Free Already Dead by Jaye Ford

foot, didn’t spend her driving life over the speed limit hoping a camera didn’t pick her up. Her hands were clammy, shoulders tight, teeth locked. Two vehicles back, a four-wheel drive opted out of the race and moved into the outside lane. The blue sedan closed the distance.
    A sign. To Newcastle, to every major stop between here and Brisbane. No exit coming up.
    â€˜Fuck,’ Brendan said.
    â€˜He’s behind us,’ Jax said. ‘What can he do from back there?’
    â€˜There’s more than one.’ He said it as though she was stupid. ‘And I’m not the only one with a weapon. They’ve got them. They’re prepared. Guns and knives and … fuck, I didn’t, I swear I … and … and fucking missiles.’
    Jax pressed her lips together, blinked hard. He was going to lose it while she was twenty k’s over the speed limit. She’d been a news reporter once, had seen the wreckage of fatal car crashes, and her memory was throwing up horrific images she’d tried to forget. Of crushed and charred vehicles, of covered bodies on roadways. And images that would never leave her, that the policehad shown her: Nick’s body, covered and photographed without a vehicle in sight to explain it.
    She clenched her teeth, eased her foot off the pedal. The car behind, a silver BMW, almost kissed her bumper before dropping back.
    â€˜Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. Good thinking. Do it fast with this guy in the way. Catch him off guard,’ Brendan said.
    Do what?
    He spoke with his face turned away, twisting to his left. ‘Now.’ The front end of a semitrailer was lumbering beside them, its load two car-lengths long. What was he thinking? ‘Get in front of it and do it, Jax.’
    She hit the accelerator, moved in front of the huge engine, scanning the motorway ahead. There was no exit. Did he want her to get off the road here? It ran straight for at least a kilometre and the verge was narrow, bordered by bush and a low metal guardrail. Not a good place to pull over, not with an eighteen-wheeler on her arse.
    â€˜Where is he?’ Brendan asked.
    As she glanced at the rear-view, the blue sedan slipped in behind the semi. ‘Just merged. A couple back.’
    â€˜Okay.’ He faced forward, spine pressed into the seat, slid the pistol chamber back and forth with a chnk-chnk , something proficient and practised in the way he did it. ‘Listen up. We pull over, let him fly past, give him a head start and get back on the road. Then we take the first exit. Ready?’
    â€˜No, wait. I can’t pull over here. It’s not wide enough.’
    â€˜We have to work with what we’ve got.’
    According to what manual? ‘We don’t have to do it here,’ she said, hearing the plural ‘we’ and wondering whenthey’d become a team. ‘He’s behind us. He probably can’t even see us around the truck. We can wait until there’s somewhere better.’ Where her side of the car wouldn’t be taken off by the grille of a speeding truck.
    â€˜Fuck!’ He swung his head to the rear window. ‘Did you see that?’
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜Cop car. Heading south. Lights on, no siren.’
    The north- and south-bound streams were separated by a wide strip. For much of the distance up the coast, the space was filled with bush or cut rock, blocking the view of oncoming traffic. Sometimes there was a gap – dirt and rubble or a stretch of tarred surface where RTA vehicles could turn around and highway patrol cops sat with radars. Jax glanced across a clearing at the sparse flow heading south, craned her neck for a view in the mirror, but couldn’t see through thick scrub.
    â€˜But it was going the other way,’ she said.
    â€˜They’re coming from Newcastle, not Sydney now.’
    Who? The police? The cops were trained and wouldn’t stop. They had guns … but missiles?