11:01AM. WBGT:101

Up ahead there was nothing to offer any salvation, not even the dubious hope of a passing police vehicle. They were alone on the road with these maniacs, who came hauling up and bumped her fender again, pushing the car this time to try and drive them into the verge. Mini screamed again and Felice cursed, dragging at the wheel to try and control the sway and jerk of the car. Something grated and groaned, there was a huge screeching sound and the car behind them fell back again, sparks spraying from the road beside it for a moment before something fell away. Felice’s car swerved and rocked and she took her attention back to the road, pulling the car steady and hitting the accelerator again.

“Fuck this!” Aaron grunted from behind her, and out of the corner of her eye in the mirror she saw movement as he undid his seatbelt and reached for the long black case he had put on the back seat. Beyond that the car was falling back a little, now turning into the second lane of the highway. She guessed they were about to try and pass her and force her off the road so in a moment of mad recklessness she turned as well, throwing her smaller car into that lane just as they switched. Glancing at the mirror she saw the car swerve again, trying to get back into the first lane, and followed it with her own turn, a little too sharp so that she had to jerk the wheel back as her car flung itself towards the verge. Behind her Aaron cursed, she heard snapping sounds and clicks before Mini’s scream of shock covered them. At the last moment Felice pulled the car back into the lane, almost fishtailing and throwing a cloud of dust up behind them as one of her wheels strayed onto the verge. She did not dare look at either the speedometer or the fuel gauge, it was all too terrifying. She just had to focus on staying ahead of these men.

Then the car exploded with sound, three huge banging roars followed by the sound of breaking glass and clattering of metal. Mini screamed again and the cabin filled with a strange, smokey smell. Felice looked back in shock through the rear view mirror at the sight of Aaron, his back turned to them, resting an assault rifle on the rear dash. Three spiderweb patterns of cracks in the rear window showed where he had fired the gun through the window. Mini screamed again and Felice yelled, “Aaron! What the fuck?!” but her and Mini’s voices were drowned by the sound of more shots as he fired again, two, three, four, five more shots out the back window. Each of them sent a little pattern of cracks like a spiderweb through the rear glass. Between the cracks she saw the car still coming, trying to weave into the outer lane and someone leaning out of the rear window, pointing something at their car.

She did not hear their shotgun fire, but the glass of the rear window exploded inwards with a terrible crashing sound, spraying the inside of the rear seat with thousands of square pieces of glass shrapnel. Aaron yelled and ducked down in his seat, Mini and Felice screamed, and a wave of warm air flooded over them. There was another confusing spattering sound and the windows on Mini’s side of the car suddenly frosted up, a million tiny fracture patterns running across them all at once. Mini screamed and tried to duck forward as the side of her headrest suddenly exploded with padding and foam. Felice spared a glance over at her, saw her sagging forward in her seatbelt, which had stopped her sudden duck. Mini looked back at her, face blanched white in terror but with no visible injury. The shotgun pellets had hit only the extreme edge of her headrest, with almost all of the blast scattering across the outside of the car. One more shot, though, and all the windows on that side would explode. Felice swerved the car again, with no purpose now except to stop them getting a good target. Aaron swayed and rocked, firing wildly again from the chunky black weapon he had resting on the back seat, and now Felice’s ears were ringing with the acoustic shock.

Over the ringing she heard Aaron yell, “It’s okay, they’re gone!” She spared a glance back through her miraculously undamaged rearview mirror and saw the car drifting off the road, onto the verge and then into the scrub beyond, where it came to a sudden, slewing halt in a cloud of dust. Aaron whooped for joy and yelled something stupid and macho.

Felice eased off the gas a little, but slowed only to a reasonable speed. She was terrified, shaking and confused, breathing heavily and almost gasping in panic. Mini looked at her and back to Aaron, her face so pale and her eyes so wide in shock that she could have been a painting or a scene from an old horror movie. “Did you kill them Aaron?” Mini demanded of him, angry emphasis on the word ‘kill’.

“What?!” He yelled back at her. “They were gonna kill us!” He dumped the gun carelessly beside him and reached out to her, placing one hand with surprising gentleness against her amazingly unscratched cheek. “I don’t know though. Maybe I hit the wheels. I couldn’t see where I was shooting.”

Felice drew a deep, harsh breath, tried to still the rapid beating of her heart, tried to calm herself down, slowed the car to a crawl as she tried to get a grip of her nerves, sort the panic from the ringing in her ears. Beside her Mini was pushing her head between the seats, forehead to forehead with her boyfriend, whispering to each other and clasping hands. She thought of stopping completely to get a grip of herself, but terror at the thought of pursuit stopped her. What if the men got back on the road and followed them? She sped up a little, a panicky eye on the road behind her. Their car was trashed – the entire back window caved in and the whole back seat area covered in small cubes of shattered glass, the windows on Mini’s side frosted up from the impact of the shotgun pellets. The instruments on her dashboard and the rearview mirror were intact, as was the front windshield, so she could still drive, see the fuel gauge, check their speed. They could keep going.

