Kinetics: In Search of Willow (21 page)

I glanced between the direction he was
pointing and the absolute seriousness on his face. "A little,
why?"

"We're stealing a car!" He was
suddenly running across the empty road toward the parking
garage.

"Harry! Wait!" I chased after him,
checking back to make sure Napoli or Joe hadn't discovered us yet.
I followed him all the way down the lines of parked cars until he
reached a car that looked like it had seen better days. "We can't
steal a car!"

"If you have a better idea, then
shoot, but for now we're getting the heck out of here!"

"Then why are we stealing this one?"
The color of the car doors didn't even match the rest of the car,
not to mention the hood was smashed slightly on the corner. It
looked ready to fall apart at any moment.

"No security alarms."

"How can you tell?"

"Trust me," Harry huffed. "I know what
I'm doing." He pulled out a shirt from his duffel bag and handed it
me. "Be right back." He came back a second later with a rock in his
hand and took the shirt from me. Harry proceeded to wrap the shirt
around the rock and then slammed it into the driver side window of
the car. The glass broke into a spider web pattern but didn't fall
out of the window. He hit the glass again a couple more times and
then peeled the shards away, using the shirt as a protective
mitt.

"I can't believe this! We don't even
have the keys!"

"I know how to wire cars," Harry said
bluntly.

I laughed nervously, looking around
for any suspicious eyes watching us. "What is this, a freaking
movie? You're a little too good at this. Is there something you're
not telling me?"

Harry had just taken out the last
shards of glass and popped open the locks. "Just get into the car,
Eugene. Do you want to get caught by those two?"

"Fine, but if the cops come after us
for this, it's not my fault." I pushed past him to sit in the
passenger side.

Harry just answered with a roll of his
eyes, and started messing with the wires under the steering wheel.
He took a small bag out of his duffel and I saw a small array of
screwdrivers and small, sharp objects. He worked diligently for a
good fifteen minutes under the dash while I kept an eye out for
Napoli or Joe.

"Done!" Harry cried out and the car
rattled to life seconds later. It sounded even worse than it
looked. "Hmm, sounds like a belt is loose." He commented as he
finished his work under the steering wheel.

"A what?"

Harry ignored me again and slid into
the driver's seat shutting the door after him. He looked behind us
as he steered the car out of its parking place. "Oh,
crap!"

Joe was right behind us phasing out of
a concrete support beam. He was talking frantically into a cell
phone, and not far behind him, three other people were running
toward us. Harry hit the gas and the car backed up rapidly right
toward Joe. His face registered some shock, but I didn't have time
to dwell on it before Harry changed gears and we were speeding
toward the opposite side of the parking garage.

"Look out!" I shouted. A car with no
driver had just careened out of its parking spot blocking
us.

"One of them is a telekinetic!" Harry
hissed as he swerved to avoid the car, and careened around the
corner that led out onto the street. He didn't even stop for the
long yellow board with the word 'STOP' stenciled over it. It was
supposed to keep people from driving past and not paying but we
slammed through it and the shattered board cracked the windshield
in about five places.

"They're following us!" Harry cursed.
Joe, Napoli and the three others were now in a car that was much
better than ours and were tailgating us dangerously
close.

"Should have risked an
alarm going off to get us a 
fast 
car." I muttered under my
breath.

Either Harry just ignored my comment
or didn't hear it and just kept swerving through traffic, swearing.
I had no idea eloquent-big-words Harry was able to curse like that.
And before I could digest the fact that this rickety car was going
over 90 miles an hour through city traffic, we were in the middle
of the city itself. I watched behind us as Harry jutted through
traffic like a madman drawing honks and flipped birdies from every
direction.

One of the guys in the SUV reached his
hands out and something came shooting toward us. It hit the roof
and tore a jagged line through the metal.

Trashcans scattered as our skidding
vehicle rounded a corner. Harry swore vehemently and jerked the
steering wheel away from the sidewalk where pale-faced pedestrians
were diving out of the way of the small, grungy car.

"Please don't hit anyone." I pleaded
through gritted teeth as we threaded between oncoming
traffic.

"Eugene, have some faith!" Harry
didn't even take his eyes off the road. "I drive all the
time!"

"At what, an arcade?" I grasped the
seat as we cut a turn that should have flipped the car.

"Your screeching is going
to 
make
 me hit someone!"

"Well forgive me if I
don't want to add 
murder
 to the stolen car you're
driving!" I grabbed onto the door and hung on as Harry cut a sharp
corner. Behind us, the car giving chase trailed only a few yards
back. The glare-hidden driver sped up and rammed us in the back. I
jerked forward, the frayed seat belt the only thing keeping me from
marrying my face to the windshield.

Napoli was following us.
Only he would be crazy enough to follow this
close 
and 
try and knock us off the road with his own car.

"Shit."

"What?"

