A short story from Collected Stories by Frederick Karl Heald, written as a teenager in the 1980s. 18 typed pages, complete except for one missing page from the scan.
[The original manuscript includes a hand-drawn map of Nevada, with cities and geographic features labeled — not reproduced here.]
NOW ENTERING NEVADA. PASS THIS POINT AT OWN RISK. THIS TERRITORY NO LONGER PROTECTED BY UNITED STATES AUTHORITIES. EXIT FROM THIS AREA RESTRICTED AND CONTINGENT UPON UNITED STATES BORDER PATROL RADIOACTIVITY INSPECTION.
“Computer?” “Ready.” “Secure.” “Yes, sir.” The door of the Lamborghini sliced shut, and hydraulics hissed as it sealed itself. The electroshock protection circuit engaged with a click-buzz.
The man who walked from the low, black car to the small, bombproof reception office looked imposing. His face was unshaven; his dark eyes peered out from behind darker sunglasses. He was dressed in black, from his black scarf and racing jacket to his black leather driving gloves and driving boots. His shiny black leather pants gleamed in the early desert sunrise. He stepped slowly to the window and knocked once.
Harry Sanders towered over the small, nervous man who answered the door.
“I want to go in.”
“What, this early in the morning?” the little man replied. “Alright. I have some forms for you to fill out. Just a minute.”
Harry closed the door behind him as the man riffled through his files.
“Ah. Here we go.” The man threaded the paper into his typewriter. “Name?”
“Capitan Harold Jack Sanders, U.S. Marines, retired.”
“Destination?”
“Las Vegas.”
“Purpose of crossing?”
“Salvage.”
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to be more specific.”
“I hear there’s some money still left there. I aim to get a little out.”
“Okay. Date of departure - May 11, 1998. Alright, put this tag around your neck - DO NOT lose it - it’s your ticket out of here. The yellow part will turn black if you come in contact with radiation - if it does, you’re on your own. Now just paste this sticker on your windshield and you’re set.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s easy to get in, son. The hard part is getting out.”
“Yeah.”
Harry walked out to the car. He had picked the Lamborghini for two reasons - speed and strength; but he still was left almost speechless by the sheer beauty of the car. He watched as the electric field danced from end to end, ionizing the morning wind. He had spent at least the price of the car outfitting it with computer, security systems, and weapons.
“Computer? Harry. Open her up.”
“Request retina scan identification. Please look into viewport, Harry.”
Harry stared into the small glass camera port in the roof and recalled the girl whose voice he’d used to program the car’s computer. He grinned and thought of the other things she used to say to him.
“Retina scan approved,” the computer answered. The door hissed open and Harry stepped into the contoured compartment and belted himself in. He started the engine as the door slid back into place, and twelve cylinders behind him purred awake.
The gatekeeper flipped a switch, and the stone door in the divider wall raised just enough for the low black car to enter. Harry eased into the small, boxlike passage compartment that reminded him too much of a garbage compactor. The door behind him slid shut and the compartment moved silently forward beneath the thick concrete divider wall. He revved the engine as the compartment began to open, and peeled quickly away when the doors were fully open.
The desert through which he passed was almost the same as it had been on the California side, but strangely different. The highway was rugged - he had to keep the speed down to 130 instead of cruising at the normal 180; and the road was not marked for automatically-piloted vehicles, so he had to drive the whole way himself.
What a shame, he thought as he drifted across the barren Nevada desert. The Republic of Nevada, it was called; but it was far from a republic. There had been no organized society there since the war; anarchy was the only type of government; the only organization was disorganization. In some places it rose to the height of Feudalism; in others it sank to the “every man for himself” attitude of complete anarchy.
But the Cold War had ended. Harry did not watch television, but he did pick up a newspaper once in a while. After the war he took to the road.
