（外文电子版资料）Geoffrey A. Landis - Hot Death On Wheels.pdfVIP

Hot Death on Wheels Geoffrey A. Landis originally appeared in Realms of Fantasy November 1996 Cars today, theyre nothing, kid; crappy little Detroit shitboxes stamped out of sheet-metal. A waste of your fuckin money and so full of electronic crap that you cant even tune em up without a fuckin computer. You like that one? Pretty, you say? Let me tell you, you couldnt afford it, not that one. Not for sale, anyway. Let me tell you about cars, kid, about real cars. I was a kid too, once. Yeah, that was a while back, more miles than I care to remember. Used to tag along behind the greasers. A grease-monkey wannabe, me, hair slicked back with Bryl Creem and snot dripping out my nose and thought I knew something about cars. Nah, I didnt know nothing back then, but Den Tolbert, he tolerated me trailing around behind him, sometimes even let me hold a wrench for him while he worked on his street-rod, let me feel like I was part of it, something special. Never heard of him? Kid, Im not surprised, you wouldnt. But believe you me, he was the best there was, maybe the best there ever was. He was a t-shirt grease-punk back when the word punk meant something, not like those fags today who think theyre something because they got a staple though their face. Not that anybody--anybody--would have called him a punk to his face, no sir. Den had a 57 Chevy, just like that one. The finest car ever made, my opinion. Hed crammed a Cadillac flathead V-8 in it, the one that, back then, they made special only for ambulances. He took it apart and rebuilt it, the engine bored and stroked and milled and ported and polished, every cam sanded and shined and rubbed and put back together the way he wanted it. He had damn near five hundred raging broncos chained under the hood, with fat racing slicks of Pirelli rubber two feet wide in back, and custom hand-tooled air shocks he took off an Italian racer that crashed and burned of