A Fistful of Trouble (Outlaws of the Galaxy Book 2) Paul Tomlinson (reading strategies book .TXT) 📖

robot’s hand. Both of them disappeared. The robot turned to look at its smoking stump. I think it was annoyed. It turned its eyes on me and began head-butting the windshield, determined to get to me. After four or five blows, the glass started to crack. Now I was annoyed. I pulled my pistol out of its holster and pointed it through the glass at the robot’s head. I think its eyes widened in the second before I pulled the trigger. The shot punched a hole through the glass and another in the robot’s forehead. It let out an almost human scream and then it was gone, whipped away on the breeze.

Harmony and I pushed out the rest of the shattered windshield so we could see. I’d dropped back some way behind the truck at this point. I pulled us back onto the paved road so we could make up the distance. As we gained on it, the trailer began to slew left and right. I could hear the truck’s tyres screeching as they slid across the concrete road surface. I dropped back again. I was worried that one of the tyres might blow and send the trailer over on its side. Then, unexpectedly, the trailer began to slow.

“What’s he doing?” I muttered.

“Maybe his tank’s empty?” Harmony was reloading her gun.

“It’s some kind of trick.”

“I’m ready for it.” She slapped the clip back into place.

As the trailer slowed, so did I. When the trailer began to slide sideways, I slammed on the brakes.

“He’s gone,” I said.

“What?”

“He released the trailer and took off.”

I drove off the road and took us around the abandoned trailer which was slowly coming to rest across the highway. I slowed down so we could look inside.

“Can you see Floyd?” I asked.

Harmony shook her head. “Just a load of scrap and something that looks like blood.”

“It’s not human,” I said. “Happy gutted an android.”

“Gross!”

When we were past the trailer, I pulled back onto the highway.

“There he is!” Harmony pointed.

Happy had a three or four-mile head start and without its trailer his truck could shift at a pretty fair speed.

“Floor it!” Harmony yelled. I did.

After that, with the wind rushing in where the windshield used to be, conversation was impossible.

“I don’t want him dead!” I shouted.

“What? You want me to kill him?”

“No!”

I didn’t think Floyd would be in the cab with Happy Hawkins, but I needed to catch the old man so he could tell us where Floyd was. I’d let Harmony shoot his limbs off one at a time if that’s what it took. I didn’t think it would come to that.

The combination of wind and smoke made our eyes stream. There was an old pair of goggles somewhere in the Trekker, but I didn’t want to stop to find them.

“We’re gaining on him!” Harmony yelled. Maybe she thought my vision was more blurred than hers.

I took us closer. I turned to warn Harmony, but she must have guessed what I was going to do. She was fastening herself into the three-point safety harness.

“Hold tight!” I shouted.

“Ramming speed!” She yelled, grinning at me.

I’d always thought the bars on the front of the Trekker were a bit too butch – but now I was glad that they were there. I pushed in close to the back of the truck, closing the gap between us. I wasn’t directly behind it. I kept us offset so I could target just one set of the truck’s wheels. Hitting the wheels on just the one side was the most important part of my plan. That and braking quickly enough to avoid a collision.

I blipped the accelerator and we lunged forward. The Trekker’s front end smashed into the truck’s rear wheel-arch, forcing the metal into the tyre. There was some blue smoke and a whiff of hot rubber, but the impact didn’t have the dramatic effect I’d hoped for. I backed off, ready to try again.

I looked across at Harmony and she looked at me. If my eyes looked like hers, then they were red and wild. We were like two kids who’d jumped onto the scary fairground ride and couldn’t get off.

“Do it!” Harmony shouted.

I jammed my foot down and the Trekker shot forward again. And this time my foot stayed down.

What I was effectively trying to do was put the brakes on the rear left side of the truck. Locking just these wheels would affect the truck’s handling a bit.

“It’s going!” I shouted.

The truck started to slide sideways. I eased off the accelerator. Happy tried to steer with the slide and he almost made it. But a front wheel ploughed into the soft dirt at the edge of the highway and the truck began to tip. Happy panicked and jammed on the brakes. The truck flipped sideways and began to roll down a slight slope away from the highway, throwing up clouds of red dust.

I brought our progress to a more controlled stop.

We sat, catching our breath and waiting for the dust to settle. The sudden silence made me feel like I’d gone deaf.

Harmony released her seatbelt and leaned forward, peering through the dust at the fallen truck. “I hope Floyd wasn’t in there,” she said.

“He could survive that,” I said.

“Do you think Happy survived?” she asked.

“I’ll go and look,” I said.

“We’ll both go.”

As we approached, I could see something pale hanging out of the trucks shattered front screen.

“Looks like the airbag deployed,” Harmony said.

There was no sign of Floyd in the cab. We walked around the wreckage. There was a lone figure sitting on a boulder a little distance away. Happy Hawkins looked dazed but otherwise unharmed. He was perched on a little inflatable ring, trying to keep his weight off his left buttock. The old bastard must have more lives than a cat. He looked up as we approached.

“Look what you did to my truck.” He was staring down at his shoes and looked as deflated as the airbag. “You shot my robots and wrecked my truck.”

I wanted to