Read Throttle (Kindle Single) Online
Authors: Joe Hill,Stephen King
Throttle (Kindle Single) (6 page)
Vince stopped at Lemmy’s bike, gasping for breath. For a moment he thought he was going to pass out, but he leaned over, put his hands on his knees, and presently felt a little better.
“You got him, Cap.” Lemmy’s voice was hoarse with emotion.
“We better make sure,” Vince said. Although the stiff periscope arm and the hand dangling limp at the end of it suggested that would just be a formality.
“Why not?” Lemmy said. “I gotta take a piss, anyway.”
“You’re not pissing on him, dead or alive,” Vince said.
There was an approaching roar: Race’s Harley. He pulled up in a showy skid stop, killed the engine, and got off. His face, although dusty, glowed with delight and triumph. Vince hadn’t seen Race look that way since the kid was twelve. He had won a dirt-track race in a quarter-midget Vince had built for him, a yellow torpedo with a souped-up Briggs & Stratton engine. Race had come leaping from the cockpit with that exact same expression on his face, right after taking the checkered flag.
He threw his arms around Vince and hugged him. “You did it! You
did
it, Dad! You cooked his fucking ass!”
For a moment Vince allowed the hug. Because it had been so long. And because this was his spoiled son’s better angel. Everybody had one; even at his age, and after all he had seen, Vince believed that. So for a moment he allowed the hug, and relished the warmth of his son’s body, and promised himself he would remember it.
Then he put his hands against Race’s chest and pushed him away. Hard. Race stumbled backward on his custom snakeskin boots, the expression of love and triumph fading—
No, not fading.
Merging
. Becoming the look Vince had come to know so well: distrust and dislike.
Quit, why don’t you? That’s not dislike and never was
.
No, not dislike. Hate, bright and glowing.
All squared away, sir, and fuck you.
“What was her name?” Vince asked.
“What?”
“Her name, John.” He hadn’t called Race by his actual name in years, and there was no one to hear it now but them. Lemmy was sliding down the soft earth of the embankment, toward the crushed metal ball that had been LAUGHLIN’s cab, letting them have this tender father-son moment in privacy.
“What’s wrong with you?” Pure scorn. But when Vince reached out and tore off those fucking mirror shades, he saw the truth in John “Race” Adamson’s eyes. He knew what this was about. Vince was coming in five-by, as they used to say in Nam. Did they still say that in Iraq, he wondered, or had it gone the way of Morse code?
“What do you want to do now, John? Go on to Show Low? Roust Clarke’s sister for money that isn’t there?”
“It could be there.” Sulking now. He gathered himself. “It
is
there. I know Clarke. He trusted that whore.”
“And The Tribe? Just . . . what? Forget them? Dean and Ellis and all the others? Doc?”
“They’re dead.” He eyed his father. “Too slow. And most of them too old.”
You too
, the cool eyes said.
Lemmy was on his way back, his boots puffing up dust. He had something in his hand.
“What was her name?” Vince repeated. “Clarke’s girlfriend. What was her name?”
“Fuck’s it matter?” He paused then, struggling to win Vince back, his expression coming as close as it ever did to pleading. “Jesus. Leave it, why don’t you? We
won
. We
showed
him.”
“You knew Clarke. Knew him in Fallujah, knew him back here in The World. You were tight. If you knew him, you knew her. What was her name?”
“Janey. Joanie. Something like that.”
Vince slapped him. Race blinked, startled. Dropped for a moment back to being ten years old. But just for a moment. In another instant the hating look returned: a sick, curdled glare.
“He heard us talking back there in that diner parking lot. The trucker,” Vince said. Patiently. As if speaking to the child this young man had once been. The young man he had risked his life to save. Ah, but that had been instinct, and he wouldn’t have changed it. It was the one good thing in all this horror. This filth. Not that he had been the only one operating on filial instinct. “He knew he couldn’t take us there, but he couldn’t let us go, either. So he waited. Bided his time. Let us get ahead of him.”
“I have no clue what you’re talking about!” Very forceful. Only he was lying, and they both knew it.
“He knew the road and went after us where the terrain favored him. Like any good soldier.”
Yes. And then had pursued them with a single-minded purpose, regardless of the almost certain cost to himself. Laughlin had settled on death before dishonor. Vince knew nothing about him, but felt suddenly that he liked him better than his own son. Such a thing should not have been possible, but there it was.
“You’re fucked in the head,” Race said.
