A close shave
The burly bloke with the bat started across the street. Others were approaching from houses further down. We’d be minced meat soon…and I couldn’t get to that door in time. Then the sugar and fear kicked into Ali’s system and he speared his cane into the door gap. Just in time. The safety mechanism reacted and the door sprung open. We jumped in.
“Car: close the doors.”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave, ” the car replied, matter-of-factly.
“Ali! Now is not the time to be searching through the glove-box!”
“Wait a sec, a-ha,” he smiled. The interior lights went off, in fact the entire dashboard shut down. And most importantly the door slid back shut with a whoosh matching the whoosh of the cricket bat outside.
“What have you done? And what the hell is wrong with this car? It’s gone crazy.”
“I think it needs some attitude adjusting, but in the short term I just pressed the reboot button.”
Sure enough, the screen on the dash was coming back to life running through the self-check, installing the startup programs.
“Quick, hold the left radio button in and it starts up in safety mode.”
“Safety mode? Watch it!” One of the gorillas outside swung the bat into the windscreen. It bounced off - bullet-proof safety glass. The others had surrounded the limo and were starting to rock it backwards and forwards.
“Get in the front and grab that wheel,” Ali ordered. I followed without thinking. Mistake number one. Mistake number two was depressing the accelerator and skidding off over the toes of seven members of the Hills Angles Bike Club (sic, I read a tattoo on one of the forearms against the window).
Fortunately I couldn’t hear their screams as we left them nursing crushed steel-capped boots in a storm of gravel.
The street signs were non-existent in the area, the dashboard compass was not active in “Safe Mode” and our sense of direction was useless after spending so long cooped up in The Complex. We stopped a safe distance off to ask an old lady waiting at a bus stop, but I couldn’t understand her accent, nor she mine.
Finally we followed a bus onto Main North Road and headed south.
We were cruising back at eighty-five when I saw a police checkpoint up ahead. Was it a scam? I’d heard about fake police checkpoints recently and decided not to stop. Soon there were a posse of police motor cycles following us, indicating through the dark glass that I should pull-over.
