Disqualification Tablet, Chapter Four

Leaving the lost city to the silence it knew best, the racer began to sprint. Joe was fast situating himself in a place light-years away and calendar-years far gone, and this alien road whose psychedelic undulations he was even now negotiating was transforming into what his road had been. That was where the powers of The Four Heroes were to be tapped. Set Joe down on that strip, and nothing could keep pace with him.

Other contestants living and robotic might have been traffic-cones, for Joe was circumnavigating them as if they were motionless. Night and day were like flickers of a light-switch, so rapidly did our hero traverse the Tablet’s tunnels to recover the ground he had lost. The car by now was a dazzling crimson filament, notching up mile after mile of Tablet track with every second that passed.

“Wow…!” breathed Flashtease, and even Contamination was for once without a retort.

Disqualification Tablet’s last loop-the-loop was nigh, a flamboyant flourish from whatever surrealist designed that course, higher up amidst the stars than any other of its wild extremities. Joe described the swiftest of ciphers in overcoming this final obstacle, and yet for him there was an instant while he was about it when time seemed to slow, and his hair streaming out behind him held on the horizontal, as his eyes chanced a sidelong glimpse that put the whole of this strange and wondrous quadrant fleetingly out of sight.

The artful loop was so set that Acheldama’s red orb seemed to hang at dead centre, and from the perspective of those traversing it one seemed to round the very chromosphere of that distant burning blot. Joe knew this particular boundary was the nearside to his home, at least insofar as the prefix “near” meant anything at all in relation to the distances his life involved today. Somewhere past that lonely aged sentinel, though incalculable expanses of cosmic ocean rolled between, the lands he remembered were still there. Every place where it had happened, from those first formative experiences on which his memories had lately dwelled, all the way to the minute he and Nottingham parted company, memorable too. There was a whole other road. It promised to be longer than this one had been, but reverting his gaze to the track ahead while the microsecond drew gradually on to its termination and real-time started up ever more insistent indications it was about to recommence, our hero knew with a certain quiet fortitude he would walk it before he was through.

They were on the home stretch. Joe blasted out of the loop’s exit-curl and zoomed past leader after leader until there, at last, were the silver locks and sleek black fuselage upon which all depended. Yet even as he girded the racer for this last bout against his veteran star-jockey rival, the very world began to shake around him. It had nothing to do with his fuel-lines, for every vehicle in the vicinity was likewise afflicted. The track itself was trembling. Joe, along with each of his fellow sentient beings behind each of their respective wheels, glanced back.

Moving through matter and vacuum as though they were one, some vast something was quite literally eating up the road. Much about it suggested a monster-truck of nightmare dimensions, though its moonlike treads were anaphasically immersed in the course such that it seemed not so much to be driving as swimming like a leviathan going after masses of tiny squirming prey. True to this resemblance it ploughed on with great mouth wide, an apocalyptic black hollow barred with antediluvian tarnished straights, as to scoop slowcoaches directly down into its gargantuan gullet. This was no competitor in a mere race. It was a primal force, one which channelled the very spirit of Disqualification Tablet’s thrusting vying hard-beaten existence, where life was lived in the raging current between asphalt and glinting stars, and nothing more than nerve-endings and a bundle of clinking linkages made the difference between doom and glory. This creature had lived since the moment in its eons-ancient galaxy when the first challenger looked the first champion in the eye. Here was the place where racing began.

“Brumber,” Flashtease whispered in awe.

Joe did not ask for elucidation. Brumber seemed self-explanatory, at least in terms of his bearing on the present circumstances. So, telling himself not for the first time he would one day get used to this place, our hero rigged his engines for escape-velocity and like everyone else sharing this stretch of track strove to stay ahead of the leveller. Mini-Flash Splitsville was going all-out with the rest of them, even as Joe pressed determinedly on to close the gap. He knew timing was going to be everything, though staying out of Brumber’s guts was not far below on the agenda.

The most resolute racers towards the rear had already started spinning in that dark direction, while those with a little more sense were mounting the embankment to quit the track and take their chances in orbit instead. Contamination screeched to Joe: “We’re not going to sauté this one, human, so I hope there’s a workable plan shoved somewhere up that ludicrous headgear of yours!”

Joe hoped so too. Nearly there. It was taking everything his motor had left to give, but he and Mini-Flash Splitsville were all but kissing chrome. Brumber’s palate however was an awning by now, lowering inch by inch down the top of Joe’s windshield, rimmed with terrible rusty rays. Flashtease and Contamination clung together. While Joe gripped the wheel and held on, Splitsville ahead threw her hair out of her face in one last backward glance then stood, the silver-blue in billows and her tunic-skirts typical of Mini-Flash modesty, to part both her palms.

Then the lacquered lips parted likewise, as Joe’s racer roared over Splitsville’s in a colossal leap for the finish and plunged into her own portal ahead of her.

Bursting free of the exit-doors our heroes beheld before them the opposite tip of Disqualification Tablet to the one from which they had started, while Acheldama’s steady red spanned the overarching sky. During the race the audience had migrated from the stands at the start-line to those at this end, and now were upright in their seats. Joe rounded out the closing furlongs and powered through the finish-tape, then blew the racer’s parachutes and slewed at long last to rest as the crowd’s jubilation rose to the very heavens and Petunia and Flashshadow hugged each other and danced for joy.

That same pair of girls was at the head of the horde which rushed down to honour the triumphant trio now disembarking from their proud crimson chariot. “Don’t forget I’m allowed to kiss the winner!” Petunia sang out.

“Please, take your pick,” Joe replied at once, shoving Flashtease and Contamination in the direction of her pucker while he turned back. A certain ebon-hued racer was just arriving, and our hero waited by the side of its lane until the silver-haired pilot pulled up to him and applied her brakes. That she did so with neither anger nor pettiness Joe appreciated deeply, for this Mini-Flash had been a fair opponent indeed, and any intelligent life-form would have known her respect for something well worth earning.

“Now, Mini-Flash Splitsville,” said Joe. “As you yourself would put it…let us rap.”

END OF CHAPTER FOUR