"Well folks, four hours later, it's finally a beautiful night for racing!" Darrell Cartrip announced, his front tires resting on the very edge of the announcers' booth as he peered down at the track. The trucks towing the huge air dryers had nearly finished their work, the asphalt finally dry enough that the racers wouldn't be at risk on their slick tires. "The sun is going down, our track is clean and dry, and it is looking to be one heck of a race!"

"Absolutely, Darrell," Bob Cutlass continued, too accustomed to their educate-the-viewer banter to miss a beat. "Our racers are going to have their work cut out for them; with the temperature dropping rapidly and all of the rubber washed off the track, it's going to be a very different surface than they've been practicing on all week."

"They planned for a rubbered-up track under the Florida sun, and they get a green track under Daytona lights!" Darrell grinned, backing up a few inches when one of the camera techs muttered in his earpiece that he was blocking Bob from the camera view. "This is where we're gonna see the most adaptable drivers rise to the top of the heap, Bob. Who's your bet?"

"Well, Darrell, since you give me first pick, I'm taking the obvious - Lightning McQueen! After last year's record-breaking championship performance, the Rust-Eze racer has everything going for him this season."

"Well, if I can't pick Lightning, I'm gonna go with our friend Jeff Gorvette. It's his last year on the track, so he's going to be pushing to end on a high note. Maybe he can steal a few wins from McQueen this year, whaddya say?"

"I'm more interested in what McQueen has to say!"

"Well, lessee if we can ask him," Darrell answered, the techs performing their well-practiced dance at the verbal cues and patching him through to the appropriate radio frequency. "Lightnin', good buddy, this is Darrell up in the booth, ya read me?"

There was no response on the channel, just a thin, static-laden silence, and Darrell couldn't quite stop his frown as he leaned back over the lip of the booth, peering down at the track. Lightning was clearly there, weaving in tight serpentines within his lane to warm his tires, but there was no indication he'd heard the call.

"Lightnin', this is Darrell, you read me?"

There was another brief silence, before an aggravated sigh gusted over the frequency; not Lightning's, but Doc's.

*I'd say we've got a bit of a radio problem, Darrell,* the old Hudson remarked. A glance at the monitor showed one of the cameras zoomed in on Lightning's pit box, Sarge and Guido already scrambling over a new antenna assembly. *Hopefully we can fix it on the first caution, and you can interview him in Victory Lane.*

"Well, Doc, I was gonna ask how you feel about Lightning's chances today, but I guess I don't have to! Sounds like you think he's a pretty sure bet."

*I'm not the gambling type, you ought to know that by now.*

"I'd know it better if you weren't here!" Darrell shot back, laughing, half an eye on the monitor. The half-smirk that curled the corner of Doc's bumper in response was a bit of a relief; the Hornet had been snappish and tense for the entirety of Speedweek, and joking with him had met unpredictable results.

*Every lap is a roll of the dice,* Doc sighed, his eyes flicking from away from the track as Lightning rounded Turn Two and out of his line of sight. *But if you ask me to bet, Darrell, I'll put my money on that kid every time.*

"You know, I hope his radio is receiving, just so he can hear you say that."

*Ah, kid knows I'm proud of him. Now stop making me get mushy, Cartrip, you have a race to announce, and I have a punk kid to get to Victory Lane.*

"Yessir, Doc. Good luck to you both tonight," Darrell laughed, and the tech cut their link to the frequency on his nod.

"Radio problems for Lightning McQueen!" Bob commented, sitting up a little on his suspension. "That lack of communication may be a serious issue for our reigning champion, who has grown very accustomed to constant contact with his crew chief, Doc Hudson."

"You wanna change your pick?" Darrell teased, nudging his broadcast partner's tire. "I'll be happy to lay my odds on McQueen if you think this radio trouble's gonna affect his chances."

"Thanks, Darrell, but I think I'll stick with my pick, and we'll find out how right I am in five hundred miles. Green flag is in the air!"

"Boogity boogity boogity, let's go racin', boys! And Danica!"

