Oh, wow. He said my name. With thatvoice.
Andhe had a potty mouth.
The way I felt about that was… interesting.
“Um,” I said, glancing back down at his bone hand, wringing the strap of my purse with both of my own while I squished my knees together, “the speedometer goes up to a hundred?”
“Fuck.”
I frowned. “We… can’t outrun it?”
It did seem odd to me that, so far, he’d avoided weaving in and out of traffic, choosing instead to take turns and blow through lights, switching lanes only when the bus had enough room to do so, too. He wasn’t trying to lose this thing. Instead, he seemed to just want to stay ahead of it.
“I’m not worried about us,” he said. “If I don’t get it off the side streets, that motherfucker is going to kill everyone, and right now, I’ve got enough to do.”
He swerved again, right onto a curving on-ramp, and I yelped, the centrifugal force sending me leaning his way, far enough that I again caught a whiff of that oaken, earthy, yet otherworldly scent.
The bookmobile thundered after us, its massive dark, blank, and driverless face somehow seeming to scowl. Still, even as we shot onto the expressway, seamlessly merging with traffic, the behemoth gained on us—its lumbering mass integrating with the flow of carslessseamlessly.
Horns again blared as unsuspecting drivers swerved to make way.
“How is this better?” I asked as he shifted us into a higher gear, his foot slamming the gas. As we rocketed forward, I blasted back in my seat, the vibrating sides of which I clenched, fingernails digging in.
“I’m open to constructive criticism,” he snarled between his teeth as we revved on, bordering on entering hyperspace.
“Therewasan overpass back on Wimberly it can’t fit under.”
“Now you tell me!”
“Well… do you have anything like… a rocket launcher?”
“I’m not Batman,” he snapped.
“Therearesome similarities,” I observed.
He aimed a skeletal thumb toward the back window. “Isn’t that thing for the kids?”
“The adminsreallyneed to purchase a new one,” I said, speaking loudly to be heard over the ripping engine as we veered into the fast lane, “but they’re not listening. Even on its best behavior, that thing is a death trap. Also, it’s atotalbeater and older than the pyramids.” I pried my hands up from the seat to start ticking off shaking fingers. “No heat, no air, and I took the stairs off last summer when I made too sharp a turn. Believe it or not,Iwas the one who got written up for that even though it was Trevor who forgot to fold them in.”
“Your point?” he demanded as the bus’s lights blazed once more into being behind us, washing all in its eye-searing white light.
“Point is, at this stage, that monsterneedsto be put down.”
“What?”
I huffed a sigh.
“They keep telling me a new bus isn’t in the budget, but then they go and buy a bunch of telescopes for the new branch out in the ritzy east end, so I know it’s a lie. The kids deserve so much better, and I’m just saying that if you torched that one, I bet you anything wewouldget a new one in time for summer reading. I wouldn’t be sad, either. Or mad. If… you had a rocket launcher. But you don’t. So, the subject is moot.”
He got quiet and, for a long moment, just roared on down the interstate, like I hadn’t said anything helpful at all. And maybe I hadn’t since he wasn’t, like he’d said, Batman.
“It does have an emergency break,” I offered.
“Where?”
“Um. There’s a handbrake lever between the driver’s and front passenger seats—mounted on the floor. You just pull up on it. But engaging it would require someone to—”
He grabbed my left hand in his skeletal grip, then positioned it on the steering wheel.
