Shift.
Immediately, the Mitsubishi was nearly a length ahead. On either side of the street, the streetlights flickered and flared, measuring out life in epileptic bursts of light:
flash
cracked asphalt
flash
Aglionby sticker on the dashboard
flash
Noah’s widened eyes
They were bodies electric.
The Camaro caught the Mitsubishi in the second half, just as Ronan had expected. The engine raged at the top of second gear, and there it was. Crouched somewhere between second and third gear, somewhere between four thousand and five thousand RPMs, there was pure joy. Screaming along with the thousands of tiny explosions beneath the hood was a place where Ronan felt nothing but uncomplicated happiness, a dead and empty place in his heart where he needed nothing else.
Beside them, the Mitsubishi sagged. Kavinsky had buggered the shift from third to fourth. Like he always did.
Ronan did not.
Shift.
The engine roared anew. The car was Gansey’s religion, and Ronan found it a worthy god. Its slender hood nosed ahead of the Mitsubishi. Put a length between them. Another half. It was nothing but up from here.
There was nothing inside Ronan. Glorious nothing, and behind that, more nothing.
But —
Something was wrong.
Kavinsky’s window rolled down. He craned his head to meet Ronan’s gaze in the rearview mirror, and he shouted something. The words were lost in the noise, but their meaning was visible. Teeth bared for a —k and then lips pursed —ou. Spat in a joyful curse.
The Mitsubishi exploded away from the Camaro. The streetlights snaked over the black windows, winking off and on across the widened gap.
It wasn’t possible.
Ronan grabbed another gear — the only one left. The gas pedal crouched against the floor. Everything in the vehicle was shaking itself apart.
The Mitsubishi was still pulling away. Kavinsky’s hand extended, middle finger waving.
Noah shouted, “Impossible!”
Ronan knew the numbers. He’d ridden in the Camaro. He knew Kavinsky’s car. He’d beaten Kavinsky’s car. Feeling was coming back to him like blood into a numb limb, stabbing him in fits and starts.
White as a fang, the Mitsubishi careened into the darkness in front of them. It was the sort of fast that didn’t belong to cars. It was the sort of fast that wasn’t a speed, it was a distance. Like a plane was here, and then it was there, in a moment. A comet was on this side of the sky, and then the other. The Mitsubishi was beside the Camaro, and then it wasn’t.
It was so far gone into victory that the only engine note left was the Camaro’s. Sparks rained down from the streetlights, searing tears dissipating on the pavement.
Only one month ago, Ronan had smoked the Mitsubishi in a far lesser car than the Camaro. There wasn’t a reality that permitted Kavinsky’s car to possess that sort of performance.
The streetlights flickered above them and went out. The Camaro smelled like a furnace. The keys dangled in the ignition, chinking metal against metal. It was slowly dawning on Ronan that he had been badly beaten.
This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. He’d dreamt the keys, he’d gotten the Camaro, he’d made all the shifts and Kavinsky had not.
I dreamt this.
“Now you’re done, right?” Noah asked. “Now you stop?”
But the dream was fading away. Like they all do, he thought. His joy was dissolving, plastic in acid.
“Stop,” Noah repeated.
There was nothing left to do but stop.
But that was when one of the night horrors landed on the roof of the Camaro.
Ronan’s first thought was the paint — the Pig was a piece of shit, but the paint was beyond reproach. And then one of the claws punched neatly through the windshield.
Whether or not it was in a dream or in reality, the night horror wanted the same thing: to kill Ronan.
35
Ronan!” Noah yelled.
The road spread out in front of them, black and empty. Ronan stepped on the accelerator. The Camaro responded with a churlish and enthusiastic growl.
Noah craned his neck. “Not working!”
A long splinter was forming in the glass of the windshield with the point of the night horror’s claw as its epicenter. Ronan jerked the wheel back and forth. The Camaro skidded violently sideways, the body rolling back and forth.
“Goddamn it,” Ronan muttered, fighting for control. This was not the BMW. Steering was an imaginary creature.
“Still there!” Noah reported.
The Camaro shuddered, the rear fish-tailing.
Ronan’s eyes darted to the rearview mirror. A second bird creature clung to the trunk.
This was bad.
Ronan snapped, “You could help!”
Noah fluttered his hands, pressing them on the window crank and then the back of the seat and finally the dash. He clearly didn’t want to do whatever he was considering.
A squeal raked through the air. It was difficult to tell if it was a nail on metal or the sound of the birdman crying out. It clawed the hair up Ronan’s arms.
“Noah, man, come on!”
Noah vanished.
Ronan craned his neck, looking.
With a tremendous crack, the bottom right corner of the windshield collapsed onto the dash. A claw snaked in.
Noah shouted, “Brake!”
Ronan slammed on the brakes. He had too much speed, too much brakes, too little steering. The Camaro swept from side to side as it hurtled to a stop. The steering wheel did nothing.
Noah and a flash of black tumbled over the left side of the hood, leaving the windshield suddenly clear. The car kicked up as one of the tires ran over the bundle.
There was no time to see where the two of them went, because the jolt had unsettled the car — Noah’s already dead, he’s all right, Ronan thought frantically — and the Camaro was running out of road fast.
The smell of rubber and brake filled the car. It was an accident without a collision. The road went left but the car kept going straight.
No.
In agonizing detail, Ronan saw the telephone pole just as the passenger door made contact.
There was nothing gentle about this sound. It was not at all like the cars colliding at Kavinsky’s substance party. This was metal rending. Glass shrieking. It was a five-finger metallic punch in Ronan’s side.
Then it was over.
The car was utterly silent. Ronan didn’t know if it had stalled or if he had killed it. The passenger-side door was buckled in halfway to the gearshift. The glove-box door had burst off entirely and the contents, including Gansey’s EpiPen, had exploded throughout the front seat.