"All right, kid, two to go, you're clear behind, three lengths," Doc murmured into the headset, less coaching and more muttering into the void. The coaching was a hard habit to break, even if they had given up on repairing Lightning's radio after the third attempt had failed. The likeliest culprit was condensation in the kid's wiring from the rain - all the more reason to live out in the desert, rather than out here on the East Coast - but it meant that Lightning was essentially running this race solo.

The only upside to the entire mess was the company they were keeping in the pits - their stall was flanked by Tony's on one side and Junior's on the other. Both of those racers considered Lightning a friend, and were willing to relay messages to him when they got within shouting distance - like 'Doc says pit for tires!' or 'Doc says stop driving like a rustbrain just because he can't coach your every freaking move!'.

He hadn't phrased it exactly like that, but asking Tony to relay any kind of message usually meant that it got a bit more colorful by the time it got to the recipient.

Still, running without his radio hurt Lightning's chances less than Darrell might have thought - or the other racers might have hoped. The kid was good, genuinely talented, and had actually grown a couple of brain cells in seven years under the tutelage of the Fabulous Hudson Hornet, all of which had kept him out front - if not quite so easily as usual. But he had opened up a clear lead by now, with Tony, Jeff, and Junior battling for second place three lengths behind him.

"All right, white flag in the air, four corners left, just hold your line," Doc instructed the static. There were probably a thousand or so cars in the stands with their radios tuned to Lightning's channel frequency, listening to Doc talk to himself. At this rate, he was going to run out of excuses not to start a Twitter account; he was certainly proving only too willing to shout into the void. Or at the very least, grumble into it.

Stretching up on his suspension, he could see Lightning rounding Turn Four, the bolt stickers on his front fenders catching the light, reflections splintering off the SAFER barrier and the fence. "Good, kid, still clear behind, clear by four. It's all yours, now bring it home."

Even without his radio working, Lightning responded, pushing out a little more speed to open up the gap between himself and the other racers, and sailing across the finish line with an easy six lengths between him and Junior, Tony losing second place by a matter of inches.

Doc ignored the grin threatening to split his fenders as Sarge, Mater, Guido, and Luigi broke into cheers around him. "Good job, kid, that's the way to - look out!"

But of course, Lightning couldn't hear him. And he wasn't aware Chick Hicks bearing down on him - not until the green Buick slammed into his side.

Blade, parked on the cement apron in front of Maru's workshop to enjoy the feeling of the weak February sunlight against his rotors, glanced towards the Main Hanger at the sudden outbreak of noise. Dipper's shrill indignation rose above even Avalanche's wordless bellow, and below that he could make out both Nick and Blackout shouting furiously in Spanish.

He'd been reluctant to agree when Dipper had asked permission to hold her Daytona party on the Base, but the team - at least, all of the team who was interested in ground racing, which was the Smokejumpers, Patch, and Nick - took turns hosting a viewing party for the year's inaugural race, and Dipper's main residence was still technically in Alaska.

While it wasn't exactly fair for the Base's permanent residents to have their peace and quiet brought to such an early end this year, neither was it fair to expect the Smokejumpers to travel to the exhaust-end of the continent in February. Which all of them were precisely stubborn enough to do, because this was their tradition, and Ford forbid they not be together to watch forty-odd cars driving five hundred miles worth of circles.

With somewhat resigned curiosity - undoubtedly, if he did not find out the cause of their shouting now, he would learn over dinner, and probably in a much less coherent fashion than he might wish - Blade nosed the updated Search and Rescue training manual closed and rolled to the Main Hanger.

The door had been left wide open, so it was no difficulty for him to stick his nose in, silently observing his team as they continued to howl at the television. Nick was shouting a suggestion that would have been anatomically difficult even for the slimmest and most flexible of cars; certainly the blocky green Buick on the screen would have found it quite impossible.

Particularly given that the Buick in question was currently on his roof in the infield grass, all four tires flailing indignantly, and from the look of things, bellowing some fairly creative profanity, while several large white SUVs with official decals tried to restrain a burly Chevrolet mix with a torn fender that half-obscured the blue number 14 on his side.

