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 19
“San Fran-cis-co, here I come!” Henty sang at the top of her voice as she streaked down the middle of that empty highway, heading West, to the Mint in San Francisco, to ten million dollars for Petey and free Presidential pardon directly from the White House for her.
For breakfast she gnawed a large chunk of the sausage. The residue of the driver’s pills she threw out of the window. “Junk!” She sniffed his thermos carefully and then poured the contents out of the window too. “Doped coffee. Ugh!” Then she boiled up some water in the minimicrowave in the console and, after tasting his instant with the tip of her finger, decided to risk it. “Breakfast isn’t complete without Hickory’s Coffee'n'Chicory,” she read from the label.
With the huge truck on autocruise, she looked around for something else to eat. There was nothing. The manifest papers told her she was hauling a truckload of Polish sausage to Chicago. So the driver had robbed a box or been given a sausage. Otherwise he seemed to have lived on pills and Hickory’s MoreChicoryThanCoffee.
Henty turned on the radio and instantly sound surround hit her deafeningly. Hurriedly she turned it down. The music stopped and the deejay hit her with a message.
“Fed up with an enforced twenty hour week, tired of subsistence wages? Want to find out about a job where there’s no limit to the overtime you can work, where men are men and some have gotten rich in as little as five years of hard work? Then call the Teamsters. Backed by the Syndicate, a part of The Caring Society, the Teamsters won’t limit your earning hours. Call the Teamsters today, drive a luxury truck tomorrow!”
Henty punched in an MP3 chip to shut the man up. When she looked up, there was The Trouble.
There was time only to reflect that she should have asked why that good broad highway was completely empty except for her own truck... She must have passed a checkpoint somewhere and the cops were too lazy to come after her once she was past them.
She punched IS-78 on the console route finder and the warning message and beeps flashed her: NOGO WARZONE NOGO. There was also a skull and crossbones just in case she couldn’t read, together with a no-entry sign.
Too late.
She was already in the middle of the battle zone. Up ahead there were puffs above the ground as somebody exploded anti personnel shrapnel bombs for maximum killing effect. To her right she could see shaven-headed punks with pink or yellow socks showing below stovepipe trousers setting up a baby katusha that would fire twenty-one rockets from a ring of launchers — all at once. To her left a group of The Trouble were running through the field, bent low. But they were city hooligans, unused to the country and made a lot disturbance of the shrubbery and, anyway, most of them showed above it almost all the time. They were easy game for the state trooper behind the mortar in the spotter chopper.
“Ouch!” said Henty when the mortar hit the little group of punks square-on. She looked away.
The chopper spotted her and somebody blasted her on the civilian safety frequency that overrides the radio.
“Hey, you in the truck! Turn back immediately! If you deliver arms to The Trouble we will shoot. Repeat, we will shoot! Now get the hell out of here.”
Henty stomped on the brake and swung the wheel to turn that huge truck almost in its own length and—
There was nowhere to go that way either. A tank clunked onto the highway. It was a huge thing and it was two hundred yards from her: wherever she steered the big truck, the tank would be in a position to blast her from so close even the shaven-headed punks controlling it couldn’t miss.
Anyway, they couldn’t be that incompetent if they had taken the tank from the National Guard, whose insignia was roughly painted over in pink and yellow stripes.
Henty swung her truck around again. Another tank was clanking onto the road in front of her. This one had one pink and one yellow sock tied to its aerial.
“Aw hell,” Henty said as she brought her truck to a standstill with the windscreen only inches from the threatening nozzle. She swung the door open and jumped down, taking the rest of the sausage with her.
“Hey, it’s another Sheila!”
The tank commander in the turret was a female Trouble. They were worse than the males. Henty flashed into a run but a whole tribe of jeering faces arose ahead of her from the brush beside the road. She stopped.
“What you got in that truck?” the girl in the tank turret wanted to know. “Guns?”
“Food,” Henty said. “Polish.” She threw the half sausage she held in her hand to the girl.
The female Trouble caught the sausage and took a bite from it. While she chewed— Henty stole a quick glance at the copperchopper hovering over the horizon. The thing could blast them with a mortar or a rocket any minute and it was sure to be calling up wholesale reinforcements. This was the end of her Run. She felt like crying. It was so stupid to be caught like this when, if she had paid attention, she could have turned the hell off 78 long before this.
“We'll take the truck,” the Girl decided, “You Boys can have her.”
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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.