Two-Lane Blacktop
2020 – The Salton Sea, California
Day or night, the voice of vengeance whispers in his ear. And every so often, Johnny Blaze can’t help but listen. It whispers today, as he’s crouched beside his motorcycle, tuning it up after the damage sustained in his last outing. A battle in a warehouse, somewhere far away. Flashes of a violent night, Johnny fading in and out in the frantic dance of possession and control. The memories hazed over, everything bleeding together in a mess of fire and retribution. Sometimes, Johnny asks: Is this all there is? Is this all we can do?
And Zarathos, the voice of vengeance that is always within him replies, What else do you want?
Justice, Johnny thinks, he prays.
That’s not our jurisdiction, is it?
But wouldn’t it be…
That’s not our responsibility. What are we?
The Ghost Rider, Johnny sighs. Soon he feels he will forget his own name.
What do we do?
We avenge the righteous who have been hurt by the wicked.
So what will we do?
Johnny doesn’t reply. He can smell something nearby. The smell of rotting flesh, sickly and heavy on the air that he now recognizes as the stink of sin and iniquity. He came to the Salton Sea in the hopes that the stink of rotting fish on the sea’s receding shores would cover it up, but this smell runs deeper. He smells it with his soul, not with his nose. The smile feels terrible as it spreads across his face, and he clamps a hand over his mouth. He knows that the rigor mortis grin is the first step of the transformation, and tonight, he doesn’t feel like transforming. He feels like being flesh and blood.
He feels like working on his motorcycle, and then having a beer and watching something dumb on TV.
But the smell that rides the wind, that wraps itself around him like a miasma… Johnny feels his lips parting, his teeth long and gnashing and bare, and the spirit of vengeance whispers again:
Johnny? What will we do?
“I guess,” Johnny says. “We’ll just have to do our job.”
And like that, the skin of his hands goes orange, burning like paper, and his muscles peel back as embers and boiling fat and meat drip away from him to reveal bones, smoking and sparking and igniting. Johnny feels his cheeks peeling back. He feels his flesh vanishing into flame, forcing a horrible grin as his teeth emerge from his skull. He feels his skull transforming, teeth growing longer, eye sockets getting deeper, brow ridge growing sharper, and his human sight vanishes and in its place comes a glowing, roiling vision of a world beneath the world, and that’s the last thing he knows as Johnny Blaze.
The smell is overwhelming now.
The world is a festering, rotting corpse, full of sin and death.
He is the Ghost Rider.
And the time has come for him to ride again.
Beside him, the hell-cycle trembles with anticipation, its eight cylinders growling and roaring, revving with the sound of brimstone cascading from the heavens. The fire is so bright and hot that the air seems to blacken around it.
Johnny hears himself scream and cackle, his voice screeching like a thousand bats swarming from the mouth of a slavering cretin in the depths of hell. He swings aboard the hell-cycle and twists the throttle. The hell-cycle takes off, bursting through the patchwork double doors of Johnny Blaze’s garage. The stink is all around him, but it comes stronger from the south.
Ghost Rider spins his hell-cycle around, leaving an arc of flaming tarmac in his wake. His rear wheel spins, burning rubber and asphalt into a cloud of smoke, and then it finds traction, and Ghost Rider is away, speeding down the two-lane blacktop.
They have been together a long time, Zarathos and Johnny Blaze. Perhaps too long for Zarathos to remember that he was not always like this. Long ago, he had been silent, efficient, a being of focus and reserve. Ever since being bonded to Johnny Blaze however, Ghost Rider has become an entity of reckless abandon. As the two beings who are one speed down the highway, they lean back on the handlebars, flaming skull cackling at nothing but the sheer rush of the road and the desert wind.
They shift their weight, sending the motorcycle off the road. Beneath them its shape begins to flow. The seat raises, the wheels draw closer together, the suspension lengthens. The body shrinks, until the hell-cycle is no longer an eight-cylinder monstrosity, but a nimble dirt-bike. It no longer belches flame and smoke in vast clouds, but instead draws them in a thin stream through the heat haze of the desert, like a whip slashing through the sound barrier.
Train tracks, raised on a long mound of earth, run parallel to the road, on the other side of which is a stretch of desert and another highway. They’re close now, the evil men that make this stink. They’re coming. And Ghost Rider will be there to meet them. He brings his bike at an acute angle to the tracks, and urges the hell-cycle on. It answers his thoughts, and with an angry buzz, it kicks and bucks beneath him and shoots forward. The earthen hill of the train-tracks is a perfect ramp, and with a blaze of fire, the hell-cycle sails through the air.
