If She Wakes

by Michael Koryta

  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.

  Up at the top of the hill, where the Challenger was executing its awkward turn, bells were clanging and guard arms lowering to block traffic on Ames Road. The train would soon take over that task. The train would block them above, the river already blocked them below, and Abby and Shannon would be sealed in the middle with Dax and his gun.

  Abby brought the Jeep to a stop, twisted, and looked at Shannon Beckley. She’d clambered off the floor and back into the seat. Blood from the cut sheeted down her cheek, but her eyes were bright above it. Abby looked down at the handcuff that chained Shannon to the vehicle. Only one of them could walk away from this.

  I’ll take the phone, she thought, I’ll take the phone and I’ll make him negotiate. Just like with the man named Gerry.

  The man he’d killed.

  The negotiating hour was past.

  She looked down the hill. Ahead of her, there was only the parking lot, the river, and the railroad bridge.

  And, now, the train.

  She looked back at Shannon Beckley, expecting to see Shannon staring ahead. But she was staring right at Abby. Scared, yes, but still with a fighter’s eyes.

  “I have to try,” Abby said.

  Shannon nodded.

  Abby started to say, It might not work, but stopped herself. That was obvious.

  Behind them, Dax had the Challenger straightened out and was facing her once again.

  Abby let her foot off the brake and started downhill. The wheel slipped in her bloody hands and pulled left, but she caught it and brought it back. Behind, the Hellcat roared with delight and gained speed effortlessly, a thoroughbred running behind a nag. Abby didn’t look in the mirror to see how fast Dax was pushing it. Her eyes were only on the bridge and the train. The train was slowing, navigating the last bend ahead of the bridge, and its whistle cried out a shrill warning, and the bells tolled their monotonous lecture of caution.

  She fed the wheel back through her blood-slicked palms, bringing the car to the right when the road curved left, toward the parking lot. She pounded the gas as they banged over the curb and off the road and then headed for the short but steep embankment that led up to the train tracks. The Jeep climbed easily, and at the top of the embankment was the first of Abby’s final tests—if she got hung up on the tracks, it was over.

  The front end scraped rock and steel as the Jeep clawed up onto the berm, and she managed to negotiate the turn, praying for clearance. She had just enough. The Jeep was able to straddle the rails, leaving the tires resting on the banked gravel and dirt on either side.

  Behind and below her, Dax brought the Hellcat around in a slow, growling circle, like a pacing tiger. She knew what he was assessing—the Jeep sat high, able to clear the rails, and its wheelbase was wide enough to straddle them. The Challenger sat low, a bullet hovering just off the pavement. It would hang up on the tracks, leaving it stranded.

  Dax didn’t seem inclined to try pursuit. The car idled; the door didn’t open; no gunfire came.

 
He watched and waited.

  He thinks I’ve trapped myself, Abby realized.

  And maybe she had. Squeezed from multiple sides now, she could go in only one direction: straight toward the train.

  She kept expecting a gunshot but none came, and she realized why—he didn’t think she’d try it. His brake lights no longer glowed, which meant he’d put the Challenger in park—he was that confident that Abby was done.

  She looked away from him and fixed her eyes ahead, staring down the length of the railroad bridge, where, just on the other side, the huge locomotive was negotiating its last turn and entering the straightaway of the bridge. How far off? A hundred yards? Maybe less. It couldn’t be more. If it was more…

  I’ve just got to run it as fast as I can, that’s all there is to it, she thought. When it came down to the last lap, when the rubber was worn and the fuel lines were gasping for fumes, there was no math involved, no calculations, no time.

  You finished or you didn’t. That was all.

  Abby put her foot on the gas.

  62

  She was doing forty when she reached the bridge and she knew that she had to get up to at least sixty, maybe seventy, to give them any chance. But she also had to hold the car straight, and the gravel banks were built to keep the rails in place, not provide tire traction. It was a bone-rattling ride and one that made acceleration painfully slow.

  The train was some thirty yards away from the bridge now. Thirty yards of opportunity remained for her to decide if it was a mistake and bail out. Ditch the Jeep, and then Abby could run, even if Shannon could not. With the diesel locomotive’s headlight piercing the fractured windshield and the train’s whistle screaming, it was easy to believe bailing was the right move.

  Behind and below them, though, Dax waited.

  He thinks I’m choosing my own way to die, Abby realized.

  She kept her foot on the gas.

  In front of her, the train straightened out until the diesel locomotive was facing her head-on. In the backseat, Shannon Beckley moaned from behind the tape. Abby was aware of a flicker of open grass to her right, a place where she could ditch the Jeep without falling into the river below.

  Last chance to get out…take it.

  She tightened her grip on the wheel. The last chance fell behind. Then they were on the bridge, and out of options.

  A brightening sky above and a dark river below. A whistle shrilling, a headlight pounding into her eyes. The bridge seemed to evaporate into a tunnel, and though she wanted to check the speedometer to see whether she’d gotten up to seventy, she couldn’t take her eyes off that light.

  She would never remember the last swerve.

  There was no plan, no target, nothing but white light and speed and the question of whether she could make it. Then, suddenly, the gap appeared, and instinct answered.

  Daylight.

  Chase it.

  She slid the wheel across blood-soaked palms, and the daylight was there, and then the daylight was gone, and then came the impact.

  A bang and a bounce and blackness. I thought it would feel worse than that. That wasn’t bad at all, for being hit by a train, she thought, and then the furious scream of the whistle brought her back to reality. She was facing a wall of grass. It took her a moment to realize that it was the bank on the far side of the river.

