Vance Troughburn's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Vance drove the new car a mile past the rival and pulled onto the shoulder. The heeler sat up and watched him. He killed the engine and listened. The rival had seen the Lamborghini. The rival would not sit on the shoulder long. He would call ahead, or ride ahead, and he would put something on the road before Vance could make a clean run. Vance had to find the staging point first. He turned the car around and took a service track that cut north of the route. The dog braced against the door as the low nose scraped gravel. A half mile in, he saw smoke. A small wooden hut sat on a stone foundation with crates stacked against the walls and a metal chimney leaking gray. A spiked-tire ATV stood out front, jerry cans strapped to its rack. Vance stopped the Lamborghini behind a rise and stepped out. He walked the last hundred yards. The hut door was open. Inside he saw bolt cutters, fuel cans, and an empty crate marked with a hardware stamp. The crate had held spikes. Vance counted three more crates like it, all empty. The rival had already laid the trap. Vance ran back to the car. He drove the service track east until it rejoined the route, then pushed the Lamborghini hard toward the Bend. Two miles short of Cutter's Bend he saw them. A wide bed of metal spikes covered both lanes, half-buried in the dust, set across the only clean line into the corner. He braked. The car stopped twenty feet from the edge of the field. The heeler whined once. Vance got out and looked. The spikes ran shoulder to shoulder. He could not drive around. He could not drive through. He opened the trunk, pulled the floor mat, and walked to the edge of the field. He worked one spike loose, then another. The dog stood guard at the road. Behind him, on the long straight he had just taken, he heard the high whine of a small engine climbing. The ATV was coming up the route. Vance had cleared three feet of road. He needed twelve. He dropped the mat and ran back to the Lamborghini. He could not clear the field in time. He swung the car off the shoulder, onto the hardpan beside the road, and drove the desert line his old coupe had never dared. The low body scraped twice. A rock cracked something under the floor. He cleared the spike field, bounced back onto the asphalt past it, and stopped. The Bend was a mile ahead, open and his. But the car was hurt, the rival was close behind on a vehicle built for this ground, and the record run he had come for would have to wait until he knew what the Lamborghini had left.