Fear Is the Rider by Kenneth Cook

Author:Kenneth Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2015-11-02T05:00:00+00:00

Fifteen minutes later they hit the sandstorm.

It whipped up in seconds. Some freak of wind across the desert spun the dust from among the stones then flung it in a long wide streak towards the southern horizon. It rose so quickly that Shaw drove into it at a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour. Instantly he couldn’t see beyond the bonnet of the Honda. He took his foot off the accelerator and stamped on the brake.

The Honda pulled to one side as it slowed down and the wheels dropped off the line of gibbers. Shaw and Katie could feel the underside of the car grating on the stones. The storm cleared for a moment and Shaw pulled the driving wheels back onto the gibber ridges, then the dust closed in on them again.

‘I can’t drive in this. I can’t see.’

‘Neither can he,’ said Katie. ‘Keep going. We can’t be far from that hotel.’

The speedometer was showing less than ten kilometres an hour.

‘He’ll roll over us in minutes at this rate!’

‘He can’t go any faster than we can.’

‘No,’ Shaw shouted. ‘You don’t understand. We can’t go any faster than him. He’ll keep going flat out until he hits the dust. Then he’ll be just behind us. If we get stuck on these bloody stones he’ll be on us in moments.’

‘Then we’ll get out and run,’ said Katie. She turned and looked behind. There was nothing but dust. Red rolling dust behind, in front, to the sides.

At times Shaw couldn’t even see the track in front of him. Momentarily the dust would clear and he’d be able to see fifty metres ahead, then it would close in again and he was driving blind. He found he could feel his way along the gibber ridges, but only by driving terribly slowly. He looked at the speedometer. Five kilometres an hour!

As the dust cleared he accelerated. Up to fifty, sixty. But always at the terrible risk of sliding off the ridges as the storm closed in again.

‘How long will this last?’

‘How the hell would I know?’ Katie was very frightened. ‘Could be minutes. Could be days.’

They were blinded now and the Honda slipped off the ridges and stopped.

‘Jesus God,’ muttered Shaw. He wrenched the steering wheel to the right and accelerated. The front wheels took again, slowly climbed the ridges and the Honda crept forward.

Both of them kept looking behind, always expecting the bulk of the Land Cruiser to loom out of the dust. But they couldn’t even see beyond the windscreen. They couldn’t remember how long they’d been driving in the storm and for all they knew the thing could have been right behind them.

The storm swirled so thickly that Shaw couldn’t see out the front windscreen. Even the bonnet of the Honda was lost. The car was barely moving, the motor racing in first gear, and the smell of burning rose from the tortured clutch.

Then suddenly it cleared and they could see a hundred metres to the front and sides.

‘Look!’ shouted Katie.

To

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