My Three Wives update

The jeep thumped over the uneven road, the artillery piece it towed thudding even louder behind it with each bump, spooling dust behind them. 

Nate scanned the dunes pressing in on all sides. He felt like he could be back home, a couple hundred years back, watching for Indians lying in ambush. It wouldn’t take much for the grumbling jeep to be a covered wagon, or for the Sahara to be a New Mexico wasteland. The great stillness around them, which swallowed up the jeep’s many protesting noises, was big enough to encompass leagues and centuries alike.

Small wonder that he felt the need to speak up. “Are we there yet?”

In the driver’s seat, Sully grunted. He was out of cigars and even the wind shipping by as they sped through the desert did little to cool them down. It wasn’t like the old open-top military jeep had AC. “I swear Nate, you’re gonna get a buster right in the chops.”

“What? What’d I do?”

“As if being married to three women isn’t bad enough, and they’re all gorgeous, and none of them are crazier than you—we had to get your damn scroll for Chloe and Elena’s TV show out of a swap meet in the middle of the desert!”

“Yeah, so?” 

“I thought it was going to be a bazaar! People selling knickknacks! Persian rugs! It was an arms deal, Nate! Terrorists! Gun smugglers! Were you really surprised that some of them were pissed at you for old business?”

Nate scoffed. “Hey, I was actually doing the right thing with those ISIS guys. They were trying to blow up ancient ruins and I was preserving them for their rich historical value. Yeah, I had to resort to violence—”

“You shot up Mahdi Ibrahim al-Douri’s favorite nephew.”

“Yeah, well, who would’ve guessed that ISIS’s top guy in Libya would be so into family values? Anyway, we got the scroll. It’s going to be a big break for Chloe and Elena. And you get a producer credit.”

“Pah. Historical value. That’s all this scroll is. Not like it’s a treasure map or a prophecy. There’s no big pay-out, just some ratings when this thing airs on Disney+. Disney+, Nate.”

“They own Discovery Channel,” Nate countered.

Sully shook his head. “It just ain’t fun anymore, Nate. I got into this business to visit exotic locales, explore ancient ruins, go where no man has gone before.”

“That’s Star Trek.”

“I don’t care what it is! I’m figuring out that I don’t want to lug a camera around, or fill out forms for filming permits, or fly in coach. If I wanna go to a beach, I can just go to a beach. I’m old, dammit…”

“You’re not old,” Nate scoffed.

“Yeah, I am. Too old to start a second career as some kind of news anchor or whatever you’re doing with the girls. I’ve been watching out for you a long time, but you’ve got Elena, you’ve got Chloe, you’ve got Nadine—between the three of them, maybe they’ve got enough moxie to knock some sense into you when you need it. And Nadine might be as tough as I was when I was her age—maybe.”

“So, what, you’re retiring?”

Sully shrugged. “Yeah. I guess I am. We’ve been to some pretty incredible places, Nate. Maybe I should go back here or there, see what some of them look like when no one’s shooting at us.”

The bullet came like a train engine, dragging more behind it. It sidestepped Sully and overshot the windshield, puckering in the ground ahead with an unimportant squirt of sand. Nate heard the hiss of it scorching the air with its passage. That, in turn, was followed by the weird echoes of the gunshot rebounding over sand and rock, riding far off into the endless distance and yo-yoing back. 

“Down!” he cried, but Sully had already thumped his well-padded backside onto the seat as more bullets followed the first: teething at the artillery piece behind them, popping in the sand all around them, a lucky few bashing through the windshield’s dirty glass. 

Sully threw the jeep into a hard right turn, momentarily ending the barrage—Nate heard it eating into the sand behind them, gnashing the ground into a comet tail of smoke as the gunner followed their wild curve and bring his aim back to their vehicle. 

Sully twisted the jeep to the left and a line of bullets stenciled itself across the side of the jeep. They sparked off the metal chassis, dislodging sand and flakes of rust, barely missing the tires before pinging off the Howitzer they towed.

“Oh, hell, were they at the arms market?” Sully demanded, nearly kicking the gas pedal through the floor in his quest for more speed.

