“Fuck!” Matt yelled from the right seat of Frenchy’s Eagle. “That’s them!”

“What?” Frenchy said from behind the wheel. They’d been about ready to hang it up for the night, but had decided on taking one last pass along the state road. Maybe it had worked!

“That fucking Jeep that just went the other way. It’s Erikson’s, it has that goofy camo paint job.”

“Well, shit,” Frenchy said, standing on the brake and checking the rear view mirror. “We can catch them. They ain’t getting away from us in that Jeep.”

“Aw, fuck!” Jack said excitedly. “There ain’t no way we’re going to be able to outrun them out here.”

“What are we going to do?” Alan asked.

“Only one thing to do,” Jack said. “Let them catch us and get out of their car. Let ’em get close, then hose ’em down. Vixen, Alan, get the ones coming up on the right side, Summer, you and I will have to get the ones on the left. Get the cans out, we may not have much time.”

“Right,” Vixen yelled. “There’s only three of them and four of us with bear spray. We’ve got the advantage this time. Let’s get ’em good.”

“We got the fuckin’ advantage!” Frenchy said as he accelerated after the Jeep, perhaps a quarter mile ahead. They were closing rapidly. “Fuck ’em! We got the gas masks, and they’ve probably only got one can of that shit. Maybe she used most of it last night, anyway.”

“God damn, finally,” Matt said, struggling to get his gas mask on.

“Remember what I fuckin’ said. Get that goddamn can away from that fuckin’ bitch and spray ’em both down good. Then we can take our time. I just wish it wasn’t out here on the fuckin’ highway where someone could fuckin’ come along.”

“It’ll fuckin’ be enough,” Larry said from the back seat. “God, I want to hose them fuckers down good.”

Matt eyed the Jeep ahead of them. They were closing on it rapidly, and Frenchy had the Eagle’s gas pedal to the floorboard. “Hey,” he said. “Slow it down. I don’t think they’ve seen us. Don’t scare them off.”

“By god, you’re right,” Frenchy said. “They ain’t runnin’ away! We got ’em now!”

The Eagle was still closing in rapidly on the Jeep – soon it wasn’t just tail lights they were seeing, but their headlights were lighting the scene. “Aw, fuck!” Matt said. “There’s four of ’em! There’s two in the back seat. I wonder who they got with them.”

“It don’t fucking matter,” Frenchy said. “Get that can and hose them down too. Then we can beat the fuck out of all of them. I don’t care who’s with them, if they’re friends of theirs they ain’t friends of ours.” With that, he whipped the Eagle out into the passing lane, roared past the Jeep, then cut back in front of it, stomping on the brakes.

“Shithead!” Jack said when he saw the brake lights flash in front of him. He stood on his brakes as well, just not quick enough.

Modern cars, the Eagle included, have an extremely laughable excuse for bumpers: the idea is for them to crush in a slow-speed accident, limiting the damage to the occupants, but causing the most expensive damage possible to the vehicle. This is good for the occupants, body shops, the auto companies that make the replacement parts, and sometimes the vehicles.

The Jeep, however, was of a much more archaic school from back when bumpers were meant to bump things. The Erikson Jeep also had a much more substantial one than came from the factory, not to mention that the bumper was rather higher than Frenchy’s. As a result, the Eagle’s bumper survived the contact, but not the tail lights, quarter panels, or trunk lid. If Jack had taken the time to look, he would only have discovered a couple scratches of paint on his bumper.

He kept his brakes on as both cars slid to a stop. “Guess this is as good a place as any,” Jack said. “Get your cans ready.”

“Fucker!” Frenchy shouted as he struggled to finish getting his improvised gas mask on. “That fucker fuckin’ hit me. He’s gonna fuckin’ pay for that. Let’s go!”

Jack put the Jeep into reverse, partly to get away from the Eagle, and partly to be ready to back away in a hurry if he had to, and waited for what would come next. As he backed away, he could see that he’d put a pretty good dent in the back of Frenchy’s Eagle. The four of them watched intently as Frenchy burst out from behind the driver’s seat, and Matt from the passenger side. Something seemed strange . . . and then he realized what it was.

“Aw, fuck,” he said, and stomped on the gas. He swung around in the seat to see where he was backing the Jeep.

