I took it all in within seconds and made my decision. The seven shots would bring more bikers hunting us. They would follow our footprints in the snow if we went that way. The bike was our answer to escape.
Before Harry the Hog bought his big bike, he’d ridden around the neighborhood on a little Japanese dirt bike. I’d been almost sixteen and he had talked me into riding it, laughing hysterically when I fell and left part of my skin on the road. But after a few more tries, I managed to stay upright. That summer, I must have ridden a hundred miles on his little bike in our yard and street.
No, I’d never been on a large one such as the one that faced me now. I’d never ridden any other motorcycle beside his, and that only for one summer. But the bike ahead beckoned. It called to me.
With Sue at my heels, I leaped on, my thumb found the starter-button, and nothing happened. I looked down and saw the ignition key dangling from a fob of some sort. After turning the key, I calmed myself, squeezed the clutch with my left hand and touched the starter again. The engine softly growled to life.
Sue leaped on behind me. I tapped the floorplate a few times with my toe and let the clutch out slowly. We moved forward and turned away from the center of town. My feet insisted on skidding along the pavement as we turned, but when pointed straight ahead, and as I gained confidence, my right hand twisting the throttle, we accelerated smoothly, and I put my feet where they belonged.
I felt Sue twist around behind me and in other circumstances may have wondered what she was doing, but the motorcycle was huge, and I was busy trying to control it on the patches of snow that covered the road in shaded places. The engine pushed us through the snow as if it didn’t exist, but the slightest turn of the handlebars threatened to crash us. I fought to keep the bike going directly down the center of the road.
A pop of sound told me what kind of a noise a thirty-two semi-automatic makes. Sue had fired her gun. Then she did it again. My eyes found the rearview mirror. In it, I saw the three bikers that were probably investigating the earlier shooting.
They had seen us. She fired again.
One bike swerved and fell, the rider rolled in the snow. A second pulled up to check on the first. Only one continued in our direction. I had no illusions about Sue having hit the biker that fell, not with a two-inch barrel from the back of a bouncing motorcycle. It was more likely the rider had seen the muzzle flash and it had scared him enough that he tried to turn too fast on the slick roadway. That told me he was also a pretender, as far from being a bad-ass biker as my cousin was. The one that stopped to help was no better. In doing so, he allowed his prey to escape. And the third one hadn’t accelerated to catch us, despite me riding in third gear about twenty-five miles an hour until finding the right sequence to shift into the next higher gear.
The road we followed was closed ahead with barricades, probably closed each winter when the snow fell and got too deep to plow since nobody lived up there. So, I slowed, downshifted, and turned slightly. The wheels found the right shoulder, then slowed more as I made a U-turn.
When the bike threatened to fall to one side, I walked it forward on my tiptoes and stopped when straight again. Now I faced the third biker, still coming at me—but slowly. I pulled my Glock and held it in both hands like they teach the cops to do in the movies.
He saw my action and instantly understood my intention. I squeezed off a shot. He twisted his handlebars in one direction, then the other to try and recover his balance. I fired again, to upset him more, if not to hit him. He was maybe fifty yards away when he lost all control.
Killing him and the others was not in my playbook. I replaced the gun in my holster and twisted the accelerator. The bike leaped ahead, gained speed, heading right past him and back into town. The bike we rode made very little noise. We blew past all three bikers that had chased us and reached the edge of town where there were tracks from motorcycles everywhere in the four-inch deep snow. Most bikes were parked in a ragged row outside a community center or something similar. A few men were lounging outside, and as one, they turned to look at us. One bearded biker raised a beer in silent salute as we accelerated past. Two or three shouted insults or whatever. None shot at us.
We kept riding.
In the rearview, none mounted up and chased us. My suspicion was that they were too drunk or doing their best to get there. They didn’t care about us. We hadn’t done any harm to them individually, and they didn’t yet know about the ones we killed or caused to crash.
Sue shouted in my ear, “I used to live right up ahead.”
“Want to stop?”
There was a slight delay before she shook her head. I felt the shake, but she didn’t say anything out loud. I understood. If she had said yes, I’d have tried to talk her out of it. Instead, I increased our speed.
The depth of the snow became less as we rode away from town until there were more bare patches on the road than snow. No vehicle had passed this way in a day or two because there were no tire tracks. We zipped past a few cars and trucks, all abandoned, half of them burned. At one place, a man either heard or saw us at the last moment and reached for a nearby rifle. By the time he raised it, we were out of range. He acted more like he was willing to protect himself than that he wanted to shoot us.
Sue shouted in my ear, her voice laughing. “This is how to make a ten-to-twenty-day trip in an hour.”
She was right. That fact hadn’t dawned on me, but she was giving me full credit. It hadn’t been my intent to ride all the way to Everett, and it still wasn’t, but the bike made very little noise and as long as we kept the speed up, we were past people before they knew we were even in the area. A person with a good rifle and a scope could probably shoot at us if the shot was hurried, but why should they? We were not doing them any harm, in fact, we were trying our best to get away. Besides, shooting at us would reveal their location to others.
We rode on dry pavement as the elevation dropped and I studied the bike between my legs. We had plenty of gas. It almost drove itself, riding soft and smooth. Someone had chopped down a couple of trees across the road ahead, but I steered the bike around one end without hardly slowing or seeing anybody. Later, there were two small groups of people, one in an RV parked beside the road, and another had pitched a tent beside it. A woman waved.
That told me things hadn’t deteriorated as much as I had expected. Not yet. One old man waved in a friendly manner as we cruised past another wide spot where a small tent had been pitched.
The North Fork of the Stillaguamish River ran along the left side of the highway. I only knew that because of a road sign. After passing through three or four communities too small for stop signs or red lights, we topped a slight rise and ahead of us flowed the river. Sandbars marked every wide turn, and the water was clear enough to see the rocks on the bottom.
We’d already traveled half of the fifty miles I’d estimated to reach Everett. Right ahead was Arlington, the town where I’d lived. Like Sue, I would avoid my old house. After that came Marysville, then Everett. Before going on, I wanted to examine the maps in detail. Make plans. Operating without plans simply felt wrong, especially after my impulsive theft of the motorcycle.
On our right were empty fields and farms, one after the other. However, on the left side of the road was the river, and across that was forest for a far as I could see. A dirt road went down to the water and I turned on impulse. A quarter-mile took us to a slight slope, and a sandbar made of fist-sized rocks. We slowed and bumped over them until we reached the water’s edge.