Blue Noon (17 page)

“Stupid cow.”

“That’s usually the problem with brilliant plans: not-so-brilliant people.”

Dess shook her head as they climbed onto an entrance ramp and shot back up onto Highway 75. “Wow. So this afternoon, when Rex made us siphon most of the gas out of Melissa’s tank? That was kind of a waste of two hours.”

“My guess is that Rex feels the same way,” Jonathan said. “When’s he supposed to run out?”

“At exactly eleven forty-seven and… oh, wait. We’re ahead of schedule here, aren’t we?”

“About ten minutes.”

She looked at Geostationary. “Well, they were supposed to come to a stop right when they got to the middle of Saddleback. Of course, Rex looked like he was driving a little faster than we figured, which is less fuel efficient, especially in an old beater like Melissa’s car. So…”

“Pretty soon, right?”

“Yeah. About eleven-forty. Unless those guys in the Mercs have guns and shoot out their tires or something.”

“Oh, right. Good point.” Jonathan realized that he had been going a bit slower than maximum, not wanting to send Dess through the windshield if an eclipse sneaked up on them. But the more he thought about it, the worse trouble he figured Rex was in. He pressed the accelerator down harder.

“So, Dess, if you see any blue sweeping across the sky, you know what to do, right?”

“Grab your hand. No problem.”

Jonathan nodded. If he was sharing his midnight gravity with someone, they probably wouldn’t carry their momentum into the blue time. Two weeks before in the desert, Jessica and Dess had been whacked against their seat belts when his car had frozen and Melissa almost killed when she’d been, but nothing had happened to Jonathan.

Of course, no one had been crazy enough to test this hand-holding theory yet.

This zooming along at seventy-five miles an hour was another reason he was glad Melissa and Jess weren’t here. He only had two hands.

They shot along the highway, the lights of central Bixby glowing before them, a great mass of darkness all around.

“Can you see anything?”

She leaned forward, squinting through the windshield at the dark road ahead. “Barely. I think that little cluster of taillights is them.”

“So what are we supposed to do now?” Jonathan said. “Try to catch up and help Rex? Or stick to the plan when we hit the county line and head out to pick up Melissa and Jess?”

“Crap, I don’t know. I hate all this plan stuff.”

“Me too,” Jonathan said.

“Maybe we should keep following Rex. We can swoop in and pick him up after he runs out of gas.”

Jonathan swallowed. “You do realize that’ll be trickier than it sounds, right, Dess? Remember what you said about them maybe having guns?”

“Absolutely. But we can’t just leave him out here with

real Grayfoots chasing him. Who knows what they’ll do to him?”

Jonathan couldn’t argue with that. Melissa’s car couldn’t outrun those two Mercedes even if it wasn’t about to conk out. “I guess I could fly over and get Jessica after midnight falls.”

“What about Melissa?” Dess said. “We’ll need her if we’re going to get into Angie’s mind. You actually going to hold
her
hand?”

Cold fingers stroked Jonathan’s spine at the thought. He’d touched Melissa exactly once before, for an emergency jump across a hundred yards of angry tarantulas. In those few seconds her tortured mind had flooded into him like a wave of nausea; it was something he never wanted to repeat.

He sighed. “I guess I’ll have to. But what about you and Rex being alone in Saddleback? It’ll take me ten minutes to get Jessica there, and that’s the deep desert—darkling country.”

“Don’t worry about me.” Dess kicked the duffel bag on the floor in front of her, which let out a clank. “I think our big problem right now is Rex staying alive
until
midnight.”

“Yeah, you got that right. Those guys in the Mercs looked pretty pissed.” Jonathan took a deep breath. “Okay, we go after Rex and save his sorry ass from the Grayfoots.”

He accelerated still more, squeezing every drop of speed out of his father’s car.

Dess scrunched down into her seat. “Sounds like a plan to me.”

As they crossed the county line, Rex kept his eyes locked on the road ahead. “Are they giving up?”

Angie turned to stare through the back window, then let out a string of curses. “No, still with us. And if they’re risking Bixby at this hour to catch us, that means they’re in a really bad mood.”

