Chapter
28: The Chase
The
front left tire hit another pothole. John reached out and pushed up on the tire
with his telekinesis. It shuddered, the motion pushing back through the car to
his body. As he let go of the tire, the car bolted under John, and he gripped
the wheel to keep the Fairlane on track, steering into the gigantic moon
looming over the desert evening. Lifting the wheels to cushion the suspension was
a neat trick, but it didn’t work nearly as well with the unbalanced tire.
Fortunately, they were only an hour from the Philadelphia gate and home, now.
“Any sign?”
They’d
brought the turret down for the run, so Rafaella was watching the road behind
them through the rear window, twisted around in the crowded back seat. “Nothing
yet. Ungh. Could you please stop pushing him into me, Jason?”
“I
can’t help it!” Jason protested. “Zombie Booker lurches on me or on you
whenever we go into a hole. John. You know, we’d have a lot more room if we put
him in the trunk.”
John
snuck a look into the mirror. Jason had his thumb to his nose and wiggled his
fingers at him. “You try staying out of potholes on this road. Especially going
60.”
Emily
spoke from the corner. “Booker’s not a zombie, and my sister would kill me if
she heard that we put him in the trunk.”
“Which
she wouldn’t,” Jason answered.
“Yeah,
because you and secrets, zip.” John didn’t have to take his eyes off the
road to know that Amy was looking back at her brother and doing the ‘zip your
lips’ thing.
“Hey,
I couldn’t run a con if I couldn’t keep a secret.”
Amy
would be rolling her eyes right now. “When have you ever run a con, Jas? Pranks
don’t count.”
“Hey,
if Jamie and Jameel hadn’t interrupted when I was scamming Liam…”
“Yeah.
That doesn’t counts, either.” Emily said. “By the way, how come Liam’s Hummer
showed up back at the ghost town?”
“It
totally counts. I’m thinking that since Liam’s gang used to hang around with
Agent Byrne, dude’s probably in the Hummer. The whole point of him pretending
to be Jenny’s boyfriend was to get Uncle Kwan to make a move on him. So that’s
a two-for-me.”
This
time, John couldn’t even try to avoid the hole. It stretched right across the
road, and he couldn’t lift four tires at once. The Cadillac’s ancient
suspension took it, but not without another bump. From the back, Jason “oofed.”
“There,”
Rafe said, with a little grunt of effort. “You hang with Zombie Book for a
while, Mr. Totally-Taking-Credit-For-Your-Mom’s-Plan.”
Pretends?
That was news to John. Though, for some reason, John felt better to be included
in that secret than about a lot that he’d heard today. Like Trine’s
explanations. “I don’t understand. Agent Byrne is an asshole. Wouldn’t he just
slime out of the situation the moment he saw trouble coming down on him?”
“Beats
the alternative,” Amy answered.
“Which
is?”
“Dad,
Mom. Mad as all hell.” John risked a glance at Amy as he caught motion out of
the corner of his eye. She was waving a fist as she spoke in a threatening way.
“Still…”
John didn’t think of Agent Byrne as the kind of guy who would worry about the
Wongs when one of Takofanes’ lieutenants was after him.
“See,
we’re not asking him to be a hero. We’re asking him not to tell random
strangers that he was conned by a teenage girl. If he wants to slime out of
things, he’s free to do it. After Uncle
Stupid shows up.”
That
was even more wacked. “Wait. Jenny was
running a con?”
From
behind, Jason replied. “Depths, dude. Depth of character. Mom is the best face
ever, and Dad is the worst. Some of us take after Mom, some of us take after
Dad.” Jason kicked his sister’s seat.
“Okay,
so your Dad’s a straight shooter. I get that, but didn’t your Uncle Kwan do the
whole Jade Empire thing on your him? Helped bring him up, trained him, set him
up? How’d he, you know, live?”
“Honest
isn’t the same thing as gullible,” Amy answered. “I hope. You’re not conning
me, are you, Jas?”
“Maybe,”
Jason answered.
“So
very, very cocky,” Emily muttered, barely heard over the sound of the engine.
