“Just a—”
The half-dead on the roof of the cab struck a third time and the metal roof tore open. The sharp point of a pickax came through the ceiling between the two women. Gert screamed, but Caxton just readied her shotgun. The pick drew back the way it had come and Caxton looked out through the hole it had made. She could see the half-dead on the cab’s roof. It was looking back down at her.
She shoved the barrel of her shotgun through the hole and fired. There was a scream and then a rattling series of thumps as the half-dead fell off of the cab.
“What about this motherfucker?” Gert asked, pointing through the windshield.
Caxton hit the truck’s ignition, then threw it into reverse.
She’d been in the highway patrol once. She knew the importance of double-clutching. The truck lurched backward, out of the loading bay, and the half-dead on the hood went flying backward. Its grenade went off instantly in a spray of yellow smoke that rolled across the windshield. Caxton caught a whiff of the tear gas before they were clear of the yellow plume, and her eyes clamped tightly shut as her throat spasmed with a nasty dry cough.
“Grab the wheel,” she said. She knew better than to rub at her eyes—that would only smear the tear gas deeper into her mucous membranes. It hurt to talk, but she had no choice. “Watch the mirrors. What’s behind us?”
“The wall!”
Caxton forced her eyes to open up. They immediately clamped shut again. They stung like they were on fire, even when they were closed, but when she tried to open them the pain was ten times worse. “Turn the wheel left. Toward me,” she said, as calmly as she could. “How far is the wall?”
“I don’t know. Too close,” Gert said, sounding panicked.
“We’ll be okay. There might be more of them coming, so we need to move, alright?” She kept her foot on the gas a second longer, then braked to keep the truck from jackknifing, then threw the stick into forward gear. “What are we pointed at?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Gert told her. “But you’re facing the wrong way! The main gate is behind us.”
“That’s okay,” Caxton said. “We’re not going to the main gate.”
“We’re not?”
“It’s too heavily defended. We wouldn’t make it halfway there. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.” And I’m not about to share, she thought, so don’t ask any questions. She hadn’t figured out yet how to explain to Gert that their mission had changed. That they weren’t going to try to escape from the prison anymore. She doubted Gert would want to hear that. “What do you see ahead of us? Open grass?”
“There’s no grass. Just—-just a basketball court.”
“That’s fine,” Caxton said.
“But it’s surrounded by a fence. With barbed wire and everything,” Gert told her.
“That’s what I needed to know.” Caxton upshifted and poured on the gas. “Now, just as we’re about to hit the fence— get down,” she said.
She felt Gert duck below the dashboard almost at once. Caxton leaned over to her right, covering Gert’s body with her own. The truck hit the fence hard, traveling at almost twenty miles an hour.
The truck went through the fence like a knife through paper, tearing through posts and chain link and barbed wire without even losing much speed. The truck had enough mass to shear off the posts at ground level without any trouble. The fence didn’t just part in the middle to let them through, however. It wrapped around the front of the truck and stretched—for a few milliseconds. Then it snapped in a dozen places at once and hundreds of pounds of metal wire and three-inch pipe came scrabbling and sparking up the hood to collide with the windshield. It shattered instantly and covered both of them in glass, while one piece of metal post shot through the cab and impaled the seat cushion where Caxton had been sitting up a second earlier.