Nothing Sane Happens After Three A.M.
The package delivery route which went near the high school was supposed to be the punishment detail, and -- Annie didn't understand that, especially when she was viewing the peaceful neighborhood through the van's clean windshield at three in the morning. It wasn't exactly a bad area. Solidly middle-class, if she was any judge. And as far as Annie was concerned, having been dealing with both city and job for a whole three weeks made her an expert.
...okay, so she'd heard fragments of weird stories drifting around the loading dock. That wasn't unusual. Three weeks had been more than enough to teach her that the local drivers liked to tell stories, and clearly the best way to top all comers was through the not-so-minor embellishment of facts. Not that she'd gotten close enough to hear the whole of anything yet, and friendships were still a work in progress after the move, but -- well, they had to be kidding around, at least during those moments when they weren't outright lying to each other.
Regional tall tales, in which horses seemed to frequently become involved. Or rather, girls with horse ears. Annie, fresh out of college, was assuming she'd missed some sort of headband-anchored fad. The less frequently mentioned tails just required a local furry community and a little more in the way of glue.
She could definitely say there was a tendency towards talespinning among the drivers. Annie guessed she understood that too. You didn't always expect to find creative types among the ranks, but everyone had to work somewhere -- Annie would know -- and besides, fiction was just about built into the job. Behemoth Retail, as it would happily remind everyone during any possible press opportunity, had started as a bookstore. Additionally, the company was supposed to be so insanely protective of its public image that any employees who kept personal journals about their work experience tended to change a few things. Like names. Their own, the employer, all supervisors, anyone they'd met that day and, just to make sure they were legally in the clear, generally wound up ending all entries with the words Parody Is Protected Speech. From behind the strongest firewall setting they could manage. Just in case.
Because things supposedly happened during deliveries. Stuff which the company really didn't want anyone to talk about, because it had a pretty significant presence in Canterlot and really didn't want to lose the entire employee pool to panic. So you switched up a few details, and that was how you stayed employed. Or so the half-assembled story fragments claimed, and she was sure she was missing the majority of multiple people's first novels...
Annie... hadn't really experienced any of it. Canterlot was a good city to live in. But if you were a delivery driver, it had a few problems. Like the fact that the place seemed to occupy roughly three times the space of any other city. It was as if someone had drawn up urban planning which could host 300% of the current population and when the expected number of residents failed to actually move in, solved the problem through tripling the size of everyone's lawn. The high school itself took up a huge patch of land, and did so through not putting much of anything on most of it.
And when you worked for a company which tracked exactly how long it took to make a delivery -- including going from one stop to another -- and, all too often, seemed to measure by houses passed instead of actual mileage...
There were probably little tricks to getting into the top driver ranks. Annie was hoping to work up the courage necessary for approaching some of the others, because it would potentially help to ask in person and besides, maybe then she could finally hear a complete tall tale. Although... she could have sworn she'd overheard something about not being fully part of the team until you had your own story to tell. There had definitely been a few accidentally-acquired words regarding how she was overdue, but Annie was currently assuming that related to the training.
She didn't really mind the job. Most of the packages were of manageable size. The majority of residents kept their animals under control. Really, when you considered it as a percentage, just about all of the customers were nice. And as an artist who was really just doing this until she found a chance to break through into her real profession, Annie really appreciated the chance to work on her postgraduate photography skills. Because the job came with a Mandatory Phone, and one of the things she had to do with every package was take a picture of it in a state of Being At The Delivery Address. For verification.
So that was exactly what she'd been doing.
Admittedly, there was only so much she could usually try with the shot. It was typically a box or a padded envelope, in front of a door. Or on steps. (She could leave items on steps once in a while, but the package had to be something mid-sized: large enough to be noticed on the way up or down.) And porches existed.
But then she had the houses themselves. There was quite a bit of variety there. Colors, building styles... it all contributed to the framing shots and since those were automatically sent to customers as proof of delivery, she always had an audience for her work!
Even if none of them seemed to appreciate the filters.
Or that one capture from just before she'd been put on the supposed punishment detail. Annie had been truly proud of that. Getting the maddened little dog into the frame had required some awkward angling, especially since it had kept moving. Couldn't claw at the clear barrier while barking its head off in murderous fury if it didn't move. And she'd even picked up some of the spittle as it flew towards the interior window glass.
Annie had mentally labeled that composition as The New American Home. The customer who'd seen the shot pop up in email had unfairly retitled it to That Stupid Delivery Drone (Two-Legged Kind) Scared My Precious Little Poochie. And now Annie had the high school's neighborhood for a while.
Several hours before dawn, on a cool night in late March, when her van was mostly loaded up with perishable purchases which had to be on porches well before sunrise. Looking at unoccupied sidewalks and vacant roads, because hers was the only active vehicle. And the miniature murder mutts were asleep, she wasn't blocking anyone's driveway because no one had to leave their house at this hour, it was peaceful and quiet and she got a clear shot of the stars because the night was pristine and stopping to line everything up for the picture only put her twenty seconds behind schedule. She could make that up.
The punishment detail? This couldn't be it. Sure, the customer had raised a fuss in the office and bringing the dog along had added some barking punctuation to the insanity, but -- if you stayed with Behemoth, then you had to learn every route in the city. She hadn't done this one before. Really, that was probably all it was. She couldn't even view the night shift as someone trying to get back at her: you had to do all of those eventually too.
She pulled the van over to what wasn't quite the last house: simply the final stop in this section before she changed residential neighborhoods. There was a long stretch of mostly-industrial road before she reached the next batch: businesses, a couple of minor factories, and the start of the winding trail which led to the scrapyard -- but someone else had that section. All she had to do was...
Annie found the proper small box among the van's contents. Strengthening legs (working with the benefit of knee wraps and a weight belt) carried her up to the newest porch. She stepped back, took out the Mandatory Phone, arranged a pleasant night piece, managed to get the potted plants into the shot, and then got back in the van. It only took seconds to get everything moving again (all recorded by the onboard computer, which was just looking for an excuse to file a few complaints of its own), and she drove towards the somewhat wider road.
Check traffic. Mirrors. There was no real need for either at this hour, because every examination found naught but empty roads. But she was a good driver.
A pretty, if somewhat too spacious, city. The sort of weather where the van's heater gave her just enough residual warmth upon getting out to reach the vents again in comfort. A job which, while not what she really wanted to do, gave her income, the twinned chances to think and plan, added to -- moments of darkness-blessed peace.
Annie smiled to herself. Checked the mirrors one more time, started the van into the turn --
-- it shouldn't have been that fast.
A photographer had to understand speed. Because photography was about capturing life, and life had this nasty tendency to try and get out of frame before you could snap the lock closed on the light. If you came across a really good collection of utterly still objects? Feel free to paint it. Things which were moving had to be timed, and if you didn't recognize how the timing was supposed to work out...
She never actually saw the approach of the car which hit the van's passenger side. There was barely any audio indication of another engine at work. A split-second of motor, followed by a desperate, almost Doppler-shifted screech of brakes --
-- and then the entire vehicle rocked.
She was jolted against the seatbelt, then felt herself bounce off the seat itself as the van dropped back onto all four wheels. Packages tumbled from internal shelving. Padded envelopes did their best, and occasionally found that was good enough. A sudden electronic wail of distress told her that the van's computer and internal cameras had all just gone offline --
-- a car door openslammed.
