Stephen Hunter - Night of Thunder

Arrgh, nothing. She wanted a cigarette but had been trying to quit.

But then she thought of her good friends from Brazil who were taking over the world.

She requested Amazon.com, and instantly that empire responded.

A few tries at k 2:11 yielded nothing except some technical gibberish, a book on Russian submarines, another on World War II ships called corvettes.

Next she tried to work the bullet angle, just in case, and went to “Cartridges” and got a lot of info, maybe too much. After scanning its contents courtesy of the Amazonians, she settled on a book, The History of Sniping and Sharpshooting, because it seemed to offer the broadest overview of the subject, then hit the one-touch purchase option so that it would arrive soon. That was stupid. Her dad would call well before then, and explain all. Still, it made her feel that she had done something positive.

She put the laptop away and checked this way and that for traffic, preparing to edge onto the asphalt. She’d be home in an hour. Another day, another dollar for Nikki Swagger, girl reporter-whoa!

Some redneck in a low black car came whipping by, faster than light or sound. Man, was the guy crazy or what? She’d never seen a car move like that, a blur, a low hum, a whisper of streamline and chrome, there and gone and then vanished forever. Was it a dream, a vision, something out of a nightmare?

It scared her. Not that these hills were haunted or anything, but you could convince yourself of anything looking at fog-shrouded hollows, hairpin turns, the dark carpeting of trees leading up to unseen peaks, the networks of roads leading off to NO TRESPASSING signs and God-knows-what-else up them. There were rumors of militia out here or some gang of outriders or Klansmen or White Supremacists or some such. There was the business about shooters, blazing away in the night, an army of righteousness getting ready for its conquest. This guy in his muscle car bolting along over a hundred miles an hour could have been an emissary from any of them.

No, she told herself. Some kid, too much beer, he thinks he’s some NASCAR hero, these people love their drivers, that’s what a kid’s fancy would turn to. She half-believed that in the next twenty miles she’d come across the low, black speed merchant on its side, bleeding flame in a pulse of red light, as the emergency service vehicles circled it and their crews tried to pull the hero, now a crispy critter, his soul in heaven, from the flames.

She shivered. Then she slipped into gear and pulled out.

He saw her. It was in a haze of speed, but he made out the Volvo and a young woman’s face caught in the glow of dash light. She’d pulled aside on the right, nestling under trees, and had been working at some task, some continuation of the curiosity that had doomed her. He saw in that flash of light a beautiful young face and he knew how close it was, he was running out of mountain road, and she’d be a much harder kill without an iron wall of trees to drive her into on her right side.

Why had he looked to the right at that moment? Who knew? It was the Sinnerman’s luck, and even the Sinnerman got lucky once in a while. He slowed to eighty, then found a wayside, pulled over more deeply, to await her.

Brother Richard punched the iPod and ran through his Sinnerman options again, beginning with the Travelers 3, going to the pure gospel of the Reverend Seabright Kingly and His Hebrew Chorus (that was funky!) and on to the personality-free Seekers. Then to Les Baxter’s balladeer, winding through the high-boring purity of Shelby Flint, and finishing up with the arrhythmic, antimelodic approach of Sixteen Horsepower. All interesting, with the Travelers 3 maybe the truest folk esthetic, the Balladeer the highest show-biz, and the Reverend the fanciest old-Negro church version, almost unrecognizable for all the hooting and shrilling.

Brother Richard knew himself proudly to be the Sinnerman. He would do the wrong. I can live with the wrong. I exult in the wrong, he thought. I define the wrong. I am the wrong. It could have turned out different, but it turned out this way.

He waited as the music roared in his ear. And finally, she came by him on the lonely road, not seeing him pulled off to the side, her placid, little, sensible Volvo trimly purring along at less than forty. He could see that she was tense behind the wheel, for he saw her body hunched forward to the wheel, her neck tight and straight, her head abnormally still, her hands rigid at ten and two on the wheel. She was worried about the road, about the possibility of a big truck coming up from behind her or barreling widely and wildly around a turn.

But she wasn’t worried about the Sinnerman. In her version of the world, there was no Sinnerman. She had no concept of the Sinnerman and no idea of what was about to befall her.

Almost out of these damned mountains. Then a short, flat run across the floor of Shady Valley, a last splurge of hills, and then Sullivan County, civilization, as 421 took her back to Bristol, to her apartment, to a nice glass of wine.

Then Nikki saw death.

It was a blur in her mirror, just a shadow as no details presented themselves. Then it was a blur in her driver’s-side window, growing exponentially by the nanosecond, full of thrust and empty of mercy. It was death in a dark car, come to snuff her out.

No one had ever tried to kill Nikki before. But she had her father’s blood in her veins and more importantly his DNA, which meant she had reflexes fast as her killer’s, and she wasn’t by nature turned toward fear or panic. The car hit her hard, the noise filled the universe and knocked her askew, toward trees which rushed at her, signaling catastrophe as her tires bit against the skittish dust. Then she did what one person in ten thousand will do in those circumstances and she did it at a speed that has no place in time, out of certitude for correct behavior at the extremes.

She did nothing. She let the car correct itself as its wheels reoriented swiftly. She had control again.

Most, seeing trees or cliff rushing at them, will overcorrect, and when they do that the laws of physics, immutable and merciless, mandate a roll. The roll is death. The neck and its thin stalk of spine can’t take the g-force and sunder under the extreme vibration. Cessation of consciousness and life signs is immediate, and whether the wreck is in flames or not, further body trauma, broken bones, sundered blood-bearing organs, whatever, is immaterial. She didn’t know that the Sinnerman, with his experience in automotive assassination, had presumed she would yank the wheel for life, guaranteeing death, and was surprised as she rode the bump out, got soft control, and then accelerated, half on road, half on gravel, to escape his predation.

He hit her again, in the rear-third of the accelerating Volvo, knocking her fishtailing off the road in a screech of dust. But she didn’t panic at the wheel and hard-spin it this time either (sure death), but instead let it spin free and find its own proper vector as she scooted just ahead of him. He pulled himself left, drew off, set up for another thump, this one better aimed.

Nikki was not scared. Fright is imagination combined with anticipation combined with dread, and none of those conditions described her. Instead, she accepted instantaneously that she was in a fight to the death with a trained, experienced killer, and she didn’t waste any concentration on the unfairness of it all. Instead, she pushed the pedal so hard to the floor of the car that she felt the beginning of g-force, though of course the Volvo 240 with its 200-horsepower six-cylinder was no match for the muscled-up Chrysler barn-burner under her antagonist’s foot. But as he struggled to find an angle, she put surprising space between the vehicles and yet was astute enough to see in supertime a turn approaching. So now she finally braked, softly turning into a power slide that would get her around the turn at the best angle and set her up for another dead-on acceleration the hell out of there, if such a thing were possible, and it probably wasn’t.