Breaking Free, Mia stunned
Mia watched in stunned, breathless silence as Arthur Sterling kept tearing along the sprawling Los Angeles interstate.
He hadn't turned off onto any of the darkened, narrow side roads or desperate exit ramps.
Curious and terrified as she was by his unorthodox strategy, she kept her mouth firmly shut, trusting the steady, confident posture of the young mechanic steering them through the night.
She simply wrapped her arms impossibly tight around Arthur's lean waist, burying her face and resting her helmeted head firmly against his solid back.
The absolute moment he had gunned the throttle, that explosive surge of vintage power had successfully left the sprawling biker gang far behind in the rearview mirrors.
Before long, though, the cold, harsh reality of physics set in; Arthur realized he might have been entirely too optimistic about their chances of a clean getaway.
Vroom—vroom!
The deafening, guttural roar of heavy, modified motorcycles behind him never faded into the ambient noise of the highway.
If anything, the terrifying mechanical howling felt like it was creeping closer with every passing second.
Suddenly, a massive, burly Redneck riding an absolute monster of a machine—a Dodge Tomahawk—shot to the absolute front of the hunting pack.
The heavily tattooed biker locked his sights directly onto Arthur and absolutely wouldn't let go, the massive engine practically breathing down their necks.
Through the vibrating glass of his mirror, Arthur caught a clear sight of that outrageous, chrome-plated machine and actually felt a brief, undeniable spark of mechanical fascination.
Plenty of gearheads and underground riders think the legendary Dodge Tomahawk looks incredibly cool on a poster or in a showroom.
But hardly any actual, hardcore biker gangs ever ride one on the open road.
The primary reason was brutally simple: it's just entirely too heavy and utterly impractical for anything other than a straight, perfectly paved line.
In theoretical engineering terms, the massive V10-powered Tomahawk tops out somewhere above six hundred kilometers per hour, yet a pristine model costs a staggering five or six hundred grand.
For that kind of absurd money, a person could easily buy almost any top-tier luxury car in the States.
Hell, you could even pick up a small, private plane for that price.
So, naturally, only the absolute most hardcore, filthy-rich fanatics ever actually buy the ridiculous machine.
The bike alone weighs nearly seven hundred kilos of pure, unadulterated American steel and engine block.
Handling that kind of immense mass nimbly at high speeds is absolutely no joke; it requires superhuman strength and a blatant disregard for basic physics.
Because of this, most outlaw riders vastly prefer the reliable, customizable agility of Harleys or Indians.
Even when high-rolling gangs go with Dodge, they almost universally skip the cumbersome Tomahawk.
At least, Arthur had absolutely never seen a gang member ride one in the wild—until tonight.
"Hahaha!"
The burly Redneck laughed wildly, his manic voice barely carrying over the deafening roar of the massive V10 engine trapped between his knees.
Using the Tomahawk's sheer, brute power, he rapidly and effortlessly closed the remaining gap.
"Hey, grease monkey..." the biker bellowed, his face twisted into an ugly, cruel sneer. "This ain't a place for your kind!"
"Hey, girl..." he continued, his eyes aggressively locked onto Mia. "Tonight let us show you what a real man feels like!"
Hearing the violently lewd taunts over the rushing wind, Arthur narrowed his eyes and noticed the massive biker violently fighting his heavy handlebars, desperately trying to aggressively ram Arthur's lighter bike off the asphalt.
Arthur's heart sank slightly as he glanced down; the glowing speedometer already read a terrifying one hundred and forty miles per hour.
His old, classic machine obviously couldn't hope to match the sheer, terrifying top speed of the Dodge monster.
Still, he'd just spent days meticulously repairing and tuning it; for a desperate, short burst, pushing it to one hundred and fifty, one hundred and eighty—even two hundred—was technically doable.
It just wouldn't last for long, though—this was a vintage, aging machine, and the engine block would eventually melt under that kind of sustained thermal stress.
He swerved hard to the right, his tires screaming in protest as he barely dodged the gang member's violent, charging ram.
I miscalculated, Arthur thought, his mind racing with cold, clinical precision. I badly underestimated the sheer horsepower of the gang's elite bikes and heavily overestimated my own ride's endurance.
Originally, his tactical plan was to simply blast down the highway at top speed until he neared one of California's notorious, heavily armed highway patrol speed-trap zones.
Once the flashing lights of the Highway Patrol showed up in the rearview, the heavily armed gang would immediately scatter like cockroaches, and he and Mia would be completely free.
Now, with this monster breathing down his neck, it looked like he was going to be violently caught and run off the road before ever reaching the nearest trap.
He was incredibly tense, his muscles coiled like steel springs, but he was absolutely not panicked.
His [Driving] skill had officially hit level 3 that very afternoon, giving him an almost supernatural level of mechanical confidence and situational awareness.
