HENTY'S FIST 1: GAUNTLET RUN: birth of a superhero by Andre Jute, Dakota Franklin and Andrew McCoy. 60,000 words in 76 chapters.
CHAPTER 17
Henty’s feet found purchase and she hunched her body and held on with all her might as the driver flung the truck into a series of swerves to rid himself of her. From all round came the sound of grating, tearing metal.
A window whirred down an inch beside her head. “Gerroff my truck!” he screamed at her.
“Please help me!” she shouted over the wind.
“Gerroff!” He swung the wheel violently and Henty nearly lost her balance.
She grabbed at the window with her right hand and involuntarily closed her other hand. The Fist squeezed right through the mirror-stand and now Henty was hanging on the window by one hand. The driver leaned over to swat at her knuckles with a length of sausage from his lunchbox.
“Ouch! You maniac!” Henty reached out with her left hand, with the Fist to grab something — anything! — before her arm was torn from its socket or the wind tore her from her uncertain hold to be smashed on the blacktop and trudged into it by the speeding tonnage of the trucks. The Fist connected with the window and went right through and grasped the windowsill and Henty pulled herself through the window, scarcely conscious of the jagged shards of glass reaching out bloodthirstily towards her.
The truck jockey kept shouting at her to get out of his truck. He also kept beating her about the head and shoulders with an eighteen-inch length of Polish sausage.
“If it didn’t hurt so much, it would be funny,” Henty said to him as she settled herself in the passenger seat while simultaneously trying to ward off the blows raining on her head. “Goddamn it, I’m not going to steal your food. Stop!”
That was when she flung the Fist up to protect her face because the other arm was smarting too much from the blows with the sausage.
The truck driver didn’t so much see the Fist as take it into himself by reaching his eyeballs towards it. In that moment Henty saw the fatigue on his face.
The driver swept some pills from the fascia into his mouth and in the same movement opened the door beside him and jumped. “Hey, there’s no need for you to go!” Henty said.
But there was no time to worry about the driver. He was beyond her care or even that of The Caring Society inasmuch as they were never going to find enough of him to give him the free reconstitution to useful basic nitrates in one of the Society’s ovens which was the guaranteed right of every good citizen. She was in a juggernaut travelling hundredtwentyfive milesperhour high up on a roundy-round intersection with one juggernaut thirty feet in front and another thirty feet behind and juggernauts to the left and the right — only her juggernaut didn’t have a driver!
Henty picked up the driver’s sausage and put it on the fascia, then jumped over the console to sit behind the wheel. It was like the cockpit of a jet but for a start there was a steering wheel. Steering wheels Henty knew. She grabbed it — too hard. The enormous power assistance twitched it to one side and she sideswiped the pantechnicon next to her. Turning away from the impact, she again applied too much force and sideswiped the one on the other side.
“This is a lot more difficult than it looks,” Henty said. “You want to be careful, my girl.” She touched the brake tentatively but it was too much. The monster behind her crashed into her and her head jerked painfully. Out of the corner of her eyes she saw her trailer coming up fast beside her, bashing the juggernaut beside her. Henty pressed on the accelerator — hard. Too much again. The intercoolers hissed, the turbochargers whined, the monster under her jumped forward and banged into the one in front which promptly jack-knifed.
Henty swung the wheel frantically to avoid the wreckage as the truck in front of her shot off into the dense inner-lane traffic. Her truck scraped the divider guardrail. There wasn’t space to get her whole truck through but she most certainly wasn’t going back into the carnage in the middle of the highway. Metal screeched and pieces flew as she bulled the big carrier between the guardrail and the hurtling disaster-in-the-making on the other side.
The tail of a trailer flashed past the nose of her truck. Henty turned the wheel, smoothly she thought, and stepped on the brake, except it was the accelerator. The intercoolers hissed, the turbocharger second stage cut in like a hurricane and the big truck pushed the trailer from before it, a hurricane in a hurry.
Henty watched the glass bend in front of her but didn’t lift her foot from the accelerator. Then the trailer was gone and the glass was whole and there was a road and a sign — INTERSTATE DEFENSE HIGHWAY 78 — and Henty spun the wheel and saw the trailer coming up beside her again and spun the wheel the other way and tried to tromp the loud pedal right though the floor. Suddenly she was heading down to 78.
“Phew!” said Henty. And, “Defense against who?
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• MORE ABOUT THE AUTHORS AT:
Andre Jute http://coolmainpress.com/andrejute.html Andre’s latest book is DREAMS Book 1 of COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS http://www.amazon.com/DREAMS-COLD-WAR-PASSIONS-ebook/dp/B00A3BSJM2 Dakota Franklin http://coolmainpress.com/Dakota%20Franklin.html Dakota’s latest book is NASCAR FIRST http://www.amazon.com/NASCAR-FIRST-RUTHLESS-WIN-ebook/dp/B00A72A556 Andrew McCoy http://coolmainpress.com/andrewmccoy.html Andrew’s latest book is STIEG LARSSON Man, Myth & Mistress http://www.amazon.com/STIEG-LARSSON-Myth-Mistress-ebook/dp/B004GXAZAM
Copyright © 2012 André Jute, Dakota Franklin, Andrew McCoy. The authors have asserted their moral right. Published by CoolMain Press 2012 www.coolmainpress.com. Editor: Lisa Penington. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or performed by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
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HENTY'S FIST 1: GAUNTLET RUN by Andre Jute, Dakota Franklin, Andrew McCoy
ActionThe Gauntlet Run is the toughest race ever run by man: across America with every man’s hand turned against you from the statue of Liberty to the old US Mint in San Francisco. There the prize awaits you: $10 million and a full and free Presidential P...