That was exactly the right way to describe it. Normally, a door would open and then potentially be slammed shut. The strange overlay of sounds suggested the driver had somehow found a way of doing it all in one motion.
And then her own door was being yanked open -- which happened with a screech of freshly-tormented metal. Nothing about the van had been meant to move that fast.
"Ohmygosh ohmygosh ohmygosh!" the self-censoring teenager gasped. "Are you all right? That's the only important thing! Tell me you're all right! Because if you're not and it's safe to move you, I can have you at the hospital in --"
She said all this while progressively leaning into the driver area, because there was such a thing as Personal Space and surely Emergencies meant that didn't have priority any more. The movement, combined with flickering interior lights and a clear night sky, gave Annie just enough illumination to work with.
The teenager's long hair was a wild prismatic multihued mess: the overall look was of a tornado which had flunked out of stylist school. Clothing mostly suggested that the girl had decided it was three in the morning, no one was gonna see, and so little things like color coordination and fabric matching could go hang. The jacket didn't go with her skin, the pants didn't work with the jacket, and there was nothing in the world which could help the boots. Not even fire, because that didn't solve the problem so much as changing it into a slightly more charred form.
Height was just about dead average. The build was slightly strange. From the waist up, the girl was on the slim side. She didn't have much of a collarbone, and the shoulders felt perilously close to the slender neck. Random clothing grabs had no need to reach towards a bra hanger. In terms of anatomical purpose, the arms existed because it was hard to yank open a door with your toes. Fingers also wove about as the girl talked, drawing strange traceries into the night air. Something always had to be moving.
The lower body suggested that was usually the girl.
What could be seen of those limbs was thick. Powerful. The laces of the ugly boots struggled to contain the calves, and they were losing. From the waist down, the girl looked like a cross between a marathon runner, speed sprinter, and the ultra-rare sort of gym rat who'd decided that every day was going to be Leg Day.
"Say something! I need you to say something! I-don't-know-if-I-can-move-you-if-you-don't --"
And she talked way too fast. Syllables blurred into each other. Diphthongs took one look at what was happening and got out of the area while they still could.
"...I'm okay," Annie judged. Shaken, but she didn't feel as if she'd gotten anything more than a light bruising from the seat belt. "...computer? Alert Code Thunder --"
The van's speakers wailed again, just before the interior GPS screen shut off.
"Just gotta make sure," the teenager quickly said. "Does that usually talk back to you, or are you going to start saying concussion stuff about phasers?"
"Talks back," Annie wearily replied. "That's supposed to send out a notice to the warehouse. Tell them I've been in an accident. If it didn't happen already."
...accident. Three weeks on the job and she'd been in an accident. But it hadn't been her fault. She'd checked. Twice. No cars had been on the approach. So the girl must have --
-- the packages...
No. She was okay. It was one of the few things Behemoth understood. If you got into an accident, then you were off the clock. If the computer had sent the alert, then there would be extra vans on the way: unload hers, redistribute some of the load, and get the orders to the customers. She couldn't get fired for something which had truly been no fault of her own, and if she wasn't hurt...
Shaky fingers, stronger than those of the teenager, carefully unfastened the seat belt.
The van's engine made an odd noise: something far removed from a sluggish piston, much closer to what was almost a low mechanical growl. The driver, aware that the damage could be spreading, instinctively turned the engine off.
"Clear the door?" Annie asked, and the teenager leaned back so quickly as to present the illusion that no one had ever been in the way. The recent college graduate got out, tested legs which were vibrating a little too much for comfort, walked around the van with the girl following her closely...
The teenager had been driving an antique: one which wasn't going to get much older. It was a car from the era where war-returned drivers had recently been piloting tanks and wanted to deal with something which had roughly the same durability, mass, and possibly quality of steering. It was the sort of vehicle which generally met with one of three endings: no replacement parts available, minor short somewhere in the electrical system which couldn't be located, or direct nuclear strike. Most of what the accident had done to that car was add a few extra dents, crack one headlight, scuff more paint, and possibly improve the radio reception because the Actual Antenna had visibly been knocked into a better alignment.
The impacting car had either rebounded slightly or been knocked backwards when the van had rocked back into position. Either way, there was enough clearance to walk between the vehicles and so Annie, using the headlights from the other car, got a good look at the damage.
The van's side door was just about caved in. The top of the sliding track was still more or less flush, but -- there were little flares of metal at the outer edges. Possible jam points. Which meant very little when compared to the fact that the center of the door was about a foot closer to being inside the van. This had mostly pulled the metal away from the bottom of the track, and there was a thigh-sized gap against the back edge.
"Hey!" the girl abruptly said. "You're a Behemoth driver!"
The logo, even when partially crumpled, remained unmistakable. "Yeah. So?"
"Can I get a look in there?"
Annie blinked.
"You want to what?
"Because I've got a wishlist," the girl quickly continued. "It's public. I put stuff I want on it. Want and can't afford just yet. But I set it up so that when someone buys me something off it, I don't get told what it was. Just that something's on the way. Because surprises are great! Even if waiting for them sucks. Anyway, I got a notice two nights ago and the whatever hasn't shown up yet, so I thought maybe if I just got back there and checked for my address..."
Annie simply looked at the girl, then silently folded her arms.
"It won't take long," the teen said. "I'm a really great speed-sorter. You should totally hire me. And besides, someone should really check in there. In case anything came out through that one gap. You don't want anyone's stuff lost, right? Especially mine."
The driver automatically checked the road. No packages appeared to have fallen out.
Annie sighed.
"What happened?"
The girl, who had followed her around the larger vehicle, awkwardly shuffled her feet. Large soles repeatedly scraped at the asphalt.
"You mean how I hit you?"
Well, at least the girl had admitted fault. "Yeah."
"So I've got this friend," the teenager said.
Annie automatically checked the old car's passenger seat --
"-- not with me!" the student hastily declared. "She's the one with the car. Um. Who had the car. She got it from a relative who didn't need it any more. Something happened, and... she decided she wasn't going to drive it herself. It's been through a lot. And the seats kind of smell like apples. Don't tell her I said that."
Automatically, "Don't tell who --"
"-- anyway, she sold it." Both hands went behind the back as eyes narrowed. "Just not to any of us! She said it cost too much for anyone to maintain, it's been used too much for collectors, and she didn't want us getting stuck with the bills! And that's when I totally could have asked my parents to..."
Which was when both females became aware that Annie was staring. The teenager just didn't seem to care.
"She sold it to the scrapyard!" emerged as a protest. "She said it was fair value, and it was easier than taking the whole car apart and selling off bits by themselves! But the scrap people were supposed to come out to her house and pick it up. They didn't. They postponed four times. And I finally said I'd drive it over for her, they agreed to leave the check in a little envelope at the gate, but I got caught up in some stuff and by the time I remembered..."
Magenta eyes briefly regarded the clear night sky with fully-undeserved frustration.
"I went out to her place," the girl said. "The car was left out for me. So I was just driving it to the scrapyard. To leave it there. It was the last ride." And her right hand reached out, gently patted the hood. "So I just thought... I'd give it one more run. We were almost at the scrapyard, too."
