You knew the nature of speed the moment they passed. A swarm of deafening metal hornets tore through your village's ancient street, carrying the first heroes you ever knew. Glorious racers, fearless and formidable. The first done was the first chosen for more. The first wins over the rest, like a last man standing on a field of battle, bloody and renewed.
Trolling outlying junkyards with your friends, you fought one another for parts to build the better racer, getting not only faster machines but stronger selves in the quarreling. Young vultures vying for the sleeker bones. It was the airplane wings nobody wanted. They could be fins, you thought, gathering them up, but even then there was the fanciful idea that if they could harness downforce, why not give the car an edge of lift at the right moments? If acrobats in their feathered caps could fly, so might cars ... .
El Jaguar earned his moniker not only because he drove the venerable D-class, but because he'd been born with the spots on his face. He was Mexico, their pride, and he represented us in the WRL like few others. But he got drafted. Then, surprisingly, you got drafted. The rebels were blowing up arterial superhighways as fast as civil workers could make them. “Politics are one thing, but driving's another,” grumbled a corporale who ran the motorpool you had to report to. The jacket read Torres but even without the mask you knew El Jaguar, black oil up to his elbows like an ancient priest searching a chest cavity for the heart. Armoured cavalry wasn't exactly racing, but the dune buggies and jeeps always seemed to have something extra under the hood, and you learned tricks of carcatecture from Torres. All the time tearing up the back stretches growing up paid off, and your skill made you a captain of a special drivers unit.
It was at the Paseo del Borges that the rebels set up the trap. The labyrinthine switchbacks proved fatal for some of your soldados, the mortars caught others, but you took point and drove right up the embankment at them, headlights showing the startled looks in their eyes. Then the landmine ripped the wheel right out of your hands and tore the buggy apart. "Capitan!" they cried as the concussion knocked you into the black.
The bandages unfurled like a blinding white highway.
Reborn. Reborn in terror. From Mictlan back into the world. The obsidian knives of shrapnel had flayed your face away, but it was nothing. You were better. And you could now see the connections: The dotted white lines, the mile markers of the soul, the secret fuel mixed in the air itself around us all, waiting for someone who knew to make it combust and push the hidden engine that turns the sky itself. The horror on the nurse's face was secondary, but in their unspoken discomfort they discharged you sooner.
The men who were left after the attack joined your team soon after the rebels scurried back into the Yucatan jungle, and the ganga back home who still worshipped the wheel came after receiving word. The ritual fires were lit in the hidden valley. They took the mystic numbers on their chests, and stood on the cars, skeptical at best. The winds began, and they felt it: The pull of the pyramids' vanishing points, the long leveled ruins of Tenochtitlan, the track echoing the rounds of mother Coyolxauhqui Moon, and powerful fusion Tonatiuh Sun, the road on Quetzaquatl's twisting back, the cleverness flowing through chaos in Lord Tezcatlipoca's obsidian rear view mirror, and Huizilipoztli's fight for dominance. The winds stopped. They gasped as the white eagle feather fell out of the dark skies, piercing your hood on the crown as a sign of what was to come.
The old airplane wingtips had kept well, and were easy to duplicate for the other cars. Like the acrobats, the wind held us weightless, separate, yet one. "Impossible!", they cried, scared, but also proud to have braved the chasm. After that, all the small jumps, formations, and carymids were easy enough. And with the aerial advantage of the wings, no one else could do them, though many would die trying.
But the ultimate revelation of racing that your death gifted you was that it's not about victory itself. It's the completion of the circle, the connecting of two geomantic points, the closing of a circuit from which energy generated can be harnessed to do magic. To make the Car Acrobatic Team more than exceptional racers. To make them the heroes not only of one old Mexica village, or of a nation, but the whole world over. The magic would make them fast, the fastest ever known, and you would drive them onto glory.
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| [Sported this Captain Terror Car Acrobatic Team vinyl for five years. Graphic Design credit to Joel Yohn.] |
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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.
