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"Get in!" she yelled. Monica slid inside and banged the door shut, and Claire hit the gas as something impacted loudly against the back of the car--a brick, maybe. A hail of smaller stones hit a second later. Claire swerved wildly again, then straightened the wheel and got the car moving more smoothly. Her heart pounded hard, and her hands felt sweaty on the steering wheel. "You all right?"
Monica was panting, and she threw Claire a filthy look. "No, of course I'm not all right!" she snapped, and tried to fix her hair with trembling hands. "Unbelievable. What a stupid question. I guess I shouldn't expect much more from someone like you, though--"
Claire stopped the car and stared at her.
Monica shut up.
"Here's how this is going to go," Claire said. "You're going to act like an actual human being for a change, or else you're on your own. Clear?"
Monica glanced behind them. "They're coming!"
"Yes, they are. So, are we clear?"
"Okay, okay, yes! Fine, whatever!" Monica cast a clearly terrified look at the approaching mob. More stones peppered the paint job, and one hit the back glass with enough force to make Claire wince. "Get me out of here! Please!"
"Hold on, I'm not a very good driver."
That was kind of an understatement. Eve's car was huge and heavy and had a mind of its own, and Claire hadn't taken the time to readjust the bench seat to make it possible for her to reach the pedals easily. The only good thing about her driving, as they pulled away from the mob and the falling bricks, was that it was approximately straight, and pretty fast.
She scraped the curb only twice.
Once the fittest of their pursuers had fallen behind, obviously discouraged, Claire finally remembered to breathe, and pulled the car around the next right turn. This section of town seemed deserted, but then, so had the other street, before Monica and her fan club had shown up. The big, imposing hulk of the tire plant glided by on the passenger side--it seemed like miles of featureless brick and blank windows.
Claire braked the car on the other side of the street, in front of a deserted, rusting warehouse complex. "Come on," she said.
"What?" Monica watched her get out of the car and take the keys with uncomprehending shock. "Where are you going? We have to get out of here! They were going to kill me!"
"They probably still are," Claire said. "So you should probably get out of the car now, unless you want to wait around for them."
Monica said something Claire pretended not to hear--it wasn't exactly complimentary--and limped her way out of the passenger side. Claire locked the car. She hoped it wouldn't get banged up, but that mob had looked pretty excitable, and just the fact that Monica had been in it might be enough to ensure its destruction.
With any luck, though, they'd assume the girls had run into the warehouse complex, which was what Claire wanted.
Claire led them in the opposite direction, to the fence around German's Tire. There was a split in the wire by one of the posts, an ancient curling gap half hidden by a tangle of tumbleweeds. She pushed through and held the steel aside for Monica. "Coming?" she asked when Monica hesitated. "Because, you know what? Don't really care all that much. Just so you know."
Monica came through without any comment. The fence snapped back into place. Unless someone was looking for an entrance, it ought to do.
The plant threw a large, black shadow on the weedchoked parking lot. There were a few rustedout trucks still parked here and there; Claire used them for cover from the street as they approached the main building, though she didn't think the mob was close enough to really spot them at this point. Monica seemed to get the point without much in the way of instruction; Claire supposed that running for her life had humbled her a little. Maybe.
"Wait," Monica said, as Claire prepared to bolt for a brokenout bottomfloor window into the tire plant. "What are you doing?"
"Looking for my friends," she said. "They're inside."
"Well, I'm not going in there," Monica declared, and tried to look haughty. It would have been more effective if she hadn't been so frazzled and sweaty. "I was on my way to City Hall, but those losers got in my way. They slashed my tires. I need to get to my parents."' She said it as though she expected Claire to salute and hop like a toad.
Claire raised her eyebrows. "Better start walking, I guess. It's kind of a long way."
"But--but--"
Claire didn't wait for the sputtering to die; she turned and ran for the building. The window opened into total darkness, as far as she could tell, but at least it was accessible. She pulled herself up on the sash and started to swing her legs inside.
"Wait!" Monica dashed across to join her. "You can't leave me here alone! You saw those jerks out there!"
"Absolutely."
"Oh, you're just loving this, aren't you?"
"Kinda." Claire hopped down inside the building, and her shoes slapped bare concrete floor. It was bare except for a layer of dirt, anyway--undisturbed for as far as the light penetrated, which wasn't very far. "Coming?"
Monica stared through the window at her, just boiling with fury; Claire smiled at her and started to walk into the dark.
Monica, cursing, climbed inside.
"I'm not a bad person," Monica was saying--whining, actually. Claire wished she could find a twobyfour to whack her with, but the tire plant, although full of wreckage and trash, didn't seem to be big on wooden planks. Some nice pipes, though. She might use one of those.
Except she really didn't want to hit anybody, deep down. Claire supposed that was a character flaw, or something.
"Yes, you really are a bad person," she told Monica, and ducked underneath a lowhanging loop of wire that looked horrormovie ready, the sort of thing that dropped around your neck and hauled you up to be dispatched by the psychokiller villain. Speaking of which, this whole place was decorated in Early PsychoKiller Villain, from the vast soaring darkness overhead to the lumpy, skeletal shapes of rusting equipment and abandoned junk. The spray painting--decades of it, in layered styles from Early Tagger to cuttingedge gang sign--gleamed in the random shafts of light like blood. Some particularly unpleasant spraypaint artist had done an enormous, terrifying clown face, with windows for the eyes and a giant, open doorway for a mouth. Yeah, really not going in there, Claire thought. Although the way these things went, she probably would have to.
"Why do you say that?"
"Say what?" Claire asked absently. She was listening for any sound of movement, but this place was enormous and confusing--just as Hannah had warned.
