Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

The train whistle shrilled to the west. To the east, at the top of the hill near the Challenger, the sky was edging from black to gray. Dawn almost here. Daylight on the way, and Dax on the run.

She’d won.

Abby twisted and looked into the backseat.

“You okay?”

Shannon nodded. Her cheek was bleeding where a ribbon of glass had opened it up, but she seemed unaware of the wound.

“He’s gone,” Abby said. “He’s running away.”

Two flashes of light came from up the hill, and she looked that way to see the Challenger’s headlights come on as the Hellcat engine growled to life, started with the remote as Dax limped that way. She watched him reach the car, fumble with the door, and then fall into the driver’s seat. He’d have a chance to escape now, and she almost wanted to pursue him.

She knew better, though. Let him run, and let the police catch him. He wouldn’t make it far. What Abby needed to do was get help on the way. She would go to one of the houses up the road and call for...

“Oh, shit,” she said, in a flat, almost matter-of-fact voice.

The Challenger was in motion, but it wasn’t turning around. He was headed down the hill, not up it.

The kid wasn’t fleeing. He was coming back to finish the fight.

Even as she hammered the accelerator, Abby knew there was no real gain to making the first move. She was backed in against the river, and her options were minimal — she could swerve left or right, trying to evade him, or drive straight at him. The Jeep had the advantage if she chose the latter, but that didn’t make her feel confident. A head-to-head crash would do more damage to the Challenger than the Jeep, yes, but there was hardly a guarantee of disabling the driver.

I already hit him, she thought numbly. I broke the bastard’s arm, I won, so why won’t he quit?

Beneath that thought, though, ran a soft, chastising whisper that told her she should have known better.

The cars would meet about halfway up the hill. Abby was bracing for the collision and thinking too late that she needed to yell out some word of warning to Shannon when Dax cut the wheel and brought the Challenger smoking in at an angle, and she realized what he was trying to do — block the road.

Easy enough. She swerved right, and the front end of the Challenger clipped the edge of the Jeep’s bumper, an impact that felt barely more solid than when she’d hit Dax. The Jeep chunked off the pavement and back onto it and then she was past him, open road ahead.

But the open road didn’t mean much to her. Not in the Jeep, not with him in the Hellcat. Ahead of Abby, Ames Road climbed up, up, up. It wasn’t a long distance, but it was steep, and distance was relative. The Hellcat went from zero to sixty in a breathtaking 3.6 seconds, absurd for a factory car, and the opening acceleration wasn’t even its strongest point. The Hellcat was truly special when it was already rolling. It could go from thirty to fifty or fifty to seventy in a heartbeat. The quarter-mile stretch ahead would take the Challenger maybe twelve or thirteen seconds.

She chanced a look in the mirror and saw the door open. Watched as he leaned out and picked up a handgun from the pavement.

“Fuck,” Abby said. Her voice was too calm; disembodied. She couldn’t see Shannon Beckley in the mirror. Shannon was still wedged down on the floor, where Abby had told her to hide back when she thought she could win this thing, a minute before that felt like a decade ago now. The rest of the race invited no such illusions. She’d hit him, yes; hurt him, yes; but he hadn’t stopped, and now he was outthinking her. Now he was in the superior car and he was armed, and whatever injuries he’d sustained suddenly seemed insignificant.

She glanced at Oltamu’s phone. What if she threw it out of the car? Would he stop to get it just as he had the gun? It was all he wanted, after all.

Not anymore, she thought grimly, remembering the way he’d fought to his feet, his arm dangling broken in front of his body, useless. No, he wouldn’t settle for the phone anymore. He’d take it, but he was coming for blood now.

Behind her, the Challenger’s huge engine roared, the Pirellis burned blue smoke, and the headlights swerved and then steadied, pinning Abby.

The top of the hill might as well have been five miles out.

The Hellcat roared up with astonishing closing speed.

He can’t even drive it, Abby thought. That didn’t seem fair, somehow. To lose to him when he couldn’t even handle that car was a cruel joke.

Then beat him, Luke said, or maybe it was Hank, or maybe it was Abby’s father. Hard to tell, but Abby understood one thing — the voice was right.

In a decade of professional stunt driving, Abby had asked the finest cars in the world to do things that most people thought couldn’t be done. Not on that list, though, was a controlled drift uphill with her hands tied together.

She wanted to use the hand brake, but that would require briefly taking her hands off the wheel, and instinct told her that that would end badly no matter how fast she moved. The Jeep sat up high, and if she didn’t have full control of the wheel, the jarring counterforce of the hand brake would likely flip the car.

Just fishhook it, then. Nice and easy. Maybe he’d overcompensate, flip his own car, break his own neck.

Sure.

The headlights were filling the Jeep with clean white light, the broken glass glistening and the roar of the Hellcat almost on top of them, and suddenly Abby knew what he would do.

He’ll be cautious, Abby thought, and she had the old feeling then, the swelling confidence that came up out of the blood, cool as a Maine river at night. She had watched Dax drive that car for hours now. He didn’t understand the car, but he respected its power. So he wouldn’t risk flipping it; he’d overshoot instead.

A tenth of a mile from the crest of the hill, Abby said, “Hang on,” as if Shannon Beckley could do anything to prepare, and then she jammed her foot on the brake and spun the wheel through her fingers, passing it as rapidly as possible, like paying out rope, left hand to right hand, feeding it, feeding it, feeding it as the world spun around them.

I needed the hand brake, she thought, but she was wrong. They hadn’t been going fast enough, and the hill worked in her favor. Physics came to her rescue as she shifted from brake to gas and pounded the pedal again. All around them was the sound of shrieking rubber as the tires negotiated with, pleaded with, and finally begged for mercy from the pavement.

The pavement was benevolent.

It granted the skid. The Jeep didn’t roll.

Beside them, the Challenger smoked by in a roaring blur.

Abby was already accelerating back downhill by then.

She chanced a glance in the mirror only when she was sure the Jeep was running straight. The fishhook had been a simple stunt — awkward and lumbering by any pro’s standard, actually — but it had been enough. The kid had had a choice: try to match it or ride by and gather himself. He’d opted for the latter.

Dax was executing a three-point turn to counter. In a Challenger Hellcat, he was executing a three-point turn to catch up to a Jeep. Abby wanted to laugh. We can do this once more, she thought, or twice more, however long it takes, back and forth, but he’s not getting a clear shot. Not as long as I have the wheel.

She actually might have laughed if she hadn’t looked ahead and seen the headlight from the train.

It was running northwest to southeast, cutting through Hammel and across the bridge on its dawn run, out of the night and toward the sunrise.