“Hey,
Emily, if you and Amy share the front seat, we’d be back to three in the back,”
Jason said.
“You’d
like that, wouldn’t you, John?” Amy asked. What was she talking about? John
looked over. Amy was blushing. He blushed back, not quite sure why.
“Whatever,
Jas,” Rafe said. “Walk this back for me, Amy. Uncle Kwan has a reason for what he’s doing. He’s got a list
of people he needs to kill. It’s just that until, like, today, he didn’t know
quite who they are until one thing or another.”
It
occurred to John that Rafe sounded almost condescending as he said that last,
like she was talking the slow kid. John glanced up at the rearview mirror, and
his eyes glanced over the cosmetics mirror as he did so. How long had he had
that spot of black paint on the tip of his nose?
Rafe
continued. “Now he knows, so he moves. What I need to know now is, what’s the
scenario?”
Amy
drew in a long breath. They waited. At last she replied, “Slow and cruel. It’s
not just who gets to inherit
great-great-grandpa’s homestead. First, Uncle Kwan likes being mean to people,
and that goes especially for Dad,. Second, he totally he hates Mom. And some of the older kids, too. Like Jamie and May.”
John
asked, “Is that more ‘Don’t Tell John,’ stuff.”
John
looked over at Amy. She caught his eyes as he replied. “Once. Jamie and May
went to the future and screwed up Uncle Kwan’s biggest plan yet. That’s the
fight where you were created with the Basilisk Orb. We weren’t supposed to tell
you . . .”
“Because
the Basilisk Orb is super-duper secret stuff,” John finished.
“Sort
of. Actually, I gather that it was the 31st Century version of the
Basilisk Orb, and you can’t actually do that much with it in the 21st
Century.”
“Because
time travel?”
“Because
time travel. But we were really worried that Uncle would do something to May
and Jamie, on account of their screwing up his big play with the Orb.”
“So,
what? It’s like Megan getting into May’s shoes?”
Amy
answered. “Don’t laugh. Megan lost May’s favourite pumps. She can’t hide behind
cute forever.”
“People
have favourite shoes?” John risked a glance over to show off a smile.
Amy
punched John in the shoulder. “You know what I mean.”
“Nope.
Girl stuff.”
“Don’t
be so dense. Guys? Guys?”
The
backseat echoed its silence back. After a long second, Rafe said, “Eww. He’s
drooling. Hey, Amy, maybe you’d like
to sit with Booker?”
Amy
continued. “May worked the whole
Columbus Day weekend for those shoes, and now she can’t wear her favourite
jeans to the dance unless she finds where Megan put them.”
“She
can’t?” John was starting to feel a little guilty about hiding the pumps in the
first place. But it had been so funny when May saw Megan parading around in them in the first place. She'd even managed to wear them down the stairs, which apparently was a big deal.
“No.
She can’t. And May wasted a sick day to go that dance. I guess we’ll stay home
and watch “True Blood” together. Sisters!"
“What,
you lost your shoes, too, Amy?” As soon as the words were out of his mouth,
John regretted them. After all, he was
originally supposed to go to the dance with Sabine, and he had this awful feeling that Amy had known about that and not liked it one bit. John found that he really, really hated the idea that he'd made Amy feel bad.
“No.”
A single word, but John could hear the anger in it. Where had that come from?
It wasn’t John who’d been stopping her from going to the dance before.
“Oh,
thank God,” Jason interrupted. “We’re being followed.”
“What?”
John looked into the mirror. At the back of the long straight stretch, emerging
from the desert haze over the ancient blacktop as it turned the “S” curve
they’d gone around a minute before, he saw the Neilsen’s familiar
blue-and-white SUV.
“Oh,
crap,” Rafe shouted. “John! Hit the gas!”
It
wasn’t the SUV that bugged John most, though, but rather the black speck in the
air above it. Reluctantly, he took his eyes off the flying thing and looked to the
road ahead as he eased down on the gas pedal. The Fairlane’s old engine was
built for high speed highway cruising, but that had meant something totally
different back in the 50s. The suspension was going to take a pounding, too.
