Fear Is the Rider Read Online Free PDF Page B

between them and Yogabilla.
    ‘Jesus Christ!’ shouted Shaw.
    Then, because there was nothing else to do, he wrenched the steering wheel to the right and sent the Honda racing towards Obiri, six hundred kilometres away.
    Forty, fifty kilometres an hour, and the gibber stones were thudding violently on the underside of the car. He held it in first until he felt the motor would fly from its mountings.
    The Land Cruiser shot into the Honda’s dust cloud as it pulled away. A hail of stones was flung into the air behind the Honda, striking the Land Cruiser, chipping the duco, starring the windscreen.
    Shaw pushed into second gear and reached eighty. The Land Cruiser and the Honda raced along the track within five metres of each other; the shower of stones from the Honda began to rattle against the Land Cruiser like machine-gun bullets. The windscreen must be beginning to star so thickly that it would be difficult to see through it although the driver couldn’t have realised this, because all there was to see was the convulsing cloud of the Honda’s dust. He must be just driving into it, sticking to the track, knowing that if he could go fast enough he would run the Honda down.
    But the Honda was by far the faster on the track. Shaw had it in third gear now and the speedometer was touching a hundred. It was pulling steadily away from the Land Cruiser.
    ‘How fast will that thing go?’ Shaw shouted to Katie.
    ‘Not much more than eighty,’ she shouted back, ‘there’s a governor on it.’
    Not much more than eighty. He was pulling away from it at twenty kilometres an hour. Nowhere near enough. He slid the gear stick into top and let the Honda fly along the dusty track. The most it would do in perfect conditions was a hundred and forty. Now he pushed it up to a hundred and twenty. On the rutted, irregular surface it was more in the air than on the ground, but the steering held true and it pulled far ahead of the lumbering Land Cruiser.
    He turned the air-conditioning off to gain the last ounce of power from the motor. He should have done that before, he thought. Immediately the temperature of the interior of the car jumped by ten degrees and Katie and Shaw felt the sweat bursting out of them. Shaw wound down the window an inch or so: the hot air rushing in was minimally better than the air in the closed car.
    ‘We can’t just go on along here.’ Katie still had to speak loudly, although it was much quieter in the car now with the air-conditioning off and the vehicle running in top gear. ‘The track isn’t like this all through it.’
    ‘There’s nothing else I can do,’ said Shaw. ‘We were bloody lucky not to bog in the desert that time. If we find a hard patch of something I might try to get past him. Are there any salt pans?’
    ‘I don’t know. I think so.’
    ‘With any luck, if we can keep far enough ahead of him, he might just give up.’
    ‘He won’t,’ she said with a certainty that chilled Shaw.
    ‘The policeman at Yogabilla said there was a place, a motel or a hotel or something, halfway between here and Obiri.’
    ‘He told me about that as well,’ she said. ‘It’s too far.’
    Shaw looked at the trip odometer. He had travelled about fifty kilometres from Yogabilla. It was about another two hundred and fifty to the hotel.
    ‘We’d get there in less than three hours if the track stayed like this.’
    ‘It doesn’t.’
    As if to demonstrate the truth of her statement the Honda struck a deep hole in the track, bounced high in the air and veered almost off the track before Shaw brought it under control.
    ‘Something’s going to bloody well break if we keep this up,’ he said.
    ‘You won’t be able to keep it up for long anyway,’ said Katie, ‘the wheel ruts will get so deep this car won’t clear the centre. You’ll have to go back.’
    ‘I can’t get past him,’ said Shaw angrily. ‘For Christ’s sake, you saw what happened then.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
    Shaw looked