Like Warm Sun on Nekkid Bottoms (70 page)

A pantsless security guard veered off with one of his comradesin-arms and tried to scoop up the discarded items, which some people were grabbing off the ground out of curiosity, politeness, or just plain greed.

Clearly, we needed to get going.

I scanned the area and saw one of those trucks designed to haul an advertising trailer. It had an immense promotional piece for the new Batman movie hooked to its hitch, advertising
Batman 16, Rise of the Ventriloquist Dummy!
Starring Matthew Perry, with Keanu Reeves as Robin!

Seeing that the driver was chatting up some girl dressed rather fetchingly as Princess Amidala, I took the opportunity, ran past him, snatching the keys he twirled absently, and leaped behind the wheel, locking the door immediately behind me. He, of course, was somewhat put out by the whole thing, as you can imagine, and began screaming and pounding on the driver’s side window. I apologized and thanked him, then turned the engine over and squealed off in an uncontrolled arc in the direction of Wendy, River and the others.

I slowed down only a little to pick them up. Morgan and Sophie were already leaping into the open bed of the truck, as Wendy and River dove into the seat beside me. Once they were situated enough not to fall out on acceleration, I left a stinking trail of rubber on the asphalt all the way down the drive toward a security guard who—I have no doubt—wasn’t paid nearly enough to become a bug on my windshield. He valiantly attempted to wave me off, apparently believing deep in that pretty place we all have somewhere in our souls that I would stop before harming him in any way.

What a dumbass. He obviously knew nothing about adrenaline, love, or their cumulative effects on the human brain. Consequently he was forced to dive for cover at the last minute, landed on a nearby hot dog cart and rolled down the street toward an oncoming trolley train filled with handicapped children.

Wow. Who could have thought
that
could go so wrong? Heroism has its price, I suppose.

I floored the truck out into oncoming traffic, where cars swerved, skidded, and dodged in all directions, knocking the hot dog cart into some bushes before the train could hit it. But now the guard was stuck on the hood of the car that had dislodged him, which was— unfortunately for all concerned—now driving right alongside me at just about the same rate of speed.

The guard looked frantically around for a few seconds in mounting terror, then collected himself once he realized he might not actually die. After a moment or two of brief calm, he looked in my direction and saw that I was the one who had started all this. That got his adrenaline going, and his love for violence apparently because both fogged his better judgment as he smiled a tiger’s smile and crawled over the hood of the old Pontiac he was lying across toward me—as if that was going to do either of us the least little bit of good.

I edged the truck away from him, but we were now going up the onramp onto the freeway, so there was a barrier rail on the passenger side that would only allow me so much getting away space. Worse, for reasons I won’t pretend to understand, the elderly woman driver of the Pontiac—who was screaming like the lead singer of Linkin Park falling down a mineshaft—angled her car closer to mine, as if hoping the guard on
her
hood might leap off onto
mine
, and thereby rid her of her problem. Her husband was apparently on my side, or rather the side that believed she should stop the car right now and put an end to all this foolishness. Unfortunately, his yelling appeared not to be getting through any better than mine.

“Pull over!”
he told his wife.
“PULL OVER!”
Then he grabbed the wheel and jerked it in the opposite direction.
“If you’re not going to do it, let me!”

His rash decision abruptly dislodged the guard and tossed the poor man my way, where he grabbed my side-view mirror—I say ‘my’ as if I owned it, but you get general the idea—and held on for dear life, his feet still perched atop the other vehicle as we both careened back and forth in the narrow, two-lane onramp. As the frightened guard hung there, he looked at me with pleading eyes, begging me not to let him die.

Feeling as if I might somehow be responsible for his desperate situation, I took pity on the poor man, rolled down the window, and reached out a saving arm.

Which he viciously grabbed and started pulling in some illconceived attempt to yank me from the cab! I mean,
really
, twice in as many days? When is removing the driver of a fast moving automobile
ever
a good idea, people?

