Free Fear Is the Rider by Kenneth Cook

faster, he’s catching up!’
    ‘I can’t hold it on the ridges!’
    ‘The faster you go the easier it’ll be. Go into third.’
    Katie slipped into third gear and the speedometer rose to eighty.
    ‘Foot down!’ yelled Shaw.
    He had been right even though he’d only been guessing: the faster the Honda sped over the gibbers the easier it was to control.
    A hundred kilometres an hour.
    ‘Go into top!’
    At a hundred and twenty the Honda almost glided over the gibbers, and the tyres stopped spinning the stones so frequently against the underside. It seemed almost quiet inside the car as it raced away from the Land Cruiser until the pursuing vehicle became a featureless mass, then a blur, then a column of dust above the heat haze.
    The desert is many different worlds. There is stone. Then sand. Then rock. Then the strange lines of scrub where the ancient soaks run. The only constant is the immense isolation. The isolation and the eternal killing sun.
    The outcrop of rock appeared ahead of them at first like a group of buildings.
    ‘There’s a town!’ said Shaw.
    ‘There can’t be. It’s something else.’
    As the Honda rode across the gibbers plain the rocks were revealed for what they were, a semi-mountainous, enigmatic outcrop rising high above the desert level. The track wound through the rock, winding and twisting, at times barely wide enough to take a motor vehicle. On either side the rock, red and white, rose high above the roof of the Honda. The surface of the track was hard, almost solid rock, but the Honda was travelling slowly as Katie took the hard turns in the track.
    ‘We could stop him here,’ said Shaw.
    ‘Stop him?’
    ‘Find some point in these rocks where he can’t ram us and wait for him with the shotgun.’
    ‘Kill him?’ She seemed to have forgotten that only minutes before she had made the same suggestion.
    ‘Kill him. Of course I’d bloody well kill him. Look, try that.’
    There was a natural cleft in the rock walls lining the track. It was about fifty metres deep and twenty wide, littered with boulders.
    ‘Stop!’ said Shaw.
    Katie stopped.
    ‘If we went in there, got the car behind one of those rocks, then got on top, when he comes after us he’ll have to go very slowly or come on foot. If we wait up there,’ he gestured at a side of the rock walls, ‘we could kill him whether he’s in the truck or not. You’ve seen what this thing can do at close range.’
    ‘But…’
    ‘But nothing.’
    ‘The hotel…’
    ‘One blown tyre and he’s got us. Here we can fight him.’
    ‘Where is he?’
    They looked east. There was a distant disturbance in the heat haze. It had to be dust.
    ‘Ten minutes behind us, fifteen,’ said Shaw. ‘We’ve got two chances if we stay in there. He might go past us, then we can cut back to Yogabilla. If he comes in after us we’ll get a shot at him at close range.’
    ‘But the hotel…’
    ‘We could be anything up to three-quarters of an hour away from the hotel even if nothing goes wrong,’ said Shaw impatiently. ‘This bloody car’s falling apart under us. And we get to this hotel…we don’t even know what’s there…who’s there, what it’s like. Here we have a chance of killing him, of getting past him.’
    Katie, young, civilised, in danger of death for the first time, tried to access the probabilities.
    ‘He might…’ she faltered.
    ‘He might do anything,’ said Shaw with sudden authority. ‘Drive in there. Get the car in between those boulders, he can’t ram us there.’
    Katie waited a moment then drove the car into the deep cleft. At the end of it, where the rock wall rose high and impassable, was a litter of boulders. She nosed the Honda in among them, scraping the sides. There was a way out on the other side of the boulders where the car could be driven back to the track, but while it stayed within the barricade of stone there was no way the Land Cruiser could ram it.
    ‘Right,’ said Shaw. ‘Keep the motor