Splintered

by Jon McGoran

  “Which ones?”

  He grinned wide and it gave me chills. “All of them.”

  “Everything okay here?” Doug said, hands on his hips, making a point of just talking to Claudia and me.

  “No, it’s not. These men won’t leave us alone,” Claudia said.

  Doug turned to them and they stared back at him for a few seconds.

  “If you gentlemen would like to sit up front, I can get you a couple of menus. Otherwise, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

  They continued staring at Doug with a sort of malevolent condescension, like they had all the power but they were going to go along with his game for now because they wanted to. The car salesman moved his arm to reveal a bulge on his hip, like he had a gun or a shock baton or something, and he wanted to let everyone know it. They let a few seconds tick by to make it clear they didn’t have to do anything they didn’t want to.

  “No, that’s okay,” said the creeper, grimacing at our food, as if it didn’t look good. “We were just leaving.”

  They waited another few seconds, then they turned and slowly walked away, looking back one last time as they went out the front door.

  Doug stayed where he was, watching them through the glass door. “Do you know those guys?”

  “No,” I said. “And I don’t want to.”

  They stayed right outside the front door, one of them leaning against a dark green sedan. Waiting.

  “Do you want me to call the police?” Doug asked.

  “No!” I said, maybe a little too quickly.

  He gave us a dubious nod. “Okay.”

  I looked at Claudia. “We should probably get going anyway.”

  She looked sadly at the remains of her burger. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Can we have these to go?” I asked Doug. “And can we use your back door?”

  CHAPTER 33

  We were in danger. I knew it. Claudia did, too. But sneaking out the back door of the diner clutching our to-go bags and tiptoeing back to Claudia’s car at the charging station, for some reason it struck us both as absolutely hilarious.

  As soon as we’d eased her car doors open and quietly pulled them shut behind us, we started snickering. It was a dangerous kind of laugh, seeing as how we needed to focus on getting away. But it wouldn’t stop.

  As Claudia started up the car and slowly drove around the back of the charging station and out the far side, we took turns taking deep breaths, trying to get ourselves under control even as the other kept laughing. The laughter didn’t fully die until we turned onto the on-ramp for the SmartPike and I noticed her staring into the rearview display, her face filled with dread.

  I looked behind us, but I knew what I was going to see. The men from the diner, right behind us in their dark green sedan.

  “Crap,” Claudia said.

  We were approaching the place where the ramp split off, east or west.

  “What should I do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” The sign directly in front of us had two arrows. The one pointing left said PHILADELPHIA 102 MILES. NEXT EXIT: DURINGER 37 MILES. The one pointing right said PITTSBURGH 221 MILES. NEXT EXIT: GELLERSVILLE 7 MILES.

  We were headed straight toward the white triangle painted on the road between the two sections that curved away on either side. The green sedan was closing on us, and Claudia said, “Jimi? What do I do?”

  “Right!” I yelled, at the last second. She jerked the wheel hard and our tires screeched as we crossed the white paint onto the westbound ramp. Behind us, the green sedan screeched across it as well.

  Claudia snuck a glance in the rearview mirror and pressed the accelerator to the floor, ignoring the flashing red speed-limiter warning light. She slid into the passing lane and started hurtling by other cars.

  We were already doing ninety-five, way faster than you were supposed to go unless you were in Smartdrive.

  “You disabled the Smartdrive detector?”

  She grinned. “And the speed limiter.” Then her grin disappeared. “Why did you say right?”

  “We had to go one way, and I figured better to go the way with the nearest exit, so we can try to lose them, and maybe turn around and go back the other way.” Also, because the plan, after eating, was to figure out how to get to Rex. And as far as I knew, he was in Gellersville.

  She stared at me for a disconcertingly long moment, considering we were going almost one hundred miles an hour and the car was under her manual control.

  “That’s pretty smart,” she said, turning her attention back to her driving, weaving through traffic so fast the cars we were passing were blurs going by. But the green sedan was keeping up with us. We passed a sign saying the exit to Gellersville was in one mile. The next exit after that was in twenty miles.

  We both saw the sign and immediately looked at each other.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I don’t think we want to get trapped on the SmartPike.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  We were almost at the exit.

  “Hold on,” she said, and she jerked the wheel hard, swerving between two cars and rocketing down the exit ramp. We almost slammed into the Smartdrive pylon, a thick steel pole bristling with electronics that served as the ground traffic control, making sure all the Smartdrive systems played nicely with each other.

  “That was close,” I said. The pylons are kind of a big deal. Every couple of years, one goes out for one reason or another and it’s traffic hell for hours.

  Claudia eyed her rearview. Just as we reached the bottom of the ramp, the green sedan appeared at the top of it, coming after us. She barely slowed down, screeching into a hard left that took us back under the SmartPike, then jerking the wheel again, onto the eastbound on-ramp.

  “We’re going back to Belfield?” I said.

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to get trapped on those back roads.”

  We drove in silence for a minute—sixty seconds that took us two miles closer to the next exit. The only sound was the soft zip, zip, zip, as we passed car after car.

  “Okay,” Claudia said. “I have an idea.” She turned and stared at me, again for way too long. “Can you drive?”