Except, she realized, their aircon was useless. The car was ferociously hot now, flooded with the superhot air over the road. The heat was so intense that within a minute of resuming their forward speed she was dashing sweat from her eyes and rubbing sweat-slicked hands on her shorts in between turns of the wheel. Mini was pressed back against the seat staring wide-eyed out of the window, blonde hair limp and straggling against her shoulders and the light material of her dress smeared with sweat patches. Within minutes everyone was breathing shallow, gasping breaths. Aaron passed one of their sports drinks to them between the seats but Mini’s hands were too wet with sweat to open it; she had to use the material of her light cardigan to grip the lid. The liquid felt blessedly cold when Felice drank it but the heat returned immediately, insufferably hot. Ahead of them the road rose toward a kind of plateau, and the scrub trees that had been keeping their car in shade thinned out and receded, leaving the road swimming in the hellish heat haze of the unshaded tarmac. Once they emerged onto that plateau their car would become a greenhouse.

“We have to get out of this heat,” Aaron said weakly from behind them. Felice looked to Mini, pale cheeks flushed and mouth slightly open, nodding slightly in agreement.

But there was nowhere to go. The car rolled out of the shade of the trees onto the higher ground and the sunlight. Felice slowed down, thinking of turning back, but remembered the heat of the service station and the dying woman inside. Could she speed up and try to get out of here as fast as possible? Maybe with windows open, moving fast, they could keep the car from becoming deadly. But she knew already that this heat would kill them. Just as Raven’s radio station had said, without aircon they would die. They needed to find shelter.

A junction loomed ahead, and Felice realized suddenly that in the rush to escape the men in the car they had missed their turn for the main highway, and were heading north instead of northwest. The junction gave them a choice of heading north on 83, or turning right onto a narrower road that went to a bunch of small towns, maybe northeast. They would have to turn around anyway, which meant more time wasted. She slowed down again, trying to think. Somehow her thoughts felt fogged and far away, coming slowly through a haze of irritation and the ringing sound in her ears. She cursed to herself, perhaps vocalized it – she wasn’t sure. What to do? There were no cars on the road, she guessed no big towns out here where they might find a mall or somewhere else to hide until darkness brought some relief. Mad thoughts of finding a service station and getting a new windshield flitted beneath her indecision, but she knew somehow that the service stations out here would be powerless, probably no one alive inside them. She might as well be in hell.

“Why are we stopping?” Mini asked her as they slowed down to a crawl in front of the junction. She was pulling her legs as far as possible from the door, where splashes of sunlight were heating up the faux-leather of the seat, and looked exhausted from just that simple effort. Behind them, Aaron lolled against the seat, one foot up on his dangerously discarded gun, head bobbing on his chest.

“I don’t know what to do,” Felice told her. She thought of the maps on her phone, remembered there was no signal. The effort of opening the map Mini had liberated from the service station was too much to even consider – the vague thread of irritation underlying her indecision turned to rage when she contemplated the task of finding themselves on the map, looking for a decent-sized town, trying to guess which place would be easiest to get to. They were just going to have to pick a direction and hope something was there. But she somehow knew that every major town that might have a functioning mall or underground parking would be hours away. They didn’t have hours. If only that stupid militia hadn’t slowed them down at San Antonio! If only …

Staring stupidly at the sign for the junction as she thought of all the stupid coincidences that had brought them here she remembered the message from Raven, and the photo. Raven’s place was out here, somewhere off the 83! That was it! She pushed the car into motion again, feeling the effort of the gas pedal in her legs, and told Mini to look out for a trail and a shack. They rolled through the junction and sped up onto highway 83, moving faster now and pulling out of their torpid mood now they had something to do. Mini leaned forward, peering at the road ahead through the unbroken front windshield, while Felice briefly described the contents of the photo Raven had sent her. Sweat dripped from Mini’s nose onto the dashboard and Felice struggled to turn the wheel as her hands slipped sweatily over it.

They found it after a few minutes, a dirt track leading off the road and down from the plateau into a denser patch of greenery. As they drove past it Mini yelled “There!” and they saw a flash of wooden wall. Felice reversed the car hurriedly, pulling into the track and seeing the shed maybe 30 meters back from the road. It was the one from the picture. She drove the car up to park near it, stared at it quizzically. Now what? Looking around, she could see no sign of a driveway or housing. The road ahead dipped into a small dell, where the scrub became real trees with green foliage, maybe a sign of a stream or a water source of some kind. Should she drive ahead and look for a house? But where? Why had Raven sent her a picture of the shack, not the road? With an exhausted sigh, she unfastened her seatbelt and dragged herself out of the car into the still, baked heat of midday. It was no warmer outside the car than inside, though she guessed this track was already several degrees cooler than the main road, which ran like a rift from hell along the horizon to her left, the air above it shimmering and rippling with heat haze. Breathing in short, sharp gasps, Felice walked over to the shed and tested the door. It opened with a faint rasping catch, the wood dragging along a concrete floor, and she found herself inside a small, shadowy room, just a toolshed maybe five feet square and thick with cobwebs tangled over old, empty hooks and shelves. Tattered, dry vines reached through the gaps in the shed wall from outside, ran around the inside of the shed. It smelled moldy and dusty.

On the bench across from the door sat an old plastic telephone, the receiver relatively dust-free and placed carefully on its cradle. The body of the phone had a single button, not the round dials or square of push-buttons she had seen in old classic movies. Just one button. She picked up the receiver and put it to her ear, eyeing it suspiciously for spiders as she did so. Under the ringing in her ears from Aaron’s rifle she heard the burring, hissing sound of a dialtone. She pressed the single button, and the dialtone turned into rings.

“Yes?” After five rings, a calm voice, sounding faraway and unclear. Was it Raven? She could not tell.

“It’s Felice,” she said. “I’m in trouble.”

“Find shade. Stay near the shed. We are coming.” The phone clicked, dead.