1 Life 2 Die 4 (6 page)

Still, the thought of what we were about to
attempt kept my blissful daydream disappointingly short.

Despite the back wheel’s abnormally wide
rubber, when Veronica threw the engine into gear and turned the
throttle it seemed as if it squealed forever, spinning madly on the
tiled floor while a cloud of burnt rubber boiled up around us. That
had to be one hell of an engine between her legs! When the massive
tyre finally bit into the tiles, despite feeling as if I’d been
holding Veronica far more tightly than necessary, I was almost
thrown off the back as the machine leapt forwards like a wild tiger
that had just had its cage door thrown wide. In the blink of an
eye, we were rocketing past the main corridor and I only got a few
milliseconds to register the surprised expression on Redhead’s face
as he bolted towards us along it.

Before he could react, I heard Veronica fire.
But when I looked round, I saw she had her gun raised toward the
window ahead instead of our enemy. When we hit the sloping, central
slab of the sculpture, the huge sheet of glass in front of us was
already exploding into a million tiny fragments.

I ducked down behind Veronica as we shot up
the ramp and blasted through the shattered window … then sailed up,
up, up though empty air. When I looked down, we were already about
forty metres above the ground, the air tearing wildly at our
clothes as it raced past.

For a moment, despite rocketing forwards, we
seemed to hang in the air while I glanced around at the stunning
view of the City. Then my stomach rose into my throat as we began
dropping towards the large, flat roof of the State Library. I
peered down at the solid concrete roof far below us and reality hit
hard - we had zero chance of surviving when the bike landed. By the
time we fell that far, it’d be like dropping out of a five storey
window onto flat concrete! Sick at the thought of all those
splintered bones, I stood up, preparing to dampen the impact as
much as I could with my legs. If I timed it just right, perhaps I
could avoid compressing
all
of my vertebrae! For a moment,
I kidded myself that if I was really lucky I might even walk again
someday; but the truth was that once we crashed, we’d be sitting
ducks for Redhead and his mates.

I pulled myself a bit more tightly into
Veronica, her body feeling just that little bit more fantastic
thanks to the knowledge I might never feel anything from my neck
down ever again. Then I was caught completely by surprise when I
heard a sudden whirring sound and the wheels began reaching down
towards the roof! It took me a moment to register that the stems on
which they were mounted were growing longer. Once the whirring
stopped, they were at least three metres long, and when we hit the
roof a moment later, the impact was cleverly absorbed as they
returned to their normal position, obviously under the intricate
control of some cunningly designed computerised suspension system.
Incredibly, it felt just like we’d landed on a gently sloping
ramp!

Hardly bothered by the impact, we sped on
along the roof and I heard myself laughing out loud, ecstatic that
we were both still in the game!

Veronica glanced questioningly back at me
before grinning. Then her eyes focused behind me and her face
twisted into a fearful scowl. I heard the ‘whoosh’ before I had a
chance to look around. When I did, I got a strong and unwelcome
sense of déjà vous - another evil red laser beam stretched from an
incoming missile straight to my back! Behind it, I could just make
out a dark silhouette of Redhead standing in the shattered GoMA
window we’d recently driven through. Already he was too far away to
make out properly, but I could imagine his evil, victorious grin
and I wished to God there was some way of turning that missile
around and sending it straight back down that ugly throat of
his!

Despite our bike already moving incredibly
fast, I felt it burst forward as Veronica slammed the throttle to
the max. When I peered ahead, the far edge of the library was
coming at us more swiftly than I’d thought possible. For a moment I
even felt like we might outrun the missile. Then I looked back and
saw that it was still gaining on us at a frightening rate.

Remembering how the earlier missile had been
locked onto my hoodie, I tried to work out whether I could get my
shirt off without toppling from the speeding bike. If I fell at
this speed, I knew I’d be dead. But if I did nothing, I was about
to experience extreme acupuncture with a high-explosive needle! It
didn’t take Einstein to tell me I had to at least try.