I don't remember passing that car in any of the local driveways.
"I didn't see you," Annie said.
The girl's feet shuffled again.
"Last ride," the teenager repeated. "I thought -- it would be nice if the car got to really open up one more time. And it's really late right now. So late that it's early. No one's on the road. I made sure. So I... gave it some speed. I just didn't think you were gonna be there." A little more softly, "Maybe I shouldn't do that again. You're okay, but... and if it had been a cat or something, I'd never hear the end of it and she'd probably never stop crying..."
The girl briefly frowned.
"Different she," the teenager added. "You haven't met. That I know about. But I'm sorry. I hit the brakes as soon as I saw you. I... just couldn't get it stopped in time."
Annie looked around. At the empty night, and the long, vacant road.
No one else out right now.
My lights would have been visible for...
"How fast were you going?" This question seemed crucial.
The foot shuffling visibly accelerated.
"I don't know."
"You don't --" was as far as Annie got.
"I gave it some speed," the teenager huffily said. "I can do that. Or I found out I can do that. Recently. It's not easy. But it doesn't exactly show up on the --"
Stopped. Blinked. Her hands came around to the front of her stomach, briefly wrung against each other.
"That's a weird look on your door," the girl added. "Did you notice? It's kind of like a face. With one eye open and the other one winking. Evilly. And I think my radiator grille gave your car some teeth. So you've got an evil face which smiles. With evil."
Annie looked it over.
I can see that...
The Mandatory Phone came out. The area was examined for lighting. Filters were applied, and the shot got taken.
"What was that for?" the girl asked.
"Insurance," Annie technically didn't lie. The company would take their own pictures, but they would always accept something from the scene. Even if no one ever said anything about her composition... "So we'd better get to it. Can I see your paperwork? Before the cops show up." Not that they were likely to do so unless one of the females called them, or they drove through by sheer accident. Any distress signal the computer might have sent off before demise would have gone to the warehouse.
"Paperwork?" was, perhaps, a little too confused.
"Proof of insurance," Annie patiently explained. "I'm not going to be directly involved in any settlement, though." Since she wasn't hurt and frankly, if it had even been a minor cut situation, saying she wasn't hurt was far easier than filling out the associated forms for a company bandage. "Just grab it out of your purse. Or the glove compartment. Wherever it is --"
Feet were now shuffling at a rate which seemed to produce blur.
"-- I don't have insurance," said the girl.
The driver's jaw clenched.
Because it was her friend's car and that friend called for a pickup, so she would have taken it off the insurance policy. Doesn't matter if the car had third-party. This one obviously doesn't have a policy which covers whatever she's driving.
"Driver's license," Annie tried. "We've got to exchange information --"
Much more softly, "-- I don't have one of those either."
"You don't what --"
"-- I know how to drive!" the girl defensively shouted. "I had all the classes! I just didn't get to take my test! I've kinda had a lot of stuff going on for the last year, and it was just easier to get everywhere on foot! Most of the time. Because I couldn't fly. Again, most of the time. And once I could really run, then doing everything on foot was just easier! And a lot cheaper than a car." She briefly thought that over. "Except for the shoes. I go through a lot of shoes. But every one of my friends knows I can drive, and I guess when I offered to bring the car over, she just thought... I'd picked up my license already."
The van's engine made a sound: a sort of low, mechanical, angry growl. Annie sympathized. She had something similar developing at the back of her own throat.
This girl... thought the recent college graduate. This kid...
"No cops on the road," the teenager pointed out. "I figured I was okay as long as I just did all of the signal stuff. But then I saw that long open stretch, I thought about how it was the car's last ride, and I -- gave it some speed." Almost desperate now, "I swear I hit the brakes as soon as I saw you! The car just isn't as fast as my reflexes! I just about had my foot through the floor and I couldn't get it stopped in time...!"
Her head went down and when it finally raised again, moonlight reflected from damp eyes.
"You won't tell, will you?" she softly asked. "About the paperwork stuff. I can get it all straightened out. I swear. I just need some time." Decibels dropped away. "And I... screwed up. I know that. But I won't do it again. I promise. Maybe... I... my friend's car is still going, maybe if you just told everyone that it was a hit-and-run and... the driver fled the scene... I..."
The teen swallowed. Most of the terror got caught as a lump about halfway down.
"That was a stupid idea," the girl said. "It's -- not responsible. It's running away from problems. Or driving. I shouldn't..." And stopped, all at once, as nearly every part of her body ceased movement.
Nearly. The mouth was still going.
"What do you want to do?" the girl's fear asked. And waited.
The van's engine let off a low-pitched rumble of fuel-driven anger. Annie, who was still trying to figure out exactly how exasperated to be, reminded herself to shut the whole thing down before anything else went wrong --
-- the girl looked all the way up. Her gaze went over Annie's left shoulder.
"Your van," the teenager said with a rather odd placidity, "is growling at us."
I need to kill the engine pushed its way through confusion, mild shock, and growing rage.
Then she remembered that she'd already done that.
She turned. Looked directly at the larger vehicle.
And then the van's single open eye -- the configuration produced by dents, shadows, and transferred dirt -- narrowed.
Phantom, mostly two-dimensional teeth had slightly parted. There was no gap behind them, not even the interior of the van and a view of scattered packages. Just more metal. Nothing which was actually capable of biting, much less swallowing -- which didn't seem to matter, because the intent was clearly there.
There was one more growl, as the single eye stared them down. And then four wheels rotated as the steering wheel turned of its own accord, pushed against their mountings,nearly breaking the axles as they tried to face sideways. The entire van lurched and its former driver, frozen in the warped face of the impossible, could do nothing more than wait for the next impact --
-- it shouldn't have been that fast.
Slender fingers gripped her waist. There was another lurch: roughly vertical, no more than an inch or two: the teenager was likely doing just about all of the lifting with her legs. But the arms had a job, and this couldn't be kept up for long...
...the world blurred.
The van's sneering face slid off to one side. Annie's shoes hit the blacktop several times in rapid stuttering succession, with each producing a jolt to her spine. Then she was next to the old car, the passenger door openslammed --
-- her head hurt. So did her back and knees, because the girl had given up on the normal rate at which humans sat down and adjusted Annie's position manually. The fresh windburn sensation on the delivery driver's face had probably been produced by the seat belt.
The teenager was now behind the wheel. And the light blue hands put the car in gear, the entire thing seemed to leap backwards, and then they were driving in reverse at an ever-increasing rate, putting some distance between older vehicle and van --
-- it shouldn't have been that fast. Even if she'd been able to move... scrambling for the car, getting in, all of it -- at least half a minute, especially with the girl needing to race around to the other side in order to drive.
It shouldn't have been that fast.
But it hadn't been fast enough.
The van screamed, and did so with a sound like pistons exploding from an engine block. Reoriented its tires, and gunned the engine.
The chase was on.
Overnight Delivery Of The Fates
The car seats did smell somewhat like apples, accompanied by a hint of mulling spices.
Annie's manually-adjusted position had her partially looking at the ancient dashboard. It was a riot of glass-faced dials and gauges, all of which had physical numbers and needles because the car had emerged (or escaped) from an era where anyone who used the term 'digital' in public was presumably an accountant and probably needed to stop. She had a direct view of the speedometer, and what that told her was that the car also accelerated like a tank. The girl had floored the pedal: an act which was having very little effect on how fast they were actually moving.
