Fear Is the Rider by Kenneth Cook Page A

or run the motorcycle flat out. He couldn’t get off the track. The line of gibbers held him trapped as long as he was moving at any speed at all. He turned the accelerator handle to its full range and the powerful machine surged forward, quickly reaching eighty, ninety, pulling clear just as the Land Cruiser came up to it. For a moment the bull bars of the Land Cruiser were within centimetres of the rear wheel of the motorcycle. The motorcycle pulled ahead, but riding a motorcycle at ninety on that surface was lethal and the Aborigine knew it. At any moment he had to hit a drift of stones, or soft sand, and there were soaks ahead.
    He knew he’d kill himself if he kept that speed, and he knew he’d kill himself if he tried to turn off the track—and he knew the Land Cruiser would kill him if he slowed down. The birds at his waist revolved with wings flapping in macabre imitation of flight.
    The shotgun slipped down his arm and began banging against his leg. He tried to shrug it back to his shoulder but he couldn’t hold the throbbing handlebars and work the gun. Both barrels were loaded and pointing at his body. He took his right hand off the handlebar for a moment and let the gun fall free. It dropped on to the gibbers and slid across off the track without exploding.
    A few moments later he ran into the soak. He knew it was there because he had driven through it a hundred times before, a patch of mud twenty metres wide kept half fluid by the seeping artesian waters. At five kilometres an hour it was just a nuisance, at ninety it was deadly.
    The Aborigine had a chance. If he could hold the machine steady it could clear the mud, but if the front wheel deviated a fraction to either side, the machine would go into a wide uncontrollable skid. The Land Cruiser was barely thirty metres behind him.
    He went hard into the soak, accelerating desperately, trying to fling the machine over the narrow strip of mud. The front wheel turned almost as soon as it hit the mud. The machine went over on its side and in a great burst of muddy spray, machine and man slewed across the soak.
    The motor was still running when the machine stopped sliding. The Aborigine wasn’t even badly hurt, just trapped by one leg under the motorcycle.
    The Land Cruiser hit him in the next second.
    The Aborigine saw nothing except a wall of grey mud, jagged at the top, as the Land Cruiser raced through the soak. The bull bar behind the mud caught him on the forehead and the Land Cruiser rolled over him, driving him and his motorcycle and the ducks at his belt deep into the mud.
    The Land Cruiser stopped just the other side of the soak, its windscreen wipers working at the film of mud on the windscreen, turned around, then came back through the soak slowly running the two offside wheels over the mess of machine, man and blood in the grey mud.
    Then it began moving fast back along the track to Yogabilla.

    The dust of the Land Cruiser had hidden all this from Katie and Shaw as they worked on the wheel. They only knew the Land Cruiser was coming back when they heard its motor.
    ‘Get the spare out of the back,’ Shaw said when the Land Cruiser went off after the Aborigine, ‘and the wheel brace.’
    Katie dropped the clasp knife and opened the hatch door of the Honda and rummaged among the clothing and books that littered the rear section. The spare tyre was under a rubber mat, bolted to the chassis. She found the wheel brace, loosened the bolt and hauled the spare wheel out.
    Shaw had the tyreless wheel off the ground. The rims were badly buckled. He grabbed the wheel brace from Katie and began to loosen the wheel nuts. The wheel turned under the pressure and he cursed himself for not loosening the nuts before he jacked up the car.
    ‘Hold the wheel,’ he said. Katie knelt beside him and held the wheel firm. He loosened the four nuts and he and Katie spun them off the bolts by hand.
    Shaw rolled the spare wheel into place, but the car was not high enough