would prove nothing, for it would take him only where his enemies had been.