Johnny Blaze knows that he’s invulnerable. He’s been run over by a cement truck and walked away. He’s been buried alive in molten steel and swam his way out. He’s been punched so hard that he left the atmosphere, and landed back in earth ready to fight again, as soon as he climbed his way out of the thirty foot crater. Yet still, this thrills him, and he feels his heart stop for a moment, and he feels breath catch in his throat. The moment of flight, of weightlessness, with the world far below. The roar of wind and flames, the brilliance of the sun shining overhead.
He can’t help but let go of the handlebars for a moment letting the hell-cycle fall away from him. He twists backwards, flips once, twice, and catches hold of the hell-cycles handlebars once more. The harmony of several V8s running together creeps into the periphery of his senses. The arc of his jump is declining.
He sees them, coming down the highway. Eight motorcycles, surrounding a pick-up truck. A driver and a passenger. The truck is towing a horse trailer, and inside… Ghost Rider can’t tell yet. A life form, certainly, but its scent is overwhelmed by everything around it.
Long ago, Ghost Rider was fascinated by the scent of sin, by the infinitely nuanced variations that were possible. At first, he had done his best to keep track of it all – to recognize the scent of someone who had caused more harm than someone else, to savor the scent of heinous motivations, to compare that to the slightly sweeter smell of inadvertent harm. But after all these years, he was done with that. Whatever variations, the smell was really just the same.
He's among them before they know what’s happening. The hell-cycle reverts with a sudden explosion of molten metal to its base form, a monstrous chopper powered by a throbbing V8.
A flaming chain whips into existence in one hand. Swirling his arm, Ghost Rider brings it circling over his head like a lasso. It trails flame and heat and fear, and the mouth of his skull bursts open in a horrible grimace of dripping embers. One of the bikers falls beneath the chain, twisting, torn apart by asphalt before anyone knows what’s happening.
“Jesus Shit!” another one screams, and his bike’s front wheel tangles into the wreckage of his friend, and he goes sailing, flipping end over end through the air.
Ghost Rider roars and flings his chain out to catch him. It wraps around him as he spins, and with an angry yank, the flaming spirit of vengeance slams him down into the highway, hard enough to drive his head down into his shoulders with a crunch.
“Motherfucker!” a scream comes from behind him. Ghost Rider whips his head around, in time to see a biker swooping in next to him, a sawed of shotgun held like a lance in his direction. Eight cylinders roar and the biker swerves towards him. Ghost Rider feels the crunch of the barrel lodging itself between his skull and his vertebrae, and it only makes him smile. The biker pulls the trigger, sending a 12-gauge slug straight through his spine. Or, it would have gone straight through his spine if his bones weren’t infused with the energy of angelic retribution. Instead, the shotgun’s barrel bursts apart, twisting out of the biker’s hands. The force is enough to twist the Rider’s head around, but now he brings it back, slowly, bones sliding and clicking back into place.
The Rider grins.
The biker tries to swerve away, but Ghost Rider reaches out and snatches the back of his bandana-clad head. He leans to his left, dragging the man off his bike as he screams, flaming skeletal fingers digging into his skull, so soft, so mortal. And then Ghost Rider leans hard to the right and plants the biker’s face into the ground, holding it there until his hands feel rough asphalt rushing past. Behind him, a hundred yards of blood and bone smeared across the desert highway like so much roadkill.
Two more converge on him, one of them swinging a chain of his own, aiming for Ghost Rider’s front wheel. The fiery avenger pulls back on his handlebars and balances on the rear wheel, and the chain slashes harmlessly at the road. The biker rams into Ghost Rider, and their faces come close. Too close. For a moment, they’re nose to nose, and Ghost Rider’s gazes is without mercy.
A woman, a bar, a broken bottle, cutting her from ear to ear for laughing at his latest try-hard tattoo.
“Wretch,” Ghost Rider spits, and breaks eye contact.
“No, no, no, NO!” the biker screams and veers off the road, throwing himself from his motorcycle into the dunes. Ghost Rider watches as he claws at himself for a switchblade, as he whips it out and stabs it through one cheek and begins sawing his way through, bloody and screaming, jaw slowly coming loose.
The other sees what’s happening, keeps his distance, raises a handgun. He empties the magazine into Ghost Rider’s back. Ghost Rider swerves in front of him and sends a pyroclastic blast from his exhaust pipes, melting flesh off bones. Three are left, and the truck driver.
