Thunderbird to leave the pavement and regain the lead once that was
lost.
Doyle put his foot down.
The big car surged ahead.
But the stranger in the van, though mad, was not stupid. He had been
expecting that maneuver. He put speed on too, and at least for the
moment, he was able to stay even with Doyle.
Wind roared between the two parallel vehicles as they hurtled westward.
“We’ll outpace him,” Alex said.
Colin did not respond.
The slim speedometer needle climbed smoothly to eighty and then on up to
eighty-five. Doyle glanced at it once. Tense and frightened, Colin
watched it with real dread.
The flat land whipped past them in a shimmering white blur of sand and
heat and free-lying salt.
And the Automover hung in beside them.
“He can’t keep up,” Alex said.
Ninety. Ninety-five . . .
Then, as they were rushing toward a hundred-miles-an-hour, with the wind
whooping between them, the madman pulled his wheel to the right. Not
much. just a little bit. And only for an instant. The whole side of
the Automover made light, brief contact with the full length of the
Thunderbird.
Sparks showered up and skittered like a fall of bright stars across the
windshield in front of Doyle. Tortured sheet metal screamed and coughed
and crumpled up on itself The steering wheel was nearly torn out of
Doyle’s hand. He grappled with it, held on as the car lurched onto the
stone shoulder, kicking up gravel that rattled noisily in the
undercarriage. Their speed fell, and they began a slow sideways turn.
Alex was certain that they were going to plow into the van, which was
still alongside of them. But then the car began to right itself . . .
He took them back onto the highway, touching the gas pedal when he would
have preferred to go with the brakes”You all right?” he asked Colin.
The boy swallowed hard. “Yes.”
“Better hold on, then. We’re going to get the hell out of here,” he
said as the Thunderbird gradually picked up the speed which it had lost,
casting its pale shadow on the side of the Chevrolet.
Doyle risked one quick glance away from the road, looked up at the van’s
side window, which was no more than three or four feet away.
Despite the short distance between them, he could not see the other
driver, not even his silhouette. The man was sitting up higher than
Doyle, on the far side of the cab, and he was very well hidden by the
yellowwhite desert sunlight that played upon the window glass.
Eighty miles an hour again, making up for lost time and for lost ground.
And now on up to eighty-five, with the speedometer needle quivering
slightly. it hesitated on the eighty-five, in fact; for a moment it
looked as if it would stick there, and then it jerked and rose slowly.
Alex watched the Chevrolet out of the corner of his eyes. When he first
sensed it moving in to brush against them a second time, he would take
the car into the stony berm and try to avoid another collision.
They could not tolerate much more of that banging around. Though it was
half again as expensive as the Automover van, the big luxury car would
come apart much sooner and more completely than the Chevrolet.
It would dissolve around them like a flimsy paper construction, roll
over and over like a weightless model, and burn faster than a cardboard
carton.
At ninety miles an hour, the car began to shake badly, making a noise
like stones rolling in the bottom of a washtub. The steering wheel
vibrated furiously in Doyle’s hands.
And then, worse, it started to spin uselessly back and forth.
Doyle eased up on the accelerator, although that was the last thing he
wanted to do.
The needle fell. At eighty-five, the ride was smooth and the car was
under control.
“Something’s broken!” Colin shouted over the roar of the wind and the
two competing engines.
“No. it must have been a section of bad road.”
Though he knew that their luck was not running that way, Alex hoped to