Of course, they were also moving in reverse. That probably did something to limit the top speed.
Also, they were being chased by a Behemoth delivery van. One which didn't have a driver.
This, when compared to all other events (including whatever had happened to put Annie in the car), seemed to be somewhat important.
The van growled. The delivery driver's dazed mind wondered if the sound represented a protest over having been dropped down the sensory information priority ranks. And when it came to how the thing was moving...
"Come on," the teenager chanted to herself as slim fingers tightened around the dense rim of the steering wheel and magenta eyes flickered between windshield and mirrors. "Come on, come on, comeon comeon comeoncomeoncomeon, just need an empty driveway, just one..."
Houses didn't flash by: they weren't moving fast enough for that and besides, there was a lot of lawn to pass on each. But each side-stretch of visible blacktop was occupied --
-- the universe gave the girl what she wanted. The old car entered a smooth backwards turn, got into the empty driveway, slowed just enough to allow a gear change without completely destroying the transmission, and then shot forward, escaping about two hundred feet before the delivery van would have caught up.
So she can drive. It wasn't much of a comfort. There was some natural talent there, but whatever skills the teenager possessed hadn't seen much practice. The driveway had worked out, but she clearly wasn't up to trying a bootlegger reverse. And when it came to the chase...
The scheduled-for-scrap car was old and had just been in an accident. It was trying, but nothing about it had really been meant for speed in the first place and the era where it could have managed a non-casual ninety was several generations back. And the van had been in the same collision, plus it wasn't acting --
-- normal.
And that was when Annie briefly managed to look past the 'driving itself' part.
It was having trouble accelerating too. Some of that was likely from the recent damage, and the rest could probably be put down to the driving technique. And not just from the lack of driver, which really didn't seem to be any kind of problem. The orientation, however...
Annie forced her head to turn, looked backwards past and over the huge plush seats. The van growled, and streetlights glinted off exposed bare metal patches in the false teeth.
Fast-numbing hands fumbled in pockets. The Mandatory Phone emerged.
The girl spotted it. (She was very attuned to movement.) "What are you doing?" emerged with unexpected sharpness.
Annie wasn't really paying attention. There were other priorities.
Isn't there supposed to be some kind of squeeze code? You held the phone so tightly as to press down on multiple scant buttons at once. Or maybe all the buttons. And that was the signal, and the phone would do the rest by itself. But she couldn't seem to remember how it was triggered, and now her hands were starting to shake --
-- it didn't matter. It was only three numbers, and a lifetime of cultural training meant there was no effort required to remember what they were.
She jabbed a finger at the screen. The keypad came up.
9-1 --
-- a blue hand swatted at the phone, knocking it out of Annie's uncertain grip and onto the roiling fabric ridges of the seat.
"Don't call the cops!" the girl half-shouted. "They can't handle this!" And got that out as the younger female put the car through a turn. The van managed to follow. It wasn't doing too badly on the turns. Straight lines, however...
"...what?" Annie gasped. "We need help! That thing is --"
-- what?
What is it?
What's happening...
"-- it's after us!" the girl declared. "We don't want to give it any extra targets! That's why I'm trying to get us out of the residential sections! If we lure it out of town, we'll have more options!"
"But the police could --"
"-- shoot at it," the girl firmly stated. "That's most of what they do until they get a chance to think. Shooting a van doesn't do much unless you hit it in the right place. And I already hit that one, and it wasn't enough. Bullets don't do enough and most cops don't think that fast. Which doesn't even matter half the time, because you can't think about this stuff too much if you're gonna beat it at all. You just have to react."
Another turn: one which took several seconds to get past the property because they were going around the corner for the sort of McMansion which felt that wealth meant occupying most of a block while using just about none of it. Annie hated those. They never let vans past the gaudily-decorated gates and you had to walk up the whole stupid driveway --
-- the van's front fender grazed a portion of wrought iron and in doing so, proved it to be some rather well-painted composite. Sections of false value flew all over the street.
The girl had now hunched the slender upper torso over the steering wheel, almost leaning her weight into it. The tip of a slightly-pointed tongue briefly emerged from between tight-pressed lips, tested the air before retreating. She appeared to be concentrating on something.
"And I've gotta fix this without getting anyone hurt," she firmly said. And then, with just a little too much of the verbal swagger from self-congratulations, because clearly she'd just been brilliant: "Even though it's your fault."
Annie didn't bother with a blink. She was alternating between checking van, road, and girl. Blinking meant missing something. She just went right for the crucial sentence.
"My fault?"
"It's your van!" the younger female determined. "So it's your rogue AI!"
"My WHAT?"
"The egghead said those could wind up really mean without supervision!" the girl verbally accelerated into the speed of non-genius. "Guess she was right! This one must have read a bunch of angry Behemoth reviews! And now it wants revenge."
"The company doesn't use much in the vans," Annie said, as a distant part of her mind wondered why she was bothering to argue the point when there was a presumed-homicidal animated multi-ton mass of metal and attitude trying to catch up with them. "It's more about using AI to predict what customers want." And rumors said that getting legal permission for the AI to make that purchase on the customer's behalf (because surely they would have done that themselves anyway) was kind of complicated: therefore, AI was currently semi-useless. "It's not advanced enough!"
"You're the one who said it could call for help!" the girl quasi-paraphrased. "So once it can do the one thing..."
Annie looked out the back window. Gauged how far back the van was, estimated the minimum time until it could catch up, decided she had enough to work with, and then looked directly at the girl before folding her own arms across a decidedly less minimal chest.
The slim torso slumped. The steering wheel was now providing most of the physical support. Judging from the half-twisted look of confessional distress on the girl's face, the emotional support seemed to be lacking.
The next two words were far too soft. Strained, as if it had taken nearly all of the girl's strength to make them emerge at all.
"...it's magic."
They were also completely sincere.
"WHAT?"
"It's a long story!" brought nearly all of the decibels back. "I can't exactly tell it right now! All you've gotta know is that there's a place out there which has magic. The real stuff. Some of it got stuck over here, and some more leaked. So sometimes things happen, and there's a bunch of us who watch out for all of it --"
The supposedly-rational part of Annie's brain wanted to question all of it. Deny. Berate. Disprove.
The section which was rather more in tune with current events calmly pointed out that there was an animated delivery van chasing them. Roughly about a hundred and fifty feet back now, and what the wheels were doing...
Annie's 'rational' thoughts gave the medulla a disgruntled kick, then wandered off to the back of the skull and muttered to themselves for a while. The creative portion of her brain decided to just accept it for a time, and did so while survival instincts firmly grabbed the controls and hung on for dear life.
Unfortunately, memory got a word in.
"So only magic can defeat magic?"
"That," the girl immediately decided, "sounds really old."
"...what?"
"Like something an old person would say," the student continued, and managed to do so while adding a dismissive tone in the middle of a car chase. "Or picked up from an old movie. Or an old show. Old stuff."