  The engineer was trying to slow the train, but with that much mass and momentum, it didn’t happen fast. The locomotive was across the bridge and headed uphill before the cars behind it began to slow. A timber train, flatbed cars loaded with massive white pine logs from the deep northern woods.

  Abby looked in the mirror. The Challenger was in the parking lot, facing her, idling. It no longer looked so smug. In fact, it looked impotent.

  She knocked the gearshift into park, then reached out her bloody fingers, gripped the edge of the tape covering Shannon Beckley’s mouth, and peeled it away. “You okay?”

  Shannon nodded, as if unaware that she could speak now, then said, “Yes.” Paused and repeated it. “Yes. I think so.”

  Abby opened the driver’s door and stumbled out into the morning air. The train was still easing to a stop beside them, each car clicking by slower than the last. In the pale gray light, she could see the Challenger’s door swing open, and she thought, After all that, he’s still going to shoot me.

  The kid limped around the front of the idling car. He eyed the pedestrian bridge below the train. Abby looked in the same direction, and for the first time, she saw Boone’s body. Dax started to limp ahead.

  He’s still coming, she realized with numb astonishment. He would cross that bridge once more, even after all of this. All for a…

  She turned back to the car and reached for Oltamu’s phone. Her hands hovered just above it, then drifted left, and she popped the center console open and found Shannon Beckley’s phone.

  It took her two tries to grasp it in her bloody fingers, and by the time she had it and stepped away from the car, the kid was at the foot of the bridge.

  “Dax!” she screamed.

  He looked up. He was limping badly, and his left arm hung awkwardly, obviously broken but disregarded, like a dragging muffler. The gun was in his right hand, but she was too far away to fear being shot.

  “Go get it!” Abby shouted, and then she pivoted back and whirled forward and sent Shannon Beckley’s phone spinning into the air. It sailed in a smooth arc out above the river and then down into it.

  Dax watched it splash and sink.

  He stood there and looked at the water, and then, finally, he lifted his head to face Abby.

  Duck, she commanded herself, but her body didn’t obey. She just stood there on the other side of the river, hands bound in front of her, blood running down her arms.

  The kid raised his gun. Abby waited for the shot.

  None came. Instead, he held it across his forehead, and for a bizarre moment she thought he was going to take a suicide shot. Then she realized that he was offering a salute. He held the pose for a moment, then turned and limped back to the car. As the train whistle shrieked again, he backed the Challenger out and pulled up the hill. The train had stopped before blocking the road, granting him an escape route.

  Abby stood where she was until the car crested the hill and vanished, then she sank down into the grass.

  She looked back at the bridge, at that narrow window between train and steel girder, and wondered how wide it had been when she slipped the Jeep through. She stared at that for a long moment, and then she struggled upright and went to Shannon Beckley. Abby extended her wrists.

  “Can you untie me?”

  Shannon looked at Abby’s face, then down to her hands. “Yes,” she said simply, and she went to work on the knots with nimble fingers. It didn’t take her long. Abby watched the cord fall away, and she remembered the strangling cord at her throat, her feet on the dash and her back arched. She flexed her fingers, then reached out and plucked the black baseball cap off Shannon Beckley’s head. She studied it and found the pinhole-size camera hidden just beneath the bill, beneath the odd silver stitching that drew the eye of the observer toward the top of the hat. Was he watching? No. But he would go back. He would go back to study what he’d missed.

  She was sure of that.

  Abby angled the bill of the cap at her face and then lifted her middle finger up beside it. Then she stepped back from the Jeep, turned, and pulled her arm back, prepared to fling the hat as far into the river as she could.

  “The police will need it,” Shannon Beckley said.

  Abby stopped. Sighed and nodded. Yes, they would. But damn, how much she wanted to watch it drown.

  She tossed the hat on the driver’s seat. Sirens were approaching from somewhere on the campus and somewhere on the other side of the river. She ignored them, studying the plastic zip ties that held Shannon’s wrists together.

  “I’ll need to cut that. You have anything that will work?”

  “Get the phone,” Shannon sai
d.

  Abby was puzzled. Shannon had seemed so composed, but maybe she was delirious. Abby wasn’t cutting those ties with a phone. “No,” Abby told her patiently and began to root around in the console in search of a better tool.

  “Get the phone,” Shannon said, each word firm as a slap, and when Abby looked up, she saw that Shannon was staring over her shoulder. Abby turned and saw the dog crouched at the tree line, head up, ears back, wary but intrigued.

  She picked up Oltamu’s phone and walked away from the car. The sirens were growing louder, and someone was screaming at her from across the river, but she didn’t look away and neither did the dog. Abby went as close as she dared and then sat in the grass and extended a bloody hand.

  “Hobo,” she said. “Come see me.”

  63

  Tara has been many things and is becoming many more. Each day seems to bring a new identity.

  First she was the vegetable, the brain-dead girl, and then she was the locked-in girl, and then, within hours of learning that Shannon was alive, Tara was the Coma Crime Stopper.

  This is because of the story Shannon told, giving credit to her sister’s nonverbal lie.

  People look at her and think she’s helpless. But from that bed, she saved me without speaking a word.

  The media loved that quote. They directed feature coverage to Tara on every network. Their attention, as is its way, swells and breaks. A van with bombs is found in DC, and a hurricane is howling toward Texas. The Coma Crime Stopper is forgotten.

  Then the contents of the phone are revealed.

  Photos, files, videos of an electric vehicle produced by a company called Zonda, which is the name of an Argentinean wind that blows over the Andes Mountains. Most of the files are complex equations or sets of computer algorithms, an FBI agent from Boston named Roxanne Donovan tells Tara and her family. The photos and videos are mostly of cars on fire. Zonda prototypes.