“His lair is in the lowest part of the Maze,” the Marquis said, aware that the assassin’s gun followed his every move. “Under Zero-the sewers.”
Tiny covered the transvestite with his. 357 magnum. He noticed with a laugh that Driver had both automatics pointed too.
They took the door beside the stairs to the basement where Felon said it opened on the driveway. The Marquis’ hands fluttered lifting his dress clear of the golden bows on his slippers.
They’d already agreed to take Driver’s car.
“It’s the fastest thing in this city,” the Texan said with calm certainty. “And I drive it fast.”
“You do,” Tiny had agreed, glancing back at Bloody. The dead gunman was carrying the nun. The Marquis had promised that her “spell” would wear off soon but the salesman was getting tired of the Marquis’ soon. He’d already delayed their departure by about six dangerous hours. They’d spent the time huddled in the basement taking turns covering the “Angel” while Driver popped out to gas and oil the car. The Marquis said he required time to create the necessary doorway past Lucifer’s defenses and salutations were essential. He’d spent the hours cross-legged on the bed doing a quiet inward chant, eyes rolled up; but that had just put Felon more on edge, if that was possible, expecting another double cross.
Tiny couldn’t believe his luck. Lucifer! If this crazy shit was true then the salesman was on his way to meet the father of all salesmen. Felon grunted “dangerous” and nothing else. That left Tiny to discuss it with his partners and they weren’t religious scholars by any stretch. He wanted to pick the Marquis’ brain on the subject but that was still a sticky idea.
He just didn’t want to blow this opportunity on a cold call.
The slowing drizzle and mist from Level Five overhead suggested that the rain had let up. That high up in the City, leaks and bleeds from sewers and runoff were more likely. Tiny looked at it optimistically: since it hadn’t percolated through quite as much human misery, what fell on his suit was cleaner.
They crossed the driveway and made their way to the side of an oversized garage where the Marquis kept several limousines. Driver had parked his car in the shadow there.
“A classic Nova SS-that’s 375 real horse!” Driver whispered proudly as he climbed in. “Metallic black, steel fenders and mags. If the engine weren’t so damned heavy I could put her up on her back wheels and dance.” The Nova was the child of another nostalgic wave that passed through the comfort seeking imaginations of the doomed, this one a re-design of the pre-Change seventies muscle car. Driver loved the Nova because it was roomy inside and its souped-up suspension was rugged enough to take the broken down roads of the Change.
They scanned the courtyard for signs of trouble as they piled in the passenger door. Felon hissed and snarled, still climbing the walls about a trap. Tiny didn’t bother reminding him he was about to cross the City in a car full of gunmen with enough outstanding warrants to choke a whale.
There was a sudden rumble of power and then a harsh rev that brought a girlish sigh from the Marquis. The Nova’s throbbing muffler echoed giving its monstrous voice. The wide muscular vehicle rumbled, its tailpipe making hot, wet noises.
Driver rolled his tinted window down. “Let’s go.”
The Angel was manhandled into a rough spot in the back seat between the angry handguns of Felon and Bloody. Tiny slid the sleepwalking nun onto the front seat beside Driver and climbed in. She was waking up but was blinking and still a little dull like she’d been smoking cheap Mexican weed.
Driver pointed the car down the drive and the Nova rumbled smoothly into life, quickly gliding onto the street and flying down the avenue toward the guard post for the gated neighborhood. The Marquis played along real nicely and just flirted with the guard and talked about going “clubbing.”
The Nova passed the gate and hit Currency Boulevard. That took them south to the main Skyway ramp. There were a lot of cars out, but that was to be expected. Day and night meant little in the covered city. Some cars bore the designs of other nostalgic waves, but about half had the squat shapes of Skyway riders. These were small vehicles with wide set tires and powerful engines designed for the challenging angles and precipitous drops presented by the Skyway designers.
