Disclaimer: I don't own Knight Rider or any of the characters or related indicia thereof. Borrowing for cheap thrills. Thank you to everyone who has reviewed this so far and I hope to have a satisfactory conclusion for you soon.
The desert stretched out in every direction, red and white and bone-dry under the blazing sun. The convoy of trucks and cars had followed a gap between two outlying spurs of the mountains, red and black instead of red and white. Dust swirled.
Ahead the lead car slowed. Brake light after brake light lit up the dust like a bracelet of rubies. Judy felt cold, colder than ice, deep in the pit of her stomach. Her driver pulled off to the side of the dirt road, following the leader.
There was dead silence for the space of several heartbeats before his dash radio crackled to life. "Unit Six, Unit Six. Bring her up to the semi. With the laptop. No fast moves."
She knew the voice. Not Knight, but one of Knight's close cronies, a bald man called French. He was rumoured, around the Wingate complex, to be a pedophile of the purest ray serene; now he sounded all business. Her driver acknowledged the command, and killed the engine, getting out to open her door and take her by the arm, the laptop bag banging against her hip. She ached—not just with sleeplessness and fear, but also with terror for Karr—for whatever it was that these men had in store for him. By now dying was almost understandable to her, and almost acceptable as well. It had been frightening at first, as they started out, and as they drove through the desert; now it seemed almost natural.
The driver dragged her up the dusty roadside to where men were already swarming around the back of the huge semi-trailer. As she watched, the back gate swung down to form a ramp, and Karr rolled soundlessly down to meet the alkaline road. His shocks bounced gently as he came to a rest, and Judy swallowed a low moan.
"Hey, McBride," said the driver, and squeezed her arm. "You want to tell me what the boss is up to?"
Hearing her name brought Judy back a little. "I…I don't know. He wanted the system brought back online; that's all I'm allowed to say, and really all I know. It's…..I guess this is a field test or something."
He made a non-committal noise, and let loose of her arm; other security personnel were hurrying up to them. One bore a white flight-suit draped over his arm like a sommelier's napkin.
"McBride? Here. Boss wants you to get dressed in this and come with us."
"What…?" she asked. "Why? Does he want me to test-drive the car or something?"
"Not my job to answer questions." The guard's face was blank, his eyes steely. "You want to put this on yourself or am I gonna have to help you?"
She took the suit. It was baggy, made for a man a lot larger than her, and would fit over her regular clothes. There seemed not to be a reason to refuse, and so she unzipped it and stepped into the legs, pulling the suit up around her butt and then her shoulders, shoved her arms through the sleeves. The guard nodded. "Come on. Boss wants you to come with us."
Judy gave her driver and the abandoned laptop bag a glance. It was only half a glance, really, given that the guard grabbed her white-suited arm and dragged her along with him, almost making her fall face-first into the white dust at the side of the road. Any hope she'd had of escaping this place and this undignified little death evaporated with the sweat that stood out on her temples.
Garth Knight stood in his white suit, with his sunglasses winking and heliographing in the early sun, hands crossed on his cane. "Ah, Miss McBride. So glad to see you again; I regret having to wake you so early for this little exercise. We are very grateful for your applied skills."
"…the least I could do, sir. Believe me. I'm glad to help."
"An admirable attitude. Come, Miss McBride. I have a special role in mind for you."
Karr sat where he had been left on the white hardpan, dust already caking his wheels and quarter panels. He had no idea where he was, only that he was in the desert again, and that the desert was a place of dying, and that the man who had taken him from the desert had nothing good in store for him.
Behind him men in jumpsuits were escorting someone in white out of a car and down from the vestigial road, all the way out into the dried white expanse of the playa itself. Whoever it was looked small and lost in the crowd of men, as lost and out of his element as Karr himself felt out here in this completely alien environment.
Karr's radio lit up suddenly, shaking him on his springs with shock. "Knight Automated Roving Robot, come in. This is Control One."
Part of him—perhaps the part that had spoken to Judy, and enjoyed her touch on his perceptors—wanted to respond flippantly, but he squashed it. "Knight Automated Roving Robot here, Control One. Command?"
"Good," said the voice on the radio, and now he recognized it as Garth Knight's. "Very good. I have a little practical test in mind for you, K.A.R.R." He could almost hear the acronym slotting into visual place, with its appropriate periods; so different from the quiet, kind way Judy said his name. "You will start from your current position and run a course of five miles at top speed northwest across the playa, and then return and negotiate an obstacle course we will have prepared for you. Are you ready?"