“What the fuck?” Alan said.

“The bastards cobbled up some gas masks,” Jack said, still checking behind him. “The spray ain’t gonna work.”

“What are we going to do?” Vixen asked.

“Plan B,” Jack said as he whipped the wheel over and turned back around in the seat. The Jeep did a reverse bootlegger turn, coming to a stop as Jack jammed on the brakes. In an instant, he had the Jeep going forward, and turned the wheel to head away from the Eagle, and town. It almost wasn’t enough; Frenchy and Matt were within a few feet when Jack accelerated away into the night as hard as he could go.

“I didn’t know you had a Plan B,” Vixen said.

“I didn’t know myself till just now,” Jack said. “Plan B is run for it.”

“There’s no way you’re going to be able to outrun them, once they get back to the car,” Alan pointed out.

“No way I could do it on pavement,” Jack said. “But if I can make it to some two-ruts, we’ve got a chance. Pull your seat belts tight. This is gonna be rough.”

“Fuck!” Matt said. “They’re fuckin’ getting away.”

“Not if I can fucking help it,” Frenchy said. “Let’s get back to the car and get after them. That fucker fucked up my car, and now he’s got that to pay for, too.

In their pursuit of the backing Jeep, Frenchy and Matt had gotten thirty or forty yards from the Eagle, although Larry had just made it out of the back seat. He dove back in, as Matt came charging up the side of the car; Frenchy dove in the driver’s side door. It took a moment to start the engine, then he stomped on the gas, trying to get the Eagle to spin around on the pavement, scattering dirt and gravel all over the area. What with everything, they were probably close to half a mile behind the Jeep when they took out after it.

Jack had the Jeep revved up as hard as it would go. It was no race car and the top speed was only about eighty. It was doing all of that when he could see the Eagle turning around in the rear view mirror. Alan was keeping a look to the rear, and yelled. “They’re coming.”

“We got a shot,” Jack said. “If I can get him high centered enough, maybe I can knock out his oil pan or something.”

“They’re comin’ fast,” Alan yelled.

“OK,” Jack said. “If we get cornered, hose ’em down anyway. They’ve got T-shirts on, we might still be able to slow them down if we hit their chests and arms. But I ain’t giving them anything this time.”

The Eagle was coming fast. Jack checked the rear view mirror, and saw that they were getting set to pass again. It seemed pretty clear that this time Frenchy was going to knock them off the road. But the timing was just about right . . .

Jack stomped on the brake hard, and the Eagle shot past, then veered into the right lane when the driver realized he’d missed. His brake lights would have flashed if he’d still had them , but Jack was already making a left turn onto a small two-rut that ran back into the forest.

That bought them some time. Frenchy had gone past the turn, and he had to stop and turn around to come back after them, and that took a few seconds.

Much of the land around Spearfish Lake is owned by Clark Plywood, the major local industry. A lot of it had been bought by the founder of the company in the early 1930s, when cut-over forest land could sometimes be had at tax sale for pennies an acre. Wayne Clark had been an advocate of reforestation and sustained-yield harvesting, which meant that there was timbering going on somewhere on the Clark lands all the time. That meant that there was a huge and barely comprehensible network of two-rut roads, logging tracks, truck trails and the like that few people knew or understood. Jack was no super expert on the layout of all of them – nobody was – but he knew them pretty well from all of his driving around looking for birds on them.

Jack could not have said why that particular two-rut he was racing down was there at all, nor explained in words where it began or ended, for there were no road names or numbers. All he knew was where it went, because he’d been down it several times before, but usually didn’t use it much because it was rougher than normal; in fact he’d go out of his way to avoid it for the sake of a smoother ride. Tonight he didn’t much care about the smoother ride; the rougher, the better. The Eagle wasn’t built to take that kind of beating, but the Jeep was.

It seems counterintuitive, but you usually get a smoother ride if you drive fast down a rough road than you do going slower. Simply put, the faster you go, the less time the vehicle’s suspension has to send the bumps to the passengers. But as in all things, there is a tradeoff: the less time the tires spend on the ground, the less control the driver has.

