Hellbent

by Cherie Priest

I crossed my fingers and prayed that Adrian had found a suitable getaway vehicle, and decided to assume the best, since he hadn’t offered any objection when I gave him the assignment in the first place.

  Above us the sky was moving in a big black block, broken up by the shadows and outlines of clouds bigger than mountains, sailing in dark and monstrous from the Gulf. Lightning cracked among them, lacing them with light that was smothered almost instantly, as if it’d drowned in oil.

  I tried not to look.

  It was hard not to look, or it was hard until the rain started—and then it was hard to hold up my face because the droplets were huge, jabbing down from the hideous, plague-sick night clouds like vengeful thumbs. I blinked against them, but running as fast as I was, they only hit me harder and smacked me to the point of stinging—and to the point of wondering if one could be flayed alive by raindrops.

  I clutched Elizabeth against me tightly, trying to shield her by holding her head and torso inside the hollow of my neck, and up against my breasts—taking the brunt of it if I could. In retrospect, it was her damn storm; I should’ve let her get smacked around by it for a while, but I didn’t. Even though she was larger than me, taller by a couple inches and heavier by twenty or thirty pounds, she felt fragile in my arms.

  At the edge of the parking lot I stopped, stunning us both—but not stunning her so badly that she ceased her susurrus whispers, even as I set her on her feet and she swayed there, then leaned on me, then stood upright without me. Upon letting her go, I shook my hands like they’d fallen asleep, for they were racked with pins and needles. Then I stood there, shivering and clutching myself while her power gathered and her bone glowed like the moon.

  After a moment, the pattern of her mumblings drew to a close and she bent forward to rest her hands on top of her knees. Her head hung down. She breathed like she was fighting the air for every lungful. I could see that she’d finished something. I could tell it from the cracking shock of light that cut the sky from horizon to horizon, and the way the wind screamed in waves that came steadier and steadier, until the whole world was a wall of billowing air that couldn’t be fought, cajoled, or reasoned with. I could see it in the way the undulating aura dissipated, and left her concretely before me without any of the distortion she’d carried with her thus far.

  “Elizabeth?” I asked her, putting a hand on her shoulder.

  Before she answered, a squeal of tires somewhere far away—no, somewhere very close—made a valiant effort against the buffeting wind and the persistent noise. I craned my neck and looked around, hunting for the source and hoping like hell it was Adrian, because if we hadn’t lost those security people, they could well be coming up on us. Or the cameras. Shit, there were cameras everywhere. If they had any kind of central authority, someone in Building 110 was watching every camera in every zone. They’d spot us eventually.

  This wasn’t that.

  My first guess was the right one: It was Adrian, screeching around a line of parked vehicles in a big-ass Hummer. “I thought they quit making those,” I said to no one, and the storm ate my observation. Who cared if it was old, new, or vintage? It was exactly the kind of vehicle someone might need to move through a hurricane, and fuck me but we needed something to move us through a hurricane.

  Had Elizabeth thought that far ahead? Had she ever planned to leave in one piece, or was she expecting to sit down and die in the place where she used to work? But there I went again, trying to rationally analyze an irrational situation. Besides, I had her. I could ask her later, when we were someplace dry and unassailed by meteorological mayhem.

  At the edge of the chaos, I heard people’s voices. I looked behind us, worried about more gunshots and thinking that I sure was glad some earth-hating redneck fascist had bought a war vehicle in which to tootle around southeast Texas.

  No worries. Well, not the worries I expected. The security people were out there, yes—but they’d either lost interest in us, or they hadn’t figured out we were the people they’d been chasing earlier.

  They were distracted by other things at the moment, namely the crowd that was leaking out of the banquet building via every door that would allow an exit. The overdressed guests were shouting to be heard over the weather commotion, and some were saying, “Bugger all this for a lark,” and heading toward the parking lot. Bowed against the wind, ducking wind-tossed debris, and in some cases holding menus over their heads for the world’s most inadequate rain protection … they pooled around the building like a bunch of morons. Who the hell leaves the shelter of a big, secure structure when a sudden storm comes galloping onshore?

