C.E. Murphy - Mountain Echoes

He yelled, “We’re not going to make it!” back, but that wasn’t what I’d asked. “It’s an eight-mile drive, Jo! The chopper is going to catch up!”

“Just tell me where we’re going!”

“There’s a track off the road up there—” He pointed at a site about two mountains over, his fingertip bobbling with our speed.

I remembered when he said it. It wasn’t much of a track, not something a car could go up. It was rocky for the first several hundred yards, rough enough terrain that it wouldn’t take footprints or other signs of passage to any meaningful degree. He was right, though: through the twists and curves of the mountain roads, it was about eight miles away, even if I could see the stretch of road it branched off from where we were. There were chunks of green valley and steep hollers between us, nothing a 4x4 could traverse, never mind my lowslung 1969 Mustang. We hit a straight stretch, a familiar straight stretch, the last one my grandmother had ever driven, and all sorts of crazy ideas came together in my mind.

I remembered the Pontiac’s massive blue weight, the black soot wings of Raven Mocker making mockery of its attempt at flight. I thought of the helicopter coming up the mountain the short way, blades hauling awkward dragonfly shapes through the air, and I thought, hell. I thought of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner laying down road over empty sky, and I thought, well, hell, whispered, “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” and slammed Petite off the side of a mountain.

We flew.

The Rainbow Connection came together beneath us, every ounce of my shielding magic slapping blocks of bright-colored roadway together under Petite’s wheels. It wasn’t going to laۙt flew. have to last. It just had to get us across half a mile of clear air, an impossible shortcut to the hidden path into the hills. I drew strength from the astonished earth, pulling it up as fast as it would let me to braid it into the air bridge. I felt like Indiana Jones crossing the invisible bridge, except moving at 110 miles per hour instead of creeping on hands and knees.

Dad made apoplectic sounds in the backseat. Morrison clutched the dashboard and stared at treetops three hundred feet below us. I grinned so broadly my face hurt. I had never had so much fun in my life. I desperately wanted to turn around and see if the helicopter had caught up, if they could see what we were doing, and how they were taking it if they could. I didn’t dare, afraid if I looked away the path I was building would fall apart, but I could imagine their expressions.

I did not imagine them firing missiles at us, which is what happened next. Dad gave a strangled warning shout at the same time I heard them, high whistles that sounded a lot like they did in movies. Morrison roared something incomprehensible, but I didn’t dare listen. I didn’t know how fast missiles traveled. I knew how fast we were going, Petite’s speedometer clocking well over 130 now, but I was pretty sure missiles flew faster than that. I wondered if they were heat-seeking or targeted or what, then remembered everybody’s favorite deep-sea maneuver and hit the brakes, spinning the second 180 of the afternoon.

I wished to God I could see it all from the outside. The shields I drew from the earth rearranged so fast I heard them clattering, blocks of magic crashing together to keep a surface under Petite’s wheels. She fishtailed from turning at such high speeds, but bless her little steel soul, she leapt right forward again as I leaned on the gas. All of a sudden we were charging a helicopter, and I did get a chance to see the pilots’ faces after all. There were two of them, a man and a woman, and their faces showed a range of emotion from shock and bewilderment to outright fury and determination to take us down.

The woman, however, also looked like her every prayer had been answered, that she was seeing living proof that the world was as awesome and amazing as she’d ever hoped. She looked like someone had just proven to her that magic was real, and nothing was ever going to take that away from her. I gave her a big cheesy grin and a thumbs-up.

The missiles behind us swung around and smashed into each other, creating a smoking fireball in the sky. I threw Petite into Reverse, not risking the time to turn around again, and flung my arm over the passenger seat so I could turn and drive backward through the airborne wreckage. I was starting to see stars, nothing to do with the missiles and everything to do with blatantly ignoring the laws of physics. I chanted, “I can do it, I can do it, I can do it,” between my teeth and clenched my stomach muscles, like the tension there could translate to magic beneath my sweet old girl’s wheels.

Twenty feet from the mountain road, I spun Petite around again and slammed us back toward solid ground. The bridge fell apart beneath her back wheels and they whirled, trying to gain purchase. Dad and Morrison both threw themselves forward, adding another few hundred pounds of forward momentum, and gravel caught beneath her wheels. She surged onto the road and I twitched a light-bending invisibility shield up around us while I slowed down enough to stop safely.

I killed the engine and it rumbled to a slow stop. We all sat there in the silence, my vision winking in and out. There was something I wanted to tell Dad. Something important. Something about keeping ad itg us hidden. I opened my mouth, said, “Ablbhlg,” and passed out.

I awakened to Morrison’s patient repetition of, “Wake up, Joanie. Wake up. Wake up, Walker. Wake up. Walker, I need you to—” and then a rough quiet gasp when I rolled my eyes open. “There you are. Drink this.”

I was willing to drink anything, especially if it had a high alcoholic content. What he fed me didn’t: it was bottled water, warm, brackish, and probably good for me. I coughed a couple of times and tried sitting up. That was when I noticed I was lying down. Mostly, anyway. Petite’s front seat had been laid as flat as it went, and I was no longer buckled in. Morrison knelt beside the door, strain deepening the lines around his eyes. “Stay down awhile, Walker. It took Joe twenty minutes to stabilize you. You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Prolly not.” My voice was weirdly hoarse. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Did it work?” Obviously it had worked. We were still with Petite instead of arrested by military mooks. That was good. I wondered where Dad was. I wondered if we’d found the missing Cherokee, except clearly we hadn’t because we were still with Petite, who couldn’t possibly make it up the ravine.

“It worked. That was the...” Morrison cleared his throat in turn. “I don’t even know what that was, Walker. That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Better than time travel, huh?” I felt like I’d been drinking sand. I fumbled for the water and Morrison poured a little more down my throat.

“Time travel,” my staid, sensible boss-former boss said, “is almost comprehensible, Walker. I pay some attention to science. I get the idea that time is how we perceive it. I can just about understand that if we can alter our perceptions enough, we might not have to be so linear.”

“You’re amazing,” I told him solemnly. “Best ever. Best Morrison ever. I love you. Can’t believe you’re okay with time travel. That’s amazing. You’re the best.” Now I sounded like I’d been on a three-day bender and was equal parts hammered and hung over.

Morrison crooked a smile. “I love you, too. But yeah, Walker, I can almost wrap my head around time travel. Flying Mustangs, not so much.”

“I shoulda named her Pegasus.” The thought was inordinately funny, and I giggled until I coughed. When I finished coughing I was weak as water. “What’s wrong with me?”