Rex gripped the steering wheel, trying not to scream with frustration. In all his detailed planning, it had never once occurred to him that the
real
Grayfoots would show up. “How did they know we were meeting?”

“No one followed me, Rex, I’m positive.”

“What about your phone?”

“They couldn’t have tapped it. That number I gave you was a disposable cell phone I bought last week at the Tulsa Mall. Never used it before you called, so they couldn’t have…” Her voice turned cold. “You didn’t call me from
your
house, did you?”

Rex didn’t answer for a few critical seconds, and by the time he found the right words, it was too late to lie.

“Was I not supposed to?” he finally managed.

She let out a groan.

“You mean, my phone is tapped?” he cried.

“Only for the last two years. Pinhead.”

Rex drove on, waiting for the burning sensation of a knife slipping between his ribs, but all he heard was Angie muttering beneath her breath. “Jesus. Maybe you really are just a bunch of kids.”

The pursuers drew closer, filling the old Ford with their headlights. They were easing up on either side now, like wolves shepherding wounded prey away from the herd, out to a nice, private killing ground. This abandoned stretch of the access road was probably just the sort of place they’d been waiting for. Rex’s plan had brought them to a perfect spot.

Angie pulled out a phone. “All right. I’m calling the police.”

“It won’t work out here,” Rex said softly. He and Dess had picked this route to make sure Angie couldn’t escape the blue time after the car ran out of gas. Since the new highway had been built, hardly anyone ever drove through Saddleback. There were no cell phone towers, no houses, no cops—just rattlesnakes, slither burrows, and plenty of places to bury a couple of bodies.

Rex checked his watch. If Dess’s calculations were on target, they’d be sputtering to a halt in about three minutes. He had to think of something soon or they were both dead.

But what could he do, trapped on a road with no turnoffs, no choices but to keep driving straight?

Suddenly Rex felt something deep inside himself laughing at his own paralysis. Why was he thinking like prey? Why was he letting his pursuers dictate the terms? Why not make
them
take some risks? He gritted his teeth and pulled the wheel sharply to the left. The Ford slid from the road and onto the sandy shoulder, where it swerved like a sidewinder for a few seconds. Then the tires gripped the hard-packed desert floor, and the car straightened, rattling like an old washing machine as it crashed through mounds of scrub grass and rumbled over prairie dog holes.

For a moment the pursuing headlights angled off into the distance behind them. But then the two Mercedes swerved from the road, turning onto the desert in pursuit.

“What are you
doing?
” Angie cried, her teeth snapping as the car shook.

“Out here there’s a chance one of them will get a flat.” “Isn’t there also a chance of
us
getting a flat?” Rex only nodded, deciding not to explain that one way or another, the Ford was about to stop moving. “Have you got a better idea?”

“My better idea was not using
a tapped phone
!

“You could have mentioned that in your note!”

“It was so obvious we were watching you! Jesus. How did you people ever take control of a whole town?”

“That wasn’t
us
who…” Rex’s words trailed off. Up ahead was a cluster of glistening humps, like a field of spiky basketballs glowing in the moonlight. He smiled at the sight. If all three cars were disabled, he and Angie might stand a chance of escaping on foot.

He aimed toward the humps, ignoring the Ford’s rattling complaints and building up as much speed as he could. Gas or no gas, tires or no tires—once Melissa’s car got going, it took a while to come to a stop.

“Rex? What is that ahead?”

“Big patch of rainbow cactus.”

“What the hell? Are you
trying
to get us killed?”

“No. But we’re about to run out of gas.”

“What?”

“Long story. This way at least we’ve got a chance.”

“Of
what?
A quick death?”

His answer was cut off by a sudden
bang
beneath the car, a sound like a watermelon hitting concrete at eighty miles an hour. More collisions rocked the Ford, Angie crying out as each cactus struck. The shock of the impacts shot up through the car seat, jolting Rex like a series of kicks in the butt.

Behind them a pair of headlights dropped back. One of the Mercedes had ground to a halt, with either a tire burst or an axle busted. As Rex watched in the shuddering rearview mirror, the car was overwhelmed by its own cloud of dust.

Only one to go.

