Brandon lives in Texas with his wife and daughters where he works as a test analyst.  This story is dedicated to his oldest daughter and is his first fiction publication.

You can visit Brandon's Blogspot here.

The Toronto nuke blew about five minutes before the clowns came. This meant that Claudio and Mariah spied the red, yellow, and orange figures at the same time they heard the news.

"Toronto?" Mariah said. "Nuclear?" She'd been messaging on her comm unit.

Claudio looked at his daughter and clenched his teeth. On her arm he could see faint razor marks and her comm still bore the outline of the Dream Puke sticker he made her remove on a weekly basis. They were on the way back from her treatment session: recovery from DP was long and painful. He looked away from her. Long and painful for her: excruciating for everyone involved.

He wiped the sweat from his brow and looked out across the sunlight arcing up from the cars in front of them, through Texas summer heat-haze. Then cars ahead screeched. A Buick in the fast lane fishtailed until it came to a smoking halt. Vehicles down-shifted then braked, creating an impromptu four-lane parking lot. There were no cars on the opposite side of the freeway: another oddity.

"What the hell?" Claudio muttered. Several dozen figures skipped among the cars a half mile on. Clowns. He felt a niggle of fear deep in his belly as he stepped from the car.

He pushed the childish jitter away. His mind revolved in orbit around the notion that Toronto was close to New York and his wife, Erica. Too close.

"Where are you going?" Mariah asked.

"Stay in the car," Claudio said. The girl huffed and looked at him with eyes flat and brow furrowed.

Claudio stood on the tarmac, hands on hips and the smell of tar and exhaust in his nostrils. He heard several cars ahead backfire in rapid succession. Then several more. Strange.

"Effing Defcon ONE, man!" an ol' boy hollered as he jumped to the ground from his F250. He wore a cowboy hat and a buckle almost as big as Claudio's head.

"What the hell is the holdup?" the man in the beamer to Claudio's right asked. The Suit looked at Claudio, eyebrows raised.

"Are those clowns?" this question came from behind him and he turned to see a college-age kid with purple hair and a face full of pustules.

"Clowns they are, brother," Claudio whispered. But that's not the sound of engines backfiring. And it was then, too late, that he saw the other group of clowns approach from behind.

The four men stood at the center of this carnage like rats in a trap as clowns cut men and women down with short bursts of gunfire. Radio voices and people in nearby cars --still oblivious-- grew frantic with the news of the City by the Bay: it now burned.

"It's you," Claudio said as a clown stepped out from the harlequin mob. The face smiled, liver spots peeking out from white, cream-smeared cheeks, eyes blood-shot and hair receding. He still had perfect teeth. Claudio had never met the man before, but he knew his face. Everyone did. He had once been the highest paid man in Hollywood. Then he had declared himself the living avatar of his cult's clown-god, Zuna. Crazy, Claudio thought.

"Hello, Claudio," the Actor looked at the other three men. "Raines. Silas. Jeffreak."

"How..."

"Yes, yes, Jeffreak," The Actor said to the punk. Claudio glanced at Mariah and tried to glare some sense into the kid to sit her ass down and stay out of sight. He smelled the stink of gunpowder. "I know all four of you, but that's the boring part. Here's what interesting: I have four podbikes a short walk ahead. One for each of you. You will each, in... ah... two minute's time run –-not walk-- to your bike and then race from here down 35 to 820 West and then merge onto I30 East. The race will conclude when the first contestant passes the Dallas Zoo.

"What do I win, you ask? What do I win?! Always thinking of yourselves, aren't you?" The Actor had spittle on his lips and glared at the men. "YOU!" He pointed at one of the other clowns, "They're not taking this seriously. Get me someone else to kill: one of their passengers will do--"

"No," Claudio said. "No, sir, I mean. We're taking you serious. Seriously. Promise." Claudio's hand hovered between them, fingers splayed.

The Actor eyed him for a long moment. Claudio remained deadpan until a smile cracked the old clown face and the Actor wagged a finger at him.

"You're more of a people-person than you give yourself credit for, Claudio.