"It doesn't matter when it came out!" protested the graduate (who was slightly younger than the series). "Or how old the character was! We've got it on our streaming service! Anyone can see it any time, as long as they renew their premium membership every year --"
"-- so it's way old," the girl casually interrupted, and then her hands rotated the steering wheel through another turn --
-- limbs almost blurred. The wheel's gears squealed, and the hint of blur vanished as the girl winced.
"Anyway, it's not like that," she continued as the very last dark house began to drop away in the rearview's reflection. "You can beat magic with science. Or magic. Sometimes it's explosions. Or hitting it in the face a few hundred times, when it has a face. Or talking to people until they figure out that being forgotten was pretty much the worst thing ever and they never should have started on that in the first place. It depends on the magic, and who's got it. Or what. Sometimes you can sort of wake them up, and then maybe they become your friends. But it's probably magic most of the time, since we're all trying to use our own magic on it --"
The girl stopped talking. An indigo flush blazed its way into light blue cheeks.
There were tall trees on both sides of the road now, and the two-lane path was starting to slant towards the vertical. Canterlot was built into a plateau on the side of a mountain: not as high up as Denver, but advanced enough in altitude so that those who moved there had to spend their first week in relearning how to breathe. They were firmly out of the residential sections, and weren't all that far from completely leaving the city borders behind.
Annie was going to need a few extra seconds before she started caring about any of that.
"...your what?" asked what, under the circumstances, was still a far-too-soft voice.
"Um," the blushing girl explained. "Some of the magic... stuck..."
"Your what?"
"...I've got speed," the local softly said, and did so as the blush deepened towards violet. "I can run really fast. Or fly, if I've got wings and I usually don't. That takes extra and I can't really do it by myself. Not all the time, not when I want to. But I can just about always run."
The jolts.
The windburn.
A body which couldn't move that fast, being forced to accompany one which was...
"And I was trying to figure out if there was anything else in there, for what I could try to use," the girl said. "Because I've got this one friend who's strong, but she can't move fast enough to get everyone to safety when something goes wrong. And I can, but I... can't carry much. Not for long."
Annie, with a growling, magically-powered homicidal delivery van trying to catch up to them along a steadily-darkening, increasingly-slanted road -- did the hardest thing, and listened.
"So I've been playing around with my magic," the girl softly went on, almost drowned out by the noises produced from a pair of straining motors -- but still audible. "Testing ideas. And I -- gave the car some speed. Because I figured out I can do that a few days ago, and I hadn't tried it with a car yet. Maybe I can't carry a lot for evacuations, but if I can load up a bus with people and get it to move..."
last ride
really got to open up one more time
The girl had -- put magic into the old car. Accelerating it to the point where it could effectively appear from nowhere along what had once been an empty road. And then she'd seen the van, tried to slam the brakes...
...wait...
"Do it again!" Annie yelped.
The girl wasted precious time on blinking, and the van strained that much closer.
"Do what?"
"Give the car speed! We can lose the van in --"
"-- I can't!"
"You just did --"
"-- SOMEONE COULD DIE!"
It should have been followed by a moment of near-perfect silence. Faint echoes of the virtual scream bouncing around the car, and perhaps fading into the thickening woods. The whining of the two engines ruined it.
"...I couldn't get the car stopped in time," the girl forced out. "I can give it speed. But the parts aren't made for it. You heard that with the steering wheel just now when I tried the fast turn, right? The brakes sure aren't designed for what I can do. When I stopped powering the car, the speed didn't just vanish. It had to bleed off normally. I didn't try to wrench off to the side when I saw your van because I was afraid I'd go through a house. And I could do it again. Give the car some speed. Lose the van. And if I saw an obstacle coming up out of nowhere, then my reflexes are good -- but the car won't respond. Fast as we're going right now, if we saw something in the road, anything, someone, I could try to get it stopped. If I push it..."
The multihued hair tumbled about, framing the hard head shake.
"And you're here," she added, as knuckles whitened and the steering wheel grip became ever-tighter. "I could get away any time. Leave the car and run. But I can't carry you. I'm not leaving you behind, not even if we figure out how to swap drivers without stopping. So it's us in the car, trying to get away with the car. Because..." and fairly good features twisted across the self-loathing wince "...I can't think of anything else..."
She made a mistake.
She's learned from it and she doesn't want to repeat anything in case that makes things worse.
It was perfectly understandable. It just had a good chance to get them both killed.
And the pursuit moved deeper into the darkening night, as trees blocked out more of the moon's radiance.
"You've got friends with their own magic? Can they help?"
"They'd have to catch up with us," the girl groaned. "They can't. Not with that old pickup and the stupid scooter."
Annie recovered her phone from the seat, just in case. Someone would have to call.
"You put magic into this car," she said.
"I said that --"
"-- transferred magic," Annie added, because supposed rationality was taking a holiday and that meant basic common sense currently had the floor.
"Yeah..."
"And you stopped powering it when you saw my van. But some of the magic might have still been in the car. So when you hit me... it transferred again, right? Into the van. And that's what did this."
"Oh, sure," the girl muttered. "Make it all my fault..."
Annie twisted on the seat, looked out the back window again. Watched headlights illuminate roughly half of the trees.
"Why is it doing that?"
"Doing what?" the now-irritated girl demanded. "Watching the road here!"
"It's still trying to drive sideways. That was just the fastest way to hit me --" us? "-- when we were both standing near the door, but it could go faster if it just pointed its wheels in the right direction --"
I hope it didn't hear me.
...it wouldn't have heard me over the engines. Enclosed car and too much noise.
...
...I just hoped a van didn't overhear me.
"The eye," the teen pointed out, "is only on that one side. It's trying to make sure it can see us."
Several seconds passed.
"Why doesn't it just look out of the headlights?" said what technically wasn't the slightest hint of insanity.
"That," the girl instantly countered, "is a fallacy."
"...huh?"
"You're personifying the inanimate," delivered an equally-transferred lecture. "Giving it human attributes! Headlights are up front, so they have to be eyes, is that it? That's just the position. They don't work that way! There's this word the egghead used..." The briefest of pauses. "Native egghead. Not the import. Not that it matters, since you haven't met either one. That I know about."
"Look --" got no further than that.
"-- I've almost got the stupid word, let me think..." Features twisted again, this time with concentration. "Pareidolia! That's the word for seeing faces in stuff! Like the old kinds of power outlets, clouds, and the front of cars! She said something in the brain wants patterns, so it sort of puts them everywhere. You're totally doing pareidolia right now."
...who is this girl?
('What' seemed cruel.)
"Anyway, I hit the side and gave it an eye." With more than a hint of grumble, "Since this is apparently all my fault... But it's got an eye now. A magic one. That's what it sees out of. Sideways."
Annie, rather than deal with a sudden influx of vocabulary, checked on the position of the van again. Brought up the phone, because the trees made for an interesting background arrangement --
-- a hint of white and orange was visible at the door's edge gap.
Then there was more color. Envelope-shaped color.
That's going to fall --
-- the van's mostly-sideways tires did a complicated sort of shuffle. The envelope, which had been an instant away from dropping into the road, slid back into the cargo section. And the phantom dirt lips produced by the magical impact briefly warped into something which was almost --
-- a smile...
Annie stared.
She turned just enough to check the old car's speedometer. Looked back again --
"-- it's the limiter!" the delivery driver shouted. "It's at the limit!"