Driver pulled the car up to an intersection. The Skyway ramps looped down from the east and west. Felon hissed in the back seat. Across from them, Tiny spotted the Authority Cruiser too. There were two uniformed Enforcers in it looking right at the Nova.
“The car!” Felon grumbled.
“I reckon she caught their eye,” Driver said patting the dashboard.
“Drawing attention,” Felon growled.
They watched the Enforcers lift a radio-telephone.
A spotlight burned out of the cruiser, slid over the car.
“Reading the plates.” Felon’s ire was growing.
“I ain’t got none,” Driver chuckled.
“AUTHORITY!” boomed a mechanical voice. “Turn your engine off and exit the car.”
“Do you think I’d draw attention to myself?” Driver glared into the rearview mirror. “If I couldn’t do somethin’ about it.” The Texan hit the gas and the Nova’s tires screamed.
The acceleration pressed Tiny into his seat as the car burned through the intersection sliding under the rusted rear corner of a flatbed. They flew toward the Level Five Skyway ramp. Sirens came to life behind them.
“Down to Zero!” Felon shouted.
“I figured a scenic route!” Driver chuckled as he worked the gearshift. The car’s engine roared and the tires squawked as they caught on the slippery asphalt. The Skyway incline rose rapidly to forty-five degrees.
“The Nova ain’t one of them elevator cars,” the Texan drawled. “She’s stylish, and she’ll run straight up a tree.”
Sirens wailed behind them as Driver shoved the Nova up the ramp with both hands, weaving in and out of slower traffic-really pouring it on as they crested the top. The engine howled at the wide lanes ahead and Driver opened the Nova up to merge.
Because there was no night and day in the City the Skyways were always crowded. The Nova tore into the thick traffic with ease-still squawking through gears as Tiny watched the speedometer hover at eighty.
Skyway 4 North ran twelve lanes across, depending on cables and struts some forty feet below Level 5. It was a distracting place with tons of traffic and lights and signs warning of turnoffs and rest stations, turnpikes and merging lanes and advertising coffee and hotels and Formalin. Tiny read somewhere that designing the Skyway system to move the City’s 150 million people around was considered a feat greater than building the wall of old China. And he could believe it too. The roads swung and looped and crossed. There were multilane and multilevel sections too-and the traffic was relentless.
Driver wove and dodged keeping to the two center lanes. The noise of traffic was overbearing-echoed and magnified by the proximity of Level 5’s heavy bulk overhead.
“See,” Driver said searching the rearview for Felon’s eyes. “I could paint her red with silver stars and leave them fuckers in the dirt!”
Crunch! The Nova suddenly bucked to the right. Driver glared out his window. A heavy sedan had made its way through the traffic. Inside fedoras were backlit by headlights.
“Plainclothes!” Tiny shouted, reaching for his gun. The nun shrieked.
“Well, all right,’ Driver drawled.
The sedan slammed into the Nova again. Metal shrieked.
“My paintjob!” the Texan growled, touching the wheel and tromping on the gas. The Nova lurched powerfully to the left and locked fenders, shoved the other vehicle across a lane until the plainclothes had to brake and do some fancy steering or hit a truck from behind.
Driver swung the Nova back to the center lanes.
“There!” Felon snapped and pointed over the seat at a sign: Level 4 down ramp – six miles.
The Nova rocketed forward. Traffic flew past the windows.
Tiny was watching the plainclothes car keeping pace two lanes over and burning to catch them. Then he spotted the marked car’s lights dodging through traffic behind them. He swung his head to the other side. Felon was watching a long black car with a dash light coming up that side.
“Fuck, Driver they’re all over our ass!”
Driver’s eyes squinted into the rearview mirror, and he tilted his head and quickly turned to make the count.
Glaring red taillights suddenly filled the windshield. Driver braked. There was a loud bang and scraping sound as the Nova slid right under the solid steel bumper of an Authority Transport. Its big armored backside was blue with a thick yellow stripe.