The truck swerves from side to side, and the three bikers in front peel off, dropping back to engage Ghost Rider. One of them glances back in time to see a chain whip forward like a snake. His face bursts out of the back of his head, and he falls with a fist-sized tunnel through his skull. The truck’s passenger leans out of his window, assault rifle hoisted awkwardly in Ghost Rider’s direction. Ghost Rider leans forward and snatches another biker off their seat. With one hand, he holds him aloft, with the other he twists the throttle.
The assault rifle’s chatter splits the wind as they bear down on the truck. The body in Ghost Rider’s hand shudders and goes limp, blood wicking off and splattering Ghost Rider’s face, evaporating in the same instant. With an angry heave, the spirit hurls the biker towards the truck. It knocks the passenger out of the window, and both go twisting beneath the truck’s wheels.
The last biker, to his credit, doesn’t run. He draws a massive machete from the sheath on his back and comes in swinging, Ghost Rider ducks his first blow, and then raises his arms to block the machete as it returns on the backswing. The blade turns to dust in his flames. Ghost Rider nudges his hell-cycle to the left, sends the biker careening off the road, into a rock. Nothing rises from the wreckage but smoke and flame.
He urges the hell-cycle forward and pulls up alongside the driver-side window.
“Pull over,” he says.
“Like fuck I will!” is the only response. That and a shotgun, jammed out the window.
Buckshot peppers him with dots of metal. Ghost Rider tears the gun free from the human hands and flips it around. A bony finger curls around the trigger.
“Not asking again,” he says.
The truck pulls over, coasting to a halt on a chorus of screaming breaks and hissing pneumatics. Before Ghost Rider can say anything, the door opens, and a man comes stumbling out. Dressed like the rest of the bikers, same leather vests, same insignia on the back. The Dogs of Hell. His face is young, though, blistering and shining with fresh acne. His beard is patchy, soft. Eyes wide and terrified. Ghost Rider stares into them.
A group standing in a circle, kicking at him while he hunches against it, gritting his teeth, weathering the pain. A bucket of reeking shit, upended over his head. A chorus of laughter.
Let him go, Johnny thinks. Look at his face. He’s young. He won’t cause any more trouble. Just let him-…
Zarathos grunts and Johnny sees:
A girl, fourteen, six years his junior. Pregnant.
His fingers squeeze, and the shotgun blasts a load of buckshot into the boy’s face at point blank range.
“What face?” Zarathos growls.
Fuck! Johnny rages against him, strains against the flaming skull that has overtaken him. The ribcage, glistening with embers and roasting human meat, is like a prison. A heart, greasy and dripping long streams of fire, beating harder, harder. You didn’t have to do that.
Zarathos stares at the body in front of him, and he shrugs.
“Rapist,” the spirit says and spits a stream of fire. “Vengeance. Easy enough.”
Johnny has no answer. For a moment, they are two beings once more, resenting each other’s presence. With slow even strides, they make their way towards the back of the trailer, heavy boots crunching through the gravel on the side of the road. The keening screech of a red-tailed hawk echoes through the crackling of the truck’s hot engine, through the oppressive heat and silence of the high desert. The rotting-fish smell is gone, but the trailer? It smells of something else. Something neither Johnny nor Zarathos can quite place. It isn’t the scent of a righteous soul. It isn’t the undeniable pleasure, the measure of peace that settles over him in the presence of those very few (so very few) that passed muster with the eldritch laws by which Zarathos takes stock of morality.
Instead it’s… an absence. They can hear it now, a voice whimpering, near-panic. One set of lungs, one hoarse throat, heaving breaths rising and falling, inside the trailer. Even as they listen, it begins to settle, to calm itself. The scent… Nothing. A life-form, void of both sin and virtue.
Well what the hell is this? Johnny thinks.
“We’ll find out,” Ghost Rider reaches forward and wrenches the trailer door open.
Inside, a young woman. She’s dressed in a white tank-top, cut-offs, cowboy boots. Her hair is disheveled and dirty. Her eyes are wide and ready, but he doesn’t see the wildness of fear within them. Ghost Rider sees readiness, and a wolf’s hunger. In one hand, she clutches an ornate dagger. In the other, a thin rod of iron, carved with runes and insignias that Ghost Rider can’t quite place. The dagger is held defensively, the iron rod is pointed in his direction.
“Oh, fuck,” the woman says. “It’s you.”