The Meridians(73)

"I am the moon," she whispered.

"Nice to meet you, Miss Moon," he answered back. "Could you let Lynette know I called?"

He didn't mean to be sarcastic, and certainly didn't want to be nasty to Lynette. After all, she had just saved his life, and at great risk to her own safety. But he needed her present, not locked away in a fear-induced coma of some kind.

He reached into the back seat with one hand, fumbling around until he touched Lynette's own hand. He clutched at it. "Lynette," he said again. "Honey, come back to us, we need you." She didn't speak, but after a moment, he felt her hand come alive in his, holding it back in a tight grip. He felt like their joined hands were a source of sudden heat in the cool of this dark night, warming him from the inside out, giving him a sense of hope for the first time since Mr. Gray had appeared in the street outside the alley.

"Still the moon?" he asked with a trace of a smile in his voice.

There was a long moment of silence, and then, thank God, Lynette spoke again. "Not the moon. Just a very scared woman."

"I can work with that," he said.

Then the car jogged suddenly forward. There was a shriek of twisted metal, and Lynette screamed at the same instant that Scott let go of her hand and grabbed onto the steering wheel, which was jumping back and forth in his hands like it had a mind of its own.

There was another crash of metal on metal, and Scott heard something shear off the car. He had barely a moment to spare, still struggling to keep the car on the road, but he managed to look back over his shoulder for a split second.

A split second was all he needed.

It was Mr. Gray. The old man was following them in Scott's own car, using the vehicle to ram into them from behind. The good news was that Scott's car was hardly a powerful vehicle, and under normal circumstances he would not have worried too much about its ability to harm them. The bad news was that Lynette's car was hardly a tank, either...and these were nothing resembling normal circumstances.

Slam, the car jogged forward and then shimmied to the side as the gray man gunned his engine and slammed into them again. Again Scott heard something tear in the back of the car, and suspected that they had just lost their rear bumper. It was nothing critical, but it meant that there were now fewer inches of protective metal between the occupants of this car and the madman driving the one behind them.

Scott tried to remember his combat driving training from his time in the LAPD, but he knew that he was out of practice and underprepared. Worse, he suspected that the assassin's own skill set did encompass using a moving vehicle as a weapon, thus giving the advantage firmly to their pursuer.

Lynette was whimpering behind him. He couldn't blame her. He had been terrified enough when Mr. Gray got the drop on him, only his anger at the loss of his family giving him the strength to stand up to the man. But Lynette, he knew, harbored no such resentment - at either Mr. Gray or the universe that had spawned him. Her heart was uncluttered by such ugly emotions, so she must have felt the fear in a much more raw, visceral way when she crept into the alley to confront the killer and save Scott's life.

"Hey," he said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror again. It was hardly the time to do this, with a trained assassin in a car directly behind them, out for blood and willing to kill, but he needed Lynette to pull herself together. For all their sakes. He didn't know if he could do what needed to be done on his own.

Slam, and the car again shuddered as Mr. Gray attacked from the confines of Scott's car. Lynette's own car started to shimmy and shake, as though something in the frame had been bent with that last hit, and Scott knew that they wouldn't have long before they lost control of the vehicle and were again at Mr. Gray's mercy.

"Lynette, snap out of it," he said. She continued sobbing. "Please, honey, please snap out of it."

No dice. The woman had apparently used up everything she had in the nightmare trip from her house to the bowels of the alley that Mr. Gray had somehow called forth from the depths of Scott's memories.

"Shit," he said. He looked at Kevin, who was still looking out the side window complacently, as though they were out for a Sunday drive instead of being pursued by a maniac with otherworldly powers and a will to destroy them. "Don't suppose you could help me out here, bud," he said, but it was mostly to have some noise to compete with the distressing sound of Lynette's whimpering in the backseat.

To his surprise, however, Kevin moved. He began unbuckling his seat belt.

"Hey, son, don't -" began Scott, but at that instant Mr. Gray smashed into the car again, and Scott felt his teeth click together hard as he was jarred and bounced. He looked at the speedometer. They were going ninety eight miles per hour, and the tachometer was deep in the red. There was no way they could go any faster than they were going.

And Kevin was still unbuckling his seat belt. Scott felt a new thrill of fear. At this speed, some kind of accident was not just a possibility, it was almost inevitable. Most likely was that a tire would blow - he doubted that Lynette had purchased racing tires for her economy car, so he knew that the friction caused by the speed they were moving at was already probably causing the tires to partially melt, growing softer and softer and exposing the cables that were the tires' last line of defense before they gave way and popped. And a tire popping at this speed would be tantamount to instant death for all of them, rolling the car over and over and leaving nothing left but a much-reduced shell of a car with so many spots of jelly inside where people once had been.