"Okay! Claudio, you just gave your daughter a little more time to contemplate her death –she doesn't do much contemplation, though, does she? -- but here's the tragedy. You get the bike with the big 'NYC' on top. What does that mean, Claudio? Who is in New York? Why might it be important for you to win the race?"

Claudio's gut tumbled. Erica.

"Jeffreak," the Actor said. The kid with the purple hair jolted.

"You will take the bike with 'Seattle' on top. You race for your mother. That's all that will matter to you, but Seattle viewers will be interested in your success or failure."

"I got the Windy City," the cowboy said, thumbs thrust in his pockets.

"Very good, Raines," the Actor replied with a clapping of hands.

"Yes, so, you have a podbike representing Dallas, as well."

"Silas, thank you, very good," The Actor said with a glance at the Suit.

"I won't play your game. Forget it," Silas said. He crossed his arms, light glinting off his shades.

"I'm truly disappointed, Silas. Will you reconsider?"

"No." Silas said.

The Actor snapped his fingers and activity erupted among the clown's to Claudio's left. The Actor pulled a Glock from his polka-dotted blouse, placed its muzzle to Silas's temple, and squeezed the trigger. The dark metal barked and Silas jerked to the ground as half of his head plastered Claudio's Acura. Mariah shrieked, but that was a far away sound beneath the droning in Claudio's ears. The firecracker-smell overpowered him.

"Two minutes?" he asked the Actor.

"Run," the clown said.

Claudio turned and stepped over the body, slipped in the spreading pool of blood, yanked his door open and grabbed Mariah's bicep and dragged her from the car. He pushed through the clowns and followed the other two men, Raines and Jeffreak, toward the front of the traffic jam. Claudio tugged Mariah past the cars with their broken windshields and drivers and passengers sprawled across steering wheels, against windows, upon the pavement. Mariah whimpered. He moved like a machine: precise, economical.

The other two men ran around the podbikes in a momentary slapstick that made Claudio chuckle. A voice deep in his brain said, I'm in shock. He pulled Mariah to a Saturn at the head of the line and opened the door, unbuckled the woman in the driver's seat, and pushed her to the pavement. Mariah screamed again and kept screaming. He let go of her and pushed his hand down on the gas. The engine answered. He looked at the fuel gage: half a tank. Claudio stood up and turned, stepped over the woman at his feet, bumped into Mariah who blubbered into her clenched fists.

He stood there for a moment, reeling. Just seconds had passed but the other two men were jetting away in their podbikes.

Claudio slapped his daughter. The residual Dream Puke in her system made her stubborn as a mule but even as his hand connected Claudio screamed inside. At the lowest moments of the last year he'd pushed her around and bullied her. No matter how wrong she had been, he'd promised himself he'd never hurt her again. And he'd kept that promise: until now.

She crashed to her butt, shut up, and stared at him with eyes wide and white. He grabbed her shoulders and yanked her to her feet.

"Listen to me, little girl. Listen good. Are you listening?"

Mariah nodded.

"You are gonna get in this car and you are gonna drive as fast as you can to Rosa's school and then by the soccer fields to get Thelma. You get your sisters, no one else. You don't go anywhere else, you don't talk to anyone else. Once you have both of them you get back on the highway and drive north for as long and as fast as you can. Got it? Got it?"

Mariah nodded.

"Tell me you got it," Claudio said.

"I -- I understand," she said.

"Give me your comm," Claudio said.

She peeled the ear-piece off her head and handed it to him. He spoke his over-ride and slaved her unit to his.

"For the next little bit I'm your guardian angel that makes sure you do right. And for once you are gonna do right," Claudio said. "You understand me?"

"Yeah, yes," she said.

"Tell me. Tell me once more," Claudio said.

"Drive. Get my sisters. Go North. Go fast," she said.

"Then what the hell are you doing?"

She stood for a moment then turned and stepped over the body. She plopped down into the seat, shut the door, buckled herself in, and pulled away with one last glance at Claudio. He saw the violet bulge on her cheek before he turned and ran to the podbike with 'NY' on the top, triggered the gullwing, jumped into the leather saddle and keyed up the power plant.

The gullwing sealed him in and the computer welcomed him.

He revved the engine and sped after the other bikes.