Karr paused before replying, the chilly knowledge of Judy's impending death seeping into his CPU like slow water. "Yes, Control One. I am to drive out northwest for five miles at top speed and then return for an obstacle course."
"Excellent. Begin."
Karr lit his engine and gunned it, enjoying that for a moment, the sheer rush of power the turbines lent him, and launched himself across the playa in an acrid cloud of rubber smoke and alkaline dust. He didn't just drive; he ran, running like a bat out of hell from the man with the blank blue eyes who had found his bits out in perhaps this very desert, and had him remade to destroy whatever those blue eyes disliked. Ran from his bleak memories of his brother and his past, from his own pain and weariness, from everything other than the need to fly as fast as he could. His wide tires roared, eating up the playa at well over a mile a minute.
When he hit the five-mile mark and turned in a wide screaming arc of dust, he didn't see his target immediately. She was quite a long way away, after all, and he'd kicked up thunderclouds of dust in his run. All he was immediately aware of was the heat of the sun and a darkness ahead, a darkness on the edge of vision, that grew more discrete and clear as he threw himself into high gear and ran for it. By the time his scanners cleared it was very close indeed to being too, too late.
Judy stood with her face turned from him and her hands tied behind her, around a stake driven deep into the dirt. She stood alone: the rest of the men had vanished, but there were jersey walls now on either side of her, narrowing the wide pan of the playa to a single-lane road that led back to the semi and the waiting cars. Beyond her white figure he could make out the forms of Knight and some of his cronies, waiting.
He had eighty feet of road left.
Karr did something he'd never done before: he murmured something like a prayer, even as he flung himself hard left and felt himself swap front and back ends, his still-spinning drive wheels working to cut his momentum, rubber not squealing on this softness, but kicking up blinding, choking clouds of dust. His sensors held the woman firmly in their awareness: he knew, as he approached, sliding, backwards, that if he had calculated even the slightest error she would be nothing more than red pulp from the waist down as he struck her.
Time seemed to slow. There was nothing at all in Karr's world but the friction of his tires and the approaching figure in his sensor screens. She was coming up much too fast—he must have miscalculated—he could hear again her quiet kind voice speaking to him and feel again her fingers on his perceptor, understanding, slow, gentle, and then he had screeched to a halt with his rear bumper barely a foot from her knees, and her eyes were still closed with the awareness of impending death and the men were beginning to run and he had no choices at all left to make.
Karr began to resonate. Playing a note so low it was beyond hearing, he upped the gain on all his speakers as far as it would go and forced the noise up, decibel by decibel, until it hurt even him: the men clutched their stomachs and fell to the ground as the low-frequency vibrations did unpleasant things to their bowels. He let the note rise, fast through the bearable levels, and then through the highest to the most high: the windows of the vehicles waiting blew out one by one in coughing explosions of safetyglass. Karr forced the note higher, focusing his sonic lance on the steel of the cuffs holding Judy to the stake, and higher still, and the cuffs jumped and vibrated and grew burning-hot and shattered.
Judy staggered forward, her burned wrists already blistering, and slumped across his back deck. He cut off the sound with a harsh squeal of feedback. "Judy! Get in!"
The driver's side door clicked open, and she raised a white face, her eyes like holes, and moved like a blind woman to slither inside—feeling her way, her fingers spread and stiff and patting the dusty curves of his side, his windows, his roof. When she fell inside and he knew she was safely in, that door slammed, and before anyone could think to raise a weapon she and Karr were gone.
He drove like a bat out of hell. More than once he thought his pursuers were catching up—they had tried like hell already to catch him, the big V-8 engines roaring in the desert, but he had effortlessly put on speed and drifted ahead in a cloud of dust. Following their trail had been easy: the convoy had left easily readable dirt-tracks along their way. He drove like the wind for both his sake and Judy's; she lay in his driver's seat, barely conscious, breathing hard even though ten minutes and at least sixty miles lay behind them. By the time he reached the road itself, he was worried.
"Judy? Judy, wake up. Please wake up."
She let her head roll from side to side on the headrest, dizzily. "Kill me. Gonna, gonna kill me. Those eyes, Karr. Like blue holes into nothing. Oh, God the white of the desert and the blue of the sky like his eyes."
"Judy. I'm, I'm…taking us to help. Please, Judy. Don't….don't be afraid. You rescued me. I'm just doing the same."
Her fingers stretched out and slowly, gently traced over the curves of his wheel, and then fell away.