“Nice!” Tiny braced himself against the dash. “They dropped back to seal us in.”
“You’d think so!” Driver bellowed. “Whoa now!” He slammed on the brakes and revved the Nova’s engine tight, started jumping traffic to the left. “We got to make that down ramp pronto.” He watched the transport’s massive body slide across Tiny’s window. Its driver suddenly poured on the fuel; its engine howled keeping pace with the Nova.
“Fucker’s fast,” Driver said wistfully. “Be fun to drive.”
Suddenly the rear window made a snapping sound-and crackled.
“Gunfire!” Felon shouted.
“Bullet proof!” Driver winced, putting the gas to the Nova. Tiny felt the car’s acceleration as they topped a hundred miles an hour. The Nova shot across six lanes of traffic toward the down ramp. Other cars were passing and moving that way too.
The transport sped up as they passed its nose and just brushed the trunk with its high front bumper. Then it opened up with a nose-mounted machine gun. The Nova’s fenders rattled and sparked with the onslaught.
“Kevlar fenders!” Driver reassured his passengers. “They gotta try harder than that.”
There was a deafening boom and the Nova rocked forward. The vehicle lurched like its back wheels were airborne. Driver momentarily lost control and rear-ended a van but he wrestled the car into trim. It was rocking like a spring was broken. Driver glared into the rearview.
“Cannon!” Felon barked.
“You win!” Driver accelerated across the final two lanes. He wove and swerved, ready for more cannon fire.
And Tiny felt his stomach jump as the down ramp collector lane suddenly dropped away to many street lit miles of Skyway ramp. To either side of the ribbon of blacktop the City’s lights burned. Interesting, yes, but the biggest thrill was the traffic. Four lanes of cars and trucks hurtled down the forty-degree downgrade.
“It’s like we’re falling!” Tiny said to himself and smiled.
“Them too,” Driver hissed at the rearview.
The transport was recklessly matching their speed hurtling downward-on either side of it, Authority cruisers. Tiny knew the sedans would be back there somewhere too.
“Plan?” he yelled. There were more cars to either side.
The Nova continued to weave. “I was rememberin’ a dirty stock car driver!” Driver shouted. “See-I thought it was dirty at the time-cars had bunched up to win a race and one fella got creative.”
The Nova squawked and lurched between a pair of slower moving cars ahead. Driver floored it and shot down the ramp toward a knot of cars past them. He gunned the Nova up to a sedan and hooked his chrome bumper in the car’s rear left wheel well. He hit the brakes and then tramped on the gas.
Tires squealed as the sedan fishtailed to the left into a van. That van rammed the car ahead of it-which hit another. The van continued to slide, rubber and engine screaming. But the incline was too much and the vehicle shuddered and rolled. It started over sideways-but its front bumper hooked another car that careened to the left, and the first sedan suddenly went end over end, sparks flying.
Driver gunned the Nova, breaking and alternately gassing the engine. Tiny grit his teeth as the Nova roared through an opening. A van flipped into another car that lurched across two lanes and almost hit the Nova’s tail before it lodged under the transport’s front wheels. A flame of sparks started. The transport was three tons of armor on tall wheels. It tipped nose down and couldn’t steer. The front tires turned wildly and one broke off.
Tiny watched through the rear window as the transport started to tumble. Cars behind it flipped, and rolled, were crushed by the mammoth vehicle or knocked off the ramp.
The salesman clapped Driver on the back as the behemoth rolled over cars ahead and then slid and bucked over the cruisers. Lights were flashing; sparks flew. Heavy metal slammed. The Skyway shuddered under the Nova’s wheels.
Driver gunned the engine and the car whipped to the bottom of the hill away from the carnage rolling, smashing and burning behind them. The Nova’s tires squawked and the undercarriage thumped at the bottom of the incline.
Driver eyed the wreckage behind him before turning the Nova toward Skyway 3 down ramp.
“See that worked well,” he drawled, throwing a smile at his companions.