Just as I was about to let go of Veronica, I
heard a tiny explosion from beneath me. My head whipped round and I
saw something flying lazily back towards the incoming missile.

While I watched, it seemed to expand and at
first I couldn’t work out what was happening. Then, as the lethal
missile closed on the mysterious object, I realised it was a net,
with strands so fine they were near-invisible. A moment later, the
missile hit the net and detonated.

“Thanks!” I yelled to Veronica as I turned
back round. Then the sound of the explosion caught up and its
powerful shockwave slammed into my back.

I felt the bike swerve suddenly, but
thankfully I realised Veronica – not the shockwave - had been
responsible for the abrupt change of direction. A moment later the
roof disappeared beneath us and we were falling again, dropping off
the edge of the library towards the mouth of a tunnel leading under
the Victoria Bridge southern access. Ironically, this time I found
myself wishing we’d fall faster – if we didn’t get beneath the
level of the tunnel’s roof, we were both literally about to lose
our heads!

I reckon Redhead must have been a pretty
caring kind of guy ‘cause he chose that exact moment to distract us
from our predicament. The air came alive with whistling chunks of
speeding lead, and in the space of a heartbeat I stopped worrying
about the danger ahead and focused instead on the swarm of bullets
whizzing past my ears. His thoughtfulness inspired both of us to
duck that little bit lower, and a moment later, the roof shot past
in a blur as we rocketed into the safety of the tunnel.

Having already extended themselves, the wheel
stems once more absorbed the impact and once again it felt
for-all-the-world as if we’d landed on an invisible ramp rather
than hard, flat bitumen. Unfazed, we raced on through the short
tunnel, its rows of yellow lights zipping past in a hazy blur.

“We’ve lost them this time!” I called
excitedly over the howl of the engine.

“Nuh uh,” Veronica replied as she slammed on
the brakes and I was thrust roughly into her back. My chin came to
rest on her right shoulder, and from there I got a clear view of
the lethal looking pair of killers sitting astride silver and
purple motorcycles in the centre of the tunnel ahead of us. They
were everything Veronica wasn’t – short, stocky and bereft of any
trace of femininity. At first I even mistook them for guys.

It was only the girly way they threw their
two enormous grenades that tipped me off.

As the melon-sized explosives lobbed through
the air towards us, Veronica swung the bike sharply to the right,
twisted the throttle hard and we shot into the Queensland Art
Gallery’s underground car park.

*****

10

While we flew towards the ticketing booths, I jumped
at the withering burst of machinegun fire that erupted from the
front of our bike. The boom-gate blocking our path disintegrated in
a storm of red and white splinters and by the time the over-sized
grenades exploded we were already thirty metres away, hurtling
through the packed car park as Veronica took us swiftly back to top
speed. The nearness of the roof emphasized our dizzying
acceleration and, despite the danger, I felt myself smile while I
listened to the up and down revving of our meaty engine changing
rapidly up through its gears. The noise reverberated powerfully off
the concrete walls, floor and ceiling around us and thumping
relentlessly into my eardrums.

Even so, I couldn’t stop grinning.

The scattered people wandering through the
car park shrank back towards the cars parked along either side of
us, their shocked looks seeming strangely normal to me after having
seen little else for the last fifteen minutes or so. Halfway along,
Veronica ducked the bike nimbly round a car that was pulling slowly
out of a parking space, and I noticed that our back wheel stayed
flat on the ground while the rest of the bike tilted over and then
back up again. Talk about keeping maximum rubber on the road.
This thing must corner like a dream!
Which was fortunate I
realized when I looked ahead again, because we were approaching an
unforgivingly solid concrete wall at breakneck speed!

My heart pounded even more wildly while my
adrenal glands served up more of their specialty dish. A moment
later they started dishing out seconds when the unusually loud
whoosh
of missiles reached my ears. I threw a fearful look
behind us and wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or terrified –
this time there weren’t any lasers painting my back, but the two
over-sized rockets blasting out of side-mounted tubes of the
pursuing bikes made those puny ‘Target-lock laser-guided missiles’
look like kiddies’ toys!