“Maybe we forgot our receipt?” Nate suggested, looking back to find their attackers.

The desert didn’t offer many options. There was just the technical a hundred yards back. It was a pick-up truck so lathered in desert sand that it looked like it had been disinterred from a shallow grave, with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in the truck bed like a harpoon gun in a whaling ship, making the whole thing into a primitive combat vehicle. The gunner was in fatigues and a black balaclava; one of Mahdi’s men. Shooting from that range had cost them the element of surprise, but with Sully swerving the jeep around to keep them out of the line of fire, the technical was gaining fast. 

“What are you waiting for, the light to turn green? Get us out of here!” Nate said.

“Where do you want to go?” Sully retorted bitterly, ducking his head as another lucky shot built a spider-web in the windshield.

“I hear Barcelona is nice this time of year.”

Sully barked out an unamused laugh, slammed them into a turn, and shifted the jeep into a higher gear. They hurdled toward a dune that filled the windshield. “Hold the hell on!”

Sully slashed the jeep into the slope at a precise angle that punched the grille through an outcropping of sand that scattered across the hood before they roared uphill. The 6-pounder was no longer in the way of the .50-cal’s fire; with them nearly vertical, bullets literally rained down on them. Nate cringed as hot lead crashed through the hood, ripped the stuffing from the car seats, and miraculously avoided hitting either of the human occupants before they were out of the way again. Hitting a moving vehicle from a moving vehicle wasn’t as easy as James Bond made it look. Still, the holes in the hood steamed and hissed—sure bet that they’d lost something more valuable than windshield wiper fluid.

Nate gripped his seat to hold himself in place and felt a smoking bullet hole under the heel of his hand. “I can’t believe it. Not only am I gonna die, I’m gonna die historic on the Fury Road!”

They gained the summit, momentum carrying the jeep over the backbone of the dune and into open air. Nate’s stomach lurched. The windshield went all blue sky, then was eclipsed by gold-brown sand as they pitched downward again. His internal organs rearranged themselves for maximum feng shui, then the jeep bit the ground, front tires, back tires, the artillery piece hitting at an askew angle and digging in. Stuck, it pulled against the jeep before the combination of momentum and weight yanked it free to roll after the jeep, something in its suspension complaining bitterly. 

“Can’t do this all the way to the plane,” Sully said.

Nate opened up the glovebox. Pens, instruction manuals, and folded papers spilled out into the floorspace. “What we need is a weapon. Anything on this crate more lethal than a tire gauge?” Then he remembered. “Oh, right.” She undid her seatbelt. “Hold her steady.”

Behind them, the technical clambered over the dune and came down the slope in a spray of sand. The gunner started firing almost immediately.

“I hold her steady, they’ll hit us!” Sully argued as Nate clambered over the backseat.

“What, is it a rental?” he shouted back, and jumped from the trunk of the jeep onto the eight-pounder, essentially a utility trailer the size of a metal mesh pallet. At the tail-end a thick slab of metal plating served as shield; it had repelled most of the fire from behind. The barrel of the eight-pounder pointed through it. Inside the shield a rack of artillery shells sat like a large Pez dispenser. 

It took Nate a moment to familiarize himself with the tank gun. There was a fire control level on the butt. Nate wrenched it down and the breech opened up, ejecting a spent shell from the last time the gun had been fired. He grabbed a fresh shell from the rack, shoved it into the breech, closed up the port.

Bullets rattled into the shield with bone-jarring impact. Sparks flew as the five-inch cartridges obliterated themselves against the metal. The noise was like a hailstorm in hell. Crouching behind the shield, Nate grabbed the eight-pounder’s firing mechanism and shouldered it into position. At this range, he didn’t have to worry about parabolas and the curvature of the Earth. He only had to point it in the general direction and shoot. Sparks from an exploded .50-cal bullet singed his face. It only hurt for a second. 

“Mine’s bigger,” Nate said, and hit the trigger.

