Chapter 3 - Red Lights on the Blacktop
The sun was bleeding into the western ridge, turning the sky the color of a fresh bruise—deep violet, rusted orange, and the suffocating black of an approaching storm. Highway 9 snaked through an endless corridor of loblolly pines, the dense canopy swallowing what little ambient light remained. There were no streetlights out here. No mile markers. Just cracked two-lane asphalt, overgrown ditches, and the oppressive silence of timber country that had been picked clean by corporate lumber decades ago.
My instrument cluster glowed a dim, pale green. The fuel needle hovered at a quarter tank.
"Ten miles to the interstate," I muttered aloud, keeping my eyes locked on the sweep of my high beams.
Rex didn't answer with a sound, but his posture changed. His ears swiveled backward, then pinned flat against his skull. He rose from his sprawled position on the bench seat, planting his front paws firmly against the dashboard, his dark snout testing the air rushing through the open passenger window.
He smelled them before I heard them.
Thirty seconds later, the low-frequency thrum began. It started as a vibration in the floorboards—a deep, rhythmic pulse that resonated through the steering column. It wasn't the single exhaust note of a patrol car. It was a pack.
In the rearview mirror, two pinpricks of amber light broke over the crest of the hill behind us, followed immediately by four more. Six motorcycles, running tight formation, their high beams cutting through the gloom like searchlights. And half a mile behind them, running with its headlights completely blacked out, was the wide, predatory silhouette of a Dodge Ram 2500, visible only by the faint reflection of my taillights against its massive chrome push-bar.
They hadn't called the highway patrol. They hadn't set up a legal roadblock.
They were hunting.
Rex let out a low, guttural rumble from the depths of his chest. It wasn't a bark. It was the tactical alert he used to give me when an insurgent probe approached our perimeter wire in the desert.
"Easy, boy," I whispered, my left hand dropping to the steering wheel while my right slid down to the floorboards, finding the heavy canvas tool roll I kept behind the seat. "Let them make the first move."
The lead two bikes surged forward, their V-twin engines shrieking as they closed the gap at eighty miles an hour. They flanking my truck, one pulling up on the driver’s side, the other on the passenger side, matching my speed at fifty-five.
The rider to my left leaned in close. He was wearing an open-face helmet, his face obscured by a neoprene skull mask. In his right hand, he carried a three-foot length of heavy logging chain, wrapped once around his knuckles, the loose end dangling six inches above the asphalt, throwing sparks as it occasionally grazed the road.
He made a sharp, downward chopping motion with his left hand.
Pull over.
I looked straight ahead, maintaining my lane, my foot steady on the throttle.
The rider didn't like being ignored. He cracked the throttle, surged ahead by half a bike length, and swung the logging chain in a violent overhead arc.
CRACK.
The steel links obliterated my driver’s side mirror, sending shards of glass into the cab and leaving a deep, jagged gouge down the door panel.
"Strike one," I said calmly.
The rider on the passenger side made his move next. He reached into his leather cut, pulled a short-barreled pump shotgun from beneath his arm, and leveled the muzzle directly at Rex’s head through the open window.
That was his second and final mistake.
Rex didn't wait for an engagement command. A trained combat dog knows a raised weapon system when he sees it.
Before the biker could seat the buttstock against his ribs, eighty-five pounds of coiled muscle and titanium exploded across the cab. Rex didn't just bite—he launched himself through the open window like a missile, his jaws snapping shut over the biker’s right wrist.
The impact was catastrophic. The biker’s arm was jerked forward with hydraulic force, his finger involuntarily snatching the trigger. The shotgun discharged harmlessly into the asphalt, blowing a chunk out of the yellow dividing line. The sudden drag of Rex’s weight, combined with the sheer agony of titanium teeth grinding into carpal bones, stripped the rider’s balance.
The motorcycle’s front wheel wobbled violently, caught the edge of the asphalt shoulder, and tucked inward.
The bike flipped end-over-end in an explosion of chrome, plastic, and sparks.
Rex released his grip at the exact millisecond of the flip, utilizing the kinetic energy to push off the falling motorcycle and vault his rear paws back onto the truck’s running board. I reached across the cab with my right arm, snagged his heavy tactical harness by the drag handle, and hauled him back inside the window just as the ruined bike cartwheeled into the pine trees behind us.
Rex landed on the bench seat with a heavy thump, shook his head once, and licked a fleck of grease from his jowl.
"Good mount," I breathed, my heart rate steadying at seventy beats per minute. "Good boy."
The biker on my left saw his partner vanish into the trees and panicked. He dropped the chain and reached for his waistband, but I didn't give him the chance to draw.
I jerked the steering wheel hard to the left.
The heavy steel bumper of my F-250 struck the motorcycle’s rear quarter-panel with the force of an iron safe. It wasn't a cinematic crash. It was pure physics. A three-ton pickup truck versus an eight-hundred-pound motorcycle is an argument that ends before it begins.
The bike went sideways, sliding across the wet centerline on its footpegs, showering the road in a brilliant arc of white sparks before disappearing into the deep drainage ditch on the opposite side of the highway.
That left four bikes and the heavy pickup truck.
The remaining four riders backed off immediately, falling into a trailing defensive escort around the Dodge Ram. They had realized that the quarry wasn't a frightened civilian running for his life; he was an apex predator driving a steel battering ram.
Then the Dodge made its play.
The massive truck surged forward, its high-output Cummins diesel screaming as it blew past the four surviving motorcycles. Two blinding roof-mounted light bars snapped on, illuminating the interior of my cab in a wash of daylight-bright white LED.
In the blinding glare, the silhouette of a heavy fabricated steel push-bar filled my entire rearview window.
BANG.
The impact snapped my head back against the headrest. The rear tires of my truck broke traction for a terrifying second, skidding sideways as eighty miles an hour met seventy. I fought the wheel, applying smooth counter-steer, feathering the throttle until the old Ford regained its line.
BANG.
A second strike, harder this time. The rear tailgate caved inward with a sickening crunch of metal.
Through the rear window, behind the blinding glare of the light bars, I saw the driver of the Dodge.
He wasn't wearing a biker cut. He was wearing a tan uniform shirt with gold shoulder epaulets and a silver star pinned over his chest. His face was broad, red, and twisted into an expression of murderous, unhinged entitlement.
Sheriff Vance.
The law had arrived. And he wasn't carrying a warrant.
"Pull over, you son of a bitch!" A voice boomed through an external PA system mounted behind the Dodge’s grille, distorted and metallic over the roar of the engines. "Pull it over or I’ll put you in the ditch and bury you where you land!"
I glanced at my dashboard. Five miles to the county line. But ahead of us, the road began to rise into the foothills of the Blackwood Ridge—a series of steep, unpaved switchbacks that cut through an abandoned gravel quarry.
If I stayed on the asphalt, the Dodge’s superior horsepower would eventually pit-maneuver me into a bridge abutment.
"Hold on, Rex," I commanded, reaching down to yank the heavy manual transfer case lever back into four-wheel-drive high.
May you like
Ahead, on the right shoulder, the rusted chain-link gate of the old quarry loomed out of the dark.
I didn't tap the brakes. I dropped the transmission down into second gear, hit the throttle, and aimed the front bumper directly at the padlocked gate.
