Kit and the Syclone

Crates hit a high tempo bassline against the bed of my truck. Getting called, loaded, and turned around couldn’t take more than a couple minutes. We packed so we could shed cargo if needed. Losses weren’t acceptable, but if they had to happen, a singular item was better than having to jettison half of it. Hence the rain of crates into the back of my truck. If they were anything substantial, the impacts would’ve dented my soul along with the bed. But they’re just blocks of compressed packing peanuts and styrofoam with wooden planks nailed in to give a slightly more some kind of solid structure. We still called them crates.

Our ringleader stood in front of the line of trucks with a walkie-talkie against his head, and a distant, either spaced out or thoughtful expression on his face. He always relaxed in strange positions as if his body forgot to release his muscles after a new stray thought took control. And occasionally his eyes would dart, like a fighter jet obtaining missile lock on an airliner it was flying by. Occasionally he fired.

There were an array of fluorescent lights propped up, aimed down and heavily shaded around the line of trucks and the pile of cargo being loaded in. It made a bright white chamber, like a paint booth or photo studio. Outside the hanger you could barely make out that something might be going down from the ethereal white outline through the shutters.

The rain of crates stopped and Del tapped my window. “What’s your payload?”

I’d lost count of our jobs. Still didn’t matter, whether it was forgetfulness, or procedure, he always asked. My answer came out as a weak mutter. “Five-hundred-and-twenty-six pounds.” His head swung back to the bed, packed fairly full with bottles if the view in my mirror was anything to go by, and then he took stock of the other drivers and loaders. A few long seconds passed and I doubted that he heard me over the continuous thuds and bangs about the hanger, especially when he settled in place and rested his arm on the roof and rested. I shrunk into my seat and felt burning on my cheeks. The second time I answered was by jabbing a button. A speaker, using my voice, said loud and clear, “Five-twenty-six pound payload.”

Then Del leaned into the cab, getting bigger as I shrunk in my seat. Perhaps he had remembered my truck’s payload, by the fact he wasn’t making an adjustment to the load.

“Want another glass of wine?”

I stared dead ahead, trying to get smaller. Everything was a glass to Del. No such thing as a bottle to him. Or a jar, or a… vase… probably. He probably calls fishbowls a glass of goldfish. Every single time we ran an alcohol was in some sort of glass vessel so if it was a joke it was long played out. I think he thought it was cute.

I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. At the top of my vision, in a narrow slit where the windscreen began and my peripheral vision ended, our ringleader was aimed at us. Harrison didn’t look at me like he did with the other drivers. His eyes twitched whenever I took his focus, like there was always a specific reason he was staring me down. Some way I’d wronged him.

I tilted my head and shifted in my seat to try and catch the reflection of the rear quarter panel in my side mirror. There was a decent gap between the arch and the tyre. Definitely enough to take most strikes without rubbing, although I’d never gotten around to either recording or taking telemetry of the rear ride height. I’d rather not chance more load, even if it’d be frowned upon.

Usually, my fingers danced across the soundboard on the dash. I’d kept it there ever since I realised the muscle memory to jab a button was an order of magnitude quicker than my ability to open my mouth and speak my mind. But I’d moved out of my driving position and offset myself enough to stumble clumsily between two keys. The process lagged, just long enough for me to fire the input again. “No thank you, I’m fine,” answered the question. The second repetition sounded over eager.

The question dawns on me moments later. Would I like? Would I like another crate of a heavily padded wine bottle to transport on sudden delivery? It’s not my decision to make. I get a call, I drive. I don’t get to decide what goes in. Is this a test? Am I being judged? Do I have to say yes? Is that why Harrison’s looking at me?

A crackle of static and feedback whipped through the hanger, which Harrison responded to with minimal motion. Hand clenched to a new frozen position on the button, jaw snapping, “You good? Over.”

Nothing changed otherwise, even though every eye was on him. The trucks were still loaded, bottle by bottle. A considerable pile was still being pulled out of the airplane.