"The what?" asked the teenager.
"It's the speed limit! The company put a choker on the vans! We can't go faster than that!"
This time, the girl blinked.
"That's mean," the open offense decided. "Forcing people to go slow. And it means that if you're running behind on a delivery, you can't make it up easily. How do they do that?"
"Varies by the model -- I think," Annie admitted. "I'm not sure." Only three weeks on the job, and this was how it, and her life, might end --
-- except the limiter was somehow in play.
"Most of them are code cutoffs," she decided, mentally reviewing every half-heard loading area discussion on the aggravating topic. "Some of the oldest vans might have the engines rigged. But this one's newer. We're not allowed to go over the maximum speed limit in the state. If we try to push, the computer reports it."
"What happens if someone's coming up from behind you way too fast?" asked the girl who would probably be doing that several thousand times.
"You try to get over."
"If it's just the one lane --"
"-- then too bad." And some of the drivers had route times which suggested they'd found a way to disable the limiter, but that was presumably the sort of thing you got taught after you had a few friends. Maybe four weeks in. "But it's at the limit. It may not be able to go any faster than this."
"It's magic now," the girl unnecessarily pointed out. "It could change its mind..."
"I'm not sure," Annie's reeling thoughts pushed out. "I just saw it try to save a package from falling out --"
"-- did you see the delivery address?" the teenager eagerly asked. "Was it mine?"
"-- and that means it's trying to follow company rules. Maybe it can't go faster. But --"
She looked at the girl --
-- who shook her head.
"I've got it floored," she said. "Something in the engine isn't working all the way right."
Which left them about a hundred and fifty feet apart. Assuming perfect driving and that neither party ran out of power --
-- Annie looked at the car's fuel reading. Then she wished she hadn't.
"Last run to the scrapyard," she said. "That was as far as this car was supposed to go."
"...yeah," the teenager tried.
"So your friend drained most of the tank."
Light blue skin did its best to pale.
"Oh, no..." the girl half-whispered. "I already went about --" magenta eyes darted to the odometer, then came back up in shame "-- we don't have a lot of range left. We're gonna run out. You're not supposed to have range anxiety on gas. That's part of why I wanted to get this car. I know it's old and slow, but stuff can be modded. And you don't get stuck waiting at charging stations --"
They seemed to be getting off-topic.
"How far can we still go?" Annie urgently asked.
"Uphill?" The snort wasn't just unladylike: it was purposefully so and wanted to beat up anyone who felt it had been even slightly moderated. "A few miles. Tops. And the slope's getting worse."
It was. The road was steadily tilting up, heading towards the rock and patchwork soil of the mountain's peak.
"Try to pull over into the woods," the college graduate desperately suggested. "We can get out and go through the trees. The van can't deal with the narrow spaces. I'll hide, and you go for your friends --"
-- which was when they cleared the treeline.
Annie half-morosely turned, looked not so much at chasing van as fading greenery. The sides of the road now offered two options. One was a patchwork of exposed soil and bare rock, all tilting up. The other had more of the same, but you couldn't go too far in that direction because once you ran out of Right, the only option left became Down.
"That was a pretty good idea," the girl miserably decided. "Wish you'd had it four minutes ago. But it doesn't matter. I can't just leave you. You saw that one really old horror movie, right? Where the car just kept coming, even if there were trees in the way, and it could sort of repair itself --"
"-- the van's not looking any better --"
"-- and it could push through some trees, or knock the small ones down." And two fingernails, put through excess pressure, broke themselves against the steering wheel to no teenager notice whatsoever. "I'm not leaving you."
She cares.
She's trying to be responsible. To do whatever it takes to make sure I get out of this.
It's like it's part of her name...
They only had a few miles before that stopped mattering.
Annie had another thought.
"What if you did?"
All things considered, the startled "Huh?" was a perfectly reasonable response.
"What if you left me? if it's only after you?" Her brain seemed to be accelerating into a gear which perhaps only the girl's feet could match. "We were both standing near the door. I was just closer --"
With open confusion, "-- why would it just be after me?"
"You hit me! It!"
"Which brought it to life," the girl muttered. "You'd think it would be more grateful."
Annie briefly considered the current state of the world. Then she thought about how she would have reacted to having been dragged into it against her will --
-- probably just a grudge.
There was even a certain degree of precedent. If you were human and you had a doctor who'd believed in the classics, then the sequence worked like this: you were born, and then someone hit you. The van had just gone through the experience in the wrong order.
And it could hit back.
It was also a Behemoth van. Taking kindly to those who interfered with delivery times was probably out of the question.
"What I'm trying to say," Annie attempted, "is that if we found any place where I could get out, and it was only chasing you -- how fast can you run? If you ditched the car --"
"-- what if it's trying to get you back?" the teenager immediately countered. "It might think it needs a driver to -- um..." A frustrated puff of air from a lower lip failed to undo any tornado damage to the hair. "...I don't know..."
Darkly, "It's doing pretty well without me."
"...be complete?" the girl proposed.
"And how," a touch of sarcasm inquired, "would it manage that?"
"Dunno. Eats you?"
"...oh."
"I," the teenager firmly declared, "am not taking that chance. Magic's weird."
They were still going up the mountain, and up. The main effect was to remove any and all options of escaping to the right. For starters, you had a thick metal guardrail. And then you had Cliff. The higher they got, the more sheer Cliff became. Too much more ascent and they would have the option to reach Canterlot the fast way. Once.
Or they could just run out of fuel --
-- the girl, whose foot had not lifted an inch from the gas pedal, checked the mirrors.
"It's dropping back," said a voice of low astonishment.
Annie immediately looked.
A hundred and fifty feet had become a hundred and eighty. Two hundred. Two-twenty, as side-tilted wheels strained and Annie heard the other engine starting to whine...
"It's a loaded van!" she exclaimed. "It's like a truck! It doesn't have the same kind of power on slopes! The older drivers complain all the time!"
"It's losing speed..." the girl just barely breathed -- and then frowned. "Is this like that other movie?"
"What movie?" Annie asked the teenager.
Who seemed to be allergic to titles. "Old. Way old. I'm not sure it's that far past whenever color got discovered. From the guy who did the slightly less old one about dinosaurs." Briefly, and visibly, considered that. "Special effects kind of hold up. Not sure how he figured out what colors they all were."
"Are you trying to joke right now --"
"-- but it's about a truck trying to kill a car. Or the driver is trying to kill the other guy, but you mostly see the truck --"
"-- why are you squinting at the rearview?"
"Your van's sideways," the teen matter-of-factly said. "Makes it hard to see the license plates. I was trying to see if there was any extra out-of-state stuff. That would mean it's killed before."
"...what?"
The smoothness with which the query was ignored suggested the girl got that question a lot. "But the car found an uphill. It was trying to pick up distance that way. Except it had an engine problem, and if it pushed too hard, it was going to blow out. The driver got stuck at the summit, and the truck caught up. That was right near the end."
"Who won?" asked Annie's morbid curiosity. She was still watching the van slip backwards. Nearly a football field's worth of road now...
"Driver. The car's driver."
"How?"
The girl told her.