Jack drove the Jeep down the two-rut faster than he ever had before, as fast as he dared, and then some. It was a winding road, soft in spots, narrow in others, not easy to drive, but he pushed it to the limit, hoping this would work.

“Fuckin’ shit,” Matt said, trying to hold on. He hadn’t put a seat belt on; it was beneath contempt, and he hadn’t had the time anyway. Now, it was too damn rough to find it.

“Them fuckers,” Frenchy swore, foot on the gas, twisting the wheel left and right trying to drive as fast as he could down the narrow, high-centered road. “They ain’t fuckin’ gettin’ away from me this time.”

“I hate to say this, Frenchy,” Matt shook his head, while wishing he could get his hand on the seat belt. “But I think you’re losing them.”

“I ain’t losing them until I say they’re lost,” he snorted. “Their fuckin’ ass is mine!”

“Yeah, if we fuckin’ live to tell about it,” Matt said under his breath.

“I think we’re losing them a little,” Alan yelled. He’d been keeping a pretty close look behind, especially since he figured that Jack didn’t have much time to check the rear view mirrors.

“Probably ain’t gonna last,” Jack yelled back. “We’re starting to run out of this road.”

They were. Not thirty seconds later, the road twisted, and the Jeep erupted out onto a gravel truck trail, which was really a pretty decent gravel road that was frequently graded. It was a ways to the next really good two-rut where they could get lost, and all Jack could do was hope that they could get there. He stuck his foot in the Jeep and got it going as fast as it would go, racing down the gravel road.

“OK, now maybe we can catch up with them fuckers,” Frenchy snarled, heading down the truck trail in pursuit of the Jeep.

“Where ever the fuck they are,” Matt said. “I don’t know how the fuck you think you can see where you’re going.”

The last month or so had been pretty dry anyway, and the day had been hot, so there hadn’t been any dew to settle the dust on the road, which was normally pretty dusty anyway. The Jeep racing down the road at eighty or more left a huge dust cloud behind it, it was thick and it was hard for Frenchy to see where they were going. “At least we know them fuckers are still ahead of us,” he said, pressing down hard on the gas pedal, flying blind through the dust cloud at over a hundred, looking for tail lights ahead.

“Oh fuck! Slow down!” Matt yelled, but Frenchy had seen the road curving to the left. He stomped on the brakes hard to try to make the corner, but the Eagle fishtailed, then skidded to one side, which probably saved their lives. If they’d gone straight off the road it would have been into some fairly large trees, but the car hit the berm plowed up by the graders and bounced off of it.

“Fuckin’ made it,” Frenchy said, sounding satisfied with himself. “Don’t be a pussy, we’re going to catch ’em yet. I think we’re gaining on them.”

“I think they’re gaining on us,” Alan yelled over the roar of the wind, the road, and the engine. “I think I could see them off to one side behind us when we went around that curve.”

“Thought that might happen,” Jack replied, just about as loud. He glanced to the side for a moment, to see that Vixen was looking out the back, too. He couldn’t see Summer, but he could feel her hands gripping the back of his seat. Damn, why did this stuff have to happen? “OK, two-rut coming up,” he yelled. “Hang on! ”

Jack stomped on the brake hard to make the corner, threw the wheel to the left and dove onto another narrow two-rut into the forest. This one led back to a favorite birding spot, and he knew it well, so he could crowd the limits of the road a little more closely.

All of a sudden, Frenchy drove the Eagle out of the dust cloud – it just wasn’t there anymore. “Where the fuck did they go?” he asked.

“Two-rut to the left back there,” Larry yelled. “I think I saw their tail lights.”

“Well, fuck,” Frenchy said, stomping hard on the brakes, and twisting the wheel over to try and spin the Eagle around. It wasn’t as nice and clean a maneuver as he’d hoped, and they lost several more seconds finding the two-rut before starting their charge down it.

Jack raced the Jeep down the twisting two-rut as fast as he dared. He really wasn’t going that fast, maybe forty or fifty since the road was very narrow and twisting, but it seemed like he was going a whole lot faster, like maybe around three hundred. It was scary as shit and he couldn’t imagine what the girls must be feeling.

“Damn,” Alan reported. “They’re still after us. I thought maybe we’d lost them when they missed the turn. We gained a bit on them, though.”