With each subsequent level the proficiency system raised, Arthur gained far more than just a simple free stat point and a cubic meter of dimensional private space.
He also seamlessly soaked up decades of advanced, instinctual driving know-how, split-second reflex timing, and masterful technique.
Thanks entirely to that system-granted mastery, he felt almost entirely fused with the old bike; he was no longer just a rider, but an extension of the machine itself.
From the subtle, changing pitch of its engine note, he could instantly, perfectly sense its exact mechanical condition and thermal limits.
After executing another sharp, incredibly quick dodge to avoid the Redneck's second attempted ram, Arthur tilted his head slightly back.
"Hold on tight!" he told Mia softly, his voice a calm anchor in the chaos.
Feeling her slender arms cinch his waist with desperate, bruising force, he aggressively twisted the throttle to its absolute breaking point.
The vintage bike, already screaming at one hundred and fifty miles per hour, violently surged forward yet again.
In a matter of terrifying seconds, the trembling needle rapidly climbed past one hundred and seventy.
Whoosh!
Whoosh!
He caught up to a civilian car a few hundred yards ahead, expertly flicked the tail of the bike with a micro-adjustment of his hips, and blew past the terrified driver in a blur of chrome.
Then, he opened the throttle even wider, risking catastrophic engine failure, and shot by another unsuspecting vehicle a hundred yards beyond that.
The cool, salty sea wind kept violently slapping against Arthur's face, trying to tear him from the saddle; right now, his heart was pounding wildly, a heavy drum in his chest.
The intense, raw thrill of that extreme, life-or-death speed made the man who had been a thirty-plus-year good boy, always playing it incredibly safe in his previous life, feel more electrically exhilarated and alive than ever before.
Vroom!
The terrifying roar of a massive engine quickly sounded again, right behind his rear tire.
With a blinding flash of bright, high-beam light bouncing off his mirrors, Arthur knew the relentless Redneck biker on the Dodge Tomahawk had already caught up.
His speed was still steadily climbing—already pushing past one hundred and eighty and terrifyingly creeping toward the two-hundred mark.
Even on a perfectly straight, empty freeway, traveling anything over one hundred and twenty on a two-wheeled vehicle is considered seriously, lethally dangerous.
High-performance bikes are specifically built so they can easily outrun most modern sports cars, and even million-dollar supercars, in a straight line.
But when real, physical trouble hits, a motorcycle's basically zero armor protection means that just one single, solid hit from another vehicle—or one small patch of uneven asphalt—and you're completely, instantly toast.
Probably very few outlaw biker gangs ever truly dare to push their heavy cruisers past the one-hundred-and-fifty mark.
While keeping the violently shaking vintage bike under absolute, masterful control, Arthur kept relentlessly overtaking civilian cars on the freeway, desperately hunting for a split-second chance to completely break away from his pursuer.
At the exact same time, he expertly split his intense attention to the vibrating mirrors, constantly watching the chaotic road unfolding behind him.
Soon, his enhanced situational awareness noticed a crucial shift in the pursuit.
Only a very small handful of the most elite, fearless bikers were still actually hanging on to the chase, rapidly closing from dozens of meters back.
Within ten immediate meters of his rear tire, there was absolutely just the burly Redneck on the massive Tomahawk, violently cursing a nonstop stream of profanities into the rushing wind.
"Punk, since you're asking for death, don't blame me!" the heavy rider screamed, his face contorted in blind rage.
They violently tore along the packed interstate freeway for a good twenty or thirty harrowing kilometers.
Arthur's eyes darted across the horizon, but he never spotted a single flashing light of a California Highway Patrol speed trap. Worse, he felt his old, over-stressed bike start to violently shudder and rattle beneath him.
He knew with absolute certainty that the vintage machine couldn't possibly keep up this crazy, suicidal speed for much longer without the engine completely detonating.
He glanced again at those trailing Hell's Angels bikers—especially the furious Redneck on the Dodge Tomahawk—who were still stubbornly glued to his tail within ten meters.
If the massive Tomahawk weren't so incredibly heavy and aerodynamically cumbersome, the crazed guy would have already agilely sideswiped him more than once and violently knocked him off the pavement.
Seeing the relentless, murderous intent in the biker's eyes, Arthur's cold calculation flared into sharp, focused anger.
Spotting a steep, curving off-ramp not very far ahead in the darkness, he aggressively twisted the throttle one final time, and the screaming bike violently surged.
Gripping the vibrating bars tight enough to turn his knuckles white, he shot past a massive, eighteen-wheeler truck, expertly used its massive steel trailer as a sudden visual shield, and aggressively veered down the steep ramp.
With a final, desperate howl of the overtaxed engine, he seamlessly vanished from the gang's sight, swallowed entirely by the neon shadows of the Los Angeles night.