The camera slid away from the Buick - whom one of the officials was regarding with an expression that suggested he was contemplating turning the 14 loose on him once again - to a younger, sleeker red car with a stylized lightning bolt paint scheme and a 95 on his side. The kid was injured - front fender and side panel caved in, and it looked like he might have been nursing a broken front axle - and leaning heavily against an older blue car, a fifties model that Blade didn't recognize.

A low, startled sound from the back of the hanger pulled Blade's attention away from the television. He was a little surprised to find Windlifter lurking in the shadows there; he hadn't even realized his Lieutenant was on the Base, let alone trapped in here with the viewing party.

He was a little more than surprised by the sound that was rolling up out of the Sikorsky's throat; a low, throbbing growl that carried under the others' shouts, a bass tone that shivered down into Blade's very frame.

He'd heard Windlifter make that sound precisely twice before - once, about five minutes before they'd had to talk Cabbie down from committing homicide, and a second time, when Cad had first driven onto the Base. Not a threat-sound, despite how it sounded, but the acknowledgement of a threat; privately, Blade called it the 'slag is about to hit the fan' sound. Which, if the look on the Sikorsky's face was any indication, was a fairly accurate assessment.

If it were anyone other than Windlifter, he would have said the expression was that of someone who had just seen a ghost - but there was no ghost in the world that would put much expression at all on his Lieutenant's face, let alone that mixture of disbelief, anger, and hurt.

Windlifter snapped his gaze away from the television, executed a sharp pivot on his landing gear, and rolled rapidly out the door.

Blade didn't say a word, just turned and followed his Lieutenant. Several of Blade's internal alarm bells were chiming - anything that could distress Windlifter to this degree could, quite possibly, be a sign of the Apocalypse. "What's the problem?"

The noncommittal noise he received in reply was only slightly reassuring. "A family matter, of sorts," Windlifter murmured in reply, but there were sharp edges to his familiar, steady cadence. The door of his personal hanger was already open, and Windlifter rolled straight to his radio.

Blade lingered at his doorway, not concerned enough to invite himself in, but slightly too concerned to simply go back to his reading. "Anything I can help with?"

"Not at the moment," Windlifter answered, rolling forward to key the microphone on. That radio was always set to the same frequency, so there was no tuning required. "Elizabeth."

That was all, no proper query or hail, but it was barely a second before the radio squawked a response, Elizabeth's puzzled voice drifting from the fritzing speaker.

*Silus? What catastrophe has befallen us that you're calling in the middle of the afternoon?*

Blade wasn't entirely sure if he should find it reassuring or worrying that Liz's thought process mirrored his own.

"Can you turn on RSN?" Windlifter asked, in lieu of any kind of explanation.

*I can, but why on Earth -* There was a long pause on the other end of the line, broken only by a sharply indrawn breath.

"Is it him?" Windlifter demanded, fixing the radio with a stare so intense Blade wondered if Elizabeth could feel it through the connection.

*Dear Ford,* came the disbelieving reply, Liz's voice soft-edged and a little frightened. *Yes. I'm almost certain, I'm looking at the picture now... I think it must be, but how -?!*

Windlifter snorted.

*Don't be ridiculous,* she chided regaining a little of her usual aplomb. *We'd have heard about it if that were the case. Besides, Nick is quite special. Normal vehicles do not simply resurrect on a whim, otherwise there would be no basis for religion.*

Blade was the one that snorted at that; the thought of Nick being hailed as some kind of deity was both too absurd and too horrifying to contemplate. The celebrity-worship had been bad enough!

"Does the how matter?" Windlifter asked, his voice steady and guiding, and Elizabeth's sigh crackled over the line.

*At the moment, I suppose not. However, I'd best inform Victoria regardless.* Another long pause, then; *She's not going to take this well.*

"Perhaps not," Windlifter agreed. "But I believe it will be better to tell her."

*You would, dear, you're too tall for her to bite anything of importance,* Elizabeth answered dryly. *She's somewhere in Tibet this month, I think. I'll see about tracking her down. Lucas out.*

Blade waited with clench-jawed patience until Windlifter had gotten his radio properly shut off before poking a few inches of his nose across the threshold of his Lieutenant's door. "And just what in the Pits was that all about?"

Windlifter, when he turned to look at Blade, bore a thoughtful frown that looked unsettlingly like the one he'd worn the night Nick returned. "That remains to be seen."

