I grabbed the shift lever mounted on the center on the dash, put the van into reverse, and floored it. I might normally have been inclined to watch where I was driving, but as the van began to move backward, I kept staring straight ahead at Gary, who had tossed his lit cigarette and was raising his gun, getting ready to fire.
The van took off with a squeal, the front tires spinning on the tile floor. To my left, Carter’s face slammed against the window as he was dragged along. Owen leapt backward.
It was a short trip.
Ten feet into the journey, the van smashed broadside into the Civic. The crash momentarily drowned out Carter’s screams. My head slammed back into the headrest.
Carter squeezed off another shot. I wasn’t sure where it went, exactly, but I didn’t feel a bullet tear through my brain, so I grabbed the shifter again and threw the automatic transmission down into first.
I tromped onto the accelerator, interrupting Carter as he banged on the driver’s door window with his free hand, trying to shatter it so he could free himself. Maybe if he’d been hitting it with something harder than his fist, he could have broken it. Owen, unarmed, was shunting back and forth, like the target in a game of dodgeball, clueless about what to do.
I realized we now had a soundtrack. There was a cacophony of car alarms going off.
As the car jumped toward Gary, he got off a shot just before diving off to my left. The windshield instantly spiderwebbed, the bullet hitting in the windshield’s upper right corner. Gary’s foot slipped in the blood leaking from Andy Hertz’s brain. He went sprawling onto the floor just beyond the van’s path.
Still dragging a screaming Carter, I slammed broadside into the Pilot. I must have knocked the back end of it a good two feet across the floor. I knew the airbag in the steering wheel in front of me was bound to deploy at this point, but it was like when you know the flash is going to go off when your picture is being taken. You think you can keep from blinking, but you can’t.
So it was still a shock when the white pillow exploded in front of me, a cloud moving at jet speed. It enveloped my face. Unable to see for the few seconds it took the bag to deflate, I blindly put the car into reverse, turned the wheel a bit to the right, and floored it again.
My head slammed into the headrest a second time. I’d hit the Civic once again, this time more to the front. The gun Carter had been holding slipped from his grasp, bumped my shoulder, and dropped down between the door and the seat.
I didn’t really have a moment to look for it.
I patted down the airbag so I could see what was happening. Carter I didn’t have to worry about, especially since he’d lost his gun. He was just coming along for the ride, wherever I decided to go, at least until his hand came off.
Owen had run to the far corner of the showroom, on the other side of the Pilot, just beyond my desk. Gary, still down on the floor next to Andy’s body, his shirt and pants smeared with blood, took another shot. He didn’t have time to aim and it went wild. A bullet pinged someplace into the sheet metal.
I heard a kind of primal screaming, almost animalistic. It took a moment to realize it was coming from me.
Gary was slipping as he struggled to his feet, preparing to get off another shot. I threw the car back into drive, pulled the wheel, hit the gas, and went straight for him.
He fired and this time his aim was better, hitting the windshield midway, about a foot left of center. The glass shattered into a million tiny pieces. Gary dove to my right, in the direction of a bank of offices, including Laura’s, and the van plowed into the back end of the Element, to the left of the Pilot I’d already pretty much destroyed. Glass shattered and the hood of the van buckled upward to the point where it was starting to obstruct my view.
Carter’s wrist was bleeding. He was still banging on the glass, screaming at the top of his lungs.
I needed to get out of there.
I hit the brakes, put the van in reverse, took a millisecond to plot a way out. I needed to find a wide expanse of glass, an area without any partitions, if I wanted to drive out of here. I was thinking it would be almost better to smash my way out in reverse; otherwise the shards of glass coming through my front window—which no longer had any glass in it—could end up beheading me.
With enough speed, I might be able to blast a hole between the Civic and a metallic blue Accord that had, so far, escaped any damage.
“Please!” Carter screamed. “Put the window down!”
I glanced at him long enough to say, “Fuck you.”
I shoved my foot down on the accelerator. Carter, anticipating the move, tried running alongside, but I’d altered my course a little, heading for the back end of the Accord, squeezing in past the end of the Civic.
The front end of the Civic knocked Carter’s legs out from under him. As I sped past the front of the car, Carter continued to be dragged over it by his wrist.
The Accord moved a few feet, but not enough to clear me a path.