The one and a quarter ton cannon rocked back with a noise like Zeus being rude. It propelled an artillery shell the size of Nate’s forearm at one half-mile per second towards their pursuers. The technical ceased to exist in a plume of flame that was immediately swallowed up by a cloud of black smoke. Something whistled through the air and embedded itself in the eight-pounder’s shield. The technical’s hood ornament.

“A little loud!” Sully called back, shouting to be heard over the ringing in both their ears.

“Sorry! I’ll set it on ‘quiet’ next time!” Nate slumped against the eight-pounder’s shield, rubbing at the scorching bites shrapnel had left on his cheek. He felt the warmth of blood smearing his palm. “Sully, check your blind spots.”

“We’re in the desert, what do you expect me to—oh.”

To the left, something hidden by the dunes was kicking sand up into the air, leaving such a trail that it looked like the horizon was unspooling up into the bright blue sky. On their right, a flea circus of motorcycles slalomed up and down the sickle-shaped dunes, keeping pace with the jeep, and coming closer and closer with every dune they flew over.

Sully wound the jeep to the left, following the curve of a hill-tall dune. The sand slipped and shifted under their grinding tires, leaving a line of avalanches in their wake. The motorcycles cut left too, coming over the last dune that separated them from each other. Scalpel-thin, their wheels cut into the sand, arterial sprays shooting up behind them.

“I always wondered what happened to Motocross,” Nate said, reloading the eight-pounder. “Guess it ended up here.”

“The truck must've radioed them. Mahdi could have an entire army combing the desert.”

“Less five assholes,” Nate said certainly.

Uzi fire poured from the motorcycles, a blitz of 9MM shells flying in from four hundred feet. Sully ducked his head down. Nate threw himself behind the artillery shield. At this range, the barrage was hardly accurate, but the storm of bullets still pelted into the eight-pounder and whizzed over Sully’s head to knock glass out of the windshield.

“It’s like they can’t see we’re having a conversation!” Nate cried, grabbing the eight-pounder and taking aim. One pull on the fire control lever and the buzzing drone of the supercharged Yamaha motorcycles, the chatter of their riders’ Uzis, all were blotted out by the eight-pounder’s roar. 

It undershot, exploding the ground in front of the motorcycles. Sand vomited up into the sky like the world had turned upside-down, creating a fogbank around the ten foot crater that the shell had left. 

The lead biker was unable to juke in time. He pitched into the hole and was instantly swallowed by the sands pouring back to fill the gap. The other four had more time to react. Razor-sharp reflexes took their bikes around the crater and through the sandy smog, emerging on the other side trailing wisps of stray sand. Their bikes roared with acceleration, bringing them within three hundred feet of the jeep, and their bullets ripped into the vehicle and the ground all around it. An endless cacophony of impacts thudding into sand and ricocheting off the jeep’s metal chassis. 

“How can you miss,” Sully demanded, “when the bullets are as big as you are?”

“Oh, like I know what to do with myself half the time.” Nate worked the spent shell out of the breach and grabbed another from the rack. “On your left!”

Moving so fast it popped a wheelie, a motorcycle came up alongside the jeep, Uzi held at the ready. Sully swerved to the left, trying to side-swipe him, but the biker went further, cutting up the side of a dune to ride at an angle too steep for the jeep to follow. He took aim—got off a few shots as Nate threw the shell in his hands like a javelin. 

It landed short of the biker, in the spokes of his rear wheel, and the sudden obstruction launched the bike into the air like a Roman candle. The biker was thrown clear, his Yamaha spiraling through space until it came down, front wheel burying itself in the sand, the rest of the bike protruding upward like a mile marker.

Nate smelled hair burning. The bullets had come so close that they’d singed his shaggy mane. A bad hair day, that’s all I need. He grabbed another shell and forced it into the breach, but the bikers were wise to him. The three of them weaved back and forth, too fast for him to draw a bead on them, peppering the jeep with gunfire as their wheels drew a triple helix in the sand. Nate was trying to aim a bazooka at a gnat.

“Why don’t you just throw more shells at them?” Sully asked. “That seems to be your specialty.”

