Out of the Black - Lee Doty [99]
Hawthorne stood quiet for a moment. "Did he say anything else?"
"I think so, something about cracks in a room, ghosts slipping through... betrayal. Something about how I had to find some people, let them know that I'm the key... that's all I remember."
"You're the key?"
Anne shrugged, "Whatever that means."
"Ghosts?"
"Yep."
"That's all?"
"Uh-huh."
"So you basically forgot the most important part." Hawthorne shook her head.
"Check. Maybe I should try to take a nap... it might come back to me."
***
"Wake up, baby!" Rae shouted through the rush of the wind.
Desperation colored her voice. She strained against the seat belt, shaking Alex's leg as he slumped in the back seat. She twisted back around, released her seat belt and scrambled between the seats. The car only swerved slightly as she bumped and jostled the driver on her journey to the back seat.
The car rocketed through the sparse suburban residential neighborhood at over twice the speed limit. It swerved again slightly as Ping felt in the glove box for his sunglasses. He pulled them from the case with one hand and put them on. Outside, night and artificial day interleaved as they tore through the wash of street lamps. Ping adjusted the glasses for night vision, and the world outside clarified and tinted yellow. The glasses also provided a windbreak that allowed him to stop squinting into the wind blasting through the shattered windshield.
In the back seat, Rae was patting Alex down, looking for bullet wounds. Ping spared a few glances at them through the mirror. He didn't see any blood. Rae checked his pulse. "He's alive, but the pulse is weak! I can't find any wounds!" she shouted, worry and relief mixing in her voice. "Wake up!" she yelled. She smacked him lightly on the cheek, kissed him on the lips- smacked him harder.
"Doctor!" Ping yelled through the wind, "Perhaps you should get a second opinion before you continue that treatment!"
She hugged Alex so hard Ping thought she might break him. "What's wrong with him? What did they do?" The worry in her voice was deepening, skittering along the edge of panic.
"I'm sure he's fine, probably just blew a magical fuse like at the libr..."
A car shuddered to a halt in the intersection less than fifty meters ahead. Automatic weapons fire erupted from the back seat.
"Down!" Ping yelled, ducking his head. He stood on the accelerator and steered for the center of the car ahead.
He heard more automatic gunfire, but didn't hear or feel the thing it usually implied; no shells hit the car, shredding through plastic and metal, tearing through flesh. Either these guys were shooting blanks or they were the worst shots in the universe. It was like having a firing squad of evil B-movie henchmen. Cool. It was nice to have incompetent types try to kill him for a change.
They bore down on the car with reckless speed. As they got within twenty meters, the driver of the other car tried to accelerate out of the way. He must have figured that Ping was either dead or crazy. Either way, he probably figured that Ping wasn't going to try to avoid a solid collision at well over a hundred kilometers per hour.
Just as he thought it might be too late, Ping gave the wheel a controlled jerk and the car did it's best to accommodate his wishes. All four wheels turned, all four motors compensated as needed to maximize traction, and the suspension actively leaned the car into the turn.
Still, it wasn't enough. There was a violent pop as the front left corner of their car connected with the other car's left rear fender just behind the rear wheel. The impact shook through them, wrenched them forward for the briefest instant, bones seeming to flex from an instant of sharp deceleration, but then they were past the other car.
In his mirror, Ping could see the other car spinning end over end- a body that flew from a popped door was ejected vertically