Devil’s Road Read online

  ‘Well, at least it was mercifully brief,’ he said after they had finished and were on their way back out of the room. He glanced at his wrist. ‘We’ve got thirty-five minutes until the handicaps start.’

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to see how the Coupé looks under the hood,’ said Dutch. ‘I need to strip out any modifications Muto put in there or I’ll risk disqualification.’

  ‘About the handicaps,’ said Nat, as they walked side-by-side to the pit building. ‘Mr Wu wants you to pull back. Don’t try to come in first.’

  She turned to stare at him. ‘Why the hell would I do that?’

  ‘I shouldn’t have to remind you that you’re not in this race to win.’

  ‘Even so, you can’t expect me not to—!’

  ‘Let someone else get the headlines. You don’t have to come in last—a middle ranking should be about sufficient.’

  Her nostrils flared. ‘You’re asking a lot of me, Nat.’

  ‘Nonetheless.’

  She looked him square in the eyes for long enough to see he wasn’t going to back down.

  She flexed her knuckles and pressed her hands together, fighting down frustration. And, although she would rather have died than admit it, she was worried that whatever innate skill she’d once had for surviving the Run had been left behind in a Russian jail cell.

  ‘Fine,’ she said at last. ‘Let’s just get this the hell over with.’

  * * *

  She made her way alone towards the pit buildings, a row of garages situated beneath the grandstand. When she entered the garage assigned to them, she found a familiar figure kneeling beside the Coupé and peering inside one of the wheel-wells.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she demanded.

  Doktor Elektron started, then gave her a lopsided grin. His one-piece suit glistened with custom inlaid electronics, a stylised silver lightning-bolt angling down from his left shoulder before terminating at his right hip. The eyes behind the ridiculous little domino mask he always wore were blue, and a little too bright. His dark hair lay flat and greasy against his forehead.

  ‘Dutch,’ he rasped. ‘It’s great to see you back in the game.’ He stepped towards her, extending one gloved hand. His costume creaked as he moved, the circuitry flashing silver beneath the overhead lights.

  Dutch stepped back and grabbed a wrench from a worktable. ‘Stay the hell back,’ she yelled, swinging the wrench in a wide arc. ‘What the hell were you doing there?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said with feigned shock. ‘I didn’t even recognise your old car at first.’ He glanced at it. ‘Sweet ride, Dutch.’

  ‘What the hell?’

  Dutch glanced around to see Nat had walked in.

  ‘I found him in here by himself when I arrived,’ said Dutch. ‘He’d been doing something down by the front right wheel-well.’

  Nat stepped past her and up close to Elektron. ‘Either tell me what you were doing, or I’ll knock your teeth out through the back of your skull.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Elektron in an aggrieved tone. ‘You know we’re allowed to check each other’s cars out before a time-trial.’

  ‘Under supervision,’ Nat reminded him. ‘And you were here alone.’ He looked to Dutch for confirmation and she nodded. He reached a hand towards Elektron’s shoulder. ‘So why don’t you—’

  ‘Nat,’ Dutch shouted, ‘don’t!’

  Too late: Elektron grabbed hold of Nat’s wrist with both gloved hands, pulling him close. Nat gasped, his jaws clamping together in a rictus grin. A faint smell of ozone filled the garage. When Elektron let go, faint blue sparks jumped from the palms of his gloves.

  Nat slumped to the floor next to the car. Dutch stepped past him, swinging the wrench with such vigour that Elektron retreated with haste.

  ‘I acted in self-defence!’ Elektron screeched. ‘And that wrench is metal, you idiot.’

  Dutch swung the wrench again, then moved to one side and pointed to the exit. ‘Get the fuck out of here before I knock your brain out of your ass. Now.’

  Elektron glared at her, then darted past her and out through the door. As soon as he’d disappeared from sight, she dropped down next to Nat and helped him back up.

  ‘What—’ he grabbed hold of the side of the car to keep himself upright ‘—the hell happened? Those gloves—!’

  ‘You’re kidding me. It’s Doktor Elektron. That’s, like, his modus operandi.’

  He coughed and stared at her with glazed eyes. ‘I guess I forgot.’

