Carrier Wave by Robert Brockway

Author:Robert Brockway [Brockway, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Brockwar Press: The Fightin'est Press in the West
Published: 2020-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

“Between the two Sleepers. Right through the middle, fast as you can.”

“That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” Bobby scoffed. “However fast you are, those things are faster. You get in their space, they’ll wake up and tear your arms before you can shit.”

“If you hit dead center,” Anna mused, “Maybe not. Maybe they won’t even wake.”

Bobby stared at her with open, wounded betrayal.

“I don’t see another option,” she explained.

A series of angry yips, too close. The lead scout had ventured nearer the bike. Barely fifty feet. Assessing the situation. Waiting for backup. At the base of the hill, backup was assembling.

“Go,” Carina said. “Go go go!”

The wolves pricked up. Something in the urgency of Carina’s voice tipped the scales in favor of attack. The pack broke like water through a dam, surging forward with an orchestra of screams.

Carina had already started pedaling; Sam could feel the strain of it, the pressure of her leg muscles nudging at his brake lever. He shot a quick look back to make sure everybody had their seats, then hauled up on his own pedals and let the lever snap open. Torque freed, the bike lurched forward – only a few inches, then struggled to break inertia. It was still on the uphill, if only just. Frantic thumping from Madding resonated through the bike’s hollow frame. The wave of shrieks behind, swelling, crashing – so loud, so close, how were they not already here? Sam stood on the pedals, leveraged his weight against the grips. An inch. Two. And then free.

A set of fangs snapped shut on the space where Carina’s ankle had been, milliseconds ago. The sharp clack of teeth on teeth. The wolf shook its head clear, lurched from side to side – the motion strangely human, like a frustrated driver pounding on the steering wheel – then bounded after its escaping prey.

But with the bar cresting the hill and all resistance gone, it easily outpaced the lead wolves. They gave up quickly, accepting the chase as lost – but even with the pressure off, the bike couldn’t afford to lose an ounce of speed. It took every bit of will in Sam’s body to keep his fingers from gently nursing that brake lever. Self preservation shrieked in his ear: slow down; stop; no living thing should be going this fast; this is in defiance of natural law; we’ll burn up like a comet --

Sam had surely gone faster in his life. A train. A car. The slowest airplane. But in those, he’d been sheltered. Cocooned away from the noise, the wind, unaware of every little textural shift in the road beneath him. Here, at the nose of the bike – only two handlebars and part of a wheel intruding on his sightline, reminding him that he was not, himself, flying a few inches from the pavement – this was different.

His adrenalin spiked, hurtled beyond the brief feeling of exhilaration, blew through the shakes and the sickness; it honed down to a knife edge and filleted Sam’s whole being away.

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