Three seconds passed without response, and it was enough to break him out of his stupor. “Alright strap ‘em down and run!” he shouted, throwing all the effort into subtlety out the window, breaking into a stride across the hanger. “Everyone knows the place, get there, don’t be a fucking dickhead and lose shit.” He climbed into an ugly last generation El Camino down the row, acknowledging every other driver with eye contact and a nod as he marched.

My Syclone’s brakes groaned and the entire frame leaned forward with the load on the axles, preparing to pounce. I had to be a step ahead, because that oversized early nineties turbo lag would bog me down trying to gas it up from idle.

Harrison moving was the staging light on the christmas tree. Three yellow lights flickered down when Del raised the tailgate, and he always whacked it up with the palm of his hand, flexing his absurd strength without even being aware of it. I didn’t even look. I was anticipating the sound and the sensation. In the same moment the tailgate slammed and reverberated through the cab, the Syclone itself became a doorslammer. Tyres spun in a weak burnout when my foot crossed from full brake pressure to zero, wiggling like a big cat ready to pounce. The same force that punched my gut and pinned me in my seat snapped the tonneau cover down.

I took the holeshot of the team, leading the charge out of the hanger doors, crashing through the temporary lights and canvas shades, onto the grassy airstrip. At the end of the strip is somewhat of a ditch, where the smooth grass ends and loose gravel and stone begins. My own brake lights fill the mirrors because of the cloud of dust, and my truck punches me in the gut for a second time in twenty seconds when I bound over the rough terrain, onto the asphalt. I might be in a truck, but it’s a truck with a sticker in the sunvisor reminding me that it’s not for off-road use.

Out on the great plains we’ve got long sightlines and everything’s far apart. If you see a light, chances are it’s still ten minutes out. But we don’t have ten minutes. Red and blue lights highlight the power poles and crop fields from all sides of the airfield. They’re already too close, we should’ve been gone minutes ago.

It’s a common misconception that a loaded truck is easier to drive because of all that weight. It’s easier to control the throttle, with the rear loaded down, but all the weight pulls the rear out and about. The dusty, rarely used asphalt roads already drive like a gravel lane, and with all that weight back there, the my Syclone just yaws more. I turn, and the truck rotates towards the apex, but is reluctant to redirect its momentum. The tyres beg for mercy with a shrieking scream when I lay the throttle down. By the time I’m accelerating into the apex I’ve got to straighten and turn it the other way before the road reverses direction. I’m going everywhere except where my lights are pointed.

Since they’re useless, I turn them off. Police lights in the distance catch on the edge of the road, and the slight dents and ripples in the surface. If the rocks and debris stay small, there’s a foot or two extra beyond where the asphalt ends, so even though I’m driving blind, the road is still forgiving and well marked. The darkness between the strobing lights becomes even worse, with my eyes unadjusted to pitch black. Between every red flash I’ve got to trust my memory on the road surface because I can barely see further than I’m driving.

All the drivers share a walkie-talkie frequency. “Who’s leading?”

“Solo-Kit. Just gone lights out.”

Instinctively I bat button on the soundboard to reply down the line, but otherwise I keep both hands on the wheel. Accelerating into the next turn, front left wheel gliding through the gravel. Losing me a ton of grip on that front inside. Sure, it’s unloaded, but I should be using every bit of friction I can take. To make matters worse I pin the throttle again to power and feel through the wheel when that inside spins helplessly. I plow out the turn, straightening up because I’m lamely forcing the fronts to lose grip.

There’s more chatter. It’s less important than processing the the road.

I turn in, blindly, across a high speed sweeper. I’ve got to use both lanes, just because the response of the truck requires it. I turn in and the truck rotates, but the rear keeps hanging out until my right foot makes a difference. The difference isn’t even visible from the outside unless you’re looking for it since it plows empty, and doesn’t exactly sharpen up with the weight in the rear. It just plows with its full body now, instead of the nose leading the charge.

“Kit! Quit swerving!”

I would, if you paid me enough to get proper rear tyres. Or air suspension so I could actually stiffen the front with the rear. Or-. I don’t say anything, because on paper I could afford it. Cut a meal here or there. Work a side job, if I really valued my own life on my first job. But I don’t, so I don’t say a damn word, but I also don’t stop how I’m driving.

