1 Life 2 Die 4 (7 page)

It was as if some giant chainsaw had just
sliced the thing cleanly in two about halfway along!

I felt pretty sure I’d have recurring
nightmares about what the charge had done to the rider of the bike.
It helped a bit to remind myself that, just thirty seconds ago,
bike-chick had tried to blow us into a million pieces. And that,
technically, that meant Veronica had been 999,998 pieces less nasty
to her. All in all, I suppose you could say she got off quite
lightly!

Despite my efforts to laugh it off, however,
I swallowed uncomfortably and turned to peer dully ahead. That was
the end of any lingering doubts I’d had that this game we were
caught up in was deadly serious and that Veronica had come ready to
play. I probably should have felt sick. Instead, as I thought some
more about it, I felt a massive sense of relief. For the first
time, I dared to think that maybe we could actually beat these
crazed killers and live to see another day.

Then I remembered the second biker and
realized I couldn’t afford to think too far into the future. All
that mattered was staying alive from second to second … and taking
out the rest of those maniacs before they turned us into worm
food!

*****

11

Moments later, we blasted out of the tunnel and
turned right onto Melbourne Street. Just ahead, the Victoria Bridge
arched gently away from us, over the River towards the Queen Street
Mall. In different circumstances, I might have dwelt on the fact
that this madness had all started about a kilometre and a half dead
ahead of us, on the far side of that Mall. As it was, I was too
preoccupied with all the cars driving straight at us! Not to
mention the fact that we were trapped on the wrong side of the road
by a concrete and glass barricade to our left, which ran along the
centre of the bitumen for another fifty metres.

Veronica didn’t seem at all
fazed
by the wave of cars racing
towards us, their occupants no doubt made reckless by their desire
to get away from all those explosions around the CBD. In fact, she
continued to accelerate as she dodged left, past the first car. The
squeal of skidding car tyres filled the air as she zigzagged
smoothly past four more. Then we were on the bridge, past the end
of the barrier, and crossing onto the left side of the road.

I let a relieved sigh go just before I
spotted a bus about fifty metres ahead, coming at us way too fast.
It was one of those ‘stretch buses’ that are like two separate
buses joined in the middle by a concertinaed section. What made my
heart skip a beat, however, was the unmistakable figure of the
driver -
Baseball Cap Man had found us
!

I saw his mouth twist into an evil grin as he
wrenched the wheel hard over. The bus veered sharply to the right …
too sharply … and began to tip. Seconds later it was sliding along
the road on its side, stretching all way from one edge of the
Bridge to the other, thick showers of sparks spraying out where the
metal sides ground along the rough bitumen. There was no way past.
But at least I knew we could just turn around and ride away from
it.

Then, over the grinding scraping racket of
the sliding bus, I heard several bursts of gunfire and noticed
windows shattering all over the side of the bus which now faced
skywards. A moment later, bad-guys’ heads started popping from the
smashed windows like rabbits from a warren! Well, not quite like
that I guess, since rabbits don’t usually pull evil-looking guns
out of their burrows with them!

Now I knew we were in trouble. Even if we
turned back, we’d look like sieves before we made it ten metres.
When I glanced at Veronica, however, she didn’t look at all
defeated. Instead, while I’d been enjoying the ‘evil bunny show’,
she’d pulled up her sleeve and raised her arm to point at a
lamp-post ahead and to our right. A moment later, just as had
happened back on Kurilpa Bridge, something shot from what I could
now see was a gun-like device strapped to her forearm. I heard the
dull clang of it hitting the lamp-post and only managed to spot the
almost invisible thread stretching from her arm to the post because
I knew it was there.

At the same time, the fingers of Veronica’s
other hand had been dancing across a keypad at the centre of the
handlebars. My concern over the fact that this meant neither of her
hands were on the handlebars quickly paled into insignificance when
three words started flashing on a small display at the top of the
panel: “SELF-DESTRUCT ON IMPACT”!

“Hold tight!” she ordered.

