Carbon 250 - Chapter 14

The aftermath of the incident involving a car driver attempting to kill a motorcyclist and that motorcyclist reponding by hitting the car with a chain elapsed quickly. The typical vultures descended:  print and tv reporters, then some talk show hosts.  The car driver had his new story ready--the one where he was not the agressor--and paraded his family on tv, milking the situation as much as he could.

On the roads, the situation began to change.  The normal state of things is that some percentage of drivers had motorcyclists, because of jealousy or some other infantile emotinon that doen't matter.  The motorcyclists--the fast ones--don't really regard the car drivers at all, because to them cars are slow-moving traffic cones, to be dodged and forgotten.  This began to change when some of the motorcyclists began to think that the car drivers were gunning for them.  Some of them were;  some of them had some very strong opinions and wanted an altercation of their own.  The problem is, pretty much everything someone in a car can do to someone on a motorcycle amount to attempted vehicular manslaughter.  There were more chains on the road.  More pipes, more knives, more guns carried.

The story about the yellow biker and the chain lost momentum as quickly as it had got it, since a single isolated incident can only be milked for so long, but before it died it was handed to a woman looking for a cause.  She was not a local by any means, and had in fact moved to the city from far beyond the suburbs, but that location was still close enough for the residents where she lived to refer to this as "the city."

Her name was Maggie Pennington, and she was well connected.  She received the news while dutifully standing near one of her children's soccer games.  Maggie Pennington had had her own brush with a motorcyclist a long, long time ago, but we''ll get to that later.  This was the opportunity Maggie was hoping for:  a cause.  She took the incident and made it part of her platform, running a terror campaing in her bid for the mayors office that made people feel unsafe in a city with one of the lowest murder rates.  She began shopping for a additional corporate sponsors immediately after the game.

There were little other signs of the coming storm.

For Eve, life continued.  She worked at the coffee shop and tips kept coming in at the bar.  She looked for a third job but nothing quite fit her schedule, or her.  She borrowed textbooks from the library.  She didn't quite know what to get; she had been undecided in college.  She read a bit of everything.  When she had a free night, she rode.  She never saw Biff, or at least was never sure that someone was him.  A rider with a black jacket on a black motorcycle wasn't a rare combination.

Dave had started moving pieces of his weekend warrior arsenal out of his bedroom, and, presumably into storage somewhere.  Eve wasn't sure what it meant, but it did seem more normal.