Throttle (Kindle Single)

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,