“You trying to get away already?” he said.
“Just making room.” She smiled at him.
“The first cocktail was absinthe, whiskey, bitters, and sugar. In New Orleans. Two hundred years ago.” He looked pleased with his knowledge.
“Cool.”
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Picking up guys. You?”
“I guessed that. Otherwise you’d be downstairs. I meant, what are you doing here, at this place? Neo-goths don’t seem your type. I like the jacket and the haircut, but it seems like you’re just slumming.”
“I like their standard of beauty.” She took a sip of her just-arrived drink. She looked at his eyes then followed the line of his face down to his lips. Dark hair, darker clothes, and insightful. Her skin tingled. “Come with me.” She stood up and carried her glass with her. He followed her out the fire exit, onto a metal balcony. It was thirty degrees cooler and half as loud outside.
“What do you do?” she asked him.
“I pick up girls in bars who don’t belong there.”
She smiled and waited.
“Does it matter?” he asked. “I don’t know what you do, and I don’t need to.”
She shook her head. No, she didn’t want to know, and she didn’t want him to ask, and she couldn’t tell if she did.
She leaned in and kissed him. His face was pleasantly rough, and he smelled slightly of machine oil. A mechanic then, for cars or robots. He might have been Mexican, then again, maybe not. He kissed her back, his arms strong where he held her. Cat felt a flutter inside, and traced his collarbone with one finger.
He said, “Let’s go to your place.”
She shook her head. “I don’t have a place,” she lied. “What about you?”
“I can’t use my place.”
Cat remembered she had money now. “I can get us a room.” She smiled at him, hot despite the cool night air.
“OK,” he said, “but I want to tie you up.”
She laughed and grabbed his hand. “Bring it on, baby.”
21
From Memphis, Mike and Leon took I-55 south, obsessively watching the rearview mirror and the cars around them. Fearful after the encounter with the hovercraft, they couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone was watching them. Self-driving cars traveled in packs for fuel efficiency, so they carefully checked out anyone traveling alone.
A tense but uneventful hour passed until they turned off the Interstate at US-82, to head west across Mississippi toward Arkansas. Leon breathed in relief at the blissfully empty two-lane highway. Mike pulled onto the shoulder and rubbed his eyes. “Time for you to drive.”
They got out of the car and took a minute to stretch. To the right, a lone farmhouse stood, the only structure as far as they could see on the open grassland. To the left, the landscape alternated between stands of short trees and more grass.
“Do you think we lost them?” Leon asked. He couldn’t stop thinking about the hovercraft and the angry, eager expression on the driver’s face
“We haven’t seen anyone following us,” Mike said. “We’re off the main route, there’s nothing to track on our car, and we’re keeping our IDs anonymous. I think we’ll be OK.”
“We still have ten hours to go.” Leon studied the road they’d just come down.
“Less if we keep up this speed.”
Leon climbed into the car and clenched the wheel. He had a total of six hours driving experience, all of them on this trip. He looked over at Mike, who was already leaning back with his eyes closed. He hesitantly put the big car in drive. The motor whined until they hit forty, then wind noise drowned out everything else. He stepped harder on the accelerator until the big car reached seventy. Jaw clenched and muscles taught with nerves, he wondered how Mike had been able to drive as fast as he did.
An hour later, Leon passed through Greenville, then crossed the Mississippi, flowing brown and muddy. When they cleared the city and the road opened up again, he gradually accelerated to eighty and then ninety. The wind roar increased, if such a thing was possible, but the convertible just floated down the road. Once in a while a car would pass in the opposite direction, a blur of color that rocked the Caddy sideways with the rush of displaced air. Slowly he relaxed.
He drove west through El Dorado, then south toward Junction City. By the time he crossed into Louisiana, he had one hand on the wheel while he switched stations on the antique radio, picking up pirate broadcasts on the disused frequencies. Leon glanced over and saw Mike had woken up.
“It’s amazing what they could do without electronics.” Leon yelled over the clamor of wind and stereo. “How do these buttons change the station?”
“When I was a kid,” Mike said, “my mom would leave me in the car when she went into a store. Every time she’d say, ‘don’t play with the radio’. As soon as she left, naturally I’d start pulling the buttons in and out, and then—”
Mike had his head craned around. Leon checked the rearview mirror, spotting a ground car in the distance. As he watched, the car grew larger. He looked down at the speedometer. He pushed down on the accelerator, bringing the car up to ninety-five.
“Go faster,” Mike said, his voice urgent.
Leon seized the wheel tighter and pushed the car to a hundred. The old Caddy seemed to drift over the road, its connection as tenuous as a cloud’s grip on the earth. The car in the mirror grew larger still. He pushed the convertible to one-o-five.
The lights of the car behind them were huge. If it were an autopilot driving, it would have changed lanes long ago.
“Slam on the brakes,” Mike yelled.
“They’ll crash into us!”
“Just do it.”
“We’ll die!” Leon screamed.
“Do it or I’ll come over there and do it.” Mike gripped the door with one hand, as his other hand struggled to get purchase on the leather seat.
Leon swore and slammed on the brakes. The tires howled as the car began to shudder. Leon looked up at the mirror, saw the other car impossibly large, then it pounded into them. The wheels continued their tortured scream as the Caddy slid into a spin, the other car hooked into their bumper. The steering wheel turned back and forth with no effect. He kept his foot mashed down on the brake, and with a lurch, the other car spun off. After a half dozen more revolutions, the Caddy came to a halt in a cloud of smoke and dust. Leon tried to get out of the car, the world still spinning around him, only to realize he was buckled in.
“No, don’t get out.” Mike held his forehead, blood oozing between his fingers. “If that car had been on autopilot, it never would have hit us. If they’d been freeriders, they would have gone around. They meant to ram us.”
Leon looked down the highway. The white car, a sleek wagon with low profile tires on maglev wheels sat a few hundred feet further on. “That car can do two hundred miles an hour easy. How can we outrun them?”
“Ram them. Do it now before they get moving.”
“What?”
“That car is made out of carbon fiber and aluminum. It weighs maybe a thousand pounds. We weigh five thousand. Do the math. Punch the gas and hit them.”
Leon looked over at Mike again. He had pulled a handkerchief out of somewhere and was holding it to his head.
Mike met his gaze. “Leon, they’re trying to kill us. Just hit them.”
Leon heard the shrill sound of the other car’s flywheel charging up.
Leon put the car back in drive and stomped on the gas. The electric motor got them up to fifty before they hit the wagon. Leon had time to see the outline of two people staring back at him, then the other car’s safety windshield shattered, going opaque with a thousand micro-fractures. The lightweight sports car barely slowed the Caddy at all. They pushed the wagon a hundred feet before it slid off and rolled into a ditch.