The oncoming vehicles began to swerve to their right as the drivers saw him cross over the centre line. Not all of them were going to be able to get out of his way. They were restricted by a sidewalk and by the concrete-block wall surrounding a housing development.
The catastrophic twang under the hood was immediately followed by a clattering-pinging-clanking-grinding that instantly escalated into cacophony.
Tommy resisted the powerful urge to stomp the brake pedal flat to the floorboards, which might cast the Corvette into a deadly spin. Instead he eased down on it judiciously. He might as well have stood on the pedal with both feet, because he had no brakes.
None. Nada. Zip. Zero. No stopping power whatsoever.
And the accelerator seemed to be stuck. The car was picking up speed.
“Oh, God, no.”
He wrenched at the steering wheel so forcefully that he felt as though he would dislocate his shoulders. At last the car angled sharply back into the westbound lanes where it belonged.
Over in the eastbound lanes, the wildly sweeping glimmer of headlights on the wet pavement reflected the other drivers’ panic.
Then the Corvette’s steering failed altogether. The wheel spun uselessly through his aching hands.
The ‘vette didn’t arc toward oncoming traffic again, thank God, but shot off the highway, onto the shoulder, kicking up gravel that rattled against the undercarriage.
Tommy let go of the spinning steering wheel before the friction between it and his palms could burn his skin. He shielded his face with his hands.
The car flattened a small highway-department sign, tore through tall grass and low brush, and rocketed off the embankment. It was airborne.
The engine was still screaming, demanding acceleration.
Tommy had the crazy notion that the Corvette would sail on like an aircraft, rising instead of descending, soaring gracefully above a cluster of phoenix palms at the corner of MacArthur and Pacific Coast Highway, then over the businesses and houses that lay in the last couple of blocks before the coast, out across the black waters of the vast Pacific, head-on into the storm, eventually up-up-up and beyond the rain and the turbulence, into a tranquil realm of silence with an eternity of stars above and deep clouds below, with Japan far to the west but growing nearer. If the genie of medicine, Tien Thai, could fly around the world on his own engineless mountain, then surely it was possible to do so even more easily in a Corvette with three hundred horsepower at five thousand rpm.
He had been nearing the end of MacArthur Boulevard when he ramped off the embankment and the drop from the highway was not as drastic here as it would have been if he had lost control just a quarter of a mile earlier. Nevertheless, having been launched at an angle, the car was in the air long enough to tilt slightly to the right; therefore, it came down only on the passenger-side tires, one of which exploded.
The safety harness tightened painfully across Tommy’s chest, cinching the breath out of him. He hadn’t been aware that his mouth was open or that he was screaming, until his teeth clacked together hard enough to crack a walnut
Like Tommy, the big engine stopped screaming on impact too, so as the Corvette rolled, he was able to hear the fearsome and familiar shriek of the mini-kin. The beast’s shrill cry was coming through the heating vents from the engine compartment. Gleeful shrieking.
With a hellish clatter to rival the sound of an 8.0 earthquake shaking through an aluminium-pot factory, the sports car rolled. The laminated glass of the windshield webbed with a million fissures and imploded harmlessly, and the car tumbled through one revolution and started another, whereupon the side windows shattered. The hood buckled with a skreeeeek, started to tear loose, but then was cracked and crunched and twisted and jammed into the engine compartment during the second roll.
With one headlight still aglow, the Corvette finally came to rest on the passenger side, after two and a quarter revolutions. Or maybe it was three. He couldn’t be sure. He was anxious and disoriented and as dizzy as if he had spent the past hour on a roller coaster.