"How much of it can you see right now?" Blade did not like mysteries happening under his nose, especially not when they affected members of his team, and if he could sarcasm answers out of his reticent second-in-command, he was damn well going to.

"Some very old family history has reared its head," came the calm reply, and Windlifter rolled out of his hanger again, at a far slower speed than he'd entered it. "It will not affect us directly that I can foresee."

"And indirectly?"

Windlifter gave an uncomfortable twitch of his rotors. "Much may influence us indirectly, from the direction of the winds to the -"

"Windlifter."

"Blade, I do not know," the big Sikorsky sighed, suddenly sounding very, very tired. "The situation may never evolve beyond this, or it may become something beyond our imagining. There are things I cannot foresee, and this is one of them."

"Well, get your inner eye checked and let me know when you figure something out," Blade answered, his rotors twitching irritably, and, with his focus now thoroughly fractured, went to put his training manual away for the afternoon and join the others in a little therapeutic yelling at the television.

~ End Chapter ~

NOTES:

Oh, you thought that was Lightning's wreck that I mentioned? Heh. No. Lighting will have to suffer muuuuuuch worse than a broken axle, because I am evil.

Okay, your NASCAR knowledge for this chapter: Temperature affects racing surfaces.

In addition to the age and type of the track surface (asphalt versus concrete), the weather is a big factor in how the surface will handle. A hot track, particularly one that's recently been resurfaced, tends to be much slicker as the asphalt softens. Older tracks have rougher surfaces, which provide more grip, but chew up tires. A cold track has more grip than a hot one, but a green track - one washed free of the accumulated rubber from tires - has less, and tends to create more wear on the tires.

In our world, the Goodyear race tires have an average lifespan of 100-150 miles depending on the racing surface, meaning that drivers have to come in at least two to three times in any given race for fresh tires. They will usually trade tires with far more frequency, as fresh tires provide better grip and handling, meaning faster and more competitive driving. (Put mildly, there is no way in hell Lightning could have come close to running half a race on only one set of tires, unless tires behave very differently in the Cars universe.)

Lightning's radio problems were planned from the start - yes, condensation can cause radio issues - but were rather hilariously and brilliantly supported during June's Pocono race, when Ryan Blaney's radio stopped working. The 23-year-old driver used 1970's era hand signals to communicate with his crew - and went on to win the race.

Both the boogities and the 'Let's go racing boys!' are Darrell Waltrip (voice of Darrell Cartrip, former NASCAR driver, and current race announcer/commentator for NASCAR on FOX) signatures. And yes, he really does add 'and Danica!' to the end of his signature phrase on fairly regular occasions. Occasional variants are 'let's go racing, drivers!' or something track-specific, such as 'you bunch of Martinsville hotdogs!'

Doc's comments over the radio are actually what a spotter would be telling Lightning in a real-world NASCAR situation. The spotters, armed with high-powered binoculars and standing on the roof of the viewing boxes at the tracks, are tasked with telling their driver where other cars are relative to them, (allowing them to maneuver and pass safely), when another car is trying to pass them, and warning them of wrecks, caution flags, and any other hazards on the track. The Cars world doesn't seem to have spotters, possibly because the cars have a wider range of senses than humans driving cars, or possibly because it would have been that many more characters/details to animate. (If you want to listen to some real NASCAR radio chatter (and see the corresponding clips from the races), search 'NASCAR Radioactive' on YouTube. Radio discussions are generally between the driver, their Crew Chief, and their spotter, and can get pretty hilarious, if not slightly rude.)

And I will explain/clarify exactly what happened to Lightning in the next chapter. Short version is Chick hit him and knocked him into Tony, who retaliated against Chick.

Disney does list Windlifter's canonical first name as Silus. Yeah, I don't know either.

Both Elizabeth and Victoria are OCs of mine - while originally written for this story before it became part of the Hallowed 'verse, they made their first appearances in All Hallowed. Liz is a 1970 Jaguar E-Type, who works as the Special Events Coordinator for the Lodge. Victoria hasn't yet appeared on screen, but she's the source Windlifter contacts to help with his research on Nick's resurrection.