  ‘He used to run around New York beating up muggers. These days most people would be cheering for the muggers to beat him up.’

  Nat swayed as he stood upright. ‘Okay,’ he said with a shuddering breath. ‘We need to take a look at the car, see what the little shit did to her.’

  Dutch grabbed a torch from the same place she got the wrench and peered inside the interior of the wheel-well. ‘If he planted anything, I don’t see it.’

  ‘Seems to me we caught him before he had a chance to plant anything at all. The question is, why do it?’

  She looked up at him. ‘Muto still has two death notices with my name on them.’

  He stared at her. ‘You think Elektron’s capable of murder? He’s a creep, but I didn’t have him pegged as a killer.’

  ‘Elektron’s been on the skids for a long time,’ said Dutch, ‘even since before I wound up in jail. He might be capable of anything, if it gave him a chance at coming first in the Run.’

  Nat stepped towards the door, still looking pale. ‘I’ll go let Wu know we’re looking at threats of sabotage on top of potential assassination.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to tell the race administrators?’ asked Dutch. ‘It’s possible we could get him kicked out of the race altogether.’

  ‘Except then there’d be an investigation,’ said Nat, pulling the door open. ‘And if Elektron does turn out to be connected to Muto or anyone else, it could open up a whole can of worms we’d rather stay unopened until we’ve finished our business on Teijouan. After all,’ he added, ‘the point is for us to avoid drawing attention to ourselves.’

  * * *

  Nat returned a few minutes later with six mechanics who near as damn stripped the Coupé down to its chassis and back up again and even took out Muto’s traffic-pacifier while they were at it. They found nothing, but it did little to settle Dutch’s unease. Then they rolled the garage door up, letting in the morning sun and the noise of the crowd gathering on the grandstand above.

  She and Nat were last on a randomised schedule of trial participants posted on the wall of each garage. She stepped out into the sunshine and watched the Australian driver, Vishnevsky, roll his enormous vehicle up to the starting line. An amplified voice boomed out his statistics, history and betting averages. Vishnevsky was something of a mystery, she learned, with questions around his origins.

  Vishnevsky’s vehicle leaned towards the tank end of the spectrum, being a modified vintage Oshkosh Tactical Protector that looked more suited to gunning down insurgents in some bombed-out city than racing. It rumbled forward once the flag came down, accelerating faster than Dutch thought such vehicles could. She stepped up to the side of the race-course, watching as Vishnevsky and his navigator threaded their way through a forest of girders pushed into the race-track at different angles before disappearing from sight. A few moments later she heard screeching tyres, followed by the bass thump of an explosion, and a huge cheer from the grandstand audience.

  ‘What’s Vishnevsky’s deal?’ Dutch asked a mechanic standing nearby. ‘Is the big game hunter look just some kind of shtick?’

  ‘He’s the real deal, a Kaiju-hunter,’ the mechanic replied. ‘He killed a Viper-Tail two years ago and sold the skin for something like thirty million dollars.’

  Dutch shook her head in wonder and watched the rest of the contestants drive their time-trials, most often returning with scorched paintwork. Lucifer Black clearly still favoured the retro flying-saucer-on-wheels look for his current ride
, which combined 1960s retro-futuristic styling with fuck-you armoured tyres. The windows, as usual, were tinted one-way so you couldn’t see anything inside.

  Armoured or not, Black crossed back over the finishing line with two of his tyres blown. Dutch watched mechanics swarm over his weird-looking car like fire ants descending on an injured rodent. Black’s identity had remained a mystery for years; no one had ever set eyes on him, and no one had even seen him getting into or out of his car. Some rumours claimed the vehicle was in fact remote-controlled, using some secret technology that could operate within Teijouan’s d-field. Like many, however, Dutch suspected Black’s “representative” Dietrich Sokoloff was the real person behind the wheel.

  ‘Ready?’ asked Nat, appearing by her side. He’d changed into a dark blue racing-suit. Dutch, by contrast, intended to race in her street-clothes, like she always had.

  ‘As I’ll ever be,’ she said, brushing her hands down her jeans. Her palms felt sticky and damp. She felt more nervous than she’d thought she would; it had been a long time after all.