  But maybe they weren’t total morons. I want to think they sensed that something wasn’t right, or that they needed to escape the venue rather than hide inside it. They couldn’t have known it was the right thing to do, not on any conscious level, but instinct is funny sometimes.

  So are cell phones, and iPhones, and the kinds of devices that might have told them they were being subjected to a very personal form of attack. Everyone who’d subscribed to severe weather alerts would’ve gotten a text message that something messed-up was under way.

  And, I had to conclude, no one could’ve guessed how quickly it would come. I’m sure some of them assumed they could outrun it and wanted to head home to beat the rain. Even so, it all felt counterintuitive to me. Maybe that’s because I don’t know dick about hurricanes. Perhaps there’s some protocol with which I’m unfamiliar, but I doubt it. I think it was just people being people. Being clueless, and inadvertently self-destructive.

  Adrian squeezed the Hummer between two cars with cheerful abandon—the kind of cheerful abandon that creates a great rending of steel and leaves paint chips and broken light covers everywhere. It put him right in front of us, though—stuck in his headlights.

  Through the windshield, I could see his face. It was contorting into something like surprise, confusion, suspicion, and outright disbelief. Fair enough. I hadn’t told him I was bringing company.

  No time to fight with him about it.

  I dragged Elizabeth to the back passenger’s-side door, wrapped my chilly hand around the rain-soaked latch, and gave a yank that almost pulled the door off, but didn’t. It opened, and I bodily tossed my companion inside.

  She didn’t put up even the slightest token of resistance. From looking at her, I assumed this was due to the fact that she was exhausted. We both appeared half drowned and run ragged, but I hadn’t been hanging around summoning the elements all evening, so between the two of us I was in better shape.

  As I climbed into the passenger’s seat and whipped the door shut, I heard her say, “Ah. There it is. In time, I hope.” Then she put her head down on the seat, and exhaled with a smile that signified a job well done—or vengeance well achieved. Or that unicorns were bringing her diamond cough drops, I don’t know.

  She wasn’t dead, but she was out cold.

  I knew it immediately. The presence of her psyche disappeared from mine, as neatly and suddenly as if someone had flipped a switch—meaning, of course, that her aforementioned plans of controlling twisters were out the window, unless she’d somehow programmed them before passing out.

  “What the hell have you done?” Adrian all but shouted at me.

  “Don’t yell. I’m right here. And you—get us out of here.”

  With a draw of his elbow he threw the Hummer into gear, but not without complaining. “You brought her along for the ride? Have you completely lost your mind this time?”

  “I couldn’t leave her,” I countered. “People were shooting at her. And she seemed nice.”

  “Nice?” He hit the gas and the wheels spun, then caught and shot us forward. The windshield wipers were banging back and forth full tilt, doing virtually nothing to clear the view but giving it the ol’ college try.

  “Nice enough. I wanted to help.”

  “You’re deranged.”

  It was rude of him, yes, but I didn’t press it. I grabbed the seat belt instead an
d strapped myself down. I’d never been inside a Hummer before, so the buckles, braces, and Oh-Shit bars were in an unfamiliar formation. Struggling with the buckle, I got myself fastened into position just in time for Adrian to hop the curb and take us bouncing across the flooding prairies of neatly mowed grass that lay in strips among the compound’s structures.

  “Where are we going?” he asked me. “And what did she mean?”

  “As far away from here as we can get. Inland, whichever direction that is. And what do you mean, what did she mean?”

  “Inland? That’s the best you’ve got?”

  Conveniently enough, there was a compass built in a bubble on the dash. It said we were going south, which wasn’t good. “North, then. North or west. Look.” I poked the bubble, and the small globe within it swayed. “Turn around.”

  “Ha.”

  Behind us, the fastest of the vehicle-owning engineers had made it to their chariots, and the parking lot was clotting with a honking knot of fender-benders. “We need a detour. And just before she conked out back there, she said It’s here, and in time, or something like that. What’s here?”

