Biff looked up from the floor.
“You!” he thundered, getting up quickly as a titter of derision circulated throughout the shop.
“All right, wiseass,” he spat, taking a step toward Marty. “It’s fat-lip time.”
Marty moved his body into position, preparing for action.
Lumbering toward him, Biff threw a roundhouse right which he was able to avoid easily, countering with a hard left to Biff’s gut and a right to the temple. Staggering drunkenly, Biff fell backwards into a table.
Seeing that their leader was in trouble, Match, 3-D and Skinhead started toward Marty.
Oh-oh, he thought, these aren’t good odds unless you happen to be Superman. In midstride as he moved forward to finish off Biff, Marty suddenly spun on his toe and headed out the front door. Biff’s lackies pulled him to his feet and rushed after him.
“That’s Calvin Klein!” Lorraine shouted to her girlfriends, “I mean, Marty! Oh, God, he’s a dream!”
George McFly stood to one side, transfixed with fear and awe as the scene unfolded. Fortunately, no one was looking at him or they would have seen his eyes mist as if he was about to burst into tears.
Damn, he thought, it’s gone wrong again. Even with help from outer space, I’m a dud.
Marty raced out of the soda shop, hesitated a moment at the corner of 2nd and Main, then turned to his left and started running as fast as his legs would carry him. Biff and his three lieutenants followed. Biff was slow but two of the others were faster than Marty and were rapidly closing the distance between pursued and pursuers.
Damn these new shoes, Marty thought, wincing with nearly every step as the backs chewed into his heels. Whirling to his right, he doubled back toward the town square. The maneuver gained him a step or two but he knew it was only a matter of time before the two fast boys caught him. Passing again in front of the soda shop, he saw that most of the kids had come outside on the sidewalk and were yelling encouragement to him. He would gladly have traded all that moral support for a couple of tough friends, but none seemed in the offing.
He had almost resigned himself to being caught when one of the youngsters on scooters turned off Hill Street in a path that paralleled his.
“Eureka!” Marty shouted.
Grabbing the scooter and literally yanking it out from under the kid, Marty lashed out with his feet, kicking the orange crate loose so that what remained was a crude homemade skateboard.
“Sorry, kid!” he yelled over his shoulder as he hopped onto it. “I’ll make it up to you later.”
He gave himself a kick just as hostile hands grabbed for his neck and missed. A second later, he was free, moving down the sidewalk at twice the speed of his pursuers.
“Wow! Look at him go!” yelled the kid whose scooter had been appropriated and instantly transformed into a lighter, faster vehicle.
“What is that thing?” another kid shouted, watching Marty speed away.
After a half block of falling rapidly behind their prey, Biff’s pals turned and shrugged, looking to Biff for a new tack.
“Get the car!” Biff ordered.
The four hot-footed it over to Biff’s convertible, which was parked nearby. A few seconds later, they roared off after Marty, burning rubber on the town square and disappearing in a cloud of black smoke.
Two blocks away, Marty looked back over his shoulder.
The convertible was closing in on him. Indeed, it was just about to hit him when he suddenly cut a sharp turn directly in front of it and started heading in the opposite direction. “Goddamn!” Biff shouted, hitting the brakes and twisting the car into a U-turn.
“Look at that!” Skinhead yelled.
Behind them, Marty had grabbed on to the back of a passing car and was now moving away from them at better than forty miles an hour. The driver of the car, who didn’t see the crouching Marty, shook his head with puzzlement as he passed the corner soda shop. There, at least twenty kids were standing on the sidewalk, applauding wildly and cheering as he passed.
“You’d think I just won a race or something,” the driver muttered.
Lorraine, who had seen all the action except that at the far end of the street, leaped up and down as Marty zoomed past, the skates sending sparks behind him.
“He’s an absolute dream!” she shouted to her two girlfriends.
Ten seconds later, Biff’s convertible roared past. Most of the kids booed and hissed the four tight-lipped villains who stared ahead with deadly intent.