  “Yeah, I can drive,” I said, quickly, so she could get back to looking out through the windshield.

  She barely glanced at the road before she returned her stare to me.

  “I mean can you really drive. Not ‘My mom took me to a parking lot to practice three times’ or ‘I watched a Holovid on how to use Smartdrive in driver’s ed class.’ Can. You. Drive?”

  “Yes,” I said, with more confidence than I felt. My plans to get my license had been sidetracked the past year, but my mom had taken me to a parking lot to practice at least half a dozen times, and more to the point, I had also stolen three cars—which was vaguely distressing to think about, especially since only one of them was my mom’s. I had also driven a truck through a fence three times, and a car through a different fence once. That ought to count for something, I thought, although I didn’t know exactly what. “Yes, I can.”

  “Good. Because you’re going to have to do it well.”

  CHAPTER 34

  Claudia’s plan was insane. Unfortunately, I was too terrified to come up with anything better. We rocketed those last couple of miles to the Belfield exit, then repeated the maneuver we had done in Gellersville: speeding down the off-ramp, screeching through the underpass and up the on-ramp, and heading west again, weaving through traffic back to Gellersville.

  That’s when it got really, really tricky.

  Claudia gained as much of a lead as she could, driving as fast as she dared. My knuckles were white from holding on, and my fingernails were white from digging into the armrest.

  The green sedan was actually falling behind, and part of me thought, since Claudia’s car was obviously top of the line, maybe we could just keep driving like that and lose them on the highway.

  But that wasn’t the pla
n.

  Halfway back to Gellersville, Claudia maneuvered the car into the slow lane. Making sure there was no one directly behind us, she turned to me and said, “Ready?”

  Then she turned on the Smartdrive.

  Red lights began flashing and beepers and alarms sounded as the car’s Smartdrive system came online and realized that something not right was going on. As Claudia and I scrambled past each other, switching places, the car immediately began to decelerate.

  As soon as I was in place, Claudia shouted at me, “Hit it!”

  I had one hand on the steering wheel, my foot over the accelerator, and one finger aimed at the Smartdrive button. I paused, just for a moment, and Claudia shouted again, “Hit it!”

  I glanced in the rearview and saw the green sedan angling through gaps in the traffic, making its way toward us. My finger jammed the Smartdrive button, turning it off and mercifully killing the alarms and warning lights as my foot pushed the accelerator down to the floor. The tires wailed, spinning until they caught some traction and we shot forward. The back of the car slid from side to side as we picked up speed.

  I started passing the other cars, then shooting past them, the rears of the ones in front of us coming at me like some terrifying Holo-Box game. I bobbed and weaved, trying to avoid them, knowing it wasn’t a game at all.

  Claudia was halfway in the backseat. She had pulled one of the seat backs down and was rooting around in the trunk.

  I was going too fast to look in the rearview. “Where are they?” I asked.

  She looked out the back windshield. “Falling back but still too close. We need more distance.”

  “Okay,” I said, which was a lie. Nothing about this was okay.

  “What are you doing?”

  It took me a second before I realized what she meant. I glanced at the speedometer.

  “One-thirty.” Holy crap, 130!

  “You can do one-forty, no problem.”

  I realized there was a good chance that Claudia might be insane. But I pressed the accelerator harder, and the needle icon crept toward 140.

  Claudia pulled the toolbox out of the trunk and checked the back window. “Okay, good. They’re falling back.”

  She wiggled her way back into the passenger seat with the toolbox clutched to her midsection. She looked out the window at the rapidly approaching Gellersville exit, then she turned to me. “You ready?”

  I nodded without looking at her. From the corner of my eye I saw her nod back. The exit was still almost a quarter mile away, but at 140 miles an hour, that was, like, six seconds.

  I pulled into the exit lane, and she shouted, “Now!”

  I took my foot off the accelerator and jammed the brakes as hard as I could, bracing my back against the seat, pulling on the steering wheel, while at the same time trying to keep the car straight enough that it didn’t slide off the road or back into traffic, or even worse, go into a roll.

  Finally the car came to a stop, just ten feet away from the Smartdrive pylon.

  Claudia opened her door, slipped out, and closed it without a word. Just like that, she was gone. I could smell burning rubber as I hit the accelerator once more, picking up speed along the off-ramp, through the underpass, and back up the on-ramp toward Belfield.

  I was getting more comfortable driving at such a high speed, or maybe just more used to being terrified. But when I got to the Belfield exit, things got even scarier. I had to try to keep my speed up while doing the whole off-ramp, underpass, on-ramp maneuver. Somehow I managed it, and even allowed myself a slight smile, though I knew the trickiest part of the plan was just ahead. I looked in the rearview mirror. The green sedan was quite a ways back. But just behind it was a mass of blue and red lights on top of a rapidly approaching police car.

  Instinctively I took my foot off the accelerator, but then jammed it back down again. The plan was still the plan. Now it was even more important that it work.