Claudio surged up through the gears, testing the handling. The podbike thrummed with power as it weaved across the lanes. He settled into the center lane and pulled back on the throttle then hit the overdrive. Skeletal frame and clear composite formed the canopy above and before him. The steering column, HUD, and a few gages perched on the console between his thighs. The seat held his body in a reclined position that was comfortable for long trips and maximized the small internal space. At rest, gyroscopes balanced the vehicle so it would not tip, and the computer had an autopilot mode that was among the best money could buy.

He passed Texas Motor Speedway and a bit later Alliance Airport.

Claudio loved bikes, though all he ever owned was an old Honda fifty as a kid and a Suzuki Savage –a poor man's Harley-- just out of high school. The BMW Podbike was a work of art.

Claudio turned off the autopilot and pushed the needle up past 100, 120, 150 mph. As he approached the 820 merge, the other bikes remained out of sight.

"Comm, link into bike array," he said.

"Connection established. ChicagoRiderofDoom has joined. Seattle_skittles23 has joined. Mariah_cutie420 has joined," the computer told him. Jesus Christ, he thought. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with cheese.

"Yo boy, you still wit us?" the cowboy's voice asked him. Raines.

"Worried about you, dude: you knocked that chick out," the boy, Jeffreak, said through his nose.

Claudio pulled off of 35, angled onto 820 and opened up the throttle. No vehicles on 820 either. Odd. Still no sight of the other bikes.

"No offense, brothers, but I came to win." He closed the link to the other bikes and started to check in with Mariah when the clown laughed over the link and piped a storm of newscasts over the three men's HUDs.

"...Jeffreak is a mystery, likely since this is not his real name, but the other men are Claudio Trujillo and Charles Raines.... meanwhile, while we seem to have a respite from the series of thermonuclear blasts, a scene of biblical import is unfolding on the highways of Dallas... shunned for years after his bizarre behavior and evangelism for his religion -- a cult by many experts... these shots were filmed by the group themselves and came to us via a rogue camera crew in league with this terrorist group led by the famed actor and religious proponent of... one of the most disturbing images of Trujillo brutalizing his daughter just after she witnesses the death of Robert Silas... several forums are being dug that seem to indicate Jeffreak is one Jeffrey Dor, a student at nearby University of... confirmed a fourth rider is trailing the others... local authorities are clearing traffic from the route mentioned in this clip but we are getting conflicting reports of the official response from the White House and the Governor... the prerecorded statement includes a list of cities that will be nuked if anyone, I repeat, anyone, interferes with the racers... confirmed reports that Salt Lake has been hit... God be with us..."

"You hit me," Mariah said over the link.

"Listen to me, just listen," he said.

Silence. Still no sight of the other bikes as the landscape languished by in parallax.

"Six months ago -- Christmas -- primed to leave. I'd had enough. I felt broken, Mariah. Now I feel lost each night your momma's away. I'm not a man to talk about love and all that... but there was a night, Mariah, when I walked to the door and put my hand on the doorknob. I was crying, Mariah. My hand stayed on that knob until it fell and I decided in my heart: this is the hill I die on. I don't know about love, Mariah: I'm not a very good man. But I decided then and there that I would stay and do whatever it took to make it work. I suppose none of that really mattered until Erica came to her own hand-on-the-door moment. She must have, because we've been good, life's been good...except for you, Mariah."

"Everything's my fault," Mariah said.

"No just the stuff that's your fault is your fault," Claudio said. "It's always more than we want to admit. The only good thing about it, girl, is that maybe we can change if all we're doing is fucking shit up."

"Deep, Pops, deep. There's an 'ism' for stating the obvious. Escapes me right now."

"Just drive, chick. Drive. Take 407. The back way. Hurry. I'm almost to 30: final stretch. There's not much time.

"Comm, queue up workout playlist. No interruptions from anyone but Mariah. And Erica."

Claudio pushed the bike harder, the power plant droning in complaint. His eyes scanned ahead for the other two bikes.

He did not see the fourth bike slide into station behind him in his blind spot.