I strengthened my grip around her waist an
instant before we passed the lamp post and the cord dragged us
smoothly from the bike, arcing us round to the right. The g-forces
built rapidly as we swung up and round, barely clearing the
railings before flying out over the edge of the bridge. I could
hear the sound of about five automatics firing simultaneously and I
grimaced, expecting to feel a succession of sickening impacts. But
when I glanced round I discovered Baseball Cap man and his mates
had correctly guessed that right now the bike was far more of a
threat than we were. Thankfully, they were all desperately firing
at it instead of us.

I guess the front of the speeding motorbike
must have been heavily reinforced, since they didn’t have a lot of
success with triggering the bomb early. Unfortunately though, just
before it tore into the centre of the bus, I saw Baseball Cap Man
scramble from the shattered front windscreen and hurl himself up
and out over the edge of the bridge. He was one guy I’d really have
preferred to see taken out of the equation.

While he dropped out of sight on the far side
of the bridge, the intense g-force I’d felt as we swung round the
lamp-post abruptly vanished, and while I listened to the rapid whir
of the line reeling back in, Veronica and I began to fall. I
completely missed what must have been a pretty impressive fireball
‘cause my head instinctively whipped round to see where we were
going to land … and how many limbs I was likely to break. Lots, I
immediately realised. A moment later we crashed into the top of a
tree while the enormous boom of the bike and bus exploding together
drowned out the sound of its upper branches giving way under our
combined weight. At least they were the kind of limbs I didn’t mind
breaking. And I felt suddenly glad I’d worn jeans and a
long-sleeved shirt, otherwise my legs and arms would have been
shredded as we crashed down through the branches. As it was, I got
little more than a nasty cut on my left hand before we finally lost
our momentum and came to rest in the more sturdy lower
branches.

Without pausing, Veronica scrambled down onto
a staircase just below us that lead up the side of a very
old-looking rock structure. I quickly followed her lead and a few
seconds later we emerged from the stairs onto a rough, rectangular
concrete platform. She bolted towards an archway perched on top and
while I followed closely I glanced sideways at a plaque attached to
the side of the arch. I wasn’t surprised to see it was a bronze
relief of a young boy’s face – I’d already realised we were now
standing on the last remaining section of the original Victoria
Bridge, which had been left standing as a monument to an
eleven-year-old boy who’d been accidentally killed near here around
the end of World War I. My year six class had been here a few years
back as part of a ‘History of Brisbane’ excursion and now, as we
raced by, I was intrigued to spot the faded remnants of Joey
Spettini’s chewing gum still wedged beneath the plaque where I’d
watched him carelessly shove it so long ago.

While I marvelled at Joey’s spearmint legacy,
I turned to Veronica and was surprised to discover her growing
shorter! When I glanced down at her feet, I realised it was because
she was disappearing into the ground on a small platform.
Hurriedly, I jumped down beside her, and while we descended swiftly
into darkness, I glanced nervously about in search of bad-guys.
Thankfully, there were none in sight. Moments later, when a
trapdoor slid silently into place above our heads, the unwelcome
thought popped into my head that it felt like I was descending into
a grave … and that there’d be plenty of room for a second plaque up
there on that arch - say, one to a fourteen-year-old boy killed by
a hoard of mysterious assassins on this very day!

*****

12

I suspected the chamber we were now in hadn’t been
part of the original bridge specifications, but there was
absolutely no doubt about the car that was crouched beside us. I
was pretty sure nothing like it could exist now, let alone back
when the original bridge was built! Like the other machines which
Veronica kept mysteriously stumbling across, it was made of bare
shiny metal, glinting faintly in the dull, greenish lights that had
come on at various points around the chamber. The mere sight of it
brought an ecstatic smile to my lips. Narrow and short, it seemed
barely big enough to encase two seats side-by-side and, presumably,
a motor at the back (though it must have been impossibly small to
fit into the available space). Although the vehicle sat higher on
its surprisingly wide wheels than any racing car normally would, it
seemed likely that someone equipped with a particularly efficient
wind-tunnel had abandoned their family and friends for countless
hours to perfect its streamlining. As I stared at it in awe, I had
the giddying feeling it was capable of things I’d only ever dreamed
of.

