first look. Before he could even see a single thing, Holly slid the panel closed.
Michael said, “What are y—”
“Listen to me.” And when she spoke, it was with beautiful, semi-crazed determination on her face. “If I don’t make it, will you tell Michael that I hate that he lied.”
She was coming closer to him, so the skin of their noses nearly touched, so close that, if he hadn’t been so shocked, he could have felt her breath—
“But the reason he lied? That’s the real him. And that, I honestly have a big ol’ crush on.”
Michael felt something in his chest seem to open up an inch.
And it happened.
There.
In the freezing Hummer, with the neon light flooding the cabin vivid and full: the distance between them evaporated.
Holly put her hands on his space-suited chest, and then her lips were on top of his.
It did not feel like a cut-scene in a game; he didn’t feel like they were kissing in front of a bursting sunset, or a victory field.
He closed his eyes, and he felt: her lips.
Warm. Dry, but wondrously soft.
And his heart was hammering like that of a panicked animal who has finally been cornered, but when he opened his eyes, Holly’s lashes had parted, and her green eyes looked at him, directly into and at him in the full-blast exposure of the light.
Holly’s lips twitched against his. Smiling. She’s smiling. Crazily, he thought: Which means I’m good at this? Gently, she broke away, and before he could say anything, she placed her warm, smooth cheek to his. “Michael-Michael-Michael.” A whisper in his ear. “I’ll trust you, if you’ll trust me.”
Michael blinked as she pulled back. Trust you for . . . ?
Holly placed her hand dead center on the car horn, and pushed.
Hooonk! it blatted through the quiet. HONK-HONK! HONK-HONK-HOOOOOOOOONK!!! so air-slappingly loud that it might as well have added a cartoony Ah-ROOOO-ga!
“Holly what are you doing?!”
Awareness was rippling across the Rapture crowd in the quarry: heads turning, searching for the source of the sound, looking at the sky, looking at the Hummer.
Their surprise was blown.
And Michael realized what Holly was doing only when he saw her hand reaching for his door handle beside him.
The door that he’d been leaning on tilted away.
He tipped backward, gasping. He grabbed out but grabbed nothing, and flew out of the car, landing on his hip in soaked, trampled snow.
“I lost Hank,” Holly shouted over the horn, which she was still honking. “I am emphatically not losing you guys, too!”
Michael lunged, but Holly transferred to the driver’s seat and pulled the door out of his reach.
“Now,” she said, and offered him a heartbreakingly shaky smile, “let’s see that skinny ass move.”
“ARE YOU INSA—”
The door slammed shut, the motor revved; the tires spun, ripped snow, caught hold. Holly ignited the roof-mounted spotlights and flickered them like strobes. Michael didn’t even get to stand: he was still stumbling up, screamingly shocked, when the Hummer grabbed air over the edge of the canyon and missiled down the access road, straight toward the Rapture below.
What are you doing? Michael thought. Stop her stop her go go go, as he scrambled over the ledge, trailing Holly down the access road, impossibly far behind.
The Hummer was flashing and honking and be-bopping back and forth. It skied, scattering snow as it leveled out on the “ground floor” of the pit, clipping the rear bumper of a SOUTHERN WV COAL/GAS dump truck. The deflated hot-air balloon, which had been knocking madly atop the roof, finally snapped free of its retraints and pirouetted heavily to the ground.
Did Holly think she could just drive into the crowd and scatter them? Oh crap, Holly you are wrong: already on a hair trigger, the Rapture crowd burst apart when she got within fifty feet, yeah, most of the men and women spreading like startled quail.
But some of the believers made their stand.
Their machine guns rising, rising . . .
“NO!”
Thunder crashed across the crater.
Michael’d been right. The windshield was bulletproof.
The thing was, the tires were not.
The front two tires detonated with flat airbursts: the car wrenched violently left, fishtailed, and Michael was still on the access road, still a hundred feet back when the Hummer finally flapped to a stop and a tall man with a dust-caked mouth and a red coat scrambled to the driver’s door, his gun clumsily spitting bullets with every step he took.
As Red Coat wrenched opened the driver’s door, Holly screamed, “Don’t shoot, he made me, he made me!” Red Coat