And so, clearly not having thought it through, the guard hung between vehicles as we entered the freeway simultaneously, forcing other fast-moving trucks and cars out of their lanes to do so.

“There they are!”
River shouted.

I turned my head—now mostly outside the window—into the oncoming rush of the wind, and saw absolutely nothing as my eye sockets ballooned out like parachutes and filled with tears from overstimulated ducts.

“AAAH!” I screamed.
“I CAN’T SEE!”

River took the wheel and Waboombas reached a foot over to accelerate. I felt her painted, bare toes press down on mine and suddenly the car lurched forward. Though I couldn’t see his face, I imagined that the security guard still dangling from my arm, mere feet above the racing pavement below, was, just about then, expressing a little concern.

“AAAAAAAAAAH!”
he said.

“I said, ‘I can’t see’,”
I told Wendy,
“not ‘go faster’!”

“We have to catch them!” Wendy informed me.
“You’re going too slow!”

She pushed harder on my foot, as if that would make the pedal go somehow beyond the floor. The increase in speed caused the guard’s fingernails to dig deep into the tender flesh of my arm as gravity, speed, and tension forced him slowly down, down, down, toward certain death on the ragged asphalt passing beneath him at just over eighty-miles an hour. I heard him praying to some god or other in a language I couldn’t understand. Possibly English, but it could have been Greek for all I knew.

“This is why I don’t let you drive!”
I heard the old man scream to his wife, and I wondered how many other, unfortunate people had found their way onto the hood of her careening automobile.

The interesting thing about speeding down a crowded freeway while people dangle precariously from various sides of your vehicle is: no matter how fast or recklessly you may be driving, there is guaranteed to be another driver attempting to outdo you.

Case in point.

As the advertising truck sped along as I hung out the driver’s side window, as River steered, as Wendy gave it all the gas it had, as Morgan and Sophie did God only knew what in the truck’s back bed, as the security guard hung off me and the hood of the old people’s car, as the old people screamed, and complained, and drove erratically—as all that was going on in full view of anyone else on the freeway who was paying the least little bit of attention—a motorcycle, of all things, raced between our vehicles out of a desperate need to—I don’t know—cut precious seconds off his commute time perhaps.

It didn’t really work out as planned.

The most immediate effect was that, suddenly, the security guard was gone. The secondary effect was that, somewhere ahead of us, a surprised motorcyclist was wobbling and careening all over the road with a screaming man on his head, and that forced the limousine to slow its speed in order to avoid a collision.

As the long, black car backed away, the motorcycle veered off, drove up and over an embankment, and disappeared into a chickenplucking factory. This meant that—as the other car containing the older couple suddenly swerved off away from us and into a slowmoving ice-cream truck, splitting it open like a boiled cranberry and spilling its contents all over themselves and their car, they both let go of the wheel and careened hard right and into some yellow, waterfilled, safety containers—we were alone on the freeway and right up alongside the limo, pacing it.

Then the tinted passenger side window of the luxury vehicle suddenly whirred itself down, and I saw Wisper’s face, frightened and screaming.

“Corky, he’s got a gun!”

A flash erupted from near her head, she flinched, and I ducked. The front windshield of the truck shattered out, and River and Wendy shielded themselves from the bits of glass that escaped the plastic safety coating and flew in their directions. Breathing hard, and more than a little scared, I hunkered behind the driver’s door, debating my next move.

“You drive,” I told River.

“I already am,” he said.

“Oh. Right. Then stay close to them.”

He gave me a cocked look that begged me not to tell him stupid things, I nodded a kind of apology, pulled the handle and pushed outward, seeing the bottom edge of the limo under the bottom edge of my door and the blur of pavement below that.

What now? I wondered. What would Bruce Willis do in this situation? Something manly, no doubt, so I should discard that line of thinking. How about Matthew Perry?

Or Spiderman?

I thought about options and considered that there might be something in the back bed of the truck that could be of help. In fact, hadn’t I seen Morgan with a gun earlier?

I sat up quickly to look through the rear window and saw Morgan and Sophie having sex.