“Maybe I will,” he retorted, scanning the surroundings. They were still speeding down a crevice between two dunes, hugging the left hand side, with the three bikers close on their tail, maybe two hundred feet behind. It was only a matter of time until they shot out a tire. Nate reached to the shell rack. “When I tell you to, fishtail.” 

“They’ll catch us!” Sully warned.

“They’ll catch something. Ready?”

“Why not?”

Nate ripped open the flap on the shell rack. “Now!”

Sully cut hard to the right, then immediately veered left again. The rear wheels lost traction, waving back and forth as Sully oversteered, keeping the jeep from spinning out entirely but letting its backside swing like a pendulum. The shells dropped down from the rack and rolled off the trailer, scattering behind the jeep directly into the path of the bikers. 

They hit the shells and were launched into the air, coming down on more shells, nothing for their wheels to gain purchase on. The first rider went down in a tangle, with the second bike slamming into his midsection; that biker fell face first into a shell. The biker at the rear managed to hit the brakes and send his bike into a skid, but the shells met him anyway, throwing him down into the sand. 

“Looks like they flunked their driver’s test,” Nate muttered.

Sully cradled the jeep back into a straight line. The dune on their left dwindled down into nothingness, leaving nothing but clear blue sky and a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon slamming into them. 

It had been keeping pace on the other side of the dune. Top off, a roll cage surrounding the occupants like they were imprisoned. Metal shrieked in torment as Sully’s Willys MB lurched sideways on two wheels for a sickening gravity defying moment before falling back down to all four. 

Sully replied in kind, spinning the wheel to send them careening into the Rubicon. Nate watched as the Rubicon grew in his view like a bullet coming out of a gun barrel. Mahdi was in the passenger seat, watching with hellish glee as the Willys MB hit, trading paint with the Rubicon. But Mahdi’s vehicle was newer, bigger, with more weight. The MB rocked it on its suspension, but only managed to jostle Mahdi. He shouted something that Nate could almost hear over the roar of both engines and the Rubicon broadsided them again. 

The steering wheel was wrenched from Sully’s hands as they were forced to the right, this time crashing over an outcropping of rock. The impact jarred Sully out of his seat, flinging him against the restraint of his seatbelt. Nate wasn’t so lucky. The world was set on spin cycle as he flew up into the air. He came back down, spinning, spiraling, catching a glimpse of the eight-pounder’s barrel—Nate darted a hand out, managing to catch himself on the cannon. Only now he was dangling on the wrong side of the shield, scorching desert sands speeding past his hanging feet, close enough to be churned up by his toes. 

“The one rock in the desert, you had to hit it!” he shouted.

Sully glanced quickly over his shoulder to clock Nate’s circumstances. “It seemed like a good idea at the time,” he said magnanimously.

The Rubicon slowed, its body clashing against the jeep in a shower of sparks as it braked. From Nate’s perspective, the backseat of the Rubicon floated back until it was parallel with him. There was one of Mahdi’s Militiaman in the backseat. He racked an AK-47. Raised it. Nate took one hand off the barrel and snaked it out to grab his rifle, wrenching it away from himself as the Militiaman fired. The barrage stenciled a line of bullet holes across the jeep’s spare tire. 

“Asshole!” the Militiaman cried, trying to pull his AK back.

“Yeah,” Nate agreed, sending it back with his pulling to smash the rifle butt into his face. The AK slipped from his powerless fingers - only for it to slip from Nate’s hand, too. “We don’t need guns!” he said. “Let’s settle this the old-fashioned way.”

The Militiaman drew a scimitar from his belt.

“That’s pretty old-fashioned,” Nate had to admit.

The Militiaman held it like he was awaiting a pitch at a baseball game. In answer, Nate threw all his weight backwards, managing to swing back far enough to avoid the blade as it slashed through the air. Instead of halving his body weight the hard way, it cut a scarlet line across his belly, barely breaking the skin in places. The wild swing made the Militiaman overbalance, and as he tried to regain his footing, Nate swung forward, letting go of the artillery piece to fly into the jeep, catching the swordsman in the chest with both feet and knocking him over the roll bar. Nate landed on his back in the middle seat. 

“You guys wanna stop and get McDonald’s on the way home?”

