Trent Reedy - Divided We Fall

JoBell took one look at the men and ran after me. “Oh no. We’re coming too.” She pushed the driver’s seat forward and scrambled into the back.

“There’s no reason for you girls to get mixed up in this,” Sweeney said, even as Becca shoved him aside and climbed in the back after Cal. Me and Sweeney slid in and I fired up the car. Its engine absolutely roared.

“Daniel Wright!” the gun-toting agent shouted. They were two rows of cars away from us. “Stop right there. We need to talk to you.”

“He got a gun. Just wants to talk,” Cal said.

“Talk to the squealing tires.” I hammered on the gas and the Mustang’s wheels screamed. We shot ahead so fast, I almost dumped it in the ditch next to the driveway. “Which way?” I asked when we were on the road.

“Away from the cop!” Sweeney yelled. The car parked halfway in the grass had started flashing red and blue lights in its windshield. It was one of those sneaky cars-that-don’t-look-like-a-cop-car types of cop cars.

Becca leaned forward from the backseat. “No, no, they’ll have cars everywhere. Head south. Get around that cop.”

“You guys better strap in!” I laid on the gas and we shot off fast. Fifty, sixty, seventy… “Hold on!” The black car was trying to block the road. He was halfway across the centerline when I reached him. “Gonna bite a little shoulder here!” The wheels hit loose gravel on the side of the road and I felt the car skid like some shaky, rocket-powered sled. I relaxed on the wheel for a second to regain control before easing it back onto the road and gunning it again. Eighty, ninety…

My grip on the wheel was so tight that my fingers ached. I stared straight ahead, barely even risking a look in my mirrors at the two screaming cop cars that now followed us, keeping focused on the road. Biting my lip to concentrate, breathing deeply through my nose to try to calm my racing heart, I pushed the gas pedal down farther.

“You gotta go faster, dude,” said Sweeney. “They’re gaining on us.”

“But this is a Mustang,” said JoBell. “They’re driving plain Fords, like my mom’s work car.”

“The cops pack a lot more power under the hood than your mom’s grocery-getter,” I said. “Sweeney, remember all those times I said no when you asked me to disable the speed governor on this thing?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry about that.” A bead of sweat trickled down my forehead. I didn’t dare take my hands off the wheel to wipe it. It went in my eye and I blinked it away. “Can someone switch on the air conditioner?”

Ahead, an oncoming semi filled the other lane, and a little Honda pulled up to the edge of a driveway. If he pulled onto the road in front of us, we’d have nowhere to go, and we were cooking along way too fast to slow down in time. “Don’t do it. Don’t do it,” I said to him. The Honda pulled out several car lengths in front of us. “You son of a bitch!” If we’d been going normal speed it would be no problem, but we were flying. “Damn it! Hold on, everybody!”

I whipped the car into the left lane to pass the Honda and put the pedal to the floor.

“Truck!” JoBell screamed. The semi straight ahead blew its air horns and flashed its lights.

“I got it. I got it.” For a second, I thought the cold terror down in my gut would make me lose it in my pants. I’d misjudged the vehicle interval. There was no room.

The second we passed the Honda, I cranked the wheel back to the right. A sound like a gunshot went off and sparks shot up by my window. The car shook, but kept going.

The semi had clipped the driver’s side mirror. My heart pounded. I checked the rearview mirror and saw the truck and the Honda pull over as the cops drove by. “Sorry, Sweeney.”

“And that, friends, is why you make room for emergency vehicles,” said Sweeney. “Well, that’s why other people should pull over. You focus on driving, Wright.”

“I have a map.” Becca held her comm out between Sweeney and me. “We’re coming up on that Y intersection. If we go right, we’ll stay on Highway 41. Or we can hook a little bit sharper turn onto Highway 54.”

I risked a glance in the rearview mirror and saw JoBell look at the comm. “Take 41,” she said. “There are way more roads that we can use to lose them.”

“Except I bet the cops will have the road blocked at the Y intersection,” Becca said. “Check this satellite view. There’s tons of trees to the right, so we can’t go around the roadblock to stay on 41. But this looks like an open grassy field at the corner of this road and 54. We might be able to drive across that to skip the roadblock.”

The speed governor kicked in and I could feel the tension going out of the accelerator. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are cruising along at about a hundred fifty miles an hour. This is as fast as this baby can go. Do we have a plan?”

“I’m with Becca,” said Cal. “Hit the grass, not the trees.”

“You try to drive onto an open field at this speed and you’ll roll it,” Sweeney said.

“Maybe there won’t be a roadblock,” JoBell said.

But I could already see red and blue lights flashing up ahead. There must have been a dozen cars sitting on the road. As we approached, I spotted police, regular uniformed guys, not the suited federal agents that had been at the school.

“They have guns,” JoBell said.

I’d seen that too. This was stupid. What if they opened fire? What if I couldn’t keep control when we drove through the grass field? What if there was no grass field? I could get my friends killed here. “Maybe we should give up.” The cops behind us were closing to within three car lengths. “There’s no way we can get away.”

Sweeney hit his head back against the headrest. “Dude, we’ve been over this. If you were just going to give up after all, you should have done it back at the school, before we were doing one-fifty and running from the FBI.”

We were coming up on the barricade fast. I could see a clearing on the left side of the road, which looked like the open field Becca had mentioned. But those satellite images were crap. What if there were tons of rocks or a big ravine or something else to tear us apart?

JoBell squeezed my shoulder. “Whatever this is all about, I trust you. I believe in you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We really need to talk about that. Hold on, everybody. This is a Mustang, and we’re about to ride it like a rodeo.”

“I so don’t like the sound of that,” said Sweeney.

As soon as we reached the open field, I cranked the wheel to the left and we launched off the shoulder down a little drop into the grass. The back tires slid and we fishtailed for a moment. The girls screamed. Sweeney screamed. Hell, I think I might have screamed. In the next second, I spotted a gentler-looking part of the embankment, and if not for my seat belt I would have flown up out of my seat when we jumped up onto the other highway.

“You did it!” Cal shouted. “One cop car spun out in the grass. He slowed way down before he came up on this road.”

When I’d steadied us on Highway 54, I checked my mirror. The police at the barricade were scrambling to their cars to follow. The two black FBI cars pulled out ahead of them and were after us again.

Sweeney slapped the dashboard. “Dude, let’s head onto one of these county highways. We can make two or three turns onto other back roads before they’ve made their first. We’ll lose them.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “Hold on.” I eased on the brake to slow down enough to make the corner. But right as I approached the intersection, about six police cars pulled out from behind the trees on the left to block the road. “Oh shit!” I stomped on the brakes hard, and we skidded out of control. We were going to slide right into the police. I yanked the emergency brake lever back and cranked the wheel hard to the left again, this time sending the Mustang into a sliding three-sixty spin.