As far as he had understood it, the war had been triggered by the takeover of a Russian submarine in the Carribean by Cuban rebels. In the panic, the submarine’s missles had been launched - at Nevada. American missles had been fired at the Soviet Union, and had been destroyed from space by a then-unknown particle beam weapon system; Russian retaliatory missles were destroyed by a similar American system. The damage to Nevada prompted global disarmament treaties for what arms there were left; and the two major countries drew up a conditionless, bilateral truce. President Ronald Reagan, in his fourth term, and Soviet ruler Anna Necroptovich were instrumental in bringing this truce.
Nevada’s statehood was revoked, since there no longer existed enough people to make up a good poker game, much less a state. The area was first fenced, and then walled off. People were allowed to enter and exit only with government approval.
Surprisingly, there was a wave of immigrants. They did not go to the major cities, which would, of course, be irradiated for a great many years, but inhabited the deserts, small towns and less dangerous areas until the radiation had decayed sufficiently.
The black Lamborghini slid effortlessly across the Nevada desert, raising a thin white cloud of dust that mingled with the early morning sunshine.
The low ruins of a small town loomed on the horizon. The car warned him of an obstruction just ahead. Harry slowed to a crawl and carefully evaded the corpse rotting in the center of the road. It had been shot, it appeared, from a passing car; the corpse looked about two months decayed. The thumb was still extended, the lonely soul pleading passers-by for passage to the afterlife. Harry mashed the pedal to the floor and shot away from the grisly sight.
The town looked as if it had been deserted since the war, and the car’s detection systems showed a slight trace of radioactivity; but they also showed some furtive movements behind the decrepit building fronts. Harry stopped the car in the middle of the street, shut down the motor, and climbed out the door.
“Computer - secure, monitor.”
“Yes, Harry.” The car hiss-click-buzzed and then continued to humm quietly to itself.
Harry turned to examine the town, his hand resting on the holster of his automatic. The town was not abandoned - Harry could almost smell the electricity in the air, see the shadows behind the graffiti-covered walls.
He heard a loud ker-zapp as a rock bounced off the electric field of the windshield and fell to the ground. He looked quickly in the direction from which the rock had come. One look was all it took. The two scroungy men leapt from the building above him and knocked him to the ground.
Harry jumped to his feet. He kicked the closest man in the face and sent him sprawling backward. The man leapt up and turned to the car. He grabbed the handle and froze.
Meanwhile, the second man had grabbed Harry’s legs and pulled him to the ground. Two other men were quickly advancing from the delapidated building. Harry planted a strong, hard, kick in the second man’s neck, incapacitating him.
The two men who had just arrived quickly grabbed Harry, pinning his arms behind his back. One wrenched his left arm up towards his neck, while the other punched him solidly in the stomach.
They dragged him over to the car. The first man had fallen to the ground, blood and pus dripping from the charred flesh on his hand.
“Awright. Turn off the security system and open the car. Quick! And no funny stuff or I’ll break your arm - off.”
Harry grunted. He looked to the left and then to the right.
“Computer…please open the door.”
“Yes, Harry. Please enter passcodes.”
Harry’s eyes again glanced to the left and the right, quickly ascessing the distances.
“Uh…one and negative one.”
The car clicked once. A hiss of air sounded from the side of the door. The two men fell to the ground.
“Good work,” Harry said, panting, “Ready for retina scan.”
“Retina scan approved.”
Harry quickly stepped into the car and started the motor. He gunned the accelerator and the twelve cylinders responded almost joyously. The wheels spun and the car quickly peeled away from the four prone bodies.
“Thanks.”
“No sweat, Harry.”
Harry could not tell from the car whether the girl was alive or dead. He suspected that she could be the bait of a trap, but he was willing to take a chance on that.
He had been flying along with the needle at 190, playing little games of keep-the-tachometer-at-the-same-RPMs, and had spotted the body lying face-down in the middle of the desert, perhaps 200 yards from the road, prostrate in the midday sun. It had taken him nearly a mile to slow the car to turning speed. He rode slowly back to the ridge he had come over just after seeing the girl, and carefully drove out on the desert floor to the body. He scanned the horizon for any movement - there was none other than the heat waves rising from the plateau. He cautiously stepped from the driver’s compartment, drawing his pistol. He kept low, and crept around the back of the car, still watching the horizon.
