The Shack: An Unstoppable Man

She wasn't pushing it though, some part of her at least seemed to sense that she wasn't quite ready. Besides, she was in a pretty good mood.

The Learning Center had a way of doing that to her. It had taken a long time, but she had really warmed to the staff, who managed to be both helpful, and probably more importantly, not condescending. They'd been really impressed with her bloody little diorama, which had really thrilled her.

Or maybe it was that cheap pizza and the ice cream she got to eat for lunch.

Probably the pizza.

Something in the rear-view mirror caught my attention. The something was moving up, and moving up fast.

I studied the rapidly growing red dot for a moment, then glanced at the speedometer. Over 90 miles per hour, and the red car was gaining on us like we were parked.

"We have a problem."

Delaney shifted her eyes to look into her mirror instantly. "Holy shit. How fast are they going?"

"Way faster than we can."

I hit the first turn to the pass, vaguely hoping they'd go on by.

They didn't; I caught the predatory outline of a red late-model widebody Charger as it turned to follow us.

Delaney's voice was cold and measured as she studied the mirrors. "All windows just went down. I'm pretty sure I can see rifle barrels out of both rear windows."

Her eyesight was better than mine, and she didn't have to split her attention to keep us on the road.

I glanced into the mirror for a moment. "Damnit. Air scoop is wider than standard. It's a Hellcat engine."

Delaney made a sour face. "Shit. I was hoping I was wrong about that."

"Yeah." Even with the Coyote 5.0 engine I'd put in her, Sally was way out of her league. I started to push her through the turns, and the Charger followed smoothly.

Two faint shots sounded from the Charger; not hits, but I had a feeling they were way too damn close given the speed and the turns.

There was no way Sally could outrun the Charger. That Hellcat engine was insanely powerful, and the fucking driver clearly had his head in the game. He was obviously a pro. I was the better driver, and with all her suspension upgrades, Sally was flat-out better on the curves, so I was gaining on the turns. I knew the road better too, but I was losing too much ground every goddamn time we hit a straightaway.

Worse yet, hitting a moving car from a moving car is damn hard, but the gunman hanging out the window knew what the hell he was doing. Sooner or later, he would figure out that I had run-flat tires on Sally and switch to riddling us instead. Delaney sat in near-stony silence, looking at her mirrors to track where they were.

"We can't lose them, can we?"

"Not a fucking chance."

We were just about out of the turns, and then we'd be running the long gravel straightaway that led to the narrow bridge over Eagle River valley. I checked the 1911 under the dash, thumbing the safety off. It was a slim chance, but if I let them disable the car, we'd have no chance at all. Four guys, apparently pros, at least two that had long guns against a single .45 and whatever rocks Delaney could scoop up wasn't likely to be even remotely survivable on our end.

Delaney saw me ready the .45 and narrowed her eyes. "You're about to do something crazy, aren't you?"

"Oh yeah." I nodded and tried to push ahead further as we hit the last series of hairpin turns, dropping down to the valley. I needed some space to do this, and I had to get it in the turns where I still had the advantage. "Hang on, sugar. This is going to be really stupid."

I hit the flats with Sally floored, but I dumped speed and downshifted as we closed with the narrow bridge, then smashed the clutch and yanked the handbrake. I gave the wheel a twitch to break traction with the road, then pulled hard left. Sally spun until she was ass-end toward the bridge. I could hear the blast of the Hellcat engine as the Charger howled out of the turns off the mountain. Just as I dropped the handbrake and jammed Sally into reverse. Delaney snarled, "Fuck!" and laid her seat all the way back. She was making herself less of a target for the gunman in the rapidly approaching monster. I almost smiled at that. We were probably both about to get killed, but damn if I wasn't proud as hell of her for staying frosty.

I needed more fucking hands. I snatched up the 1911 and switched it to my left hand, juggling the steering wheel.

Off-hand shooting sucks, but it was better than nothing. I levelled the gun out the window and placed the shots as accurately as I could. The gunman pulled himself tight against the car when he saw what I was doing, but he was still holding it together and began to adjust his aim. A round snapped through the middle of our windshield.

I pushed the gas to the floor, accelerating as fast as possible in reverse to lessen the impact of the crash when they caught up. He'd put on too much speed, and wouldn't be able to stop in time. If they rammed us, it'd probably disable both cars and maybe, just maybe, the wrecks would block the bridge and I could hold them long enough for Delaney to get into the tree line on the other side of the river. It sucked, but...