“I don’t think so. For all we know, he was going to see her when we crossed his path at the diner. It’s what a father might do for a kid he loved. Arrange things so he could look in, every now and then. See if she might even want a ride out. Take a chance on something besides the pipe and the rock.”
Lemmy rejoined them. “Dead,” he said.
Vince nodded.
“This was on the visor.” He handed it to Vince. Vince didn’t want to look at it, but he did. It was a snapshot of a smiling girl with her hair in a ponytail. She wore a Corman High Varsity sweatshirt, the same one she had died in. She was sitting on the front bumper of LAUGHLIN, her back resting against the silver grille. She was wearing her daddy’s camo cap turned around backward and mock-saluting and struggling not to grin. Saluting who? Laughlin himself, of course. Laughlin had been holding the camera.
“Her name was Jackie Laughlin,” Race said. “And she’s dead, too, so fuck her.”
Lemmy started forward, ready to pull Race off his bike and feed him his teeth, but Vince held him back with a look. Then he shifted his gaze back to his boy.
“Ride on, son,” he said. “Keep the shiny side up.”
Race looked at him, not understanding.
“But don’t stop in Show Low, because I intend to let the cops know a certain little whore might need protection. I’ll tell them some nut killed her brother, and she might be next.”
“And what are you going to tell them when they ask how you happened to come by that information?”
“Everything,” Vince said, his voice calm. Serene even. “Better get moving. Ride on. It’s what you do best. Keeping ahead of that truck on the Cumba road . . . that was something. I’ll give you that. You got a gift for hightailing it. Not much else, but you got that. So hightail your ass out of here.”
Race looked at him, unsure and suddenly frightened. But that wouldn’t last. He’d get his fuck-you back. It was all he had: some fuck-you attitude, a pair of mirrored sunglasses, and a fast bike.
“Dad—”
“Better go on, son,” Lemmy said. “Someone will have seen that smoke by now. There’ll be Staties here soon.”
Race smiled. When he did, a single tear spilled from his left eye and cut a track through the dust on his face. “Just a couple of old chickenshits,” he said.
He went back to his bike. The chains across the insteps of his snakeskin boots jingled . . . a little foolishly, Vince thought.
Race swung his leg over the seat, started his Harley, and drove away west, toward Show Low. Vince did not expect him to look back and was not disappointed.
They watched him. After a while, Lemmy said, “You want to go, Cap?”
“No place to go, man. I think I might just sit here for a bit, side of the road.”
“Well,” Lemmy said. “If you want. I guess I could sit some myself.”
They went to the side of the road and sat down cross-legged like old Indians with no blankets to sell and watched the tanker burn in the desert, piling black oil smoke into the blue, unforgiving sky. Some of it drifted back their way, reeking and greasy.
“We can move,” Vince said. “If you don’t like the smell.”
Lemmy tipped his head back and inhaled deeply, like a man considering the bouquet of a pricey wine.
“No, I don’t mind it. Smells like Vietnam.”
Vince nodded.
“Makes me think of them old days,” Lemmy said. “When we were almost as fast as we believed we were.”
Vince nodded again. “Live pretty—”
“Yep. Or die laughin’.”
They said nothing more after that, just sat there, waiting, Vince with the girl’s picture in his hand. Every once in a while, he glanced at it, turning it in the sun, considering how young she looked, and how happy.
But mostly he watched the fire.
Joe Hill
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
Horns
and
Heart-Shaped Box
and the prizewinning story collection
20th Century Ghosts
. He is also the Eisner Award–winning writer of an ongoing comic book series
Locke & Key
. You can learn more at www.joehillfiction.com and follow him on Twitter, where he goes by the inspired handle of @joe_hill.
Stephen King
is the author of more than fifty books, all of them worldwide bestsellers. Among his most recent are
11/22/63, Under the Dome
, the Dark Tower novels,
Cell, From a Buick 8, Everything’s Eventual, Hearts in Atlantis, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon
, and
Bag of Bones
. His acclaimed nonfiction book,
On Writing
, was also a bestseller. He is the recipient of the 2003 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He lives in Bangor, Maine, with his wife, novelist Tabitha King.
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www.AuthorTracker.com
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Grateful acknowledgment is given to IDW chief creative officer Chris Ryall for his assistance with this e-book.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A version of “Throttle” previously appeared in
He Is Legend: An Anthology Celebrating Richard Matheson
edited by Christopher Conlon. Published by Tor Books, 2010.
“
THROTTLE
.” Copyright © 2009 by Joe Hill and Stephen King. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Art by Nelson Daniel © 2012 IDW Publishing
EPub Edition © APRIL 2012 ISBN: 9780062215956
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