He stepped up to the body. The girl was wearing a knee-length skirt, white blouse, and heeled sandals. There were large perspiration stains below her arms and down her back. Her hair was tangled and sandy as if she had slept on a dune the previous night.
Harry turned her over, and almost fell over backwards with shock. Michelle Williamson. Eighth grade - Johnson Junior High School. Harry sat heavily on the ground, staring dazedly.
Harry had fallen for Michelle in a big way, and had taken a whole year getting up the courage to ask her to the eighth grade graduation dance. She had looked shocked, and told him she would LOVE to go with him, she had been in love with him ever since she had first met him in the lunch line and they had both turned away shyly…BUT…she was leaving that afternoon, moving to Connecticut where her father had gotten a new job and she wouldn’t even be attending the graduation exercises. They had sat silently for a few minutes looking at each other, then Harry had said, Well, thanks anyway, and walked away, his heart falling out in pieces with each step. They had never seen each other again.
Harry again turned the body over. Yes, it was her. Twenty-odd years hadn’t made any difference to her angelic appearance. Harry thought in panicked jolts, not knowing what to do. Finally he pulled himself together enough to carefully feel for her pulse. He could feel the weak yet insistant ba-bum, ba-bum, ba-bum in her wrist. His heart leapt. He slowly lifted her into the passenger’s seat and began rubbing her face with ice cubes from his cooler. The color began to come back to her cheeks, and her chest began heaving regularly. He poured a cup of water over her parched cracked lips and down her pale throat. He sat, waiting for some response, cooling her forehead, easing water down her throat.
Just as he thought he could see her beginning to gain consciousness, Harry heard the roar of motorcycle engines in the distance. He looked toward the road and was stunned to see a cloud of dust rising along the ridge - a gang of motorcyclists. They were following his tracks to avoid slipping into the softer sand, but were advancing rapidly.
Harry leapt over the hood and into the driver’s seat, accidentally dropping the pistol. He had the doors sealed and the engine started before he missed it. The bikes were fifty feet away. He stepped on the gas, warming up the engine.
Harry carefully laid his trail across the two hundred-odd yards of desert that lay between himself and the road. He gunned the motor, and it screamed in response. The tires shot sand back at the bikers, who had stopped just behind the car. The tires caught, and the car shot forward, catlike, across the desert floor. The lead biker had stopped to pick up Harry’s pistol. The Lamborghini eased onto the highway before the first shot was fired. Harry accelerated - sixty miles per hour, switching into second gear. Another shot. The bikes had gotten to the road and were slowly closing the distance between themselves and Harry. Two, thought Harry. Another shot. Three. Harry hit one hundred and jammed the shift into third. He expected that the bikes would redline at one-sixty. Four. The needle climbed. Harry held the tach just between yellow and red - he didn’t want to blow the engine right now. One-forty, fourth gear. Five shots. The sixth shot mashed into the rear spoiler. Harry grimaced as he heard the bullet splintering the metal spoiler, lead digging in, scratching and tearing into the specially reinforced rear wing. He knew that would cost him a few hundred dollars to repair. One-fifty. One-sixty. The motorcycles were fifty yards behind the car…one-sixty-five, fifth gear, the Lamborghini began to pull away. The seventh shot mashed into the rear, bulletproof window, the lead pancaking and forming a pocket in the glass. One-seventy. One-seventy-five. The eighth shot went wide. Harry quickly eased the car up to one-ninety to get some distance behind himself. When he decided he had five miles, he screeched the speed down to fifty, pulled a bootlegger reverse and felt the tires on one side begin to break from the asphalt. The car continued to slide backwards, tires smoking, for about a hundred yards. Then, with a jump, they caught. The needle rose anxiously to sixty (second), one-ten (third), one-forty-five (fourth), one-sixty-five (fifth). He held the needle at one-eighty and let the engine cool a little. There was a hill just ahead - Harry knew that the bikers would be just behind it. He flipped a silver switch on his armrest and let his fingers rest on a small joystick knob. His left hand gripped the steering wheel chrushingly and the thumb sat poised above a small trigger button.