Still smiling, I reached for the door and
climbed in as Veronica stepped round to the driver’s side. While I
settled into the steeply-reclined, black leather seat, she squeezed
in beside me and I became suddenly, and very acutely, aware of her
faint but deeply intoxicating perfume.

“We should be okay here for a while,” she
told me softly, and I noticed an odd inflection in her voice. When
I turned to look at her I saw a confused jumble of emotions playing
across her face. Our eyes met and for a moment there was
electricity in the air again. Then she frowned and abruptly turned
to peer ahead through the windscreen.

I frowned too. Besides a vague hint of fear
and her usual air of gritty determination, I was sure I’d detected
an unfathomable sadness in her big, beautiful eyes. Yet the
overriding impression I’d received was of a fierce, thinly veiled
sense of longing. It instantly brought back the words that had
never been far from my dazed mind since she’d spoken them: “
I’m
your wife.
”

“Veronica … why do you think we’re m ...
married?” I asked, surprised to discover my voice sounded strangely
husky, like hers, while I forced the final bizarre word out.

I watched her smile silently to herself while
she peered ahead through the windscreen at the rough, dimly lit
rock wall. It was clear that she was seeing something quite
different in her mind’s eye.

“I remember when I first met you,” she began
obscurely, “as if it was only yesterday.” Her voice sounded kind of
dreamy, and there was a hint of laughter, as if she found the
thought amusing somehow. Naturally, I assumed it was because she
was joking about remembering when she first met me. We both knew it
had been less than half-an-hour ago! She couldn’t possibly have
forgotten if she’d tried!

“You seemed so terribly sad,” she continued.
“And at first you just stared oddly at me, as if you were looking
straight through me. Then your eyes suddenly focused on mine and
you smiled so warmly that it felt like the sun had risen inside
me.”

She smiled again and it was such a genuine
look of joy that it left me feeling deeply shaken and confused.
That wasn’t how I remembered it at all! By my reckoning, I would
have had a look of absolute shock and horror when I’d seen her for
the first time, as I’d stumbled across the pedestrian crossing and
she pulled out that mean-looking gun of hers!

As if reality was quite irrelevant to her,
Veronica’s expression stayed like that for long seconds before she
gave a sudden, girlish giggle.

“You know, ever since I was a little girl,
I’d always imagined some incredibly romantic marriage proposal …
perhaps at the top of the Eiffel Tower … or over a candle-lit
dinner in a beautiful garden somewhere.”

I felt myself turning red. Her mushy feelings
about wedding proposals weren’t exactly what I’d been trying to
find out about when I’d asked why she thought I was her husband.
Particularly given that she somehow believed I had a starring
role!

She continued to stare ahead at the wall
while she carried on, oblivious to my glowing red cheeks.

“Then, one night we were having pizza at your
flat and I was in one of those foul moods we women are prone to now
and then.”

I blinked.
What on Earth was she talking
about?

“I’d just torn strips off you about something
- I don’t even remember what anymore, probably ‘cause it was so
trivial.” She sounded as if she honestly believed the crazy words
she was speaking! “But you just smiled at me … which, of course,
made me even more furious! I was so angry that when I went to stand
up I shoved my chair back too hard … it tipped over and smashed
your beautiful engraved glass coffee table into a million
pieces!

I could only stare uncomprehendingly at her,
wondering how she had managed to create this bizarre fantasy world
of hers.

“I was far too furious and embarrassed to
apologise,” she continued, “so I just stormed for the door instead.
I had it open and was just about to walk out when I heard you say
those wonderful words: ‘Veronica - I’m so crazy about you! For
God’s sake, marry me.’”

She turned to peer affectionately at me and I
didn’t know where to look, or what to do. Was she simply mad, or
was it possible she’d mistaken me for someone else?