As Damm helped him to his feet, the wags zooming past honked their horns.
Thrill Bill was rummaging around in Nara’s pack. He took out five grens and a couple of slap charges. He handed each of them a gren and kept a pair for himself. “Throw when I do, where I do,” he told them, then climbed the twisted heap of steel.
After a moment or two, he shouted down, “Got a big pack of vehicles coming on the right. Four lanes deep. This is it!”
Ryan yanked the pin and let the grip safety plink off. When he saw Thrill Bill underhand his grens toward the approaching wags, he did the same. All five grens rolled to a stop in the middle of the four lanes of traffic.
As the grens popped off, Ryan pulled back to cover behind a crushed sedan. Shrapnel spanged the side of the wreck and skipped off the tunnel’s ceiling. The explosions were followed by a squeal of tires and the crash of metal and glass.
The new pileup was massive.
Thrill Bill jumped down from his perch and ran. “Come on!” he shouted to the others. “Before they get away!”
Ryan chased after him.
The four wags in front were tipped on their sides and starting to burn. The ones behind were wedged together tight, and crumpled fore and aft. Ryan saw the drivers slumped over their steering wheels.
Thrill Bill kept running, past the rows of totaled vehicles. He stopped alongside the driver’s door of a sleek maroon minivan at the back of the pack that appeared undamaged. The driver, a man in a blue blazer, shirt and tie, took one look at the hair, the beard and the pulse rifle and decided he wanted no part of the warlord. All the van’s windows started to fill with black from the bottom up. They were made of armor.
Before the guy could put the wag in reverse, Thrill Bill slapped his hand against the driver’s window.
When his hand came away, there was a two-inch disk stuck to the surface.
Ryan dived for cover behind one of the wrecked cars. As Nara joined him, he saw the driver’s door fly open and the driver bail out. The door locked back on its hinge, and the man sprinted away from it. He got about as far as the rear bumper.
The explosion blew off the door, and armor shrapnel nailed the driver in the middle of the back. He hit the concrete on his face, bounced once and didn’t move again.
Thrill Bill jumped in through the doorless opening and unlocked the other doors. The tint was dropping from the windows as Ryan and Nara piled in the back, with Damm in the front passenger seat. With a screech of tires, the warlord reversed the wag, then shot forward around the obstacles.
He seemed to know where he was going, and what he had to do to get there. With the accelerator floored, he slashed across the lanes of traffic, cutting between the speeding wags. Miraculously, Thrill Bill hit only one other wag, smacking its right rear bumper as he swerved past. The impact sent the other vehicle into a lazy slide that turned into a 360, then another, then another. Ryan saw the car slam into a twisted pile of wreckage. As orange flame billowed, Thrill Bill shot up an off-ramp on the right and the finale was lost from view.
The ramp ended in the merging lane of a higher-level freeway. Thrill Bill eased over three lanes to the left and stayed there. The wind through the open doorway was whipping his hair around and making its spikes untwist into long, greasy curls.
“Check that,” Damm said, pointing at a tell-you coming up fast on the right.
Ryan saw his own face again, again enormously enlarged, but this time with the words Find Me. Go In The First Wave!
“FIVE’S getting downright desperate,” Damm said.
“With a reward like that on your head,” Thrill Bill said to Ryan, “maybe you’d better keep it down.”
Ryan slumped lower in his seat.
After another ramp leading upward, and another merger with a higher freeway, Thrill Bill announced, “We’re almost there.”