He grimaced in pain. “I sincerely hope there isn’t a next time.”
The three of them couldn’t fit through the shattered doorway at the same time, so Louise stepped through first. It took her outside the protection of Joy’s shields, and the sudden flare of intense heat and thick smoke made her stumble forward, coughing.
She saw the gunman just as he saw her. She stared unbelieving as he raised his rifle and took aim at her.
But then the male fell over, twitching.
“Hooyah!” Chuck Norris squeaked as she fist-pumped. “Taser is in the mouse!”
“Chuck!”
Chuck waved her tiny hands. “I totally saved you!”
Louise scooped up the mouse robot. “Yes, you did. Thank you.”
The detached garage had obviously been built to hold horse carriages. It was a massive, dimly lit building with heavy timbers supporting its barnlike roof. It housed a dozen sleek modern cars. The light of the growing house fire flickered through celestial windows over the bay doors. From deep pools of darkness, the light gleamed off polished chrome in pinpoints like demonic eyes.
A box truck sat in the oversized end bay. Louise’s heart sank as she envisioned trying to find Tesla in a tightly packed truck. As they rounded the back end, however, she was relieved to see that the elves hadn’t started to load it yet. Carefully labeled boxes sat in stacks, obviously organized into groups. The Jawbreakers stood on one of the larger cardboard boxes, waving.
“That was so scary!” The two broke into excited squeaking. “We were so scared. And Lou! Bang! That was awesome. And then boom! Better than fireworks!”
“Are you in here?” Jillian asked.
“Yup! Yup! We’re right here!”
The box had been labeled: “Wood Sprites’ toys, possibly dangerous.” It had been sealed shut with strapping tape. Louise pulled out her Swiss army knife. While the mice all sang “Boom, boom, fireworks bloom” in four-part harmony, Louise cut open the box and folded back the flaps to reveal Tesla.
The mice fell silent as Louise snapped open the storage hatch. The nactka was still safely inside. The twins breathed out with relief, and all the mice cheered. The elves must not have realized that Tesla had a hidden compartment.
“What is that?” Crow Boy looked like he was going to fall over.
“The most important thing in the world.” Louise closed up the hatch. “We need to get out of here. Fast.”
“Lou.” Nikola tugged at her hair. “Put this mouse someplace safe and I’ll drive Tesla.”
She tucked the little bundle of fur into her carpenter pants leg pocket. Tesla shook awake and wagged his tail. She hugged him tightly.
“Awesome!” Jillian cried as she lunged into the box to pull out their tablets from deep inside it. “They’re still password locked. And our phones! Yay!” She dove into another box that was labeled: “Wood Sprites’ objects, unidentified, possibly dangerous.”
“What is so dangerous about a soldering gun?” Jillian muttered, still half inside the box.
“We need to go!” Louise scanned the cars around them. “We’ll take one of the cars and send the rest out to random addresses to muddy the trail.”
“I say we take the Lamborghini.” Jillian pointed at the dangerous-looking sports car.
None of the cars blended in with normal traffic. All the other vehicles were the tanklike limousines. The Lamborghini could outrun anything short of a helicopter and maybe even that. At the moment, speed and maneuverability outweighed everything.
“Does it have self-driving?” She scooped up the Jawbreakers. “It is a Lamborghini.”
Nikola tilted his head, which usually meant he was accessing another computer. “Yes, it has a self-drive option. It’s recommended to be used when the driver has been drinking. What does taking in fluids have to do with driving?”
“We’ll explain later,” Jillian said. “Can you disarm its security and unlock it?”
The Lamborghini chirped and its doors opened. The garage doors all started upwards, gliding slightly on well-oiled tracks, preparing for a mass exodus of cars.
Crow Boy wavered in place, looking like he was upright on sheer willpower alone. There were a dozen thin cuts on his arms, seeping blood. If he fainted, Louise doubted that she and Jillian could get him into a car. It took several tense minutes to get him across the large garage to the Lamborghini and into the passenger seat, wings and all.
Only then did Louise realize that the sports car was much smaller inside than she had expected. There was no backseat and there was a stick shift between the two front ones.
Nikola hopped into the driver’s seat and put his paws on the steering wheel. “Where are we going?”
“River Edge Station.” Jillian scrambled into the car and straddled the divider between the seats. “Yves can track us via the anti-theft GPS on this.”
“No.” Louise vetoed that. “We need to get Crow Boy to a hospital quickly.”
Crow Boy murmured something about no hospital and flying under the radar.
Louise ignored him as she eyed the crowded interior. The only place for her was on Crow Boy’s lap. She eased carefully in, making sure that she didn’t put weight on his broken leg. “The trains don’t come often enough to River Edge; we’ll be stranded at the station for too long.” She tried not to be scared when he wrapped his arms around her. Joy sat on Louise’s lap and glared up at the boy. “We’ll go into the city and have the car make a bunch of stops. They won’t know where we actually got out.”
“Okay, the city,” Nikola said. The engine suddenly rumbled loudly to life.
“Oh shit, it’s a combustion engine?” Louise thought only big construction vehicles were still run by gasoline.
Nikola tilted his head. “To go we do this?”
The sports car leapt forward with a roar and squeal of tires. They slid sideways through the turn of the driveway and raced toward the far road. Louise and Jillian both shrieked in surprise and fear.
“Oh. Sorry.” The car started to slow.
“No, don’t slow down now! Go!”
“Okay!” Nikola bounced in his seat with excitement and they flew into the night. “Mapping quickest route to Manhattan.”
Third star to the right, Louise thought, straight on toward dawn.
It was twenty miles to Times Square. They did it in nearly ten minutes, leaving black contrails of tire marks at every turn. They slowed down — slightly — for the Lincoln Tunnel while Nikola explained that he’d avoided the George Washington Bridge because it was congested despite the 3:00 a.m. time.
Louise gripped tight the armrest built into the door, trying not to scream as they zipped past slower cars. “I thought that self-driven cars couldn’t speed.”
“Speed limit is set by the road, not the car.” Nikola tilted his head back and forth as he communicated with outside computers. “Snow or ice or something could change the speed that the road can be traveled safely, so the car is told the speed limit along with all the other traffic data. We’re filtering the information as it’s coming from the road, leaving all the other factors constant but changing the speed limit upwards by sixty miles per hour.”
Louise glanced at the dashboard, read their speed, and whimpered slightly.
They slewed sideways into an impossibly rare parking space within view of the Times Square subway station entrance. They sat there panting as the car rumbled in idle.
“So, where do we go?” Jillian whispered.
“We need to go to a hospital for — for — Crow Boy.” Louise winced as she realized that they’d spent the last hour fleeing and not asking the most basic of questions, like “What is your name?”