Chapter 12 Helena
My legs pumped under me hard as I flew past the library, heading as fast as I could away from the curb that my renegade Bug, in its pursuit of me, had already lumbered up and over. I hurtled toward a barrier of bushes that, though they wouldn’t stop the car, might just slow it down.
“Help!” I shouted with as much volume as I could muster as I burst through the bushes, though it remained to be seen who could help me in this scenario.
One glance behind showed my car struggling to roar over the shrubs. I took the opportunity to fly into Third Street, into the path of a pickup that had to swerve to avoid hitting me.
“Oh God!” I shrieked, scampering to clear the road and climb onto the opposite sidewalk. Just as I shot through the line of darkened cars parked at meters, the vehicles revved to life, their lights springing on.
“Not happening!” I squealed as I diverted course again, shooting straight back across the street, racing away from the row of driverless cars that, one after the other, peeled out of their slots to barrel after me just as my Bug had done.
By some miracle I managed to make it back to the library’s side of the street without becoming roadkill, though my Beetle had since vanished from its spot near the bushes.
I bolted down the sidewalk, my flats crunching the crispy leaves that scuttled after me. Pushed by the wind that seemed to be trying to hurry me along, I traded my attention between my phone and the road.
Traffic now split into two raging streams, one consisting of drivers all swerving to avoid the chaos and another consisting of sentient cars bent on flattening me.
“Heeelp!” I screeched again, fumbling to thumb the emergency button on my cell.
Then, as I leaped to avoid being bucked by the grille of the driverless Buick that bumped onto the curb, I dropped my phone, its screen cracking on the pavement.
I abandoned the device, taking a hard right down the alleyway behind the library.
The narrow road let out onto Second Street, which ran parallel to Third. Except something worse than either my Bug or another car blocked the path to the other side.
Somehow, the library’s gargantuan children’s bookmobile—the one with the Very Hungry Caterpillar plastered across its side—had made its way into the alley.
The flat, dark face of the enormous and rumbling bus reflected the streetlights in a way that gave the illusion of bright glowing eyes. Its engine revved and roared, and I shrank under its scrutiny, vision burned and blurred by its high beams.
I hesitated, half tempted to charge the thing just to see if I could swing my way into the driver’s seat, action-movie style.
My odds of infiltrating its prone-to-sticking folding door before the beast could mow me down, though, weren’t good, so I turned to again run.
But only just in time for my Beetle to appear at the far end of the alley.
“Oh, shut the front cover,” I whispered. Though maybe now was as good a time as any to start actually cursing.
With a squeal of tires, the growling bus shot forward. I screamed and charged toward my Bug even as it sped straight toward me, because what other choice did I have?
None. At least not until a tall, hooded, and black-clad figure gripping a scythe materialized before me, his dark form unfurling from plumes of smoke.
With a cry of relief, I ran at him as hard as I could—harder than I’d ever run toward anything in my life.
He stood there—reaching for me with his free arm even while my Volkswagen closed in on him from behind, its headlights outlining his phantasmal shape, their white glare all but blurring that skeleton’s hand from sight.
But he didn’t seem to care that he’d found himself in the middle of a spectral game of chicken.
He wasn’t looking. He was just waiting.
For me.
Reaching him at last, I launched myself at him, throwing both arms around his shoulders, clutching him tight, my crushing embrace finding only bones to hold, my rib cage smashed against his.
That arm closed in around me, gripping me tight in return, clamping me to him before we shot up like a rocket. His robed form carried us above the dueling vehicles and out of harm’s way an instant before they collided.
An earsplitting roar of crunching metal and shattering glass ripped through the night. My Bug’s horn blared as the bookmobile shoved the car down the alley.
We remained in the air, levitating just below the tops of the surrounding buildings where we weren’t likely to be seen.
Unable to help myself as the wind battered us from every side, I buried my face against his shoulder, fingers curling into the coarse fabric of those dark robes, gripping hard.
And then I sobbed my desperate words into his frame.
“I was starting to think… you weren’t going to come this time.”