  The Gellersville exit was approaching. I tried to do the calculations in my head. I was going faster than before, and aiming for a different place. I was still working on my estimates when I pulled into the exit lane and flew past the place where I’d hit the brakes the first time. I waited one more second, then did it again, punching the brakes as hard as I could, trying to maintain control of the screaming, smoking, bucking car, and at the same time trying not to think too hard about the fact that Claudia was out there, and that if I lost control, it was entirely possible I could squish her like a bug. I skidded past the Smartdrive pylon, saw a flash of color through the window that might or might not have been Claudia.

  The car skidded to a stop, and I looked out the back window just in time to see a tiny arc of sparks spewing out of the base of the pylon, and Claudia backing away from it.

  The air filled with the incredibly loud and bizarrely sonorous tone of hundreds or thousands of tires screeching in unison as every car on that stretch of the SmartPike came to a halt.

  Claudia stood in the middle of the ramp, her back to me as she looked over her handiwork. I couldn’t see the green sedan, but I could see the police lights, a quarter mile back, hopelessly mired in the frozen sea of gridlocked cars.

  Claudia turned, ran toward me, and got into the passenger seat.

  As I drove away at a safe, lawful speed, she turned to me with a manic grin and said, “That was freaking awesome!”

  CHAPTER 35

  Gellersville seemed like a slightly bigger version of Belfield. I was so focused on the rearview mirror, I didn’t notice too much of it at first. I kept to the speed limit, even though part of me wanted to be doing 140 again, putting as much distance as possible between us and the mayhem behind us. But when I stopped at a stop sign in the middle of town, across from a dull concrete building with a big American flag out front, I kept my foot on the brake.

  After a few seconds, Claudia looked around nervously and said, “Um, we need to keep moving and find someplace inconspicuous.”

  “That’s the police station,” I said, staring at the concrete building. “That’s the jail. Where Rex is.”

  As I said it, a couple of drones flew by, low and fast, headed for the SmartPike.

  “Yes, and that’s also where the police are. We can’t just stop here staring at it. We need to get out of here.”

  A pair of drones lifted off the roof of the police station, red and blue lights twinkling, and zipped across the cloudy sky in the same direction as the other two, toward the SmartPike.

  I drove up the block and turned into the Dairy Queen parking lot. It was closed for the night, but the sign was still lit up. In the rearview, I saw a pair of patrol cars pull out of the lot next to the station. Their lights started flashing as they headed back the way we’d come.

  I pulled all the way into the back of the parking lot, by a pair of dumpsters. Then I turned the car off and let out a heavy sigh.

  “You did good,” Claudia said, punching me in the arm. “But maybe I should drive now.”

  “I need some air first,” I said, getting out of the car. I took a few unsteady steps, and took a deep breath, trying to fend off a vague jittery feeling that I suspected could turn into a case of the shakes.

  Claudia got out the other side of the car and came over to me. “We need to keep moving,” she said, grabbing my elbow. She pulled me farther behind the Dairy Queen and glanced up as the sky filled with the sound of quadcopters. “We just shut down the SmartPike. They’re going to be looking for us—not just those creeps that were following us. Everybody. And it won’t take long before everyone turns off their autodrive and they get those cars moving. We need to figure another way out of this place and we need to use it, fast….Jimi, are you okay?”

  She was leaning over and looking up at my face, checking.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Who were those guys?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I saw one of them before. Back in Philly, at the Lev station near my house. He seemed like he was watching me. Maybe w
aiting for me.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I think so. I…I’ve had this feeling lately, like I’m being watched. First I thought it was from being on the news, after Pitman. My fifteen minutes of fame, you know? Then I thought I was going nuts. But with that guy showing up out here, saying he needs to talk? Maybe I’m not nuts.”

  “Well,” she said with a smirk, “I wouldn’t rule that out just yet. But they’re definitely after us now, so we need to get out of here.”

  “I know, but…Rex is right across the street.”

  “I know. And our best chance to help him is to get home, get help, and…oh, crap….”

  Her voice trailed off as she looked past me. I turned and saw the car salesman and the creeper, two menacing grins coming toward us, one on either side of the Jaguar.

  “Well, that was a cute trick,” said the creeper.

  Claudia and I looked around, but we were trapped. We both took a step back, which put us right up against a tall wire fence.

  “Very cute,” said the car salesman, above the noise that increasingly filled the air. “But unfortunately, it wasted all our doing-things-the-easy-way time.”

  The creeper took out a stun gun. “I almost felt bad, you two being such innocent young ladies and all. But you’re not so innocent, are you?”

  The car salesman took out a stun gun, too, but he fumbled with it, his hands looking clumsy. “And…you’re not…ladies, either,” he said, his voice sounding sluggish, too.

  The creeper scowled at him. “What hell’za matter with you?”

  Both of their guns were sagging, aiming at the ground in front of us.

  Claudia snuck me a glance that seemed to say Something’s up with these two. Should we make a break for it?

  I honestly didn’t know, so instead of replying, I looked back at the two goons, still staring at each other. The creeper grabbed the car salesman’s shoulder and looked at his back. “What the…,” he said, turning his head to try to see over his own shoulder. “Aw, goddamn it.” He turned and glared at us, his face angry and red even as his eyes went dull. He raised his gun again, slurring, “You little…” Then he pitched forward onto his face.