So she decided that the only choice was to turn with the truck.
“Fuck, would you look at that?” Mike snarled. There was an old lady in a powered wheelchair in front of him, going along at a fixed rate of one mile per hour. He fucking knew what was in that truck and what it was about to do. He had a binary solution set…
“Wait!” Britney yelled, getting out of the car and running to the chair. She grabbed the controls, turned the chair and drove it off the sidewalk. “Go!” she yelled as Mike pulled past.
“Yeah, you stay here,” Mike said, dropping the car into second.
“What?” Britney screamed. “Wait! No!”
“Young lady!” the old woman shouted, her wheelchair mired in a holly bush. “Just what do you think—”
He sped up, horn blaring and reached the intersection just as the two cars, side by side, completed a perfect turn. He could hear sirens behind and in front of him but none of the cops would reach the truck in time to stop anything, even if they had a shoot order.
“Let us get just a bit down the road,” Gabrel said. “Then we will begin.”
“Yes,” Mahmoud replied. “The spray will drift behind us, though, and strike all of the cars.”
“Yes,” Gabrel said, speeding the truck up slightly. “Allah is with us.”
Mike skidded through the turn of the sidewalk and jumped the curb just in front of the truck. He punched the accelerator and, as the car jumped forward under full torque, hit the brakes at the same time and turned the wheel to the side. The car did a one-eighty in a cloud of blue smoke from the rear tires. As soon as he was pointed at the truck he released the accelerator and popped open his door.
“Prophet’s Ghost,” Gabrel snarled. “Now! Hit the release now!”
“STOP!” Britney screamed, running into the intersection and holding up her hands. A rental Lincoln Navigator driven by a Brazilian driven nearly to fury by the two idiots in front of him ignored her and she jumped to the side. But the two cars behind him both stopped.
“What the fuck is going—” the driver of the right-hand minivan, a perfect male specimen of Americanus Arcticus started to say.
“POISON GAS!”
The passenger had ducked down but Mike put four rounds into the windshield on the driver’s side, splattering the driver all over the interior. The truck continued to roll forward, though, a smoky haze spewing out of the rear. Mike considered that for a moment. He really didn’t want to die from VX and if he just ran into a cloud of it he wasn’t going to do anyone any good.
But the wind was from the north. It was spreading the cloud backwards. Of course, that was right into a major intersection, but if he could get it cut off…
He ran forward just as a blue sedan, the driver a white-haired old woman, cruised sedately to the north. She gave him a look of absolute exasperation, clearly placing him with the car in the way.
Mike could give a shit about her opinion. The truck, now out of control but only doing about five miles per hour, was drifting towards the left-hand lane. He darted to the side and yanked open the door.
Two shots went past him just about at head height and he responded by pumping six into the passenger. There was a lever there that wasn’t one Mike recognized and while hitting the brakes he pushed it up. The hissing from the rear stopped.
Putting the truck in park he bailed out and ran for his car, which the truck had just about hit. If that truck had hit his GT he was going to be sorely pissed.
There was a lot of screaming from up towards the intersection, but there was only one person he was worried about up there.
Britney glanced over her shoulder and blanched as the rear of the truck started to spew vapor. And, worse, the wind was carrying it right for the intersection.
She didn’t have much time to decide but she also wasn’t interested in dying today. And standing here was going to mean dying.
“Get back in your cars and go that way!” she shouted, pointing west down Sand Lake. “Get out of here!”
She ran down the sidewalk, paused to extricate the old lady, then took control of the wheelchair and started driving it east down the sidewalk, screaming at people to turn back.
“What is going…”
“Oh shut up you old bat!” Britney screamed, hitting the woman on the head. “There’s poison gas back there! Keep going east,” she added, jumping off the wheelchair and pointing down the road. “Don’t stop until you reach a cop!”
She ran out into the traffic again and stood in the road, arms spread. Cars maneuvered around her until a minivan filled with a family stopped.
“What the hell is going on?” the man asked. “I’m a police officer.”
“HAZMAT!” Britney screamed. “Now park it and HELP!”
Behind her she heard a crash and turned to look: the cars that had entered the intersection were now completely out of control. Probably everyone in them was dead. The cloud was now invisible but that just made it worse.
“Fuck,” the policeman from Chicago said. “Honey,” he said to his wife, “get the kids and start walking east…”
“But…” the woman protested. Then she saw the out of control cars ahead of her. Every car that had been in front of them was now scattering randomly across the intersection and even into oncoming traffic. As she watched an SUV that had formerly held a family from Ohio met a late model Honda head on, killing a female college student on her way to her job at Hooters. The policeman’s-wife side immediately took over. She stopped protesting and just started unstrapping and grabbing kids.
Britney managed to get the left-hand lane stopped — the cop’s minivan effectively blocked the right — and after getting through to the lead driver that he’d die if he drove forward, started getting people out of the cars and headed down the road.
The crashes in the intersection had traffic pretty effectively stopped in all directions but she wasn’t sure how far the cloud had spread. So she went from car to car as fast as she could, just saying “POISON GAS! GET OUT!”
After the fifth car she saw a police car coming west down the mostly empty eastbound lanes and decided she’d done all an intel specialist should do. She was standing about three hundred yards from the intersection, head down and breathing hard because she’d been trying really hard to hold her breath as much as possible, when she heard a distinctive horn.
“Figured you were a goner,” Mike said, grinning at her. “But we’ve got other fish to fry.”
“We going to Disney now?” Britney yelled as the GT made another bootlegger’s turn.
“Disney’s that way,” Mike said, gesturing over his shoulder. “So, no. We’re going to Wet and Wild.”
“Why?” Britney asked. “Besides girls in bikinis.”
“What do people do when they think there’s poison gas in the air?” Mike asked, making a screaming turn onto Universal and jerking into the oncoming lane to avoid a rolling roadblock. An oncoming SUV jerked to the side, broadsiding another and before you could say “Suburban” there was a beached pod of the things.
“Run for shelter,” Britney said, bracing herself as Mike slid through a three-lane sweep between four cars, missing them all by a whisker.
“And if you’re at Wet and Wild?” Mike asked. “There’s not much shelter.”