At one hundred eighty miles per hour, the road whips by at three miles per minute. Cars traveling sixty in your lane travel towards you as if you were going sixty - in the wrong lane. A collision at such a speed would leave car parts scattered for almost half a mile. Many Lamborghini drivers, red-lining the L.A. to Phoenix run in the 1980’s foresaw this type of collision and created a system by which one could avoid such an occurrance.
A Lear jet takes off at a mere one-seventy-five miles per hour. A nameless Countach owner installed in his pride and joy a set of small panels beneath the door sill and under the rear running lights, and a vertical stabilizer which could be extended from between the two engine blocks. The flip of a switch from the driver extended these panels, and a small joystick was capable of turning them slightly out of forward alignment.
Harry saw the bikers on the horizon, approaching at a composite speed of three hundred forty miles per hour. He pushed the trigger on the steering wheel. A door behind the rear wheels opened and released about a thousand small, four-pointed metal caltrops which scattered widely across the road and onto the shoulder.
Four seconds later - it seemed to Harry almost a minute, his tunnel vision slowing the time to a crawl - the bikers were upon him. A shiver from his fingers to the joystick sent the car into the air.
Three of the twelve bikers had decided that this little game of chicken at five and a half miles per minute was too much, and had skidded off the road and flipped wildly across the desert. Two had been knocked backwards off their bikes with the wind from the passing car; and three had watched the car pass overhead and had rolled sideways, end over end as they hit the sand on the shoulder.
“OH MY GOD…What the HELL…?” Michell gasped, flabbergasted, “how…wha…ha…who…he…tha…”
Harry hugged the car back onto the road. The anonymous designer of the so-called ‘Countach Flight System’ had died - no human remains found to bury - when he tried to keep the car in the air above a freeway for a time long enough to qualify it as an aircraft. He had been caught by a gust of wind and had flown almost three hundred feet into the air before the tiny panels lost their miniscule lift. The car was smashed into the desert nose first and impacted upon itself so severely that there was no way to separate the driver from the fuselage. The Countach was not made to be a glider.
“Harry Sanders. Try to relax.”
“TRY TO RELAX?” Michelle tried to reason, “one minute I’m about to pass out from heat exaustion, the next minute I’m flying into the air in some…” She looked around her, “…CAR, with some guy I haven’t ever seen…who…?”
“Harry Sanders. Johnson Junior High School.”
“Oh my god.”
“Are you all right?”
“HARRY Sanders? You mean…Harry Sanders?”
“Yeah, Harry. Listen, do you feel alright? How long had you been out on the desert?” Harry had slowed the car and was turning around.
“I can’t believe it. Harry Sanders. Uh, I’m Michelle…Williamson. Do you remember me?”
“Yeah, of course. You moved away. Now tell me, are you okay?”
“Uh, yeah, sure, I’m alright. Do you have any water?”
“Sure. You can fill this cup from the spigot in the glove compartment. What were you doing out there?”
Michelle swallowed down a few cups of water. “I was trying to get to some town. This guy left me out there because I wouldn’t…”
“Wolldn’t wh…” Harry began to say when he noticed the motorcycle lying in the middle of the road. He slowed quickly. He saw the lines of rubber from the three ‘chicken’ bikers leading off the road, and the telltale bits of chrome, rubber, and flesh trailing away from the road.