A Crown Vic appears over a crest in the road, flying by in the other direction, and its high beams sear my dark adjusted eyes. There’s always a Crown Vic first. In case we decide to get physical, or so the group theory goes. My finger twitches on the soundboard, as my radio scanner starts squawking. “Ahh-dispatch, bastard went by, no lights.”

The cop car was out of sight before the response. “Think it’s that GMC?”

They said ‘road block’ in the next back and forth, but something else in my head told me it wasn’t relevant. And then when the chatter quietens down, it becomes strangely calm. Serene, even, to be doing triple digits in the middle of nowhere with a bed full of ill-gotten booze, utterly blind. The engine doesn’t really sing or scream - it’s a truck engine - although it sounds sort of stressed near the top of fourth gear. The police lights and sirens are louder and clearer than my engine.

The view’s wide, although I’m probably being suicidal not considering that a farmer or a trucker might be stopped somewhere with their lights out. All the power poles are far back and I’d probably screw up even harder if I lost control, using that precious extra distance to spin and hit the pole with my side of the cab first. The snow poles closer to the road could be dangerous, because while we all have high nose trucks, it’s easy to picture them going over the hood instead of getting trampled under. There’s so much feedback from the noise of my engine rebounding off surfaces and roadside furniture. The intake noise gets chopped up by the power poles as you get close to them. Fences and barn walls echo it as you approach and pass them, even when they’re far away from the road. But those are all the static things. I’m still useless at judging the reflection of oncoming cars.

A picture tells a thousand words. At a hundred miles-per-hour, I’m getting a couple hundred pictures a second, and they’re repeating so much. It’s not about what they’re saying, but what’s new. What’s changing and varying? What’s physically possible?

Everything that keeps me comfortable is subconscious. The warning signs slip by me because I’m too distracted and careless. My scanner picks up a different voice, but every cop and dispatcher melds into one, indistinct enemy. “In pursuit, matching speeds.”

Pure white, blinding beams blast through my rear window, reflect off every mirror into my eyes, and turn the dusty windscreen into a sheet of paper. I fumble for wipers and keep my right foot planted. Whatever’s on my rear bumper is too close to make out and too quiet for my liking.

I jerk a lane change and stamp on the brakes, and the other car reacts a moment slower on the brakes to match speeds slightly ahead. But I’ve got a push bar, and now our closing speeds are down I initiated by linking up to their rear quarter panel and swapping pedals to pit it. It’s a Mach-E in detective spec, with steel wheels and in that new car gloss grey colour, and now its tyres are chirping and the stability control is freaking out.

Locking the auto ‘box into second gives me a touch more pushing power than whatever it was trying to do before. The Mach-E driver’s panicking now, holding the brake and countersteering impressively to keep it from going around, while their lights are flashing in an emergency stop. The heavier car is winning, pulling me down to a crawl.

“Kit, the fuck are you doing?” Harrison snaps, not on the walkie-talkie, but in my head. It was the only choice I saw and it was the wrong one, I’m already sure of it. But the fact that I’m still alone gives me some strength to keep pushing. Yellow, downturned headlights get bigger quickly in my mirror.

An ‘00 Ford Lightning followed by a screaming REPU flew by. We’re somehow still doing double digits, even as the chassis flexing squeaks like hundreds of mice fleeing through the frame crushing in on them, and my skin crawls and every little piece of sympathy for this truck begs me to stop. But I know who’s driving that Mach-E, and I don’t intend to let them box me in.

Another Lightning passed. There’s a couple more headlights in my mirror, counting us down.

We’re coming to a stop. And when we do stop, I get the power, and the detective in the Mach-E becomes trapped, because I’m not boxed in. We could sit and wait all day because they can’t get out their car quicker than I can back up and go. Until they get backup, I’m untouchable.

I couldn’t tell you the taillights of the Ram SRT-10. But that exhaust note is like few others.