  I craned around to see into the back. Adrian took a sharp left turn and Elizabeth Creed rolled off the seat, down onto the floorboards.

  My bad. I should’ve strapped her in, but at the time it hadn’t seemed like the most efficient use of those scrambling moments. She was probably better off down there anyway. She didn’t have as much room to toss about and get herself hurt. But she wasn’t really the focus of my attention now. After making note of her position, the only thing I could see was the back windshield.

  Or that’s not quite what I mean. I looked toward the windshield and saw nothing but a sheet of black. At first I thought it was a ludicrous tint job, the kind that douchebags sometimes get when they want to pretend like they’re drug dealers. But no, it was not a tint. Just the sky, which was falling down.

  “Adrian …”

  “I’m going as fast as I can!”

  The Hummer scuttled over the curbs and over the grass at a speed so uncomfortable that every bump felt like someone punching me in the tailbone.

  “Get us away from the banquet hall. Or the cafeteria—whatever that was.”

  “I’m. Working. On. It.” He informed me through gritted teeth.

  Something huge and round smacked loudly against the front windshield, breaking off one of the wipers in a violent, smashing twist. Lightning told me it was a stop sign. The brief blip of illumination also told me that it’d cracked the windshield, but the structural integrity held.

  We weren’t driving anymore; we were wading through the fiercely blowing litter of the entire NASA compound, all of it being hurled via winds traveling so fast I shuddered to speculate. Rocks, leaves, a bicycle, and a single cell phone kamikazed the Hummer en masse. We bullied onward, despite the fact that we couldn’t see where we were headed, and if it weren’t for the bumbling bubble compass, we would’ve no doubt driven around in circles.

  “Shit,” Adrian declared. “Shit shit shit shit shit.”

  “I heard you the first time.”

  “This place is a goddamn maze!”

  “I have maps!” I remembered.

  “Fat lot of good they’re doing in your bag, there.”

  “Give me a second, would you?”

  I unzipped the sodden duffel and retrieved my bag, which was not quite soaked through. That damn duffel was “water-resistant” at best.

  It dawned on me that I should pray I hadn’t broken any of the bones, but right then and there it seemed like a minor hypothetical calamity compared with being trapped in a space compound while a hurricane and all its attendant twisters came barreling toward us.

  “Got ’em,” I announced, and I flipped through the damp sheets in a frantic hunt for the pertinent schematics. “We need a point of reference.” Gaining one was easier said than done, since water cascaded over every window, and on the other side of the water was nothing but mobile darkness incoming. “Forgive me, but I think I have to roll down a window.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Can’t see anything with it up. My apologies, but here I go.” I pressed my first two fingers down on the window button like I was taking its pulse. The sheet of tempered glass went skootching jerkily down until I was on the receiving end of a downright biblical facial.

  I squinted against the water and leaned my head out as far as I could—then unbuckled my seat belt so I could climb up on the window and sit on it Dukes-of-Hazzard-style because, son of a bitch, if we didn’t find our way out of this rat trap soon we were all going to fucking drown … or possibly be picked up and chucked into a wall by that giant tornado behind us.

  It was my turn to say, “Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit!”

  “Do you see anything to guide us?”

  “Yes!” I screamed back inside the cabin. “A tornado! A big black one!”

  “And that’s going to guide us how?”

  “We’re going to get as far away from it as we can, as fast as we can!” I wiped a sopping curtain of hair out of my face and threw my head left and right, hunting for anything of use. But it was so hard to see, even for a monster like me, and it was so hard to look away from the tornado.

  It’s not like she hadn’t warned me.

  The woman said she was bringing a tornado, and by God, she’d brought a tornado. Say what you will about her mind or her methods, but hot damn. That’s follow-through.

