Chapter 6 - The Shadows on the Highway
The autumn dusk descended upon the Coosa Valley like a bruised violet blanket, trapping the thick scent of cured yellow pine, damp hickory leaves, and mountain mist beneath a low-hanging ceiling of slate clouds.
Highway 21 stretched south toward Talladega—a narrow, two-lane ribbon of blacktop that carved through fifty miles of unbroken national forest where cell service died ten miles outside the municipal limits and the only lights were the amber clearance bulbs of logging rigs hauling sixty-foot pulpwood stems down from the ridges.
My headlights cut through the gloom in a single, focused beam of pale yellow halogen, illuminating the white mist rising from the asphalt.
Every five miles, the vibration of the road changed.
A motorcycle is not an automobile; it does not isolate you from the geology beneath your wheels. An experienced rider feels the settling of the subgrade through his footpegs, smells the change in soil chemistry when the pine gives way to limestone creek beds, and hears the microscopic shift in wind shear through the risers of his handlebars before the trees even bend.
Ten miles south of the county line, near the abandoned rail siding at Ironaton, the wind died completely.
In my left rearview mirror—mounted low on the chrome drag-bars—two pinpricks of blue-white high-intensity LED light crested the ridge behind me.
They were moving fast.
Not at the steady, sixty-mile-an-hour pace of a local timber hauler, and not with the erratic, bouncing cadence of a county pickup truck with bad leaf springs.
These lights were stable, low-slung, and closing the quarter-mile gap at eighty-five miles an hour.
A second set of lights appeared behind the first.
Twin blacked-out Dodge Ram 2500s, running without amber running lights, their heavy fabricated steel cattle-guards visible through the spray like the blunt snouts of river predators.
The River Road crew hadn't all been taken in the Ohatchee box.
Randall Croft was an experienced backwoods operator; he always ran a trailing three-man chase element five miles behind his primary logistics convoys to clean up the brass and recover the vehicles if an interstate interdiction went sideways. They knew the federal net was closing around the county, they knew their bank accounts were frozen, and they knew that forty miles of mountain blacktop lay between the courthouse steps and the state police barracks in Montgomery.
They didn't want the jump drive. The jump drive was already in a federal vault in Birmingham.
They wanted blood.
They wanted the sixty-year-old outlaw who had put their bosses in federal chains and painted their family's name across the front page of every newspaper in the state.
I didn't reach for the throttle. I didn't downshift into fourth gear to try and outrun two five-hundred-horsepower turbodiesels on a winding two-lane blacktop with four cracked ribs and a bullet graze in my shoulder.
A shovelhead Harley-Davidson is an iron tractor. It will run through three feet of creek water, it will pull sixty degrees of lean angle through an unpaved gravel switchback, and it will throw eight hundred pounds of momentum into an iron bumper if you know where to drop your weight.
I touched the front brake lever once, flashing my single red tail lens three times in the mist—the old club signal for an incoming collision.
The lead Dodge accelerated, its Cummins diesel roaring like an industrial compressor as it pulled out into the opposing lane to execute a high-speed pit maneuver against my rear swingarm.
Ahead of us, half a mile into the gloom, the wooden trestle bridge over the dry bed of Cheaha Creek loomed out of the fog.
The bridge was eighty years old, built of heavy creosote-soaked pine timbers and single-lane steel girders, with a six-inch concrete lip where the asphalt met the approach apron. The guardrails were nothing more than three-quarter-inch rusted steel cables strung between rotted cedar posts, dropping forty feet down into a jagged gorge of dry limestone boulders and discarded rail ties.
The lead truck was twenty yards off my rear fender now.
Through my mirror, I could see the silhouette of the driver—a heavy-set man with a tactical ballcap pulled low, his passenger leaning out the open window with a short-barreled pump shotgun held across the side-mirror bracket.
"Hold your line, girl," I whispered to the old machine beneath me, my gloved fingers curling around the knurled aluminum throttle grip.
One hundred yards to the bridge approach.
Fifty yards.
The passenger leveled the shotgun barrel—
I slammed my right boot down on the rear brake pedal, locking the heavy mechanical drum into a full, screaming slide while simultaneously dumping the clutch and snapping the handlebars forty-five degrees to the right.
The rear tire broke traction with a deafening screech of burning vulcanized rubber, throwing up a five-foot rooster tail of road grit and sparks against the Dodge’s chrome push-bar.
The motorcycle didn't slide into the ditch.
I feathered the front disc, using the high-side torque of the iron flywheel to whip the entire eight-hundred-pound machine in a complete, ninety-degree pivot on the narrow road, slipping through a four-foot gap between the bridge’s concrete abutment and an old rusted iron rail car that had sat on the siding since 1974.
The driver of the Dodge had half a second to react.
At eighty-five miles an hour, four tons of four-wheel-drive steel does not corner on wet pine needles.
The Dodge’s massive front tires locked up, smoke pouring from all four wheel wells in a blinding white cloud as the driver stood on the brake pedal with both feet.
BOOM.
The truck struck the concrete bridge abutment at seventy miles an hour with the concussive, earth-shaking violence of an artillery shell hitting a bunker.
The heavy steel push-bar caved the radiator into the engine block in a microsecond; the six-cylinder diesel engine broke its motor mounts, shearing through the firewall into the cab; and the entire four-ton truck vaulted into the air, flipping end-over-end over the shattered timber guardrail to plunge forty feet down into the blackness of the gorge below.
The explosion that followed was not a Hollywood fireball.
It was a dull, heavy, subterranean crump—the sound of an eighty-gallon fuel tank rupturing against limestone boulders, followed by a thick, oily column of black diesel smoke and yellow flame rising through the bridge timbers into the cold mountain air.
The second Dodge slid to a halt fifty yards back on the highway, its high-beam LEDs illuminating the shattered guardrail, the smoking radiator fluid pooling across the asphalt, and my black motorcycle idling quietly in the shadows of the rusted rail car.
The driver of the second truck didn't get out.
He looked at the flaming grave of his partner’s vehicle forty feet down in the dry creek bed. He looked at the heavy-set biker sitting motionless in the mist, his arms crossed over his leather vest, the red wax heart gleaming faintly in the firelight.
The truck’s reverse lights snapped on with a sharp, white click.
The second Dodge backed down Highway 21 at fifty miles an hour, its tires screaming against the blacktop, turning around in an abandoned logging turnaround before vanishing northward into the fog with its lights dark.
I sat in the darkness for two minutes, listening to the crackle of the burning tires in the creek bed below and the steady, unhurried thrum of my own engine idling at six hundred RPM.
My shoulder was throbbing, a hot, sticky sensation telling me that the bullet graze had torn open under the torque of the turn.
May you like
I reached into my pocket, pulled out an old bandanna, wiped the road grit from my goggles, and clicked the transmission down into gear.
The old Harley rolled out from behind the rail car, crossing the trembling timber planks of the bridge through the drifting smoke, and disappeared into the vast, silent pine forests of the southern ridge.
