"Poetry Cops"

CHAPTER ONE:  "Escape!"
***
"Jump on," he yelled to her. "Fast!"

Grunt and the rest of the gang poured drunkenly from the riotous biker club into the parking lot, tripping over one another while grabbing chains, knives, and baseball bats. Red faces. Glaring eyes. An angry mob.

Dinah looked at the young man on the blue-painted motorcycle. Exactly the kind of white guy she most hated. Lanky and lean. Bland, smug, and superior, with the pale blue eyes of a serial killer.

The black sky hovered as empty as his mind.

"Get on--" he said, more gently, but insistently.

Redness appeared over one eye on his summer-tanned Aryan face, where he'd been punched defending her from the gang. That meant something, she supposed. But could she trust him? Did she have a choice?

These thoughts went through her brain in the space of a second. When a horde of crazed racists are out to destroy you, one second lasts forever.

Around them: a town, cars, diners, saloons, a yellow-black biker club and parked in the lot, about 100 gleaming low-cut and chrome motorcycles.

"Get on!" the young man shouted violently.

At the bark of his voice Dinah jumped on the back of the chopper grabbing his waist and the bike roared to life propelled them like lightning from the parking lot-- thrown beer bottle missing her head-- they escaped onto the blacktop the long highway into the encompassing enveloping suddenly protective night.
***

CHAPTER TWO:  "Pursuit"

Dinah thought: If he knew who she was he'd kick her off the motorcycle. The blue bike went faster. Then faster.

How fast? How many miles per hour? 90? 100? More? The young man she clung to took no chances. The gang followed.

The sky above filled with stars as they left behind any shred of civilization. Dinah smirked to herself. That hadn't been civilization.

Dinah saw in her head an image of the fight in the club, fresh and violent in her memory.

A large bearded man held an empty beer bottle by its neck, ready to club someone with it-- then collapsed backward from a sudden punch, head snapping back nose splayed open blood spraying everyplace. The brute lying among chairs.

The mob froze.

The blue-eyed young man pulled her toward the wide entrance of the club. The way out.

"Back off!" he told them in a resounding voice, surprising in its fierceness.

The biker gang held one another back as if eager to fight him but not really, because they realized the man was dangerous. Where'd he come from? Why?

His voice held them at bay.

From a more genteel world, Dinah had never heard that kind of man's voice.

This man in front of her on the bike now moved his hand back, clasped her thigh in a vise grip and moved it forward, closer to himself.

"Grab tighter," he instructed-- ordered? "We're going faster."

The bike seemed to leap rushing cool night Western air slapping her face. The road rose, then dipped. They headed east. Ahead: mountains.

The rider didn't know Dinah was a well-paid leftist investigator who'd infiltrated the alt-right to help bring down the movement. If he did he'd surely kick her off of his precious blue bike.

Who was he? She meant, beyond a fascist white supremacist defender of patriarchy who'd likely rescued her for crude sexist reasons. She was "attractive" by outdated conventional standards. She wanted none of it.

"What's your name?" she asked through rushing wind.

"Blake."

Dinah dared not think about what might await.

An hour later the bike slowed, and slowed. Blake pulled it into a gas station. The sensation of not speeding, of rest, was jarring.

When she stepped off the motorcycle the world continued moving around her. The blue bike, symbol of her rescuer (captor?) displayed itself arrogantly, long and low to the ground. Sleek. Blazing under the station's lights. It'd already brought them a long way.

As Blake filled the gas tank of the obnoxious chopper he looked her over.

"Do you always rescue women in distress?" Dinah asked.

Back at the club the mad gang of violent biker men had wanted to rape her.

"Every day," Blake smirked.

His glance at her might have been one of regard or it might have been one of contempt.

From the night they heard a deep thrumming sound. A distant roar.

"What's that?" she asked.

"That's the gang, baby."

She wanted to tell him not to call her baby.

The distant roar moved closer, became louder.
***