Next came the two bodies on the road, torn to pieces from skidding almost a hundred yards, and the three who had lost control, parts of bike intermingled with parts of man. Finally came the two ghost-ridden bikes of the riders who had fallen off earlier. Harry weaved the car to avoid the wreckage and the carnage, and continued down the road, watching the odometer. It took him almost a minute at thirty miles per hour to get to the caltrops. The remains of two motorcycles lay on the road a few hundred yards ahead. Harry drove out into the desert about two hundred yards to avoid any possible scattered caltrops, then forward parallel to the road for about a quarter of a mile. He then drove back to the road. Something felt wrong.
“God, how many of them were there?” Michelle asked, astonished at the number of bodies, or parts of bodies, she had seen.
“That’s what I’m worried about,” Harry told her. “I thought that there were more than this.” He hadn’t seen any between the wreckage and the caltrops; there were two here, two rolled before he had gone over them, and five who had wrecked after he had gone over. Harry raked his mind; along the ridge, rear-view mirror images, and the short overhead view he had gotten. Yes, there HAD to be more than nine.
“Oh, well, let’s keep going. They probably went off the road back there somewhere.” He did not sound sure.
“Oh, I was going to ask you, where are we - and where are we going?”
“We’re between Beatty and Las Vegas, on Ninety-five, heading towards Las Vegas. I’m going to try to recover some of the cash I hear is left…”
“We’re in NEVADA? That BASTARD!”
“Huh? Who?”
“Well, you see…damn! And I don’t have a tag!” She looked greedily at Harry’s. He tucked it into his shirt.
“Well…I was at this party the other night. There was something in the juice, and I ended up getting plastered. This guy offered to take me home, and of course I accepted. Then he tried to…and, well, I wouldn’t let him, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“And then, well, he hit me! I guess I passed out, because the next thing I knew he was dumping me out of the car and onto the desert. Before I knew what was happening, he had driven away. I thought for a while he was just playing a joke on me, but then I realized that he wasn’t coming back. I thought I could hitchhike to the nearest town, but by that night no one had come along the highway. I slept next to it, hoping that someone would drive by. Then at about two in the morning I heard a car coming. It was a pickup. I got up and started to try to flag him down, and he started shooting at me. I ran out into the desert, but he didn’t try to follow me. Since this morning I’ve been following the road, a few hundred feet away. I guess I passed out from the heat yesterday before you found me. I’m sure glad you got there…”
“Oh sh…there they are.”
There was a bike on either side of the road. Between them was a chain, two feet high. Harry flipped the switch and started to twitch the joystick, but he was too late.
The chain caught on the front spoiler, ripping it off. It slid up over the hood and up the windsheild. Harry thought, panicked, the rear spoiler. He had reinforced it - to stay on, pressing the car to the ground at one hundred ninety miles an hour, it had to be very solidly attached to the body of the car.
The chain slid over the roof. The jolt will rip the car backwards, he thought. I have my seat belt on, but she…a quick glance told him that Michelle would be sent through the windshield.
The car was in the right lane, so the motorcycle on the right provided resistance first. The car swerved a bit to the right. Then the second cycle caught and the car lunged backward and Michelle’s forehead raced towards the windsheild. Her face was contorted in a silent mess of confusion, anger, and terror. The chain was taught. The head was almost to the windshield.
“you jerk!” Harry shouted. “Stay on your own side of the frigging road!”
He pulled the 1978 Ford station wagon back to the yellow line.
“Calm down, Harry. We’re almost there.” She settled back to reading the travel brochure. “Hey, here’s a nice place, the Sands. The Triple A says that it has a pool, a casino in the lobby, and accomodations for children…”
“DADDY! Are we there yet?” little Harold yelled from the back seat, “are we there?”
“Yeah, I’ve got to go to the bathroom!” Jill added.
“Alright, I’ve got to stop and get gas anyway. Mitch, do you need anything?”
“No, Honey, but the kids’d probably like something to drink.”
Harry pulled off the road at the Seven-Eleven and got out to fill up the tank. He paid the cashier and walked around the back. He was starting to open up the gas tank when he noticed a large dent in the back of the luggage rack, as if it had been hit by a rock or a bee-bee.
“Damn kids,” Harry thought.