“Cliff!” shrieks Carey, still cradling his arm. Thom sees Slone’s eyebrows pop up above the dark glasses, then descend. One hand leaps to the emergency brake.
The car turns around within a space barely wider than it is long, back wheels ending up perched on a fifty-foot precipice. The Hell’s Angels are five hundred feet away, hooting and whirling chains.
“We can ram them,” Slone says conversationally. “They’ll still kill us.”
“No,” Thom whispers. “Go it.”
For the first time, Slone grins.
This time the whip-round clips one tailfin, which flaps brokenly behind them as they soar out into suburban sky.
“We must be in Scranton,” says Rick urgently, “in half an hour.” It’s a two-hour trip. They all know this.
“Be ready in five minutes,” says Slone, calm through static.
Two minutes later Rick and Carey are out the door; Thom kicks it shut behind him and lunges out into the road, where he barely halts himself in time. A roaring Alpine White Eldorado whiptails a U-turn around him and brakes. Thom stares through the windshield as an expressionless Slone whips off his sunglasses, revealing another pair of sunglasses underneath.
Thom feels a sudden wild hope: they just might make it!
Thursday, January 22, 2004