Page 38 of Redline Baby

The front just goes.

Washes out from under me in a single violent lurch, the bars wrenching sideways out of my hands, the front end tucking out from under me in an instant with nothing to catch and no window to catch it in.

One heartbeat, I'm leaned into a corner. The next, there is no corner. No bike. No up. Just the ground coming for me sideways.

Then it's loud. The fairing slams down and the world fills with the screech of plastic and metal tearing across asphalt, a long, ugly shriek, sparks chewing off the engine case in an orange spray I can see flaring past my visor.

I'm down with it. My shoulder takes the road first, a slamming impact that punches up through the leather and into the bone. Then my hip. The gear sliding and snagging and sliding again, the pavement raking under me at speed, my whole left side a single screaming line of friction and heat.

The bike cartwheels off to one side.

I skate out across the lane on my back and then my side, momentum doing what momentum does, until it finally, finally runs out.

I come to rest on the shoulder.

For a moment, nothing moves.

I'm on my back, twisted halfway onto my side, the dirty visor smeared with road dust so the world is a brown blur with the dark sky behind it.

I just breathe.

My breath roars inside the helmet, wet and ragged, fogging the shield, the only sound in the universe for one long, stretched second. The bike is ten feet behind me, thrown on its flank in the road, one wheel still turning slowly, spinning down with a faint ticking whir, throwing back the last of the light.

Then my body reports in. My left shoulder screams, a grinding pain that flares white when I try to shift my weight off it.

I stop trying.

My hip is wet.

I can feel it through the torn gear, a warm, spreading dampness against my skin, and I can't tell yet if it's blood or sweat.

Can't tell.

Don't move to find out.

I just lie there feeling the dampness spread.

The road is empty.

In both directions, it runs out into the dark.

No headlights. No taillights. Nothing. Just the pale line of the lane and the tree line and the wide black nothing beyond it.

The engine has cut out.

The high, screaming noise I came out here to drown in is gone.

All of it.

And in its place is the thing I've spent the entire night and the entire year running from.

Quiet.

Just the wind moving low across the asphalt. And the slow, dying tick of cooling metal somewhere behind me, the bike letting go of its heat into the cold, one beat at a time, while I lie on the shoulder in the dark and breathe.

There is no one.

There is no one for miles.