The car lurched as another
of the threads came free from its hold on the mountain. There were
only three threads holding the weight of Zed's car and Baxron sliced
faster through the third thread.
Inside the car, Zed hand
rippled like it was trapped in a haze of heat waves riding from a
road in a desert. He took a breath and grabbed the handle of the
sword.
A :) appeared on the LED
panel in the side of the sword and a new voice cleared its throat in
Zed's head.
“Owwww,” he screamed,
“turn down the fucking volume.”
“Sorry,” Quicksilver's
voice said without a trace of remorse.
“What the fuck is this?
Is my head a free boarding house for voices?
“You're out of your
league Zed and you need help. So take what you're getting and count
your blessings.”
“Yeah, yeah, talk later,
first get me out of this. That asshole is chopping the threads that
are holding us and if we drop its goodbye to everything.”
“Start the car. Let's
scoot before he has a chance to drop us.”
Zed put the sword back in
the passenger seat and then he wrapped the seatbelt around it. He
clicked in his own seatbelt too. Something he had not done for quite
some time. He keyed the ignition and put the car in gear. His hand
was red from holding the sword. It looked like a tattoo on his palm
Baxron looked at Zed, his
face red with the effort of slicing the last thread. He waved a
bye-bye to Zed and got a middle finger in return. The last thread
snapped under the weight of the car and Zed fell from his view.
First Zed felt
weightlessness and he loosened his jaw to wait for the bump. Many
racers had bit off their own tongues or jarred their teeth after a
bump. He was a pro.
The car, still stuck to the
web, hit the side of the mountain and stayed there. Zed slowly moved
the car forward so that it swung like a pendulum from the side of the
mountain. At the height of the arc, he switched to reverse gear and
the car moved back the way it had came. The web went taut, stretching
to the point of breaking. Zed knew he didn't have much time, at the
top of the backward arc, he switch gears and the car sped forward
like an arrow from a bow. There was a pool of water at the bottom of
the mountain and the car splashed into the pool, going under the
surface. But no water entered the car. It just spread apart, leaving
a cube of void the size of the car.
“Oh fucking no,” Zed
said.
The girl in a frock with a
teddy in her hand was sitting on the hood of his car. “Ask me a
question or I'll eat you.” She opened her mouth wide and every
sharp teeth illustrated her point.