so rarely filled his time. Forsaken of all of those things. All but the guilt of missing them.
He burst into a clump of pines and passed six motorcycles parked up under a shroud of needly darkness. Black shadows given away by chrome handle bars that found dregs of light in the gloom. Pines thinned and were replaced by an eclection of cottonwood and ash and birch. Trunks of silver and granite and opal. He dodged his way through a scattering of boulders and into a clearing. Deep oranges and translucent amber’s; a cocktail of light, served from beyond the tops. Casting a glow over silver domes and crags of rock. Rocks filled with clefts and nooks and crannies, like they had been splatter painted with liquified obsidian. More rocks to slow him down, strewn over a cloud of autumn detritus that glowed like garnets and rubies in sunset.
He cursed the place for making him pause. For taking his breath away. He ran on.
Into the wood. Past firs and oaks and shrubs and fallen logs. He ran until the hunters were thinned. Crouched behind a thick oak, he waited.
Fast moving footsteps rustled leaves and crunched twigs.
“Where did he go?” one whispered.
“He was going this way,” said the other, almost level with the tree.
Linc brought the power supply back and swung it hard and level. It was tempting to use a head shot, but so far he'd seen no completed crime. Only threats and hate. Not proof of guilt.
Football had taught Linc what the human knee was designed to do and what it was not. Not designed to bear a frontal impact from a ten pound steel object. Not designed to fold backwards upon itself. Bone and tendon and ligament crunched.
The first biker hit the ground and began to wail like the girl he'd tormented. Two disabled. Four left.
He re-gathered his steel mallet and sprung from behind the tree. The other thought for a fraction too long. Long enough to pass beyond reach of a swinging knife blade. He sprinted for a thicket of saplings, deeper into the woods.
“What happened?” A loud voice, further behind, gravelly. It was Shane. The pack's leader was leading again.
“My knee!” bawled his fallen bootlicker.
“Shut it, you pussy!” commanded Shane. “ROA don't cry like little girls!”
The wailing faded to a whimper.
Linc checked behind. The one with the knife was well ahead of the last three.
“This way!” he panted as loud as he could.
Linc reached the thicket and veered left, keeping the blanket of leaves between himself and his pursuer. His sprint was more of a lopsided canter, his right arm a pendulum. A lesser bellied man would catch him without problem. He pushed harder and gained ground. Breath by breath and step by loping step the wheezing behind him waned. He reached an outcrop of shrubs. He stopped and sheltered behind the vegetation and removed his right shoe. Three yards past the bushes and to the right stood a large fir with a thick trunk. He placed his shoe on the ground on the far side of the tree, jutting out enough to be seen on approach.
He returned to the shrubs and crouched and waited. He denied his gasping lungs and drew breaths slowly, deeply, quietly. The panting biker crept up on the left side of the tree with his knife ready.
Linc raised his steel club and bought the broad side down on the back of the bikers head. Hard enough for a headache that would last a week. Hard enough to knock him out. Not hard enough to be permanent.
He retrieved his shoe and changed direction again. This time to the right. He crouched in the next cluster of bushes and returned the shoe to his foot.
The last three bikers caught up with their unconscious comrade.
“He’s alive,” said a voice Linc had not heard before.
They were out of sight. Close enough to hear.
“When we catch this guy we're gonna make what we did to that little girl's boyfriend seem like a walk in the park,” said Shane, the sarcasm gone from his voice. Now just anger.
“Fan out. And watch your backs. This one's devious.”
Linc continued on his new course. He figured he was heading south now. Close enough to parallel with the road. He began a slow arc that would eventually bring him back to the roadside. Keep him as far as possible from the chasing bikers. The girl had long enough now to get a good head start and if he disabled the row of motorcycles they would both get away clean.
Not like these damn bikers. How they thought they could get away with this kind of crap was beyond him. The law may be stretched but they usually caught the worst offenders. It made no more sense to him than the oil dictators that seemed to have sparked all of this. Refusing to sell their oil was always going to end badly. Tolerated for decades, they forget who allowed them to rise to their roost. Who allowed them to continue. But the first of them had gone the way of Saddam and others had joined the peace talks. The wars couldn't last. And neither could all this gang violence. They would be made to pay. Maybe not tomorrow. But surely just a matter of time.