This was only going to work for so long, Jack thought. He was going too damn fast for the condition of the road and he knew it. It was only going to be so long before his memory or skills gave out on him and the Jeep bit a tree. The only thing he had going for him was that the Jeep was better suited to this trail than the Eagle, and maybe it would be the one to bite a tree first. If he could get a good lead, maybe he could find a place where he could hide, but it was going to be tricky to make that work.

If the narrow two-rut seemed fast to Jack, it seemed considerably faster to Matt, who now at least had managed to find his seat belt, which was more than Frenchy had even tried. Frenchy was really worked up now, driving like a maniac down the two-rut, somehow managing to keep it on the road, stomping the guts out of the accelerator as he raced down the rare straight sections, pounding the brakes hard to get around the narrow corners. The car slid this way and that, especially on the corners. Twice he sideswiped trees, both on Matt’s side of the car; once he bounced the left side of the car off a sand bank.

“Maybe we’re gaining on them a little,” he said. “This fuckin’ two-rut ain’t as rough as that last one. We’re gonna get ’em yet.”

“They’re still back there a ways,” Alan reported, “but they’re gaining a little, I think.”

Damn, Jack thought, exploring his options. There were only so many things he could do to try and lose Frenchy, and following this two-rut was going to be leading him into an area where the roads were a little bit better and there weren’t that many good two-ruts to follow.

Well, there was one option he could think of, and if it worked, it could lead to another one. “Gonna try something in a couple minutes,” he yelled to the four in the Jeep. “If it works, great. If it doesn’t, we may have to fight ’em. If you don’t have your spray in your hand, get it there.”

About thirty seconds later there was a fork in the trail. He headed down the definitely lesser-travelled branch.

Truck drivers can be as lazy as anyone else, and Clark Plywood didn’t spend money on bridges when they could avoid it. There was a place up ahead that Jack knew that truck drivers often used as a short cut in the winter, and it happened to be a place that he’d had pretty good luck in birding, catching a couple of rare ones there. The truck drivers didn’t use it in the summer, since it was a muddy swamp that was easy to get stuck in. It might be that the Jeep could claw its way through the mud, and the Talon couldn’t. It was worth a try, anyway.

Though unimproved by anything but the passage of truck tires, the road down to the swamp was straighter and wider than the two-rut they’d been following, and Jack wasn’t surprised to hear Alan say that they were still being followed, and being gained on. “OK, hang on!” he yelled as he stomped on the gas. “Here goes nothing.”

The so-called “road” ahead looked nasty. Even at this time of the summer it was a sea of mud; the only way he could see where the route ran was because he could see the places where the trucks had torn things up so badly that even marsh grasses didn’t grow. With his foot flat on the firewall, he aimed the Jeep down that narrow corridor.

“Jack, what the fuck . . . ” Vixen yelled.

“Hang on,” he yelled. “This may do it.”

At a rate of speed so high that Jack didn’t want to think about it, the Jeep raced into the mud hole. Just like high speed smoothes out bumps, high speed kept the Jeep more on the surface of the water and mud, without sinking in much. Jack fought the wheel instinctively, trying to keep the Jeep going straight as it hydroplaned across the mud hole, throwing water and mud to both sides, churning up more from the spinning knobby tires. Nobody breathed much, but then it took less than a breath to be on the other side, with the four knobby tires clawing them out of the last of the mud hole and up the bank, going slower than they had a few seconds before.

“Fuck,” Vixen breathed. “Made it. Jack, you are crazy as shit.”

“I’d sure like to sit around and see what happens,” he said, “but I don’t think we really ought to be here when it does.” He pointed the Jeep up a straight shallow hill leading away from the mud hole.

Frenchy charged down the trail following the Jeep, which wasn’t all that far ahead of them, now. They’d gained on the Jeep a good deal in the last couple minutes. “Almost got ’em now,” he gloated.

Frenchy and his friends were close enough behind to see the Jeep charge off into the mud; they could see the mud and water flying to each side of the vehicle they were chasing. If he’d been thinking, Frenchy might have given second thoughts to following them across the mud hole but he was too mad and the chase was too thrilling. His reaction was mostly, “If they can do it, we can do it,” and stuck his foot in the Eagle again. It was probably just a ford or something anyway.