“Left,” Veronica shouted obscurely, and I
somehow grasped her warning. At this speed, if I leaned the wrong
way when we turned, I’d be flung from the bike like a marble from a
slingshot!

I leaned steeply to the left while both she
and the entire body of the bike did likewise. My left hip skimmed
along centimetres above the ground as we flew round the corner at a
speed that would have sent any normal bike skittering across the
concrete to become a permanent fixture in the wall. A second later
we shot into a pedestrian tunnel just as the missiles hit the wall
behind us.

The explosion was unbelievable! Flames
billowed out through the confined spaces, consuming the area in a
searing, deadly heat, and the noise felt like someone was hammering
on my eardrums. Thanks to our brute of a bike, however, we managed
to outrun the bulk of the blast wave.

A few seconds later, when I peered back at
the aftermath, I felt a deep admiration for the engineers who’d
designed this car park. I’d been imagining the whole thing
collapsing in on itself, but somehow the structure held despite the
utter devastation which had just been visited upon it.

Relieved that the whole place hadn’t come
crashing down around us, but hoping the explosion had taken out the
bikie chicks, I turned to peer ahead over Veronica’s right
shoulder. The narrow, brightly-lit pedestrian tunnel we were flying
along kept going straight for a hundred metres or so and I noticed
it had a set of steps leading up to the left about halfway along. A
few panicked people were racing towards them and I couldn’t resist
a dry smile as I wondered if their eagerness to get out of there
was due to the massive explosion or the hog of a bike screaming
along the underground passageway towards them! Possibly both, I
decided as the last of them leapt from the tunnel and scampered up
the steps just as we rocketed past.

When I looked ahead again, we were
approaching a T-junction way too fast to stop! Then Veronica
slammed on the brakes and they bit hard – much harder than I’d
thought possible. Of course - I’d forgotten about the phenomenal
gripping power of that monstrous back tyre! Even so, I found I had
to squeeze the bike hard between my legs to keep from shoving
Veronica forwards off the bike as my momentum did its best to send
both of us careering into the wall ahead!

A second later we veered into the left branch
of the intersecting tunnel and I waited for Veronica to slam the
throttle forwards and get us out of there. Instead, she caught me
completely by surprise when she kept the bike turning hard left
through 180 degrees and along a short ramp that sloped up beside
the tunnel we’d just come out of. She caught me even more off guard
when she stopped!

“
What are you doing?
” I demanded
incredulously. Now that the bellow of our engine had died away,
over its throaty idling I could clearly hear the distant sound of
the other two bikes roaring towards us along the tunnel, their
riders having clearly escaped the worst of the explosion too.

In a flash, Veronica was off the bike and
stepping over to the wall on the far side of the corridor we’d just
turned off. Ignoring my question, she whipped something from her
pocket and pushed it against the wall. Then, still holding the
object, she stepped back to my side of the tunnel and slammed it
hard against the wall. This time it stuck.

“Improving our odds,” she said.

Puzzled, I peered closely at the device while
she slipped back onto our bike and gunned the engine. Just before
we leapt forwards up the ramp, I made out a hair-thin thread
leading back across the opening to a small, grey dot on the far
side.

We were ten metres away and already moving
fast when the first bikie chick came round the corner and her front
wheel hit the trigger-line. I was looking back at the time, so I
got a crystal clear view of what happened. The device she’d just
triggered must have been a cleverly directed charge on a very
slight delay, ‘cause she managed to get her bike halfway through
the opening before it exploded towards her. I’d expected yet
another powerful, uncontrolled explosion, so at first I thought the
thing must have miss-fired. There was a surprisingly soft
bang
accompanied by a thick cloud of smoke as the
detonation fanned out vertically in a thin, directed line. Then, as
I worried about how many more of those rockets the woman might have
on board, her bike skidded from the smoke and toppled onto the
ground in two halves.