Place yourself near a cliff, so that the truck has to drive towards the edge to get you. Once it starts coming, aim the car directly at the truck, then jump out before impact. The car catches fire when it hits and the truck's driver, blinded by flames and fear, can't stop in time. The truck goes over the edge...
"We can't do that," she said.
"No," the teenager admitted. "This car's got a lot of problems, but catching on fire isn't one of them. Diving out before the hit, though -- hey! It's really dropping back! It's -- slowing down..."
We're going to make it.
We're going to make it.
We're --
-- the car's engine sputtered. Nearly died, as the fuel needle swung into the red and both females instinctively began to rock back and forth, trying to will the vehicle forward --
-- something in the tubing coughed, and the indicator came back up. Just a sliver. Enough to keep the whole thing moving.
But the van...
...slowed.
The eye glared at them. False teeth gnashed.
"It knows it can't get us," the girl breathed. "I think -- I think it's giving up..."
And the van began to turn. Using the two lanes and minimal shoulder to give itself enough space to work with, until the reversal had that false face pointing downhill. Back towards the city.
The engine rumbled, and something about that sounded -- angry.
Frustrated.
Looking for something to take the frustration out on.
And then it drove away. (Still mostly sideways.)
The last of the Behemoth colors vanished around a mountain curve.
The girl looked at the fuel indicator again. Slowly, reluctantly lifted her foot from the gas pedal, then started to apply brakes. The remaining momentum was carefully directed towards the minimal right shoulder (the road's, not her own) and as soon as the car was stopped, she turned the ignition off.
Both females looked at other. Two hands reached for separate door grips.
They got out, under the clear and cool night sky. Listened.
There was an engine out there. One which was becoming steadily more distant.
"It did give up," Annie managed to breathe. "We outlasted it. We won..."
She wanted to drop to her knees. To kiss the ground, even when said ground was frankly way too high up and in close proximity to an inadequate guard rail. And then get a picture of any lip imprint in the dirt. For the art of it.
But the girl was frowning.
"It still sounded mad," she decided. "Really mad."
"But we're okay --" She almost wanted to hug the girl. (Kissing was right out. Not her type, not her preference and, just to mention, underage.)
The teenager looked directly at her, and the magenta eyes were wide at the edges with poorly-repressed fear.
"Who's it going to take the mad out on?"
Which was when they heard the horn.
Behemoth drives weren't supposed to use the horn too often. Frequent use got you written up. A polite, near-phantom presence: that was the ideal. Why, those packages had probably delivered themselves...
But it was the van's horn. Annie recognized the tones. It just usually didn't get anywhere near that loud. Or sound so much like...
"It's laughing," the girl softly decided. "It's decided to hurt someone else instead of us, hasn't it? And it's laughing..."
This didn't feel like a particularly unreasonable confusion.
"Can you run fast enough to catch up to it?" Annie asked.
"More than!" the girl's surging confidence instantly declared (with accompanying gestures) -- and then slumped, at the same time as most of her spine. "But what do I do once I'm there? Trying to get in might be a bad idea. We don't know how much of the van is still -- van. Or what it can do with the interior. I could try to drive it once I'm inside, but if it overrides me... And I don't have the tools to take it apart while it's moving, I don't know how. And I can hit it a hundred times, but it's metal. I'd break my hands by the third."
"Your friends?" Getting desperate now.
"I can get them. But it'll take too long. The van will be back in the city before I can put us all together. We've got to stop it before it reaches people. Even another car on the road..."
The gestures slowed. Moved in on each other, and hands wrung.
"I can try," the teen said. "I always try. But all I've got is speed. Sometimes I can figure out how to make that work. I can't right now, and the egghead isn't here. How do you beat a van when all you've got is speed?"
A photographer had to understand speed.
The timing of movements.
Acceleration.
Force...
Annie looked at the old car. The road. Up led to safety. A really long walk after the call to the company where she would just quit, but -- safety. Leave Canterlot. Abandon the madness.
Madness, twinned with magic, probably made for some really interesting shots.
She gave the battered antique vehicle one more moment of regard.
Then she got in.
"What are you --" the girl started.
"I don't know how your magic works," Annie stated. "But I'm a photography major --"
"Then get my good side," was also fearful, and thus a little sarcastic.
"-- and when you work with light and movement all the time... it can really help to have a minor in physics."
The teenager blinked. Then she grinned.
"You're an egghead?"
"And you're talking about other things being old? Who else is still using that word --"
"-- and you've been one this whole time? I need eggheads! You can't have a good team without at least one!"
Something happened. The driver's side door openslammed. And then the girl was behind the wheel.
"What's the plan?" she eagerly asked. "Because there's always a plan. That's what eggheads are for."
"Try to start the car -- no, not yet," Annie said, because the key was already back in the ignition. "I don't know if this has to be moving already before you do anything. But we're going to need all the speed we can get. And before we do this? Go scout the road back. Stay in the trees once you get low enough. And make sure there's no one else around."
Nothing to hit.
Or rather... just the one thing.
There is -- something moving in the night. Or rather, driving, on that section of the road between the start of the mountain's treeline and the outskirts of the city. Almost ambling along, because it's trying to decide what to do next.
It isn't aware of much. The van knows that it exists, that something has hurt it, and it couldn't hurt that thing back. It's not very happy about that last part.
Also, there are packages and they are going to be late. Late is very bad. Being in an accident means you can't get packages delivered on time. So the party responsible for that had to hurt.
The new thing doesn't have a lot of true memories. Just from when the pain started. But there's something before that. A vague set of... residual impressions. Things which happened before it woke up. Those aren't really memories, any more than reading a book would allow someone to remember events from a character's point of view. But they can be reviewed. And it seems to the van that there's a lot of delivery interference out there. It cuts you off in traffic. Refuses to clear a space. Runs in front of active vehicles while chasing a ball and you're supposed to stop.
It can try to get at the blue girl again later. It's sure it's been past her house before -- which means that part has been scheduled. But for now -- it has deliveries to make. Without a driver (which it couldn't get back, and the seat belts were ready and waiting and would have never opened again), that's going to be complicated. Still, it can move its interior contents somewhat. Maybe there's a way.
Make the deliveries. Crucial. So that's the next part.
And while it's doing that, it can just make it easier for the next deliveries to go through. By getting rid of a few things which consistently slow routes down.
Security code panels. Can't operate those anyway.
Gates.
Cars.
People.
Delivering a purchased ball is crucial. The child playing with one is just -- in the way.
The van isn't exactly pondering all this as it drives down the hill in that rolling sideways pattern. It hasn't been around long enough to truly ponder much of anything. But even a touch of granted intelligence is enough to tell itself that it both knows exactly what's going on and has a perfect plan.
So it's driving.
There's a lacrosse stick in the cargo hold. That goes to the blue girl's house.
You can always drop a package off with a family member.
Or on top of them.
Or run over them.
Or through --
-- there's a sound. A engine. Weak. Dying. Almost out of fuel. Coming downhill. But the sound is off, and the van doesn't know how or why. It doesn't know about Doppler effects on the sonic level. And it's facing the wrong way to spot how fast --
-- something goes by.
It's moving almost too fast to see. The blur just barely gets past the sideways van, using the left shoulder for all of it and coming just a little too close to the trees in doing so. There's a sound of impact, and one side mirror goes spinning away into the night.
