Can you tell I spent all morning Sunday watching trials bike stunts?
Nestled in the space where a normal radio would be had been, a police scanner sat and squawked about the accident on the bridge ahead of them. Her tires squeaked, almost with joy, as they slowly climbed the polished granite curb. A low growl rolled from Her dual tailpipes. Not upset, but hungry. For speed.
Nestled in the space where a normal radio would be had been, a police scanner sat and squawked about the accident on the bridge ahead of them. Her tires squeaked, almost with joy, as they slowly climbed the polished granite curb. A low growl rolled from Her dual tailpipes. Not upset, but hungry. For speed.
The cars in front of Her, bound by laws of state and nature, were bumper-locked and watched Vedoro Green with envy. Their operators pulled out cell phones to capture the infraction, but She wasn't street legal anyway. One didn't need license plates to differentiate Her from the 260 million other passenger vehicles. She was one of a kind. Sure there were others that shared Her chassis, but it was what She could do that set Her apart.
A route was recalculated with the 'pedestrian' option selected. Heads turned when she drove by, but never more so than as she drove along the empty sidewalk, dashing up to 30 mph and power sliding to angle in between the railings of the public library. For a moment it was clear to the onlookers that her tight ground clearance of 5.3 inches was not enough to climb the first step. She seemed to whine in frustration as it would require a tow truck to back out of this tight situation between the rails and the traffic, but the sound was not that of a spoiled princess, it was the whine of a compressor powering up the hydraulics. Suddenly, with a sound like a can being crushed, She raised up to a height of 9 inches, higher than a Ford Ranger, and began climbing the stairs. At the top of the stairs was a bronze statue of some long dead war hero, mounted atop a gelded horse, heroically raising his sword aloft. As She drifted around it She shat long, black rubber burns on the white marble.
A tall elderly woman with short, freshly permed, burgundy hair, and large glasses on a gold chain ran out of the library and shushed Her as she sped off to the west along a pavement walkway toward the library's dedicated parking lot. But the Librarian's anger turned suddenly to fear, "Look out!" she yelled after Her. Ahead the pathway was blocked to traffic larger than a golf cart, by waist-high marble obelisk. The hydraulics crunched again, launching the passenger side into the air. Balancing on two wheels She navigated the gap, entered the parking lot and fell back down on all fours. She growled approval, and tore though the empty parking lot toward the "Entrance" side of the automated toll booth. Her tires squealed, perhaps in fear as they saw the quickly approaching tire shredders protecting the lot from toll dodgers.
She checked traffic both ways, but never slowed down, and as she was about to drive into the iron teeth of the shredder, the hydraulics crunched and She jumped clear over them, not even touching the sidewalk on her way to the street. Taking a sharp 90 She found herself momentarily facing an oncoming garbage truck, but nothing so stout could out maneuver her. Finally the police scanner crackled with an alert about Her off-roading on public land. Because of the accident at the bridge the cops were just blocks away, not only to dodge them, but also to continue following Her GPS guidance She took another sharp 90 down an alley so narrow it threatened to scratch Her mirrors. She danced like this from alley to alley across five blocks while the Bears chased sightings of where's She'd been. Neither traffic, nor stairs, nor narrow allies blocked her passage until she pulled out onto a wide boulevard and into a construction zone her GPS wasn't aware of. On both sides jersey barriers blocked off the entire boulevard. In front of her the bare orange of a high-rise's iron skeleton rose out of a dirt lot, crowded with heavy construction equipment, stacks of I-beams, piles of gravel, and beyond lay the canal. Thank goodness it was getting dark and the construction crew had left.
The scanner chirped about the alley She had just emerged from, and low-voiced officers had already deduced her exit point. She wasn't trapped, She just had to get creative. After a recon lap around the construction lot, her tires bit into the dirt and took a running start toward a modest pile of gravel launching her through the air and onto the second floor of the high-rise. From this height She could see a barge lumbering slowly down the canal toward Her, if She accelerated fast enough She could clear the gap and use the barge a mobile bridge. Carefully knocking over a few sheets of ply-wood which leaned again one wall, it collapsed in her path and formed a ramp. She backed up as the barge drew near, and when the moment came she burned out her back wheels building up engine RPMs before catapulting forward like an F-14 off the deck of a aircraft carrier. Feet from the ramp She realized she wasn't going to making it. She didn't have enough height. At the last second the hydraulics crunched and threw the rear tires into the air, forward kick-flipping Herself through the air and gaining the height she needed to land on the highest stack of shipping containers.
Just as the radio was squawking about disappearing cars and scrambling the eye in the sky, the garage door was closing behind her. Carefully the little one in the back seat was unbuckled and lifted over a shoulder.
As the door was quietly closed a voice said, "Shhhh, he's asleep."
"Thank you so much for driving him around the block. Sometimes he just won't go to sleep without a little car ride. I hope traffic wasn't bad."
A shrug. "Nothing we couldn't handle."
Then the eyebrow went up. "You didn't have anything to do with that accident on the bridge?"
"No. We kick-flipped over the canal and skipped that section."