The Mach-E betrays no driver body language through the push. But they’re furious, I know. At me. At this gig. And then they prove it by stamping on the gas, hard. It leaps off my nose effortlessly.

The El Camino is the newbie’s car these days, for the new initiate ever since the previous owner disappeared. By the fact its cabin didn’t buckle and crush, and the fact I didn’t watch two bodies fly through the windscreen, I knew the cage was worth the effort, and the five-point harnesses were justified. Crates exploded into a flurry of polystyrene snow and wooden shrapnel over us.

Adrenaline finally pumping, I shouted into the walkie-talkie. “El Camino down!”

There was a storm back down the speakers of everyone talking over everyone else. But I wasn’t listening. The detective in the Mach-E stumbled, clutching his head, supporting himself on the door, and then the fender, fumbling for his pistol. I shot him first, with my high beams, making him jolt bolt-upright before clutching his head and sliding down his car.

And then Harrison climbed out of the El Camino, his own forehead bleeding, nose cracked, body pulsing with how much air he was moving. And he staggered over to me, one hand wrapped around the bed of the El Camino as a support rail, wavering like it was all he had to stop him falling off the top of cell tower. He got to the closest part of it to my car, and judged the distance like he was leaping between skyscrapers, even backed off a step before shambling over and landing on my hood. He had an easier time getting into mine, and dropping on the seat, as sets of red and blue lights shone vividly for the first time this night.

Harrison exclusively spoke in snaps and snarls. “Now what’d you do that for? What’s your excuse for fucking this all up?”

And I sat there, trying to determine my thought process like it mattered. Why I’d hung myself on their quarter panel. Why I didn’t back up and get away. Because evidently it was the wrong move, and the person who judges my fate is sat in my passenger seat, demanding answers.

He was never very animated. He just sat there, gesturing at the blocked road, shouting at me. “Go! Go! I said go! Why aren’t you going?”

Blood streamed from his forehead, I could tell that much, even while the only lights were a set of red and blue strobes getting closer. Everything he soaked caught the light like moonlight over the sea. All over the seats, and the carpets, and that staple of the period GM fuzzy finish around the bottom of the doors.

Cop cars pulled up behind us, and the detective stirred. But out of habit and instinct for the fastest acceleration, I held the brakes to build some torque, to subdue some of the turbo lag, and that momentary delay really pissed Harrison off. I apologised again and again while his ranting rose with the engine revs, but when all that pent up torque was released, he didn’t stop. Flecks of his blood coated the rear-view mirror or the rear window. Another splatter when we dropped off the side of the road to clear the wreck, and I hurt my Syclone more by hammering its frame against the floor. The cop cars chasing were higher and weren’t weighed down with so much payload. One followed my path without hesitation. The other stopped to investigate the crash.

“Eighteen months, that’s what you’re avoiding,” he said. “Don’t you know how well protected you are here?”

“Don’t wanna talk,” I mumbled, hesitant to use the soundboard with him in the car.

“Oh, we need to talk. You’re gonna tell me why you think it’s okay to do that!” He folded his arms and leaned back, so his back was against the window, staring and watching at me.

The Vortec has more power than the Crown Vics. Despite driving a truck, with a load in the back, and a distracting ballast in the passenger seat, I’m lighter. They aren’t geared much taller. And if my tyres are crappy, theirs are outright shitty. The roads are wide, open, fast, and quiet, so I can’t get caught out, and they can’t even pull some stupid kamikaze move. We simply drove away from it.

Harrison waited until the road steadied to reach for the mic. It could’ve been the poor lighting, but his knuckles looked battered and bruised and bloody. “Kenny’s down.” He wound down the window and spat into the gale of airspeed, and I watched the revs drop a couple hundred from the extra drag, and rise again when he wound it back up. “Definitely dead.”

My foot’s glued to the floor. The road is straight, and reasonably smooth, and there’s not an obstacle I could possibly need to prepare for. But none of that stops Harrison from turning to me, satisfied with his piece to the rest of the crew, and telling me, “You’ve gotta catch up with the convoy, drive faster!”

I’m still not sure why he wants us in convoy.