Delaney suddenly sat up, twisting the release on her harness and dragging something across her lap. I didn't have a hand free to push her back down, and for a bizarre moment, I thought she was trying to climb out the window. A fraction of a second later, she was kneeling on the seat and leaning out the window, slamming an AUG down on top of the mirror and bracing the barrel grip against the mirror to stabilize the gun. The AUG's insanely loud chatter overwhelmed the roar of both engines for a second. The first two armor-piercing rounds hit a little low, into the engine block, but as the Charger closed to within less than a half dozen yards, the rest of the magazine seemed to go right through the lower half of the windshield, mostly through the driver's side.

I'm sure there were a few misses in the storm of armor-piecing rounds. There had to have been. But the driver must have been hit more than a few times, and probably everyone in the car had; the Charger veered out of control, jumped off the road, shot past us and flew almost gracefully off the edge of the cliff. It rather ungracefully slammed into the rock on the other side before dropping the seventy-five feet down into the deep river.

I let Sally slow to a stop as we reached the other end of the bridge.

Delaney melted back into her seat; the empty AUG pointing straight up. She stared blankly ahead, fighting to catch her breath. "Fu...fuck 'em if they can't take a joke...right?" There was just a little bit of kid in her voice, a pleading, almost desperate sound.

I put my arm over her shoulders as best I could with the console between us. "Fuck 'em."

Delaney suddenly yanked free and tore at her collar. "Fuckfuckfuckfuck."

I looked frantically for blood just as she pulled her hand out of her collar and threw a shell casing down on the floorboard. "Fuck. That burned."

She yanked her collar down, and I could see the hot brass burn on her neck.

We sat there for a long moment. "You learn that from video games?"

She nodded shakily. "And...you know, summer camp. Kurt said that since all us girls are small, we should stabilize long guns against something whenever we can. Especially on full auto."

"Good advice. Obviously." I really, really needed to talk to Kurt and find out just what the fuck was going on in Texas. I saw movement at the other end of the valley.

Delaney squinted. "Is that...?"

"Yeah. Another Charger."

No way that was a coincidence. Delaney leaned back and started feeling around the floorboard while I dropped the magazine from the 1911 and slammed another home. She sat up, holding up another mag for the AUG and fumbled to replace the empty.

Just as I heard the decisive click of the AUG magazine locking in, the distant driver calmly and slowly turned the flat black car around and headed back up the hairpins.

"Fuck. There are more of these assholes?"

I nodded. "Looks like it. But there aren't as many as there were a few minutes ago."

Delaney suddenly trembled, shoved her door open and leaned out, hurling her breakfast onto the shoulder of the road.

She sat bent over, shaking, for a couple minutes, then sat up, wiped her mouth with her bandana, closed the door and stared blankly out the windshield. "I think I need a soda."

"And maybe a hot dog?" We needed to check on Sheree and make sure she knew what happened.

She brightened, although it was obviously forced. "Hot dogs." We both knew what we were doing, steadying ourselves and getting our nerves back to as close to normal as we could.

"Sure, we can pick some up and see Sheree. Let's put Sally up and get the rollback first, though, okay?"

She looked up at the bullet holes in the windshield and nodded. "Yeah. I have no idea how we would explain this shit to the sheriff."

"How the fuck can we explain it when we haven't got a clue what is going on."

I turned Sally back around, and Delaney pulled her seat upright, staring forward unblinking, the AUG across her lap.

I glanced over at her. "Let's go ahead and put that thing back out of sight, okay? We don't want to give any state troopers we pass a stroke. Just put it where you can reach it if you have to."

She finally blinked. "Oh. Yeah." She pushed it back onto the floorboard behind me, then covered it back up with her book bag. "I know I shouldn't have taken it out of the hide, but...I just...I don't know...I just woke up with a really bad feeling this morning. I didn't want you to think I was...freaking out for no reason."

I thought about it for a moment. "Yeah, well. Next time, let me know you put an illegal full-auto weapon in the car I'm driving. But I'm damn glad you brought it."

She nodded a bit manically. "Me too..." Her face fell. "Ugh. We're gonna have to put it in the car crusher, aren't we?"

"Yep. And my .45. Just in case. If anyone happens to pull some dead bodies out of the river and finds one of our bullets, we don't need to have the matching weapon lying around."