"Cops!" Harry hit the gas. We
catapulted down a one way street—in the wrong direction. I looked
back again, this time seeing blue lights flanking Napoli's car
along with two helicopters roaring in circles above us. The police
probably thought we were with Napoli's crew.

"Helicopters, too!" I
yelled.

Harry looked up through the sun roof
and let out a string of curses. When the street entrance to a small
neighborhood appeared, he waited until the last second. He nearly
flipped the car making the turn.

"We gotta shake 'em." Harry hissed
through his teeth.

"How? The helicopters won't lose us,
even if the cars do."

Something hit the roof and we looked
up to see a dent in the roof. "That's what you think," a voice
shouted out there. "Drive straight!" The hoodie guy peered through
our new sunroof.

Water started following us. From
birdbaths to pools to puddles on the ground, Hoodie was gathering
whatever water and moisture that he could. In one hand he
controlled the massive, amorphous, airborne globule of water
trailing after our car, and with the other he took slivers of water
from the globule and formed ice spikes the size of my
arm.

The helicopters were hovering above us
nearly side-by-side. Hoodie jabbed his hand out and the spikes
followed his command, striking the helicopters. One of the choppers
spiraled out, crashing into someone's back yard. The pilots had
jumped out at the last minute. One tumbled down the roof taking a
leaf-filled gutter with him, the other dove into a tall
tree.

Harry grinned. "One down!"

The other chopper started to pull back
but Hoodie wasn't letting it get away. "Not so fast,
sucker!"

The spikes hit it in the tail section.
It started spinning midair, smoke spewing from the engine. Napoli's
car slowed abruptly, the cop cars were forced to slow with him. The
chopper was between us in the air when it finally plummeted to the
ground. In the rear view mirror I saw a tower of smoke rising from
burning wreckage. I could see the pilots running away from the
fire, barely escaping with their lives. My heart beat jumped a
notch.

"He almost killed them." I
whispered.

Harry didn't reply but focused
intently on the road in front of him. I looked up but Hoodie was
gone.

"At least we're safe."

I stared at him as we pulled onto one
of the interstate on-ramps. He was breathing deeply and looked a
perfect picture of calmness. He glanced at me and smiled, "Stop
staring and see if the radio works.

I leaned forward and tuned the radio
on. It was going to be a long ride. With the sun sinking into the
horizon in front of us we sped toward the west.

CHAPTER 16

“
A real
friend is one who walks in when the rest of the world walks
out.”
- Walter Winchell

"Well, this is what we get for
stealing a crappy car." I bit out and chucked a rock into the
hedge. I pressed my weight against the passenger side door and
tilted my head slightly so that I could see Harry's face as he
fiddled with the car parts under the hood.

Not an hour into our getaway the
crappy car had up and died. Apparently it wasn't made to go at 90
miles per hour for any extended length of time. Harry didn't know
what was wrong with the thing, and the more and more time that
passed I came to the realization that the car wasn't going to get
fixed. We would probably end up hitchhiking the rest of the way to
Oklahoma and beyond.

"Oh, stop complaining,"
Harry's muffled voice drifted up. He was trying, and the key word
here was trying, to get the car running again. So far he was having
no luck and the sky was getting darker and darker by the moment,
and here we were stuck in the middle of Nowhere,
Missouri, about five miles west of some town
called Rolla. A few cars had passed us but none of them had
stopped.

The darkening sky was cupped by steel
gray clouds. It was well west of us and it was hard to tell from
this vantage point where the storm was heading. The clouds looked
strangely unnatural against the brilliant pink and orange of the
sky to the east. Dark blue was slowly overtaking the sky but all
that would be gone if the storm passed over us.

"How far is Springfield?" Harry asked
and dropped the hood of the car with a huff. He wiped his
grease-smeared hands absently on his shirt and came to stand next
to me while I flipped through the ancient road atlas we had found
in the trunk of the car. I stopped on the map of southern Missouri
and located the road that had taken us out of St. Louis and led us
straight into the boonies.

"About forty or fifty miles, it looks
like." I used my index finger to gauge the distance between Rolla
and Springfield. Harry started to rub the bridge of his nose, then
belatedly realized that he still had a bit of car grease on his
fingers and scowled at his hands irritably. "So what
now?"

He started wiping his hands on his
shirt again, leaving little black trails on the red fabric. "I
don't know. I think we're better off walking."

"Maaaan." I felt like chucking the
yellowed road map into the hedge after the multitude of rocks that
had been thrown into the ditch during my idle time after the car
had broken down.

"There should be a gas
station or a motel or 
something
 nearby."

"But fifty miles?"

"It's shouldn't take too
long."

"Harry we
are 
not
 made of magic or these Kinetic teleporters, whatever
they are called. We have to 
walk.
 That is going to take
us
hours.
" Harry
was being far too optimistic.

Harry pushed off the edge of the car
and pushed around me to open the door. I moved out of the way and
he grabbed his duffel bag. He started walking along the road and it
took me a moment to grab my own bag and run after him.