He doesn’t shut up and I’m forced to hold onto his words in case they’re pertinent, and unlike when I’m alone, I can’t pretend the walkie-talkie lost coverage and mute them. The road suddenly kinks, and while it’d be smoother to use all four lanes, I don’t like driving at the oncoming. It may even be futile, unless all the other maniacs running around with no lights on are just as thoughtful. But I don’t like driving on the oncoming lane.

“You’re turning too hard, you’re going to smash up the bottles,” he said, as I swung through another long curve. There’s taillights in the distance, and no sign of a Crown Vic in the mirror. “Pull over.”

He grunted when I pinned the brake pedal and the seatbelt hooked him. I was useless; reckless and stupid; going to ruin him and this whole operation. He unbuckled my seatbelt before we came to a stop, and slapped me. By now I’d been trained enough to look at him when the his hand stung my face. “I’m driving.”

I reached for my soundboard. “What did-.”

He tore it off the dash and frisbeed it away before it could recite its line. “Get out. I’m driving.”

With the engine still running, I pulled the handle and stood up at the same time as him. And when he was walking around the back of the truck, I dropped back in the seat and buried my right foot on the gas. The engine rumbled up through first crawling at first, then kicking me hard when the turbo spooled up, as he cussed and ran after me. The door was open and the air was slamming it shut against me. The increasing distance and wind noise drowned him out. I held on by one hand on the wheel, half on the seat.

I lifted when the door squeezing on my wrist became uncomfortable, and I was sure Harrison wasn’t hanging on the tailgate somehow. I took my first breath when both hands were on the wheel and the wind rushing past was no longer deafening. I buried my foot back on the gas.

The miles passed and I just kept heading east, operating on autopilot. Purposefully going too fast to afford the space to to think about the events of tonight. Some part of me was checking in on my direction, providing some sort of method to the direction I was going in the forks in the road, presumably based on nothing but the vibes of the roadsigns and how civilised that direction was. But the rest of my head was in racing driver mode, listening to the way my truck rotated and slid and skittered. I was driving faster than if I was in a pursuit situation, because if I did make a mistake, I could just recover. There was no impeding doom behind me, and the roads were wide and easy to drive fast, which just pushed me closer and closer to the ragged edge.

Until I turned around a long sweeper and the road opened up into nothing. Miles of dead straight, utterly flat, thoughtless driving. The gauges were all safe. The load in the back was secure. And my thoughts were starting to stir methods of Harrison coming back to me. My hand reached over to my scanner, and stopped. The radio wasn’t picking up any station worth listening to, and the voice of the hicks on air only reminded me of him in the way they talked about the things they did.

Everything reminded me of him, in a way. My posture that I had settled into needed correcting, with my hands at nine-and-three and the seat reclined slightly to untense comfortably. And no matter how I tweaked it, he commented that I was sitting strangely and grabbing attention until I did enough else wrong that he’d stopped talking about it. My speed was too fast because it was attracting attention or too slow because I wasn’t getting there fast enough and despite not aiming for anything in this very moment, I was going at the wrong rate for a person who was probably hiding in a ditch miles away. And because he’d never elaborate on why I’d done things the wrong way, leaving me hopelessly shooting fish in a barrel, praying that I was satisfactory and my position on the team was safe. It felt like dumb luck that it took that long to turn on me like he did on some of the past. If only I didn’t weld that cage so securely, or spec the nuts in the passenger seat so heavy duty.

The El Camino used to be Sadie’s. It was ugly when she bought it and aged even uglier years later. And it was especially ugly when it kept showing up to work with Harrison without Sadie in sight. And I regret being so thorough on the passenger seat welds.

The sun rose, and its warmth made everything, from the road surface to the crops in the fields, glow like molten steel. I was now far away from whatever I used to consider home. About the only thing familiar or trustworthy was the view to the end of the hood, but on the great plains, everything’s the same old rough and nothing. Endless views to distant hills that cut the horizon short, and a golden glow emanating around the hillsides, like there might be treasure waiting for me. The road’s paved, so it has to be taking me somewhere civilised. They all do here. If it isn’t paved, it isn’t worth driving towards as a stranger.