"... the song gained some popularity while Trujillo was in high school, and as viewers watch the strange antics of Mr. Raines singing what is called "The Rodeo Song", and Jeffrey Dor listens to a steady stream of techno, the songs from Trujillo's playlist are hitting torrents hard... Mr. Mustaine was asked his opinion of his work gaining such notoriety at a time like this... The four horsemen ride and look what the soundtrack is! you, James Hetfield... Dallas and Tarrant County officials are asking residents more than 25 miles from the city centers to take cover where they are and stay off the roads... assuming that with Mr. Silas' refusal to race, DFW will be nuked but at the conclusion of the race... the highways and roads have become like ghost-towns, puzzling officials... as Trujillo tries in vain to reach Raines and Dor, we wait to learn who drives that fourth bike and what is meant by the spray painted symbol on its canopy..."

Two dots. He could see Raines and Dor. Two far off dots, but he could see them. Claudio halved the distance as they merged onto I30 and then lost some as he swerved onto the final highway.

"Mariah," Claudio said over the comm. "Mariah, how much longer until you have the girls?"

Silence stretched too long for Claudio's nerves to bear when he heard his eldest daughter clear her throat.

"Dad. I already got them. I'm driving fast. I'm gonna make sure they're safe. That we're safe."

Claudio just breathed for a moment. His girls were safe. His wife would be. It would be enough. It would have to. He thought about Mariah and in his mind he imagined a line of police cars chasing her up 35 toward the Oklahoma border.

"Did you have any problems?" he asked.

"Not really," Mariah said.

"Let me talk to Thelma," he said.

"She's sleeping in the backseat with Rosa. They played hard today, Dad." Claudio heard a crack in her voice as she said this.

"What's the matter, Mariah?"

She laughed.

"What if sometimes you can't win, Dad? What if everything you can do sucks and there's no way out?" She sounded on the verge of tears.

Claudio thought of his situation and wondered if she had a sudden plague of empathy. Maybe she'd realized that by the end of the day he'd be dead.

"Baby..." he stopped. The words lodged in his throat. His eyes blurred.

"While there's still you, there's still possibilities. I will win, my girl. You and your sisters and your mom will live, and all you gotta do is promise me... promise me to be the best You you can be."

He heard the girl sob over the comm. His eyes locked on the other two bikes: he would make his move in another five minutes, just after jetting past downtown Fort Worth.

"Dad. Daddy. No... I'm talking about me. Me! What if I'm stuck and everything I can do is shit?"

What the hell: did the kid suddenly care what he thought? He shook his head, concentrating on the other two racers. They were neck and neck ahead and he aimed for the space between them.

Downtown Fort Worth grew on the left and then fell behind him as he came even with the other two men. He looked to the left at Raines, who sat singing and bobbing his head. When he looked right to Jeffreak the kid gave him a little wave and smile then focused on the road.

Claudio edged ahead of the other two and they immediately sent him comm requests which he ignored.

"Look, girl. Look, Mariah. The end never justifies the means... Do unto others as you would have them do unto you... do not take what's not given... harm no living thing... All these things that the adults have been telling you all this time: it's a framework for living. It's good; necessary. But in the end you're the one doing the living and you have to decide, based on what you know, what to do. The truth I can share with you is almost every one of the old rules you're going to break. So, you know... do no harm, or as little as possible. And be ready to stand up for your decisions, even if they were crap in retrospect." Claudio sighed. Those other two goons were hitting him with comm requests still. To hell with them: he was in this to win. He'd told them.

"I don't know if that helps you, babe, but that's what I got."

"It'll do. Dad."

"Hey," Claudio said.

"What?"

"I'm sorry I hit you."

"You should be. And I'm sorry for this," she said.

The forth rider surged out of Claudio's blind spot, flashed past him, and took the lead in the race.

"...communications with the riders has been blocked from outside those four vehicles and all we know from the feeds running from inside the bikes themselves is the comment from Raines, too graphic for us to play on air, that indicates the mystery rider is female... Trujillo in the lead and New York residents can be heard just outside our studios chanting 'Claudio, Claudio, Claudio'... in a fashion reminiscent of one of the songs he has listened to in his fateful ride...forums plastered with videos like this of fans mimicking the lyrics of this song in particular... 'We care a lot!'... the big question is 'Does Trujillo know the identity of the final rider?' who has, we now see, taken the lead from him... 'We care a lot!'... Analysis shows communication between Trujillo and the fourth racer since almost the beginning of the race...'We care a lot!'... Traffic Four is reporting the symbol on that final bike -- now in the lead -- looks like nothing so much as a hastily spray-painted globe..."

