What Would Satan Do_ - Anthony Miller [48]
“You’re not listening, Cas—wait, what was her name?”
“Lola Ford.”
Liam didn’t say anything. He wasn’t being stoic or anything – but he’d found that he needed a moment just to breathe.
“You still there? Hello?”
“Okay,” said Liam. “I’ll do it.”
Chapter 17. Texarkana
It was 4:45 a.m., and Satan was tired. It had been a long drive – eighteen and a half hours of the most excruciatingly dull and culturally irredeemable territory the United States has on offer. Now, finally, he was careening toward Texarkana, about to cross the border into Texas.
Texarkana is a small town. It doesn’t have a lot going for it, other than its fantastic name. Maybe that’s because naming your town by combining parts of the names of the two states whose border it straddles – while wildly imaginative and cool – doesn’t, by itself, inspire captains of industry to build factories and distribution centers that would otherwise lead to some kind of economic vitality. Or maybe it’s because Texarkana is located in East Texas, and East Texas is second only to Death Valley when it comes to lacking signs of intelligent life. Either way, the town is small, and there is rarely anything that any citizen of Los Angeles (or any other city, for that matter) might recognize as traffic. Travelers on their way to more appealing destinations are therefore mercifully spared having to stop anywhere inside the city limits. Not that stopping outside the city limits is really any better. But still.
Tonight, though, the traffic gods were pissed. And they’d arranged a mile-long line of stopped cars and jarring red taillights to demonstrate their wrath.
The snarl-up caught the Lord of Darkness by surprise. Despite traveling at over twice the legal speed limit, he’d been dozing very slightly, and was forced to apply his brakes with more urgency than he might have liked.
It is a scientific fact that, for every doubling in speed, the distance required to bring a car to a stop increases by a factor of three. And any vehicle – even a fancy-pants Italian sports car with the ceramic brakes option – will require approximately the distance of a football field to slow down from 150 miles per hour. That is, unless there is something nice and sturdy handy, like a tree or a telephone poll. But there weren’t any of those available to help out.
The other drivers on I-30, who up until that point had had very little to do other than to sit and wait, were treated to the sight of a bright orange supercar hurtling toward them as the Devil struggled to bring the car down from near-orbital velocity. They oohed and aahed as the Lamorghini’s tires howled and screeched and smoked. It kept going long enough that a couple of the folks who were waiting in the line of traffic were actually able to turn around to check in to see if there had been any forward progress. There hadn’t been any, so they turned back to the still howling and screeching tires.
“Jesus Christ!” said Satan.
The car finally came to a stop.
Hmmm, thought Satan, watching as a gaggle of people gathered around, snapping away with their camera phones. He devoted roughly half a second to cool, levelheaded reflection, and then decided that this was as good a time as any to test the off-road capabilities of his car.
The Devil inched the Lamborghini around an appalling, minivan-shaped abomination that he’d narrowly avoided hitting and eased out onto the shoulder. It wasn’t wide enough, so he had to drive with one wheel off in the grass, which was exactly the sort of thing the engineers in Sant’Agata had had in mind when they gave the Gallardo LP-460 five whole inches of ground clearance. Satan’s bumpy, tilted forward progress was punctuated periodically by reassuring scraping sounds as the car’s undercarriage made contact with the edge of the pavement. Up ahead, Satan could just make out flashing lights and what looked like the boxy shapes of military trucks parked at jaunty angles.
The checkpoint