AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Twenty-Four
BROOKE
“Left left left leftLEFT!”
I jerked the wheel as hard as I dared, while stomping the clutch and downshifting through two gears. The vehicle lurched as its shocks took the brunt of the sudden adjustment. Hanging dangerously through the roll-cage, Devin yanked his arm back inside with a grin.
“Got it!”
He held his prize clenched tightly in one big fist: a bright yellow flag, blowing in the wind. I smiled and turned my attention back to the road, or rather the trail I was currently taking. I shifted back into third, sand sputtering out behind us as the dune buggy shuddered.
“Take the red trail at the next crossroads!” Devin shouted.
My heart skipped a beat as I swallowed hard and adjusted my goggles.
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
The buggy trails criss-crossed again, marked by three different colors of LED lights. Blue marked the easier trails, and the white trails we’d been sticking to were intermediate. The red trail was supposedly the hardest, filled with softer sand and bigger hills that spun through the desert in steep rises and breathtaking dives.
We could take whichever trails we wanted, and we could switch at any crossroads. But the flags we grabbed along the way were worth more on the harder concourse.
“How many points do we have?” I screamed back, skidding hard to stay in bounds.
“No clue.”
“What?”
“I SAID NO CL—”
Devin’s sentence died with a choke as I crested the next rise. The roads crossed over each other again, and this time I slid neatly into the red-bordered track.
“You sure you don’t wantmeto drive?” Devin asked, a bit nervously.
“After what you did in Milan last year?” I laughed.
“Look, those streets are narrow,” he grunted defensively. “Reallynarrow.”
“You got stuck between two walls.”
It was hilarious — one of the funniest episodes of our entire season. At the time, the girls and I had been in a different part of the city, fighting our way through a different challenge. But what happened between Devin and that car and that tiny, narrow road…
“I didn’t—”
“Stuck between twowalls, Devin!” I laughed manically, piling it on. “Just like in the first Austin Powers movie!”
The teasing was merciless, but my God, it felt good! Or maybe it was the pure exhilaration of the ride. The cold night air blasted my hair back into my face as I gripped the wheel.
“The network made it look worse than it was,” Devin was saying miserably. “They shot the whole thing from weird, obscure angles. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it—”
“FLAG!”
Devin jumped up like a shot, as I steered the buggy up alongside the next dangling flag. He snatched at the very last moment, then stuffed it in the bag at his hip.
“Shit,” he swore. “Almost missed that one.”
“Should I slow down?”