"Still going to win, Claudio?" The Actor's voice asked.

"What do you want?"

"Just checking in with my Star in this final act of our great play."

"This is my life, you bastard."

"You don't have to thank me, Claudio."

Claudio ignored him. He chased after the bike in front of him.

He had not seen her face, but he knew his daughter piloted that bike.

He edged forward, hand sweating on the steering column. Not long until they passed downtown Dallas and then the zoo.

He tried to remember if the zoo was before or after the Zen Center, where he had attended Rissho Kosei-kai services for a couple years until he and Erica lost the business and almost left each other. Devotion to anything spiritual had been too much, it seemed, at the time. He'd let people down back then. He regretted that.

"Baby?" he asked over the comm.

"Daddy," Mariah finally said. Claudio could see downtown looming as her bike swerved ahead of him. She rocketed forward when he tried to gain on her, then fell back into a speed that kept her ten car-lengths ahead of him.

"What's going on, baby? Where are your sisters?"

"They got to me on the off-ramp, Dad, when I tried to turn around. Look: there goes downtown. Remember when you worked in the building with the 'X's on it?"

"Renaissance Tower," he said.

"Things were still good back then," her voice said.

"Were they?"

"They were, dad. Not perfect, but good. What happened?"

"We remember the past in a way that keeps us sane. We're always struggling, baby. We struggled then, too."

"We were good, though," she said. Her voice cracked.

"We're not so bad, Mariah," he told her. Who was he trying to convince?

"We're not very good," she said.

"We decide that: right now. Each moment," his voice wavered again.

"It is what it is. Right, dad?"

"Now you sound like me," he said.

They each coughed a polite laugh.

"Do we pass Rissho Kosei-kai before the zoo?"

"I can't remember," he said.

"What's that prayer you used to do?"

"Namo myoho renge kyo," he said.

"The only prayer I ever say is: 'Dear God, help me'," she said.

He laughed with sincerity this time. It felt good. He heard Mariah laugh, and that felt even better.

"That's probably at the top of most people's list," he said.

"Now it's my turn to be the helper, dad. This is my hand-on-the-doorknob: my hill."

He waiting, listening, focusing on the road.

"Anyway, here's the thing. The cowboy's beating the other guy. If he wins Chicago is saved, but Dallas, Seattle, and New York are goners. If you win, New York -- and Momma -- are saved, but the other three die. With the punk kid in last place Seattle's done for regardless."

It took a moment for him to reply.

"But if you win Dallas lives at least," he said. He thought of his wife and the other girls.

"No: when I win Dallas burns. So do all the other cities each of you race for."

Mariah must have patched the other men into the conversation, as she let them curse her for a few seconds.

"Baby...what are you doing?" Claudio asked. His bike edged forward again and she matched his speed increase.

"Dad, they have thirteen other cities set to explode too. They aren't American cities, but when they told me that the lives of thirteen cities worth of people could be saved by me, or a single city by one of you..."

Claudio passed the statue of the giraffe and started to cycle down through the gears when he scowled, shook his head, and then looked out through the canopy and over at his daughter who had maneuvered back beside him.

She looked back at him, the bikes in tandem. He wondered if his eyes looked as full as hers. Full of all the things that could be said but wouldn't.

"Dad," she said.

"Mariah."

The other two bikes slid along-side theirs and Claudio glanced at Raines and Jeffreak. Their eyes were wide now, too. The cowboy was red-faced and silent. The boy had tears on his face but waved at him when Claudio looked his way.

"Do you think we can outrun the blast?" the boy asked.

Claudio started to answer when Mariah piped up.

"We can try. Right, Dad?"

He looked at her. He smiled. He nodded. Then he tilted his head and his bike surged forward. That last good look at her, he thought he saw a stranger beneath the panic and despair. Pride, maybe.

Mariah opened the bike up and raced ahead, and Claudio followed his daughter, ready for the fire when it came.