Then, with a parting
bang,
the cactus patch fell behind them. Melissa’s Ford was wobbling, its right-front tire making a sound like a rubber flag in a strong wind. But the engine kept rumbling underneath Rex, and the desert still flashed past in front of their headlights.

“They’ll be getting nervous now,” Angie said, looking back.

“Nervous?”

“If they lose the other car, they’ll have no way to get out of the county in time. They’re Grayfoots, brought up so they’d rather die than be in Bixby at midnight.”

Rex blinked. After all his careful planning for tonight, would his insane, wildly improvised idea of barreling through a cactus patch be the one thing that actually worked? Inside him, the darkling half of his mind was quietly pleased.

“Rex, did you say something about running out of gas?”

“Well—” he started, but suddenly another explosion shook the car. The steering wheel jerked out of his hands, and the car began to swerve out of control across the desert floor, swinging into a bootlegger’s reverse, tipping so far to the right that Rex thought it was going to roll over. The horrible screeching of bare metal skimming across rocks and hard-packed sand filled his ears, and a cloud of dust rose up to swallow the world around them.

Somehow the Ford didn’t roll over, but when they finally skidded to a halt, it was listing to one side like a sinking ship. Rex was pretty sure that both right tires had been reduced to rubber confetti.

The engine died then with a cough, finally realizing that it had run out of gas.

Rex waited for a pair of headlights to lance through the dust swirling around them. The other Mercedes couldn’t be far behind.

The view gradually cleared, revealing a starry sky, the dark mountains in the distance—and a pair of red taillights receding into the desert.

“What the hell?” he said. “They totally
had
us.”

Angie took a while to catch her breath, her hands slowly releasing their grip on the upholstery. “It’s too close to midnight.”

Rex looked at his watch. “But they still had fifteen minutes. Plenty of time to kill us and get to the county line.”

“Yeah, but first they had to drive back around the cactus to pick up whoever was in the other car.”

“What? They’re too nice to just leave them out here?”

“Those were all Grayfoots.” She let out a snort. “And they’d never leave family behind.”

He looked at her. “Just you.”

Angie nodded slowly. “Just me.” Her dazed eyes took in the slowly clearing dust, the empty desert, and finally dropped to stare at her watch. “I guess I’m screwed. Your little mindcaster friend will be here soon, won’t she?”

The smell of terror from Angie had become almost overwhelming. Her hands were shaking now, as if she were even more afraid of a mindcaster entering her brain than of the Grayfoots catching her.

Rex let out a slow breath, willing his thudding heart to calm down. With Angie’s fear scent filling the car, a hunting frenzy threatened to take over his mind. But he needed to keep control, to keep talking to her.

“Let me be honest, all right?” he said through gritted teeth. “It was always my plan to trap you in Bixby for midnight. That’s why I only had so much gas.”

“So you
knew
the Grayfoots were going to show up? And you came anyway?” She whistled. “You’ve got guts.”

“Well, not exactly. Things didn’t quite go the way I planned.” He sighed. “But listen, Angie, have you really been telling me the truth about the past? The way the old midnighters—” Rex’s voice choked off as his nose suddenly caught the sharp smell of stainless steel. Angie’s knife flashed in her hand. “Hey, what the hell?”

“Listen, Rex, I know that in fifteen minutes you can do anything you want to me, make me drooling and stupid like your father, maybe turn me into your slave. But that doesn’t mean I can’t even the score.”

“Hold
up,
Angie! No one’s going to turn you into a vegetable!”

“Yeah, right.” She snorted. “So you lured me out here to steal my bank card password?”

“No, to make sure you were telling the truth!” The knife came closer, and his darkling mind writhed at the smell of steel. “We had to do this! If the world’s ending, we had to know for sure!”

Angie paused, her eyes narrowing. “What did you just say? If the
what’s
ending?”

“The world… or at least a great big chunk of it.” Rex spoke quickly, his eyes never leaving the knife. “We think the blue time is expanding far enough to swallow millions of people. They’ll be defenseless against your darkling pen pals.”

She shook her head. “That’s crap, Rex. Darklings can’t hurt normal humans.”

“Not usually. But the barrier between normal time and the secret hour is weakening. In certain spots daylighters can slip through. You know that girl on the news this week, the one who disappeared in Jenks? She walked into the blue time.”