Linc reached a small clearing. An ancient Douglas fir lay across a grassed area enclosed by a ring of its maturing descendants. Dappled light played from the gently swaying tree tops above, down to the fallen giant, drawing undergrowth toward the sky and revealing objects in the clearing. Ferns and shrubs crowding the edges. Clumps of sedge grass, spikey bronze seed heads waiting for an animal to carry them somewhere worth growing. The feet of a young man tied to a tree.
He hung limp against the rope around his chest, his arms bound behind him. His torso was red and his shirt was long gone. The scarlet hieroglyphics on his stomach appeared random and the blood had stopped welling from the cuts, no longer trickling down to stain the waistline of his jeans. The scribbled torture ran up to his neck and down both arms, leaving a space in the middle. In the center of his chest the skin had been peeled away to form large bold letters, “ROA”.
The boy, or not much more than, was a mess of blood that could only have come from a beating heart pumping blood to open wounds while he was skinned and tortured alive.
Linc lost his breakfast on a colony of mushrooms. Settled beneath the fallen hulk of fir. He gave his weight to the rotting trunk. A pair of handprints pressed into papery crust. Waited for strength to return to his knees.
He hauled himself back to his feet and checked for a pulse. His life was gone.
It was as bad as anything he'd heard about on the news. Shane and his crew had graduated from raping women and killing other scumbags to torturing innocent and unknown travellers. And now the evidence was here. Beyond possibility of doubt.
He'd risked too much already.
If they caught him, a nasty beating would be the tip of the iceberg.
If they caught him, he was staring at his fate. This is what they did to somebody who had not taken out half their crew.
If they caught him, now they would want proper revenge. And three against one was still good enough odds for this lot to think they have backbones.
No.
He'd risked everything with these hooligans. For what? A girl he didn't know? She may be innocent. Or she may not. What if she provoked them? Nobody deserved this, but he could not bring her fight home to his family. They would be the ones to pay if he kept this up.
He'd given them enough disappointment. He'd been naive. Gullible even. Promise after promise. He'd done what they asked. Spent his life at work. And always the same result. Some fine print. Some excuse. You didn't complete section x on form c. A depression is coming you know. The worst since nineteen thirty. It's not just another Iraq you know. This time it's America vs Arabia. We must be seen to be frugal you know.
And always it was his family who paid. Their last experience of him would not be another helping of let down.
Not this time. Just disable their bikes and get out of here.
The girl had a head start. It would have to be good enough.
Now she was on her own.
Voices rose behind Linc in the distance. He headed to his right, as close as he could figure to a beeline for the bikes. He picked up the pace and ran.
Hoped the voices were far enough not to hear him snapping and rustling twigs and leaves.
The light grew and the woods thinned. Rocks and branches and ruts were easier to see now, easier to avoid a rolled ankle and certain capture. Clumps of sage with leathery leaves and lavender flowers ground underfoot as he ran and released their musky odor. A Concolor Fir whipped against his arm. A sniff of orange. Like Christmas punch. The euphorious smells of the forest invaded his lungs. His favourite place. Distracting. Just where he wanted to be. Any other day.
He blocked it out. Focused on the power supply unit. its weight destroyed his rhythm and slowed him down. But his conscious now understood his lizard brain. The unyielding grip on the smooth steel handle. The security of the weapon. The nakedness that would have come from letting go.
He passed a row of pines, bare trunks extending to the leafy roof high above. On the last tree in the row was a smooth limb he had not seen at first. Light brown. Grainy. Moving towards him fast. Too late to avoid. It struck his chest like a car accident. It stole his momentum and he flew to the spongy ground with a whump. His hand lost its grip on the warmed steel handle and the box tumbled into a bush.
From his back, Linc had a clear view of one of Shane's last two followers, standing by the pine. A beefy guy, about six foot and dressed in the standard black leather kit. He twirled the baseball bat with a familiarity of long time lovers, or dance partners, or whatever bikers do.
Linc