For a fraction of a second, I placed my bare hand on the base of his neck, touch the exposed skin. I imagined the burning pain, the searing as my powers started to work and his soul started to work free of his body, into mine—
And just as quickly I ripped him from the car as he shoved it, using my leverage to swiftly spin him away from it, placing myself between him and that vehicle, between him and the children and mother he’d been just about to mash into a paste.
I’d meant to crash him into my own SUV, parked only a few feet away, but as I yanked him around, he hooked his elbow and locked it in place, pinching two of my fingers so it took me an extra second to work them free.
A second is forever in a fistfight.
I hadn’t quite gotten them loose when he whipped me into a punch I didn’t see coming—hello, distraction, trying to free myself from his momentum and the whirl—and he leveled me into my own vehicle, neatly reversing the plan I’d set for him. I hit it with a lot more force than I would have been able to marshal against him, though, denting the door in solidly upon impact, the windows shattering above my head, bones cracking all up and down my back.
“So she shows her weakness,” the Terminator said over the ringing of bells in my head and the screaming of every nerve in my back from my shoulders to the base of my spine. I was pretty sure I’d broken every rib, or at least it sounded that way to me in the chorus of howls as the neurons fired. “Do you consider yourself some kind of hero?” He loomed in my vision. “A funny thing from the most wanted criminal in America.”
I tried to get to my feet, but without Wolfe to heal me …
Wolfe …
… I couldn’t muster the strength. Muscles use bone to anchor them, to push off of, but with my ribs broken, my entire back in furious agony, I couldn’t push up to my feet. The best I could do was lean against the car, trying not to topple over left or right, my legs bent, my body nearly in a sitting position.
It would have been handy to have some fire to throw …
… Gavrikov …
Or a light net …
… Eve …
Maybe a little fear to cast in the Terminator’s mind?
… Bjorn …
I’d settle for being able to turn into a dragon and bite his head off.
… Bastian …
But there was no one here to save me now. No voice to encourage me to fight on …
… Zack …
Just me, alone.
On a freeway.
Broken bones scattered throughout my body.
Crippling pain running through me.
A question occurred as the Terminator took a step closer, and I couldn’t raise so much a hand against him.
“Who are you?” I asked, my voice rasping. Every breath hurt.
“That’s classified,” he said with a tight smile, and raised his fist, one last time, to smite the hell out of me.
30.
“I bet the identity of your daddy … is classified, too … even from you,” I said, holding my sides. Darkness was closing in around me, the man I had taken to calling the Terminator looming over me, fist raised high, ready to bring it down and crush me once and for all.
And this was my last gambit. A “yo daddy” joke. One step above the rhetorically classic “yo mama.”
But the funny thing was …
The Terminator actually hesitated. He kept his fist high, his face scrunched up in concentration, and he asked, somewhere between confusion and disgust, “What?”
I lifted my leg in a hard jerk and slammed my foot into his groin. It wasn’t much; it still activated enough muscles in my core to completely wreck my ability to hold myself upright, triggering pain against all those broken ribs, and I slumped and fell over immediately afterward.
If I’d been a normal human, it’d have been a good, solid kick in the balls, one that would have sent my opponent to his knees, clutching his groin, wondering if my “yo daddy” joke distraction had just cost him the ability to be a daddy himself someday.
But I was freaking metahuman.
And I punted his ass across the damned road, his crotch riding at about the level of his shoulders as he Team Rocket’d over the car behind him and landed somewhere in the ditch beyond. “You shoulda made like a squirrel,” I muttered as he flew, “and learned to protect your nuts.”
I heard the landing over the screaming of my ribs. It sounded like it hurt.
Without a moment to spare, I heaved myself off my knees and fought against the pain surging through my body. I moved nearly bent double, clutching my chest as I navigated around my own SUV, now partially in the other lane, casting only a look behind me to see if the mother and her three kids had escaped the car behind me.
They had. Whew.
The mom was holding her baby tight as she ran for the exit ramp, the driver of the van next to her running alongside her, grabbing a couple of the kids to help them along. It was nice to see strangers helping each other, even if I had to watch it while bent double and hauling ass across lanes of parked traffic under the wide, watchful eyes of lots of drivers probably wondering what the hell they’d just witnessed.
I crossed the median, leaping over the barrier between lanes with a seething grunt as the landing made me almost scream. Pain ran through me with every movement, and I felt like I was blacking out on my feet. Near-instant healing was something I was sorely missing at the moment, as someone honked at me and I dodged a Cadillac Escalade by a matter of inches. The draft current almost knocked me down as it whizzed behind me at seventy miles an hour.
Lucky for me that whatever was causing this traffic jam had slowed things down in the eastbound lane, too. I managed to make it across the freeway with no major incidents.
I was looking around for Harry and the others, but I didn’t see them anywhere. Sirens were going in the distance, and I knew that I had to make myself really scarce before they showed up, because the last thing I needed was legal entanglements right now.
There was a tall embankment and a ten foot fence dividing Interstate 94 from the world beyond. Darkness was still creeping in on the edges of my vision, and I was afraid I was going to pass out any second. I looked left, then right. Ahead, some few hundred yards, I could see the Radio Drive eastbound onramp. Flashing police lights told me that going that way was a terrible idea. Looking right, I saw nothing but empty freeway back to the Woodbury Drive exit, and that was a bad idea, too.
I looked at the fence, almost beseechingly. Couldn’t it be shorter?
There was nothing for it, though, so I jumped it, damned near catching a foot on it because I was trying to leap with a shattered rib cage. My right foot brushed the top bar and then I descended in a steep dive.