Helltown - Jeremy Bates Page 0,14

their futures, to prove he wasn’t a chicken.

Mandy and Jenny gave up yelling and buckled their belts. A fear-soaked silence followed, magnifying the purr of the engine and the hum of the tires.

Only a handful of seconds had passed since Jeff gunned the gas, but it felt like much longer. Steve’s fear had warped his perception of time, slowed it down, and for a crazy moment some mordant part of his brain contemplated jumping out of the speeding vehicle. But it was traveling too fast. He would break his back or neck—and likely get run over by the oncoming hearse. Besides, he was frozen stiff. All he could move were his eyeballs, which he strained to the left so he could read the speedometer. The needle wavered just below seventy miles per hour.

He looked back at the road. The hearse was sixty yards away, the headlights bleeding together to form a blinding wall of shimmering white.

Fifty yards.

We’re going to die, Steve thought.

Forty.

He braced his hands against the dash.

Thirty.

“Jeff!” Mandy shrieked.

Twenty.

“Jeff!”

Jeff swerved to the left. The hearse screamed past. Jeff yanked the wheel to the right but overcompensated. The car knifed across the dotted line toward the opposite shoulder. He yanked the wheel left again. Right, left, right, left, trying to regain control of the now fishtailing vehicle.

They careened off the road and plowed through a small tree, shattering bark and branches. They hit something that launched the BMW into an airborne somersault. For a moment Steve floated in zero gravity, and he was thinking this was it, this was how he was going to die, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it—

The car struck the ground nose first. The impact accordioned the engine block and slammed Steve with the force of a sledgehammer to the chest. The seatbelt strap bit into his flesh and held him suspended above the dash, which was no longer in front of him but below him. The handstanding vehicle crunched forward onto the roof, where it rocked back and forth before coming to rest in the still, silent forest.

Noah had been seconds away from getting out of the Jeep and going to talk to Jeff about the assholes in the hearse when the BMW’s rear tires squealed and literally burned rubber. Through wafts of smoke, he watched the car shoot away down the road.

“He’s playing chicken!” Austin exclaimed from beside him.

Noah didn’t know what to do, but he knew he couldn’t sit there doing nothing. He shoved the Jeep into gear and accelerated.

“He’s not going to give!” Austin said. “Jeff’s not going to give. The motherfucker’s going to get them all killed.”

“The hearse will give,” Noah said automatically.

“Don’t get too close,” Cherry said from the backseat in a borderline terrified voice. “Stay to the shoulder. Do you hear me? Stay to the shoulder.”

“I’m straddling the goddamn shoulder!” Noah said. In fact, he could hear loose gravel spraying the Jeep’s undercarriage.

Then, ahead, Jeff arced sharply to the left. For a moment it appeared as though the hearse had plowed straight through the BMW, but Noah knew that had to be a trick of the fog and the glare of the headlights. He eased fully onto the shoulder and slowed.

Two seconds later the hearse thundered past, hogging the center of the road, bovine horn moaning. Noah tried to glimpse the driver, but the hearse’s headlights had blinded him. No one turned to watch the morbid vehicle depart. No one said anything. They were all staring in horror at the slewing BMW ahead of them. In the next instant it bucketed off the left side of the road into the mix of evergreen and deciduous trees.

Cherry sobbed and screamed in the same breath.

Austin shouted: “Go!”

Noah was already accelerating again.

When Steve realized he wasn’t dead, and when his shock subsided, he heard moaning from behind him. “Jen?” he said. “Mandy?” He tried to crane his neck around to check on them, and that’s when he saw Jeff in the darkened cabin, crawling through a hole in the windshield. Then he realized Jeff wasn’t crawling; his lower body was ragdoll limp.

Steve couldn’t see the upper half of his friend, the half that had been launched through the windshield, because the glass had gone gummy and opaque with cracks.

“Fuck Jeff,” Steve mumbled. “You stupid fucking fuck…”

“Steve?” Mandy said shrilly. “What’s wrong? What happened to Jeff? Is he dead? Is he dead?”

Steve unclasped his seatbelt and collapsed onto the car’s ceiling. He twisted himself around so he could see