Dear, GOD! There was a time and a place for
everything
, and this was
neither
!

I dropped down again to avoid any additional gunfire, and before I had time to consider what a stupid idea it was, I opened the door, shimmied out and back toward the rear of the truck. Hanging on for dear life and realizing this was way scarier than when you see it in the movies, I leaned out and reached for the gun that lie beside the furiously rutting Sophie and Morgan.

“Look out!”
I heard Wendy call, and I turned just in time to see the limo moving fast toward me, apparently with the intent of crushing my legs.

Son of a…!

I jerked my feet up, which threw me completely off balance, and when the limo slammed the truck, the impact knocked me onto the roof of the Boone’s black transport, as it immediately swerved away again, two lanes over from where we’d been.

Over in the truck’s bed, I saw Morgan and Sophie’s heads pop up in surprise. Apparently the earth had moved for them, and they knew it couldn’t have been Morgan’s lovemaking.

“What the hell?” Morgan said as he watched me scramble atop the swerving limo.

“Throw me the gun!” I yelled to him.

“What gun?” he asked, clearly confused.

“You had a gun!”

Morgan’s hamster reluctantly got out of bed then fell backward into the wheel. “Oooh, right.
That
gun. What’d I do with that?”

He slowly reached over, apparently unwilling to get off Sophie long enough to do anything with any actual urgency, and searched through some things I couldn’t see. After a moment, he held up the dark pistol.

“You mean this one?” he asked.

“You have another one?”

“No,” he said missing the sarcasm.

“Then, yes. I’ll take that one.”

“What are you gonna do with it?”

“I’m thinking of starting a collection.”

“Really?” He missed it again.

“No. Can you toss it to me, please?”

Just then a hand appeared over the edge of the limo and fired a random shot to, presumably, either kill me or threaten me into jumping off the roof. I ducked and called to Morgan more urgently.

“Morgan!”

He started to toss the thing, then stopped and seemed to consider something of great importance.

“I may need this back,” he said, concerned. “It isn’t mine. It belongs to one of those security guards back there. I took it when they were holding…”

“I don’t really need the history of the thing right now. I just need the gun. Will you give me the gun if I ask nicely? Please?
Pretty please?”

“You don’t have to be such a grouch.”

Without moving off Sophie, he half-heartedly tossed the thing so that it dropped between our two vehicles and bounced its way, end over end, down the freeway and into a TV movie about someone who finds a loaded gun on the freeway.

I looked at Morgan as if he were a child who’d crossed that final line and now had to be given up for adoption.

“What?” he moaned. “I threw it as hard as I could.”

Then Washburne’s hand was firing at me again, and I realized this wasn’t the time to be petulant about Morgan’s lack of enthusiasm for my plight. I hunkered down on the roof of the limo and skittered about like the superhero I was painted to be, avoiding randomly fired bullets and trying to figure out what the real Spiderman would do if he were in my situation, riding atop a fast-moving limousine on a busy freeway. That is, if there
were
a real Spiderman.

He’d taunt his villains, I realized.

So I stuck my head down the opposite side from where the gun was for just a second, then withdrew it quickly enough to see the glass I hadn’t been able to see through explode outward in a burst.

That was effective.

And scary.

But I was going to do it again. First, though, I needed to talk to Wisper.

“Funny how you could call me a ‘clothist’ out on the beach earlier!”
I yelled, loud enough to be heard through the broken window.
“With genuine disdain, I might add. But I call you a nudist in a moment of weakness, and you’re off riding with the Boones!”

I glanced at the advertising truck, and saw River and Waboombas looking at me with serious concern as they paced us, moving in and out of traffic, working hard to stay close. I smiled and gave them the thumbs-up, which didn’t seem to ease their minds at all.

Unaffected by their lack of faith in me, I skittered to the other side of the limo and stuck my head down, reaching for the door handle. I knew it would be locked, but I was trying to give the idea that I was attempting to get in a little more authenticity. I rattled it once, then jerked quickly back up to narrowly avoid another glass-shattering gunshot.