The van's single open eye regards what's once again empty road.
It doesn't understand what just happened.
And then the other car, which just had to get far enough below the van to pick up some running room, comes back.
It would still be moving almost too quickly to see... if it intended to pass again.
It doesn't.
The car is old. It's not really made for acceleration and in fact, looking at the speedometer right now would show -- about thirty miles per hour. Whatever the girl is doing, concentrating fiercely as she clutches at the wheel and another fingernail breaks as something very much like static made of prisms crackles across her skin... it doesn't touch the gauges.
It was a car meant for those returning home from war.
It's built very much like a tank.
It doesn't have crumple zones. It has armor.
Smaller than the van. Lighter, still. But what mass it possesses is dense.
And it rams into the damaged door, into the teeth, just below the eye which can only stare at the two females inside that car as
the
van
gets
pushed
up
the
mountain.
It's physics. Force equals mass times acceleration. The blue girl has acceleration. What she needed was mass. Enough to have an impact, along with making the contest into metal vs. metal. And the van weighs more, the packages even help a little -- but the girl is pushing, and so is the car. A car whose engine no longer makes any noise at all, because the gas just ran out, and it doesn't matter. It just had to get on the road.
The rest is magic.
The van is being pushed up the road. Around curves. And sparks flash across the girl's body, flicker across the car, the van can't steer out of this because the car is directing everything from the outside as the teenager steers around upslope curves and past the treeline, every shift the van tries to get away is countered, the car is just about pushing into the van, it's going to breach the cargo compartment and the packages --
-- they're coming around another curve. A high one. The van sees a guardrail dropping away below --
-- perhaps it knows.
It was a short life. But there's still some final things to do.
The van looks at its driver, through the windshield. At the woman's face, the features of the one it was going to keep on the routes forever. It doesn't understand why this is happening. Why she's doing this, or the reason she's even here.
(Force: mass times acceleration. She's adding her body's mass. And neither female would leave the other.)
It closes the one eye, as it's pushed towards the guardrail.
The side door flies open. So does the back. Packages come out in almost all directions: several bounce off the car. One cracks the windshield, but that's okay: it was a steel toolbox and the package is fine. Nothing is sent towards the cliff, because only the van is going to die. Perhaps the driver will remember what's truly important. After the end.
It feels the guardrail against metal skin.
The interior of the other car seems to blur.
Both women vanish.
The van can longer feel the road under its tires.
Only air.
That's interesting.
And then the plummet ends.
The two females were standing at the edge of the cliff. Each was looking down at the mingled remains of the two vehicles, and doing so from positions which were about twenty feet apart. Granting each other a little privacy, as each softly spoke into a small handheld screen. One paused to get a moonlit shot of the wrecks.
Finally, they both put their phones away. Moved towards each other, stepping around several packages on the way.
"What did your friend say?" Annie asked.
"She's gonna say the car just vanished from the driveway," Rainbow explained. (There had finally been time for introductions.) "Since she didn't see me take it, it's technically not a lie." Paused. "Or she'll have her sister say it. That's easier. How about your coworkers?"
Annie had tried calling another driver first. "They know a few ways to claim the van was stolen while I was out of the car. Things which don't make me look bad or get me fired, and the company won't know what really happened." Behemoth becoming aware of magic and trying to get some of its own felt like a really bad idea. "The story is... car thieves, two snatches, they ran into each other, really ran into each other, and... that was it."
"The cops will buy that," Rainbow decided. "After they flash some lights and make a little noise. It's easier."
"You'd know?" From experience?
The girl nodded.
Annie hesitated. "And... the warehouse people said a few other things."
"Like what?"
"They asked which student it had been."
Rainbow winced.
"What did you say?"
"I told them it was you," Annie admitted. "Then Rash told me you still owe him three sodas. Going on four, because there's accrued interest. And they want to hear the whole story from me when they show up to take me back to the warehouse, since -- having a story means I'm... one of them now." There had been a few cheers audible in the background...
"Rash?"
"Yeah."
"They're gonna be diet sodas," Rainbow firmly said. "He needs to get in shape. How are you feeling? I know I got you into the safety roll when I pushed us out of the car, but you're still pretty bruised up."
"I need the rest of the weekend off," Annie admitted. "But it's better than dead. " She took a breath, started to extend her right hand. "So -- before anything else happens -- I know it started with an accident, but thank --"
The teenager wasn't looking at her.
"How much charge do you have left on your phone?"
Annie automatically checked. "Some. Why?"
"Because there's enough light to see tonight," Rainbow said. "But it's way too dark to read, and all the headlights are down there. And broken. Anyway, it's still the weekend, right? Because yesterday was kind of crazy, and tonight just blurred. It's easy to lose track of time when you do this stuff! I mean, I bet for you, it was the most exciting night of your life, but for me, it was just -- it's Sunday, right? I feel like this is probably Sunday. Saturday was kind of intense." In the tones of strictest confidence, "Be glad you missed Saturday."
Annie looked at her. Rainbow shuffled her feet. Road dust blurred.
"You saved my life," Annie softly said.
"You stayed in the car," Rainbow quietly replied. "To be with me. To help. And you trusted that I'd get you out. That takes guts. I don't meet a lot of people with that kind of guts."
Maybe I shouldn't...
"Especially old ones," the girl unnecessarily added.
...and never mind.
"Are you going to tell?" Rainbow quietly asked. "About the magic?"
"No." It was the truth.
"That's the smart decision," the student decided. "It's good to know smart people."
"So why do you want to know about my phone?" Annie asked. She already had a very good idea. You didn't have to be around Rainbow very long to figure out how that mind worked. "For the light?"
"Right!" the teenager promptly said, "Mine's really low on power. And just about nothing burns charge like the flashlight function, right? So I'll just borrow yours, see which of these packages is mine because that should really be delivered on Sunday, grab it, we'll both wait until the Behemoth people come out to get you, and then I'll head on home before Rash tries to collect those sodas right here --"
Do it.
"You did hit my van," Annie pointed out. "Because you were messing around with magic."
"I know," was rather soft. "And I'm sorry. But we both learned some stuff tonight. About what I can do. It might be important."
"It is," Annie decided. "You also hit my van. And I'm telling you the same thing I tell everyone else. I can't pass a box over when I'm walking up a driveway. No one gets their package until it's at their address and there's a picture of the delivery."
"But I just saved your life..."
The photographer smiled.
"You want your package?"
The blue skin seemed to be paling again. "Yeah..."
"How fast are you?"
"...aw, no," the girl breathed. "Oh, come on..."
"And after we finish gathering and sorting everything, you're going to check along the road," Annie ordered. "All of it. We need to make sure nothing fell out."
The deliveries were complete before sunrise.
Annie never got disciplined over the loss of the van, although she did wind up on the receiving end of several free drinks. (None of which went to Rainbow, who was underage.) But she did get called in regarding a round of delivery verification pictures. Ones which were oddly... blurred, because the Mandatory Phone didn't have a high-speed lens and the girl had seen absolutely no need to slow down for that either.
And the inclusion of background composition elements was horrible. Especially when it was compared to what Annie usually did --
-- usually?
Someone had noticed.
She talked about that at the bar, on her second night out with her coworkers. And her new friends laughed.