She looked back at the AUG. "Thirty thousand dollars, right?"

I nodded.

"Shit. I really like it too."

"What do you think bail would run on a homicide charge? Way over thirty grand. It did the job. It's a tool. It did what you needed it to do. Besides, we have a few more." I paused. "Maybe, with the way things are going, we need to put good hides on the floor behind the seats, and maybe in the rollback and the wrecker. Maybe we'll keep a couple legal folding-stock long guns of some kind in the hides. You know, just in case."

Delaney looked at me suspiciously, then gave a sinister smile. "You're going to let 'Little Miss Mayhem' play with guns?"

"Jesus, not if you keep smiling like that. That's just fucking creepy." I snorted.

*****

"Do you think it has something to do with the drug pushers?" Sheree kept one eye on the front door to the Quickmart as we ate.

"I dunno. Feels wrong. Those cars are sixty-five thousand or more apiece. I suspect that's more than these low-level gangs ever move. And these guys were real pros. Real good."

Sheree gave Delaney a wicked smile. "Just not good enough, huh, baby?"

Whatever Sheree thought about it, she'd long ago decided that anything that had to be done to protect Delaney was acceptable. Far beyond that, she was making it clear to Delaney that she'd done the right thing.

Delaney finished the last of her third hot dog. She'd replaced her breakfast and then some. Her nerves had evened out. "Nope. Not near..." She stopped staring at the table. "I think, maybe, they were older too."

Sheree looked at me. "Well?"

I shook my head. "I don't know. I was too busy trying to drive and shoot to get a good look. But, yeah, maybe."

Delaney stared at her plate. "I couldn't see the driver or the others on your side, but the guy shooting on my side...he was like, you know, your age."

I chuckled. "Ancient."

Delaney nodded sagely.

*****

Two days later, I watched Delaney wince as the compactor bit down on the rusted out hulk. "This sucks."

"Better than prison, right?"

She nodded, still watching the compacter reduce the last car to a block. We'd carefully ground out the serial numbers and disassembled the .45 and the AUG, scattering the metal parts into five separate cars before crushing them. There was no point in being careless, even if I was close to a hundred percent sure nobody was likely to look. I'd already put a new .45 in the rollback.

She sighed. "I should have told you about the AUG. I can't even figure out why I did it or what I was thinking."

"Your instinct was right, even if you couldn't explain it. Just remember to tell me next time, okay?" I glanced over at her.

Delaney looked up at me. "How could I do that? Know something without knowing it?"

"You knew something was wrong, you saw or heard something, or maybe you just put things together in the back of your brain without knowing it. You've got good instincts; trust them. If it looks like an ambush or feels like a trap, go with your gut."

I suspected that I knew exactly what was going on. Delaney was young, and if not "book smart," she was clever and adaptable. So many people had tried to kill Delaney that she'd simply changed to her "new normal." She'd been hunted enough that the wariness had settled into a background rhythm, a survival mechanism that simply ran all the time, watching everything. It wasn't perfect, couldn't ever be perfect, but watchfulness wasn't something she did any longer.

It was something she was.

She had the same reflexes as an animal that had been hunted and trapped but managed to get away. Delaney would constantly be looking for hunters, always shying away from traps.

We watched the process finish, and the giant maw of the crusher slowly opened up and locked. Delaney suddenly looked up at me. "That reminds me, I'm hungry."

"You're always hungry. We just had breakfast."

"That was hours ago."

I looked at my watch. "It was an hour and fifteen minutes ago."

She leaned over and looked at my watch. "Your watch has to be broken."

"We'll do the pickups first, then feed you before you starve to death."

Delaney nodded earnestly. "I could, you know."

"I'll try to make sure you survive; I've had enough excitement lately."

*****

Napalm Burrito Overdrive

*****

"Tacos."

I looked over at Delaney. "Do you ever choose anything else?"

"Well, we could go get Thai food."

"Not without Sheree. She'd never forgive us. Besides, we're practically in the Taco Grande parking lot already."

Delaney looked thoughtful. "Maybe we could all run up to get some Thai food on Sheree's birthday. We haven't done that in months." She looked down. "She loves Thai food."

"You ready for her birthday?"

Delaney gave an uncharacteristically gentle smile. "Yeah. I got everything all ready."

