Night of Thunder

After these important comments, Richard finally consented to do his job, and roared through the lesser precincts of NASCAR with much less pizzaz, as if he’d grown bored, having the attention span of a gnat. It was just snap, crackle, and pop, as the flimsy structures were eaten alive by the power of the Cash in Transit truck, and no pile of hats or Chinese Confederate flags or funnel cakes or barbecued ribs and sausages could stand against the onrush. Beer exploded, tables of goods were splattered, tents billowed as their ropes were cut, signs fell, but it lacked the FX grandeur of the previous few minutes’ work. As spectacle, it had fallen. His esthetic sense somewhat blunted, he glumly soldiered on.

But as tactical enterprise, the genius of the plan soon became evident. There simply was no way any four-wheeled vehicle could have followed them, because Richard left behind him so much more damage than had been there before, and whether or not planned, the dynamic of the crowd, ebbing this way and that, opening before him, then solidifying behind him, precluded penetration. Then too, of the few roads around NASCAR Village, all were impenetrable, because all were jammed with civilians headed out, not in. Many of those people had abandoned their cars upon seeing the panicked crowd and hearing stories of machine guns, armed guerrillas, terrorists, Klansmen, militia. So in the vast mess, only the armored truck had any maneuverability, purely on the strength of its ruthlessness. It could and would drive through anything, it could and had driven down anybody, it was without conscience, a Moby Dick on land, or a Godzilla or a Beast from Twenty Thousand Fathoms that regarded humanity as insects to be crushed. It was just diesel nihilism on four tires, driven by venality and psychopathology and the fury of sons who’d disappointed their fathers, and it was unstoppable.

Richard drove on, he flattened, folks danced in delight, some throwing beer bottles at him, not so much to stop him but to participate in the wanton pleasure of the evening. Now and then a police bullet sounded a pitiful ping as it bounced off the heavy armor but failed to penetrate. At the far end, the anticlimax arrived with a whimper. Richard found a dirt road that led to a gated installation in the lee of the mountain, built up some nice speed and fragmented the cyclone gate with his Ford cyclone, and roared along the edge of the mountain, which presented itself to him as an incline swaddled in trees.

“There ’tis,” shouted the old man, and indeed, up ahead, an archway in the trees revealed a dark portal, behind which lay the serpentine of a switchbacked track to the top, glistening with perpetual mud from a dozen mountain springs, its existence all but forgotten, a relic left over from logging days. “Here’s where you earn all that goddamn money we done paid you!”

“Think there’s a man in America who could get a rig this heavy up a road this steep and sharp? Well there ain’t but one, and he took the Pike’s Peak hill climb three times running and some other uphills as well, and has done the trick on bikes and go-carts and destructo jalopies and tractors and big-daddy trucks and hell, even a kiddie cart or two.”

“You’d best have it, boy.”

“Hang on, Grandpappy. The elevator is reading Up.”

He plunged ahead.

A lesser man would have wept. Not Caleb. His shattered nose blossomed blood, and he felt like a piece of popped corn in a corn popper, floating this way and that, a hard trick with a thirty-pound rifle in his hands.

“Goddamn him, that sumbitch, gonna whip his ass!” screamed another flying Grumley, immediately before hitting the goddamned wall or sharp shelf or any of the dozens of hard surfaces inside the box.

“The fucking little prick, he doin’ this ’cause he thinks he’s special, it’s his little trick on us poor dumb Grumleys.”

“He thinks we ain’t human!”

It was, in other words, no fun in the box. The five boys each were made clumsy by submachine guns, their body armor, their spare magazines, the darkness, the claustrophobia. It was like a submarine undergoing a depth-charge raid by the Japanese. They were tossed this way, then that, without visibility. On top of that, shrapnel, in the form of thirty-pound bales of bills in tamper-evident plastic bags flew around the interior like really heavy pillows. They fucking hurt when they hit you, and they could hit you at any time from any angle. Then there was a lunch box or two, maybe a few cans of Diet Coke, and who knew what else afly in the dark atmosphere of the steel box and though the shocks supporting it were thick and strong, they did little to protect against the vicissitudes of crumple and crunch that Richard produced as he wreaked vengeance on NASCAR for the crime of being NASCAR. Back here, a hero was needed, a man of strength.