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I slowed down only a little to pick them up. Morgan and Sophie were already leaping into the open bed of the truck, as Wendy and River dove into the seat beside me. Once they were situated enough not to fall out on acceleration, I left a stinking trail of rubber on the asphalt all the way down the drive toward a security guard who—I have no doubt—wasn’t paid nearly enough to become a bug on my windshield. He valiantly attempted to wave me off, apparently believing deep in that pretty place we all have somewhere in our souls that I would stop before harming him in any way.

What a dumbass. He obviously knew nothing about adrenaline, love, or their cumulative effects on the human brain. Consequently he was forced to dive for cover at the last minute, landed on a nearby hot dog cart and rolled down the street toward an oncoming trolley train filled with handicapped children.

Wow. Who could have thought that could go so wrong? Heroism has its price, I suppose.

I floored the truck out into oncoming traffic, where cars swerved, skidded, and dodged in all directions, knocking the hot dog cart into some bushes before the train could hit it. But now the guard was stuck on the hood of the car that had dislodged him, which was— unfortunately for all concerned—now driving right alongside me at just about the same rate of speed.

The guard looked frantically around for a few seconds in mounting terror, then collected himself once he realized he might not actually die. After a moment or two of brief calm, he looked in my direction and saw that I was the one who had started all this. That got his adrenaline going, and his love for violence apparently because both fogged his better judgment as he smiled a tiger’s smile and crawled over the hood of the old Pontiac he was lying across toward me—as if that was going to do either of us the least little bit of good.

I edged the truck away from him, but we were now going up the onramp onto the freeway, so there was a barrier rail on the passenger side that would only allow me so much getting away space. Worse, for reasons I won’t pretend to understand, the elderly woman driver of the Pontiac—who was screaming like the lead singer of Linkin Park falling down a mineshaft—angled her car closer to mine, as if hoping the guard on her hood might leap off onto mine, and thereby rid her of her problem. Her husband was apparently on my side, or rather the side that believed she should stop the car right now and put an end to all this foolishness. Unfortunately, his yelling appeared not to be getting through any better than mine.

“Pull over!” he told his wife. “PULL OVER!” Then he grabbed the wheel and jerked it in the opposite direction. “If you’re not going to do it, let me!”

His rash decision abruptly dislodged the guard and tossed the poor man my way, where he grabbed my side-view mirror—I say ‘my’ as if I owned it, but you get general the idea—and held on for dear life, his feet still perched atop the other vehicle as we both careened back and forth in the narrow, two-lane onramp. As the frightened guard hung there, he looked at me with pleading eyes, begging me not to let him die.

Feeling as if I might somehow be responsible for his desperate situation, I took pity on the poor man, rolled down the window, and reached out a saving arm.

Which he viciously grabbed and started pulling in some illconceived attempt to yank me from the cab! I mean, really, twice in as many days? When is removing the driver of a fast moving automobile ever a good idea, people?

And so, clearly not having thought it through, the guard hung between vehicles as we entered the freeway simultaneously, forcing other fast-moving trucks and cars out of their lanes to do so.

“There they are!” River shouted.

I turned my head—now mostly outside the window—into the oncoming rush of the wind, and saw absolutely nothing as my eye sockets ballooned out like parachutes and filled with tears from overstimulated ducts.

“AAAH!” I screamed.