  Off in the distance I saw a huge banner waving—the kind of vinyl sheet that’s easily the size of a house, flapping from one corner and being on the very verge of ripping loose. A lightning strike landed way too close, causing Adrian to jerk the wheel and nearly fling me out of the open window … but it also gave me the short clarity to see that the banner advertised a new exhibit in the space museum. Something about the progression of flight suits from the sixties to the present.

  Okay. Space museum.

  I lunged back inside the Hummer and sat wetly on my maps, which were now absolutely dripping. That didn’t stop me. They were still readable. I pulled them out from under my butt and ran a finger along the pages until I found the museum building—only to learn that it wasn’t one structure, but several. Regardless, they were close enough together to give me an idea where we were. This idea, combined with the tempest-tossed compass, sufficed to show me the way.

  I force-rolled the window back up—an exercise in futility tantamount to closing the barn door after the barn has burned down.

  “We’re about to hit a cross street,” I said, pointing pointlessly up ahead, as if he could see what I was trying to indicate. “Take a right, and the road ought to go straight for a few blocks.”

  Adrian discovered this cross street by virtue of plowing over the YIELD sign. Its red-and-white design mocked us from the windshield until it slid slowly off the side and stuck corner-down into the street. It didn’t stay there long. The wind grabbed it and threw it like a discus, surely beheading or otherwise belimbing anyone unfortunate enough to get in its way.

  “Yes,” I said, gesticulating wildly. “This way! Now at the next … it’s not an intersection, I don’t think. It’s a roundabout. Take it far enough around so that you’re going straight.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense!”

  “Yes it does! Just pretend it’s not a roundabout, and you’re going straight! Or shit, just do what I tell you!”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  I growled, “You’re the one who wants to play ghoul. Here! Yes! Go right—go around to the right, I mean.”

  He did, and I looked behind us only to see that the tornado had not gotten any farther away, and if anything it looked bigger, meaner, and closer. That might’ve been my imagination, but I didn’t think so.

  “Here,” I said, punching him in the right arm. “Here, right here. Now veer off to the right again—see? It’s like there was no circle in the middle and you just went straight.”

 
“Roundabouts are fucking retarded.”

  “No doubt.”

  “Now where?” he asked, straining to see through the insufficiently cleared glass.

  “Straight, until the road dead-ends in a T,” I said, consulting my notes. I consulted them fast. They were falling apart in my hands. “Then go left, and we ought to be home free.”

  “Ought to be?”

  “Let it never be said that I made promises I can’t keep.”

  “Sometimes I hate you. A little.”

  “Back at you, gorgeous,” I said, giving up on the maps. I wadded up what was left and chucked the clumps of disintegrating paper into the backseat before I remembered Creed was there. Upon checking her status and noting that it was unchanged, I decided that it didn’t matter if she played host to some enormous map spitballs. This was all her fault anyway.

  The Hummer heaved and jumped one more curve—a big one, and I had no idea if it’d been on the map or not—but suddenly we were on something that drove like a regular road. Beneath the tires, regular asphalt crunched, not the poured cement of driveways and compound paths; and within the sheets of water slicing down through the headlights I could see streaks of yellow.

  Adrian saw them, too. He said, “Lane markers.”

  “Is this the interstate?”

  “No, we haven’t gone that far. But I’ll take it.”

  “I don’t see any other cars,” I said with the first wisps of optimism I’d felt in an hour.

  “Me either. It might just be a service road, or a local route. Who cares? It’s empty, it’s straight, and it’s pointing us away from the tornado. Right? I don’t see it.” He sat up to look into the rearview mirror.

  I turned around and said, “I see it, but it’s not getting any closer. I think we’re leaving it behind.”

  “Jesus be praised,” he said under his breath.

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I think it stopped on top of the cafeteria. That’s why it’s not coming toward us anymore. It’s busy tearing shit up back there.”

  “Just doing its job,” he said, and gave the Hummer more gas than was probably safe—given that we were headed top speed down a two-lane road, in the dark, in the absolutely-not-fucking-around rain, with only one working windshield wiper. But we rolled like hell now that we weren’t scaling curbs, medians, and signs at every turn.