  They walked back over to their garage, where engineers and mechanics, under the supervision of Nat’s hired security, finished performing last-minute checks on the Coupé and fuelling it up. She felt her heart thud the way it always did before a race, a steady thrum that left her mouth gritty and dehydrated. She got in behind the wheel, Nat sliding into the passenger seat beside her.

  She strapped in and guided the Coupé out into the open air. The grandstand appeared to be packed to capacity, and as she pulled up at the starting line, she saw even more people in their thousands scattered across grassy slopes rising up on either side of the race-track. She had a fleeting mental image of a sniper crouched up high amongst the crowds and pushed the thought away.

  The countdown began, banks of TV cameras swinging around to focus on them. She focused on her breathing, hands firm on the wheel.

  Then the flag came down, and the tyres span against the tarmac, propelling them forward. They hit the first turn, and she eased back, but not too much.

  ‘I heard someone say there’s a lake of fire right after the girders,’ Nat informed her.

  She grunted an acknowledgement. The girders, each six metres long, had been driven into the race-track at different angles. There were a few narrow gaps, but she managed to slalom the Coupé through them without losing too much speed.

  Screw not winning, she thought, one hand on the wheel and the other on the clutch. A savage grin stole onto her face as the speed built up again.

  The next turn brought them in sight of a ramp. Light blossomed on their right as they approached, burning oil spreading across a pool on the ramp’s far side. By the time the front wheels hit the base of the ramp, the flames rose a dozen metres into the air.

  They drove up the ramp, and for a long moment the Coupé was airborne, passing through the flames. They landed hard on a second ramp, knocking the wind out of Dutch.

  They rolled back down to the ground and Dutch took the next bend fast, twisting the wheel hard. The Coupé slid sideways into a long, straight stretch and she floored the gas.

  ‘The fuck?’ Nat shouted. ‘Are you trying to win?’

  ‘Fuck you,’ she yelled back. ‘You don’t like it, you drive the damn car.’

  They came to another bend followed by another long, straight stretch of tarmac Dutch didn’t trust one tiny bit. The race organisers were notorious for inventing brand-new obstacles for each year’s time-trial with what Dutch always imagined to be sadistic glee. The time-trials alone were dangerous enough that every couple of years someone wound up going home in a wooden box without ever reaching Teijouan itself.

  Straight ahead, Dutch saw what looked like steel plating laid over the track. As they approached, the steel plating came apart, separating into two halves that rose to reveal a pit dug deep into the ground.

  Something huge shouldered its way up and out of the pit; something with multiple legs, chitinous skin, a long, whiplash-like tail and a pissed-off expression.

  ‘Is that—?’ Nat started to say, and then the beast was upon them.

  A Kaiju, he’d meant to say. But by the time the thing had climbed all the way out of its hidey-hole, he was too busy screaming to say much else that was coherent. It was one of the lesser Kaiju species, being not much larger than a typical mid-range house, but in some ways that made it more dangerous. The small ones moved faster and were smarter.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind Dutch wondered who’d caught it, and what process had led them to think hey, maybe we should chain it up in a hole in the middle of the Fuji race-course.

  Dutch knew she had no choice but to barrel on through. She maintained her speed, noting that the creature was at least restrained by battleship chains wrapped around its extremities.

  The creature raised a tail like a scorpion and leapt towards them in a manner that made it clear to Dutch that the chains were, nonetheless, quite lengthy. Dutch pushed in the clutch and hit the brakes hard, spinning the wheel as far as it could go. The car skidded in a circle until it faced in the opposite direction.

  ‘Christ!’ Nat shouted in disbelief. ‘You’re facing the wrong way.’

  While she performed this manoeuvre, Dutch glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw, as she had anticipated, that the Kaiju had begun to run towards them with even greater speed, believing they were about to flee. Then she put the car into reverse, driving straight under the creature and between its legs before it had time to react.

  ‘That’s my signature move, asshole,’ she screamed back at Nat.

