Excerpt: Martini Man

Martini Man

Kevin Udy ©

Chapter One

Hoover was howling down the road, hanging onto the gears, and howling its guts out in the blinding sunlight. Terry loved to just listen to it, holding off changing up just that bit longer just for the sheer pleasure of the sound adding to the speed. God he loved it. They were a team, these two, man and machine in harmony, a dance with life and little else that could spoil it. Just as long as they both stayed looking at this face of the coin.

The road was a familiar one, ridden since his youth, and he knew every inch of it in the kind of detail that becomes familiar when your life depends upon it. The well-known miles flashed by, time disappearing in the shroud of concentration that comes with living for the next second, and focusing on nothing else. Heaving the big Suzuki from side to side, braking, accelerating changing gear every few seconds, working up and down the gearbox, the ever-changing revs playing tunes on the exhaust. Shifting his weight around the bike, slipping off the seat to get his body-mass off the lowside of the bike at each turn it made, in a ceaseless dance that had a frenzied and unstoppable momentum.

It was a baking hot, even though only late morning, and the sweat ran down Terry’s face under the full-face helmet, stinging his eyes as he blinked it away. He reached under the visor to wipe it out of his eyes on the long straights when he could ‘rest’ before the next batch of corners. He was hotter in his leathers than was comfortable with the exertion of climbing all over the bike, and he welcomed the long straight run of tarmac as he enjoyed the relative calm of sitting still for a minute or so. Just letting the bike run herself up to flat-out, throttles held wide open, and glancing repeatedly at the speedo to see the magical numbers chased by the needle. The New Ton of One-Fifty passed by, this, like all modern fast bikes, making the old Ton all too easy to attain and so worthless as an achievement. With lightening-quick glances downwards at the clocks, he watched the needle reach past it for one-sixty. Felt it feeding his need for a constant speed-fix.

It was then that he started to notice something was wrong. At first he dismissed it. At that speed, his attention was fully taken up with watching for every thing necessary for survival, but it kept creeping into the periphery of his concentration. Pushing in. Getting in the way. Things looked different. Odd. Bloody odd, in fact. Suddenly felt odd too, as Hoover bucked and the steering tank-slapped violently for a couple of seconds after hitting a dip in the road.

“Shit”, as he struggled to hold it in line, ‘Jees”, he thought, ‘didn’t see that!’ That was the dip in the road here he always avoided before they resurfaced this road. Hadn’t had to shift to the white line to avoid it in ever since.

He feathered the throttles, and Hoover’s exhaust note lost its harsh edge to a loud whisper of power. The tension of straining every steel muscle eased, and she cruised at a slowly eroding speed, as if patiently waiting and not understanding why. As the speed slowed, and he could shift more attention to the countryside around him, he still couldn’t see what it was. The road was rougher than it should’ve been though. Odd.

It wasn’t something he’d passed, or was approaching, but all the same there was something strangely unfamiliar about the familiar. When he looked, it all looked ok, but at the same time he knew it wasn’t. Terry was more and more unsettled, and the unease crept over him like a fog. After a few seconds, it got so bad that he glanced again in the mirrors, and shut the bike down, letting it slow on a closed throttle, finally braking, and pulling over to the side of the road.

What the hell was it? The hedges had been the first thing that he could see that were wrong, but he wasn’t sure why. Weren’t they a different shape and height all of a sudden? Well, no, that couldn’t be, now could it? Must be something else. God, it was hot. Hoover sat patiently burbling and growling under him, waiting for the inputs to bring her alive again, but still he sat there, so sure that something real weird was going on, but at the same time at a loss to just what it was. He turned in the saddle, looking back along the straight downhill sloping road. They had resurfaced it a while ago; he was sure this was now smooth and level, whereas for years it had had some nasty lumps in it. He could see one from here…….. the one he always avoided by the manhole cover there. He’d been caught out way back there too, hitting that dip he used to be always ready for. None of that was there a month ago when he was last along here.

“Too weird, man” he muttered, looking up at the sun in the clear blue sky. He was aware how ridiculous it was to be sitting there, wondering what was wrong with something that couldn’t be anything but imagination. Just a sensation, or whatever had made him so uneasy to actually stop and look around. Maybe he was getting way too old for all this shit, he thought, as he patted the black tank, and muttered “C’mon hunny………. let’s go”

He eased the clutch out and gave the bike it’s head again, nailing it to the wall, and revelling in the surge of acceleration. That buzz he never had tired of in all the thirty-eight years of thrashing big bikes.

Line her up, squeeze the trigger, and feel the adrenalin surge as the world rushed at him.

Settling into her rhythm, he once again focused into the fine detail of attention Hoover demanded when she was let loose, a thought gently nagged that no cars had appeared as he was sitting back there by the verge. Although it was a B road off the main routes to Cornwall, at this time of the day there was usually at least a car or two every couple of miles to pass, and those he’d passed not far back should’ve gone past him whilst he had been sat there. Maybe they’d both turned off.

The thought was hardly dismissed when he abruptly snapped the throttles shut again, and simultaneously slammed the brakes on hard. Hoover dived as her suspension crushed under the g-force; her front tyre tearing on the road’s surface as it struggled to grip, the back tyre juddering and skipping, locking-up and trying to swing to either side as he rushed her down through the gears with savage blips of the throttle.

Stopped in seconds, he sat there and stared at he old garage in sheer disbelief, his whole body felling suddenly cold, and every hair bristling with something like raw fear.

“God” he said.