John eased out to straddle the single yellow line in the middle of the
blacktop, where the road was mostly a little less worn. This would be a bad
time to run into oncoming traffic for the first time this trip. Unless it was a
Piper & Norton convoy. They could show up any time.
“Crap,
crap, crap,” Rafe continued. “Thanks for making me match that movie, Emily.”
“That
thing behind the Blue Wonder is a dragon!”
Jason said, also shouting. Which was good, because the way the engine was
complaining, John would never have heard him otherwise.
“Seriously?
A dragon? Like, firebreathing and everything?” Could you even tell if a dragon
could breathe fire at this distance, John wondered? In a video game, there’d
probably be a fire special effect.
Jason
picked up the thought. “Well, I can’t tell the colour, but even if I could, you
couldn’t necessarily tell. Hopefully, it’s got something lame, like chlorine
gas.”
“Do
they have dragons with, like, sniper rifles?” Rafe asked. “Because, yeah. Speed
up, John, if you can. Amy, you’re forward observer. Emily, you’re rear. Jason,
you’re still ready for deployment, or are you just going to keep on complaining
about having the window seat? I’m going to check the turret hydraulics. The
moment we’re caught, we need to deploy all our weapons.”
“Should
I start dropping mines and oil?” Amy asked.
“Only
if you can lay them on the lip of the really big potholes. Otherwise, it’s
pretty much a waste of ammo. If this does turn into a running game, we want to
have weapons when the SUV catches up.”
“If?”
John asked, talking louder to be heard over the engine.
“Remember
May’s story about being ambushed in the free zone? How they tried to chase the
bandits into a trap afterwards?”
Amy
raised her sunscreen, hardly necessary as night crept over the desert, and
deployed the binocular gunsight built into its reverse side. “So the real
danger is an ambush ahead?”
“Probably
just before the Philadelphia turnoff. It’s way meaner to drop the hammer when
the people you’re chasing think that they’re home free.”
“That
sounds like the old try-too-hard to me,” Emily pointed out. Why not just chase
us down and kill us?” Emily had a quiet voice, so when she raised it enough to
be heard over the engine, it sounded high and scared. As well it should.
Dragons, Telantassar said, meant business.
Jason
snorted. “Uncle I-hate-you-and-your-little-dog-too showed us the dragon. You
show what you have up your sleeve for a reason. We’re scared and running faster,
so that’s the reason. We’re running into trouble.”
Rafe
was leaning over the front seats now, fiddling with the turret parts where they
folded against the inside of the roof. He heard her question clearly. “John,
can you do a dimension hop yet?”
Bitter,
he answered. “No. I haven’t had time to compute it. I’ve been busy. Driving.”
“Yeah.
Figured. Sorry. Just that I thought we were better off making time for the
gate. Plus, I had a feeling we were being run. If we stop, Kwan will just drop
something on us. Like a dragon.”
“In
other words,” Jason said, “It’s not John’s fault that I’ve had Zombie boy here
drooling on my shoulder for the last hour.”
“We
are not going to put Booker in the trunk.” Emily protested. “It’s not nice.”
“Not
nice is what your breath smells like after you’ve been unconscious from zombie
drugs for 10 hours,” Jason observed. “If we can’t put him in the trunk, at
least you can shift spots with Rafe and share it. Rafe can’t run the turret
with Book flopping all over her feet, anyway.”
Amy
moved in response, and John glanced over. Rummaging through her belt pouch, Amy
pulled out a little travel toothbrush. “Here, Jason. Looks like I’m not going to need it today.” She
glared over at John, their eyes meeting for a long second again, and a pit
opened up in John’s stomach. Once she brushed her teeth, that scent of green onions would be gone from her
breath. He thought he would miss it, and that was a crazy thing to think,
because he wanted to kiss her again. And that made him think again about Trine
telling him that there was no room for him in the Mandaarian Enclave. He
wondered if he should tell Amy, and that thought scared him more than the idea
of Amy talking to him the way that Trine had.