She'd refused to tell me just what she was planning, but she'd cleared out the "swear jars" a few weeks earlier. I'd settled on buying Sheree a nice purse, since she'd mentioned that the lining in hers was starting to tear. I had no idea what kind or how to pick one, so I just gave Tiffany cash and asked her to find one that Sheree would really like. She was thrilled to help and started talking a blue streak about it, finally telling me she needed to pick up two purses and two wallets so that Sheree would have the right purses. Apparently, according to Tiffany, she'd need one for every day and another one for going out. With matching wallets. I'd just given Tiffany more money; this purse thing was a whole language I didn't speak.

"I'm thinking of getting an El Diablo combo." Delaney stretched and patted what little belly she had. Her stomach rumbled in either hunger or protest at the thought of the oversized half-jalapeno, half-beef burrito with the obligatory crunchy taco.

"Extra Diablo?"

She grinned. "Do they make 'em any other way?"

"That sounds good. May do that myself."

I pulled into the Taco Grande lot and parked the rollback behind the store so it wouldn't block out ten economy car parking places. We were just late enough that the lunch rush had died off, but I wanted to be considerate. Or at least not get my tires slashed.

Delaney clomped happily up the walk toward the side door.

The kid at the register made Mooky look like a damn brain surgeon. It took four tries to get the order straight. Mooky gave a half-wave from where he was working in the back. He cast a meaningful; glance toward a corner of the dining area where I could see the sheriff sitting at a table with one of his deputies; he lifted his soda in recognition but kept eating, - probably chuckling over the cashier's unintentional comedy routine. Of course, he wasn't on the wrong end of it. The deputy must have been new, and I didn't recognize him at all.

As we headed out the door towards the rollback, Delaney was ahead of me, looking in the bag. "I got eight packets of Napalm sauce. That should be enough, right?"

"I think so."

She damn near ran over Billy as he was coming up to the door. He blinked and grinned at us. "Hey, Doc. Delaney. Y'all gettin' some grub?"

Delaney gave a wolfish smile. "El Diablo combos."

He laughed. "That's the good stuff right there. Get yerself a coupla packets a' that Napalm..."

"Hey, Billy!" A dark-haired guy called from the parking lot. "Get me a..."

Billy's face shifted; he suddenly looking older and grimly unhappy. "Goddammit, Marco." He said it softly, almost sadly.

I blinked as I looked at the guy in the parking lot. I didn't recognize him. But I did recognize the car - a flat-black wide-body Charger.

But it was too damn late. Billy snatched Delaney with lightning speed and pulled her into a chokehold, backing toward the parking lot rapidly. Her soda and the bag fell under her feet. "Stay back, Doc. I'll break her neck. Swear to God."

Without looking back, he yelled. "Fire it up, Marco. We gotta go! Now!"

I tossed my soda into the bushes by the door and followed, keeping far enough back not to pressure him.

We were almost halfway to the Charger, moving through the parked cars slowly. Delaney was hanging limp, hands dangling.

"Didn't want it to be this way, Doc, but it was gonna have'ta happen one way or the other."

"Look, Billy..."

Delaney suddenly twisted, tucking her chin into his elbow and digging it in, making sure she could breathe. She brought her heavy work boot up and raked it down his shin before slamming it onto the top of his foot with every ounce of strength she had - a classic rear choke-hold counter.

"Shit!" Billy started to react, but it was too late; mostly because Delaney's left hand came out of her cargo pocket with the Stun gun and slammed it into his thigh with a nasty crackle.

"FUCK!" Billy fell backwards as his leg gave out, and Delaney tore loose, bolting toward me, reaching out. I caught her hand and spun to sling her rolling under a pickup truck. "Go! Go! Go!"

I turned back to Billy. He was scrambling towards the Charger, already shaking off the Stun gun. "Marco. Cover me!"

The driver spun back out of his seat and started to level a remarkably familiar large revolver at me.

I dropped, but there was no chance to flatten myself completely to the ground before several cracking gunshots slammed out in rapid succession.

I saw Marco spin and fall to the ground, the revolver flying out of his hand. The sheriff was moving out through the other door of Taco Grande in a tactical walk, still tracking the gunman with his own gun. His deputy was coming out behind him, ready to back him up.

Billy took two bounding steps and dove easily over the hood of a compact, coming up at the rear of the Charger, snatching up the revolver smoothly.