I could’ve kept driving at the sun for hours or days or for the rest of my life. But the gas light takes me out of it. I passed a gas station not too long ago. But at my speeds there won’t be one too far ahead either. I pressed onwards.

Pungent gasoline overrode every other sense. Usually its a welcome scent, but I was craving a coffee. It’d been a long night.

Naively, while browsing the gas station store for ways to clean up the blood, I realised that splitting us up into our individual skills was part of their racket. I could drive. And that was my worth. There was no need to teach or share skills, because we needed to depend on the others for the crew to stay together. I couldn’t tell you shit about cleaning a crime scene. Setting up the jamming equipment. Each one of us was a totally disciplined specialist. And only Del and the other loaders got access to the safehouse gym.

I grabbed a box of baby wipes and hoped for the best.

The worker placed the coffee on the worktop and gestured past my head at my Syclone parked up. The little flecks of blood on the glass made me cringe. “Nice ride. Like a GNX engine right?”

A voice screamed at me for talking to strangers until every other thought shut up. I stared at the counter for a long time, and on some level was aware of the hot coffee cooling off in front of me, and the splashed and stained plywood counter, but I couldn’t quite move or acknowledge it.

“Four-point-three.”

The cashier eyes kept looking past me.

“Four-point-three litres, the GNX was three-point-eight,” I repeated, a little louder. The heat rising from my coffee cups my chin like a long lost lover. “So it’s not from the GNX, it’s a little weaker.” Freedom hasn’t felt so good. “It’s fun. Nothing like it.”

Apparently I’d babbled into something they could leverage. He said something about a 454 El Camino that slipped by me.

I looked up, and ratcheted my cheeks up high. My smile felt chiselled on. “Those were the last of the good ElCos. See you around.”

His head perked up. “You gonna be running this route often?”

I pretended not to notice as I walked out into the forecourt. My wallet was still empty, but at least my gas tank was full. The full bed caught my eye as I thumbed my

I didn’t know how or where to sell the wine to. Or if my bottles were even legit. The crates gave an encouraging slosh when I picked one up and shook it. We worked out some deal where I’d use a few bottles as collateral, until I ‘found my wallet’. Lying was about the only thing I felt comfortable with, because when I did, he didn’t yell so much.

The fuel load gained wasn’t offset by the bottles jettisoned, so the Syclone would leave slower than it entered. The sun was firmly above the horizon by this hour, and there wasn’t a soul in sight.

The Syclone reared up when as the torque converter loaded up against the brake. When the brakes released, my coffee went flying, pooling with the dried blood across the interior. I didn’t know where this road lead, or what I’d do once I emptied the next tank of gas.

Story Notes

Three songs guided this story:

I Wish U Didn't Hate Me So Much by Kit Major
Caffeine & Alcohol by Kat and the Hurricane
El Camino by Not My Weekend

Font on the banner is called Slowdex. I wanted to use the Syclone logo, but I also wanted the vibe across my page, so I settled for this as a compromise. This font isn't all that pretty to use in regular typing (I used a mix of capitals and lowercase to build the banner at the top), which is why it doesn't feature outside of images.

Feelings

There's a lot I'd like to spend more time massaging and tweaking, but broadly this story does what I want it to do. Which is exist. It's been a long time since I've generated any sort of fiction unsupported by other media or without a reason. Racing Heart was nice because there was structure and a goal, but this is the first time in months I've written something for myself. Elements of it are way too forced and awkward to match the songs that blatantly inspired it, and as I'm writing this I wonder if I should've described the cars a little more because the average person is likely totally unaware of what a GMC Syclone or fifth gen El Camino is off the top of their head. But then again, this isn't for mass appeal.

It feels nice to be able to write about driving again. I've struggled to imagine being behind the wheel and hold these images in my mind to analyse and consider their details.

Legal Stuff

You can go to the specific location here. Screenshot taken with the sun set to 2025-03-10 12:01PM UTC, which has no bearing on the specifics of the story, I just picked a skybox that looked pretty. And you can view the screenshot here here.