“Hey Gus, what the hell are you doing back here?” the young man asked, blinking rapidly.
“That ain’t Gus,” said the other uniformed man riding shotgun with him.
Ruppert jumped up into the cab and slammed the door. He cranked it and slammed the gas. The two trucks peeled out as they turned to pursue him. Piercing blue lights strobed from their headlamps and grilles-apparently Goblin Valley trucks had been authorized as police vehicles, too. Sirens howled from both trucks.
“Permission to speak, staff sergeant?” Nando asked. Ruppert swerved around a tight corner, intent on reaching the gate before the guards put the school in lockdown. It took him several seconds to process what Nando had said, then grasp that the boy was addressing him.
“Yeah, go ahead.” Ruppert glanced in the rearview and could have wept. There were now four trucks chasing him, blue lights flashing. He made another sharp turn, tires skittering and squealing across the pavement, then righted the truck and accelerated.
Lucia found the controls for the blue lights in their own truck and switched them on.
“Is this a special night exercise, sir?” Nando asked.
“Sure, call it that,” Ruppert said.
The boy frowned and sat back, folding his arms in.
Lucia lifted her modified remote, which no longer had any wires dangling from it. She pressed the PLAY button. Every loudspeaker in the compound sprang to life, repeating a single phrase again and again:
“ Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”
It was the suicide bomber slogan “God is great!” They hoped it would confuse the people in the compound about what was happening-maybe they would think the next event was a suicide bombing.
Lucia pressed the 4 button on her remote, and thunder and smoke exploded behind the wall, which was now on the right side of the truck. Seconds later, char and ash rained down on the trucks behind him.
She worked back from 3 to 1, summoning columns of flame behind the aluminum wall. The last bomb actually blasted loose a panel of the aluminum fence, which slammed into the truck immediately behind him. That truck swerved and crashed sidelong into a cinderblock wall, but more trucks were close behind.
Lucia lifted one of the two remaining bombs.
“I’m taking 5,” she said. She slid open the rear window of the truck and crawled through it, then dropped facedown into the truck bed behind Ruppert. Ahead, the western gate blocked his path, and hadn’t even begun moving for him. He remembered how long he’d waited last time, and swore under his breath. He lightened up on the accelerator.
He glanced in the rearview. Lucia squirmed on her stomach along the bed of the truck, bomb in one hand, remote in the other. He hoped she kept her fingers away from the number buttons. Blue lights flashed from the rear of his own truck. Maybe some of the pursuers in the back would lose track of which truck was the quarry, since they all looked identical. In the confusion, some of them might not even grasp that they were chasing one of their own trucks.
His speed dropped to fifty, then forty-five. The gate wasn’t budging.
Lucia leaned up over the tailgate and flung the bomb. It cracked into the lead pursuer’s windshield, then she pressed the remote and dropped to the truck bed, covering her head with her arms.
Red light filled the rearview mirror. Ruppert had no choice but to slow even more as he approached the gate. Fire engulfed the truck behind them. Fortunately, the driver had managed to hit the brakes and slow the truck, or it would have slammed directly into Ruppert’s tailgate, and into Lucia.
Then the truck immediately behind that one crashed into it, which boosted the flaming truck forward. Ruppert waited, idling, at the western gate, and could only watch it approach, like a burning barge on a swift current.
Lucia scrambled toward the open window. Already, another Goblin Valley truck was nosing its way around the side of the bombed truck, its driver struggling to avoid the burning pyre on one side of him and the solid concrete wall on the other. The truck crept forward.
A guard leaned out the passenger side door and raised something long and black in his hands.
“Get the fuck down!” Lucia screamed as she slithered in through the window. She smacked Ruppert’s face sideways into the seat, then rolled on top of him. Ruppert reached for Nando, but the boy was gone-he’d already tucked himself down on the floorboard, knees drawn to his chin. His face was eerily placid. A sane boy would have been screaming right now. Ruppert felt like screaming himself.
The machine gun sounded like a thousand corks popping from a thousand bottles of champagne. The guard strafed the truck, obliterating the front and rear windshields, the headrests, chunks of the steering wheel and upper dashboard, the side view mirrors. Lucia tumbled down to the floorboard to protect Nando with her body.
The stutter of bullets ceased, and Ruppert dared to poke his head up and look over the dashboard, through the remnants of the windshield. Miraculously, the western gate was rolling aside. Already it stood half-open, nearly wide enough for the truck.
He turned his head and looked out the rear at the next Goblin Valley truck, the one that had shot at them. It had forced its way past the burning truck and now accelerated towards him.
“We’re going.” Ruppert still spoke in a whisper, despite the sirens screaming behind them and the loudspeakers chanted Arabic battle prayer. “Get ready with number six.”
Lucia pulled herself up to a kneeling position on the floorboard and grabbed the final bomb.
Ruppert swung his feet down to the pedals, so that he was halfway between sitting up and lying on his side. He stomped the accelerator and swerved the truck to drive it through the opened portion of the gate. Twin metallic squeals sounded along the sides of the truck as the side mirrors sheared away. The truck scraped between the gate on one side and the concrete wall on the other.
Then they pulled loose and they were free, charging towards the menagerie of stone goblins filling the valley. Ruppert squinted against the wind pressing in on him through the open windshield area.
“Now!” Ruppert yelled, but Lucia was already pitching number 6 out through the demolished rear window. It struck the ground just outside the open gate, a few yards ahead of the caravan of trucks.
Lucia clicked the remote, and a fireball engulfed the gate area, which was still close enough behind that a wave of heat ruffled through Ruppert’s hair. She hurled the remote itself, entirely stripped and useless now, out the window, and it shattered against a passing boulder.
With all his mirrors shot away, and a field of giant boulders ahead, Ruppert couldn’t waste time looking back to see whether the bomb had destroyed the next truck, or in some other way blocked the gate. They would know soon enough.
He pushed himself upright and rammed the gas pedal to the floor, and soon he was dodging the maze of elevated boulders on their narrow sandstone stalks. The fire and smoke at Goblin Valley School retreated behind them. Ruppert let himself breathe again, and glanced down at Nando, who’d remained silent through the entire ordeal.
The boy glared up at him, his mouth fixed in a thin, straight line, his dark eyes blazing. Was the kid going to cause trouble now?
“Incoming!” Lucia cried. She grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it to the right. A screaming, whistling sound punctured the air next to Ruppert’s ear. He saw the artillery rocket slam into a cluster of the big goblin boulders ahead, enveloping them in flame, kicking up wide jets of sand. The dirt track they were traveling led directly into the flames and the swelling black cloud of smoke.
Two large boulders, the first one the size of a beach ball, the next one much larger, hurtled out of the smoke, rolling towards them.
Ruppert slewed off the road into sand, and found himself dodging rock formations that seemed leap towards him wherever he turned. Some of them towered above the truck.