time this book is out. The days blast past you at full throttle, man, and leave you breathless.
I had a fear when I started out that people would know I was Stephen King’s son, so I put on a mask and pretended I was someone else. But the stories always told the truth, the true truth. I think good stories always do. The stories I’ve written are all the inevitable product of their creative DNA: Bradbury and Block, Savini and Spielberg, Romero and Fango, Stan Lee and C. S. Lewis, and most of all, Tabitha and Stephen King.
The unhappy creator finds himself in the shadow of other, bigger artists and resents it. But if you’re lucky—and as I’ve already said, I’ve had more than my fair share of luck, and please God, let it hold—those other, bigger artists cast a light for you to find your way.
And who knows? Maybe one day you even have the good fortune to work right alongside one of your heroes. I had a chance to write a couple of stories with my father and went for it. It was fun. I hope you like ’em—they’re here in this book.
I had some years to wear a mask, but I breathe better now that it’s off my face.
And that’s enough from me for a while. We’ve got some riding to do. Come on. Let’s go.
Bring on the bad guys.
Joe Hill
Exeter, New Hampshire
September 2018
Throttle
with Stephen King
THEY RODE WEST FROM THE SLAUGHTER, through the painted desert, and did not stop until they were a hundred miles away. Finally, in the early afternoon, they turned in at a diner with a white stucco exterior and pumps on concrete islands out front. The overlapping thunder of their engines shook the plate-glass windows as they rolled by. They drew up together among parked long-haul trucks, on the west side of the building, and there they put down their kickstands and turned off their bikes.
Race Adamson had led them the whole way, his Harley running sometimes as much as a quarter mile ahead of anyone else’s. It had been Race’s habit to ride out in front ever since he’d returned to them, after two years in the sand. He ran so far in front it often seemed he was daring the rest of them to try and keep up, or maybe he had a mind to simply leave them behind. He hadn’t wanted to stop here, but Vince had forced him to. As the diner came into sight, Vince had throttled after Race, blown past him, and then shot his hand left in a gesture the Tribe knew well: Follow me off the highway. The Tribe let Vince’s hand gesture call it, as they always did. Another thing for Race to dislike about him, probably. The kid had a pocketful of them.
Race was one of the first to park but the last to dismount. He stood astride his bike, slowly stripping off his leather riding gloves, glaring at the others from behind his mirrored sunglasses.
“You ought to have a talk with your boy,” Lemmy Chapman said to Vince. Lemmy nodded in Race’s direction.
“Not here,” Vince said. It could wait until they were back in Vegas. He wanted to put the road behind him. He wanted to lie down in the dark for a while, wanted some time to allow the sick knot in his stomach to abate. Maybe most of all, he wanted to shower. He hadn’t gotten any blood on him but felt contaminated all the same and wouldn’t be at ease in his own skin until he’d washed off the morning’s stink.
He took a step in the direction of the diner, but Lemmy caught his arm before he could go any farther. “Yes. Here.”
Vince looked at the hand on his arm—Lemmy didn’t let go; Lemmy of all the men had no fear of him—then glanced toward the kid, who wasn’t really a kid at all anymore and hadn’t been for years. Race was opening the hardcase over his back tire, fishing through his gear for something.
“What’s to talk about? Clarke’s gone. So’s the money. There’s nothing left to do.”
“You ought to find out if Race feels the same way. You been assuming the two of you are on the same page, even though these days he spends forty minutes of every hour pissed off at you. Tell you something else, boss. Race brought some of these guys in, and he got a lot of them fired up, talking about how