  She kept the Coupé moving backwards, so that they had a good view of the Kaiju as it tried to reverse direction. It got tangled in its chains and bellowed its frustration, its long jaws snapping as they accelerated backwards down the race-track.

  ‘And fuck you too,’ yelled Dutch, performing the same manoeuvre to bring them the right way around.

  She glanced sideways at Nat, who looked shellshocked, his lips set in a thin line. ‘When the hell did they start putting live Kaiju in the time-trials?’

  ‘I think this is the first time,’ he replied, his voice small and still.

  Everything else the racecourse threw at them felt like a Sunday afternoon drive by comparison. What the Coupé lacked in armour-plating, it made up for in all the agility and speed Dutch had promised. Before long they crossed the finishing-line and the flag came down. Dutch exited to cheers and heard the race commenter announce that they had, indeed, raced the course faster than anyone else.

  ‘Don’t look so glum, sport,’ she said to Nat as they got out of the car. Engineers and mechanics swarmed around the Coupé. Dutch felt giddy in a way she hadn’t in years.

  ‘I told you not to—’ He stopped and closed his eyes, his jaw set tight.

  ‘Not to win?’ She laughed throatily. ‘My ass.’

  Island of Death

  The next day, at dawn, Dutch boarded a Chinook along with the rest of the drivers and their navigators and flew fifteen hundred kilometres south-east to the former island-nation of Teijouan—except for Lucifer Black who, as usual, insisted on riding inside his car while it was choppered in separately. She saw the South China Sea far below, and the outline of one of the battleships that formed the blockade. Nat sat beside her, back in his deep-blue racing suit and still monosyllabic. He’d hardly said a word to her ever since she made the terrible mistake of winning the time-trials.

  Which was fine with Dutch. She spent the trip flicking through a copy of Kaiju Spotters Monthly she’d found discarded near the grandstand until the island hovered into view.

  A light mist covered the ground when they landed at the Security Zone, a flat spit of low-lying sandy terrain at the very southern tip of Teijouan, a few hundred metres wide and walled off from the rest of the island by a six metre steel fence with guards patrolling along the top. Heavy artillery guns poked their long barrels over the fence in the hopes of deterring any inquisitive Kaiju that wandered too close. A road p
assed beneath a portcullis-style gate set into the fence, coming to an end on a low rise near a jetty.

  The road had served as a starting point for the Devil’s Run since the race’s inception. A two-story concrete shell that had once been holiday apartments served as a once-a-year temporary headquarters for military authorities who busied themselves protecting the racers and their attendant mechanics, along with the press and support staff, for the three days the race was expected to last. A dozen speedboats sat moored at the jetty in case the need for a quick getaway presented itself, and when Dutch disembarked from the Chinook she saw journalists and photographers mingling with race officials and military. Several Japanese destroyers sat a couple of miles offshore, their guns also pointing north.

  ‘Hey,’ asked Vishnevsky the Kaiju-hunter, coming abreast of Dutch as she moved away from the ‘copter. He had to shout over the noise of the rotor blades. ‘Where are our cars?’

  ‘Coming in now.’ She pointed towards a huge Russian-built Mi-26 landing at that moment.

  He touched the brim of his hat and grinned. ‘Good to know.’

  He headed for the Russian cargo chopper at a brisk place and she followed in his wake. By the time they got there, Vishnevsky’s Oshkosh had already been brought down the ramp. Lucifer Black drove his own vehicle out into the sun, unseen as always behind his tinted windows. He revved his engine and span his ride through a couple of turns that kicked up sand and dirt before pulling up close by the starting line.

  Elektron’s Peterbilt semi-truck came down next, and Dutch noted he’d mounted a pair of jet engines on its rear bed. The Padres had, like the Siberian long before them, picked a souped-up vintage US Army jeep for their ride—a wise choice, in Dutch’s experience, given such vehicles required little to no extra modifications to protect them from the effects of the derangement field.

  Countess König, by contrast, had chosen a T-model Mercedes Benz—not the fastest car, but sturdy as hell and not given to breaking down in tight spots. General Hurley had picked a Toyota Hilux—fast, manoeuvrable, tough, able to deal with a variety of terrains, and hence popular with insurgents and terrorists everywhere.