Like the Jeep, the Talon was going fast enough to hydroplane its way across much of the mud hole and still have some speed to come out the other side; like the Jeep, it threw water and mud all over the place. However, Frenchy wasn’t quite as fast on the wheel as Jack had been, and as he got pretty well across the swamp the car began to slide to one side. It was cocked pretty well over when he reached dry ground, and the left rear quarter panel sideswiped a tree, hard. That knocked the car the other way, but another tree arrested the slide, at the expense of the right rear quarter panel. “Fuckin’ made it, by God,” Frenchy exulted. “They’re not getting away now.”

“Fuck,” Alan reported. “They made it. Damn near lost it, but they made it.”

“Win a few, lose a few,” Jack yelled back. “I still got a trick up my sleeve, and if they can make this one, I’ll just say the hell with it and let ’em catch me while you guys scatter into the woods.”

“No, we’ll stand and fight,” Alan said as he reached for his pack with the two athames. “They may not have their gas masks on. They’ve got to be pretty hot and they’ve got to be pretty pissed. But they’re gaining fast.”

“Not much longer,” Jack said, and wrenched the Jeep onto a gravel truck trail like the one they’d been on earlier. Once again he stuck his foot in the Jeep’s throttle, and the Jeep raised a cloud of dust.

A mile or so up the road was a complicated intersection known as “Six Forks.” It was, in fact, one of the few places in this area that Jack even had a name for, and he knew that the intersection was even more complicated than that since several other roads joined or crossed close by. It was very easy to head down the wrong fork if you didn’t know where you were going – but Jack did.

About a half a mile down the fork Jack chose, the road widened out into a large informal parking area; on the far side was a steep sand hill, a hundred yards or more to the top. If the place had a name Jack didn’t know it, but it was where the local ATV freaks came to try to climb the hill. Jack had tried it once in the Jeep, and hadn’t made it; it was a long way to back down. But then, he’d started from a dead stop at the bottom of the hill; the local ATV freaks didn’t consider it quite sporting to hit the bottom of the hill at seventy-five miles an hour, which is about how fast Jack was going when he started up the hill.

Frenchy was racing through the dust cloud in hot pursuit of the Jeep, and he was indeed getting closer, so close that occasionally he could get a glimpse of tail lights. “Almost got ’em!” he yelled. “Get ready! Any second now!”

“How are you planning on stopping them?” Matt asked.

“I’ll lay a bumper on ’em and put ’em into a tree,” Frenchy snarled. “They deserve to get their asses kicked for leading us all over the boonies like this. We almost got ’em now!” He stomped down even harder on the gas, closing on the Jeep in the dust cloud.

Frenchy had no idea of where he was, and for that matter, neither did Matt or Larry. In the dust he could see from the Jeep’s tail lights that the road went up a hill and it had to be a fairly steep one – but he had no idea how steep until the car pitched upward and began to lose speed in the slippery sand.

Pure momentum carried the Jeep a long way up the hill, and the tires, still in four wheel drive, were churning away at the steep sand, throwing it all over the place. The Jeep slowed, but continued to claw its way upward, and it still had a little speed in hand when the grade began to ease, allowing the spinning wheels to find enough traction to get over the top.

“Thank the Goddess,” Summer breathed.

“Holy fuck!” Alan said. “I thought we weren’t going to make it.”

“I wasn’t sure,” Jack said, his heart pounding as he looked around for the exit road that the ATV people used to get back down to the bottom of the hill. “That may have done it, but I don’t want to hang around to find out.”

“Damn good thinking, Jack,” Vixen managed to say, “but I’d sure like to know if you’ll be able to drive back to town at a normal speed.”

With his foot on the gas, Frenchy tried to get the Talon up the hill, but it lost speed rapidly in the sand. Still, its momentum carried it a good way up the slope before it sighed to a stop, rear wheels still spinning and digging themselves even deeper into the sand.

“Fuck!” Frenchy said, more enraged than ever. That fucking Erikson and his bitch were getting away, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it. “Fuck them fuckin’ fuckers! Now what the fuckin’ fuck are we gonna fuckin’ do? ”

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