A riot broke out. Mahdi twisted in the passenger seat to aim a Heckler & Koch MP5 back at him. Nate shot out his hand, catching his wrist and pinning it up against a bar of the roll cage. The swordsman came up shouting “Bastard!” before Nate lashed out with his leg, foot catching him in the sternum and knocking him away. Mahdi opened fire with the MP5 as he tried to bring it down; the bullets made a series of puffs in the passing sand. Nate wrenched his arm, trying to break it against the roll cage, while the Militiaman recovered. 

He hurdled the roll cage, bringing his scimitar down on Nate from above—he rolled out of the way, ripping the MP5 from Mahdi, and fired it at the swordsman. It clicked emptily. “Quick smoke break while I find some bullets?” he suggested.

The Militiaman slashed at Nate, forcing him back over the backseat and into trunk space. He brought the MP5 up again to defend himself, catching another lumberjack swing. The force of the blow drove Nate back against the Rubicon’s rear door, bending him backwards over it. If he resisted, the scimitar would cleave him in two. If he backed up with it, he’d fall out and be smeared across the Sahara. 

“Asshole!” the Militiaman barked in her face. 

Mustering all his strength, Nate threw him off, reaching down to take hold of the winch on the Rubicon’s rear bumper, the tow hook. The swordsman was winding up for an overhead strike when Nate struck first, slamming the tow hook deep into his chest. He screamed, power leaving his body, the scimitar slipping from his hands.

Nate grasped the tow hook by the line leading into it. He gave it a hard tug. The Militiaman was jerked off his feet, falling over Nate to land behind the Rubicon. The winch sung as it paid out its line, yards and yards of it, until there was no more slack to be had. Then the line snapped taut.

“What a drag,” Nate said.

Mahdi was by now standing on the middle seat, wielding the scimitar his minion had dropped. He held it like it was an extension of his body, with an expression on his wizened face that said he very much wanted to make it an extension of Nate’s.

“You killed my nephew,” he said. No emotion. He spoke like he was having a dispute in traffic court.

Nate rested his hands on a crossbar of the roll cage. “You know, I wasn’t going to say anything, but he was kinda a terrorist? I know this must be hard for you to hear…”

The scimitar whipped forward and Nate leaned back, letting his grip on the crossbar hold all his weight, but he still felt the wind of the scimitar’s passage before it notched the crossbar between his hands. Sparks shot away from the impact. He pulled herself back, bringing up his left elbow to come around and crash into Mahdi’s temple. Mahdi collapsed to the right, falling off the Rubicon and out into open space. His arms shot out, trying to catch himself, and his outstretched hands found the side of the artillery piece that the Willys was hauling. His feet clung to the Rubicon in a precarious grip, forming a bridge between the two vehicles, a human plank.

“And they say there’s no bridging the gap with radical Islam,” Nate said. 

In an unbroken march, he walked over Mahdi, swung onto the artillery piece, moved from it onto the Willsy, and finally climbed into the passenger seat beside Sully. Grabbing the wheel, he gave it a sharp jerk to the right. The Willys curved away from the Rubicon and after a moment, it swung around to pursue, sand splashing out from its hydroplaning tires. 

“Infidel!”

Nate looked over her shoulder. By some massive effort of will, Mahdi had clawed his way up onto the artillery piece. With the Rubicon hanging back but still hot on the Willys’ heels, Mahdi rose, drawing a knife from his robes in a challenge to Nate. Nate came up out of his seat, working his way down the Willys to Mahdi.

“You think you’ve won?” Mahdi growled. “For all your struggles, for all your planning, you will—” Nate stomped on the trailer hitch. The artillery piece detached from the Willys and its tow hook pitched down, digging in to the sand. It brought the eight-pounder to a near-instantaneous stop. The Rubicon barreled into it, crumpling around the motionless slab, its own speed turning the artillery piece into a wrecking ball. Nate shielded his eyes as they both went up in flames. 

“Guess now he can double-check all that Allah stuff in person.” He sat back down in the passenger seat. “You’re sure you want to retire?”

Sully shook his head. “Positive.”