Jason
interrupted his chain of thought. “I’m not going to brush Book’s teeth!”
“So
instead of doing something, you’re just going to complain? Take the brush.
There’s toothpaste, too.”
“This
is stupid. You know, if we’d just done what I said… there’s plenty of room in the trunk. Book wouldn’t
have cared. He’s unconscious!”
Rafaella’s
voice came from overhead. “Jason, would you
like to ride in the trunk?”
“There’d
be more room for me in the trunk than there is back here.”
“Never
mind,” Amy said. “Let’s just let him run behind already. Then he won’t have to
deal with Book’s breath, and we don’t have to put up with his B.O.”
“Hey!
I just happen to be the only guy to do any real work back at the ghost town. It’s
not like I can take an air bath or something.”
Abruptly,
the gauge on the far left of the dashboard that connected with the time machine
clicked over to ‘Brialic Connected.’ “Guys, guys… We have a hop solution.”
“To
Earth?” Rafaella asked.
“Earth-731.”
John corrected. “Yes.”
“Where?”
“On
the way to the cabin, just past the turnoff to Nittany Road.”
“That’s
quite the coincidence,” Amy pointed out.
“Not
really,” John said. “Goblin Deep is one of the hardwired reference points. The
transfer point is only five miles away from it on a straight line.”
“Wait
a minute. We’re not going to end up hitting the pavement at 70 again, are we,
John? Because we’d end up in a rollover for sure.”
“C’mon,”
he protested. “It’d be fun! The seatbelts are doing anything right now.”
“Except
keeping me from learning even more about Book than I have in the last half
hour,” Jason pointed out.
“Afraid
Book will go somewhere Theera hasn’t?” Amy asked.
“Well,
Theera is prettier than Book.”
“Not
that much prettier,” Rafe pointed out.
“Book
is prettier than anyone in this car except Amy,” John said. And then he took a
minute to feel very, very clumsy.
“You’re
an idiot, John,” Jason helpfully pointed out.
“An
idiot that can put us down on that road at 20mph ground speed,” John said.
“Then
we have a plan,” Rafaella decided. “Do it, please, John.”
John
geared down as he watched the needles get closer and closer to alignment as Amy
adjusted the control knobs beside her on the dash. As soon as she managed to
align them and they hit 20mph, they could receive the input and Amy would initiate
the jump. John glanced at the driver’s side mirror. The SUV and dragon were at
least two miles behind, he guessed. Yet they seemed to get much closer, much
faster as he slowed down. Just my imagination, John thought to himself.
“Isn’t
Takofanes playing it a little unimaginative?” he asked, as he aligned the
pointers.
“Why
do you ask, John?” Amy looked at him, and he resisted looking back. Between the
gauges on the dashboard and the road, he really did need his attention focussed
right now.
“Well,
I mean, he’s Mr. Ancient Lich Lord and all. I get that he has dragons and
werewolves and what have you to send to help Uncle Kwan out. My question is,
where are the dark elves and Illithids and Otyughs and Beholders and Githyanki
and those guys?”
“A
lot of those are Hasbro intellectual property,” Jason pointed out. “He’d better
have good lawyers before he tries to take over the world with mind flayers.”
“You
guys are such nerds,” Rafe said.
“Oh,
come on. We’re all nerds now,” Amy replied. “Look at you. You spent more time
playing Morrowind than going to school last month.”
“That’s
an exaggeration!”
Emily
began, “Actually, counting your sick day last Friday….”
“I
had to get ready for Skyrim!”
“Too
bad this couldn’t wait a day, or we’d totally be prepared for those dragons,” Amy
noted.
Jason
snorted. “Ha! Uncle Kwan’s secret plan!”
“To
have Book come over from Babylon on the last day before Skyrim was released?”
“He’s
diabolically clever! Of course he is. I’m his nephew!”
“Great-great-nephew.”
It was Amy’s turn to correct. “Also, ha!”
The speedometer hit
20mph. John took his right hand off the wheel and signalled to Amy, who closed
the little knife switch beside her on the dashboard. The world was plunged into
darkness.
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