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River took the wheel and Waboombas reached a foot over to accelerate. I felt her painted, bare toes press down on mine and suddenly the car lurched forward. Though I couldn’t see his face, I imagined that the security guard still dangling from my arm, mere feet above the racing pavement below, was, just about then, expressing a little concern.

“AAAAAAAAAAH!” he said.

“I said, ‘I can’t see’,” I told Wendy, “not ‘go faster’!”

“We have to catch them!” Wendy informed me. “You’re going too slow!”

She pushed harder on my foot, as if that would make the pedal go somehow beyond the floor. The increase in speed caused the guard’s fingernails to dig deep into the tender flesh of my arm as gravity, speed, and tension forced him slowly down, down, down, toward certain death on the ragged asphalt passing beneath him at just over eighty-miles an hour. I heard him praying to some god or other in a language I couldn’t understand. Possibly English, but it could have been Greek for all I knew.

“This is why I don’t let you drive!” I heard the old man scream to his wife, and I wondered how many other, unfortunate people had found their way onto the hood of her careening automobile.

The interesting thing about speeding down a crowded freeway while people dangle precariously from various sides of your vehicle is: no matter how fast or recklessly you may be driving, there is guaranteed to be another driver attempting to outdo you.

Case in point.

As the advertising truck sped along as I hung out the driver’s side window, as River steered, as Wendy gave it all the gas it had, as Morgan and Sophie did God only knew what in the truck’s back bed, as the security guard hung off me and the hood of the old people’s car, as the old people screamed, and complained, and drove erratically—as all that was going on in full view of anyone else on the freeway who was paying the least little bit of attention—a motorcycle, of all things, raced between our vehicles out of a desperate need to—I don’t know—cut precious seconds off his commute time perhaps.

It didn’t really work out as planned.

The most immediate effect was that, suddenly, the security guard was gone. The secondary effect was that, somewhere ahead of us, a surprised motorcyclist was wobbling and careening all over the road with a screaming man on his head, and that forced the limousine to slow its speed in order to avoid a collision.

As the long, black car backed away, the motorcycle veered off, drove up and over an embankment, and disappeared into a chickenplucking factory. This meant that—as the other car containing the older couple suddenly swerved off away from us and into a slowmoving ice-cream truck, splitting it open like a boiled cranberry and spilling its contents all over themselves and their car, they both let go of the wheel and careened hard right and into some yellow, waterfilled, safety containers—we were alone on the freeway and right up alongside the limo, pacing it.

Then the tinted passenger side window of the luxury vehicle suddenly whirred itself down, and I saw Wisper’s face, frightened and screaming.

“Corky, he’s got a gun!”

A flash erupted from near her head, she flinched, and I ducked. The front windshield of the truck shattered out, and River and Wendy shielded themselves from the bits of glass that escaped the plastic safety coating and flew in their directions. Breathing hard, and more than a little scared, I hunkered behind the driver’s door, debating my next move.

“You drive,” I told River.

“I already am,” he said.

“Oh. Right. Then stay close to them.”

He gave me a cocked look that begged me not to tell him stupid things, I nodded a kind of apology, pulled the handle and pushed outward, seeing the bottom edge of the limo under the bottom edge of my door and the blur of pavement below that.

What now? I wondered. What would Bruce Willis do in this situation? Something manly, no doubt, so I should discard that line of thinking. How about Matthew Perry?

Or Spiderman?

I thought about options and considered that there might be something in