At the top of the ramp, something hits the roof with both feet and sticks. The steel bows; the dome light blinks like an eyeball. Nails rake the metal—skritch—then thump-thump as it finds a seam.
"On us," Rick says, uselessly.
"Belt tight," Gavin snaps. He angles the van to straddle the food truck's corner. The attacker rides the flex, heels finding spots that dent and hold. A fist punches the headliner above Gavin's temple. Foam dust rains. Another hit. The fabric parts around knuckles scabbed black.
"Don't shoot—no gun," he tells himself because habit wants a weapon he doesn't have. Think in weight, think in angles. "Hold," he says to the wheel. "Hold."
He stabs the brake with the measured violence of a man who knows how vehicles move. The van noses down. The thing slides, belly over the windshield header. Its face drops into view—smile cut into the wrong place by glass and road, eyes raw. It opens its mouth like it's about to ask for something and plants both hands on the glass. Spiderwebs bloom across the windshield.
Madison screams once and doesn't repeat it. "It's right there—Gavin—"
"I see it."
He drags the wheel left. The food truck's serving shelf juts out like a jaw. The thing rides the hood, palms skidding on cracked safety glass. Gavin bleeds another five miles per hour and eases right so the shelf will catch it square.
"Three, two—now." He threads the van inches from steel. The shelf takes the clinger across the back and peels it sideways in a crunch; something hooks—forearm or gear—and holds for one ugly second. Skin stretches, then parts. An arm tears free and slaps the A-pillar like a wet rope. The rest of the body spins off and hits the ramp lane with a slap and a tumble, rolling in mirror-smudged arcs. The arm pinwheels, lands in Madison's lap, and keeps trying to grab.
"Shit—shit—get it off!" Madison flings it; it flips, fingers still hungry, and sticks against the glovebox seam, nails squealing on plastic. Rick swings the pry bar down and pins it; the wrist pops; the hand goes slack.
"Window—half down," Gavin says. Madison cranks; he catches the arm by the sleeve with two fingers and the van's motion sucks it out. It skitters along the ramp and vanishes under tires behind.
They merge. The freeway is a stuttering artery: red brake lights, random motion, long gaps where cars have become sculptures. Somewhere glass rain hisses constant. Somewhere else a horn dies and stays dead, stuck at a pleading note. A jackknifed box truck lies diagonal three lanes over, a scatter of packages like bones. A sedan rides its belly on sparks. People run, but the running is wrong—measured, low, hands ready to grab.
"Shoulder," Gavin says. He punches the indicator without irony and rides the stripe. The van hums steady. "Madison—eyes on signs. Find me exits that aren't names, just numbers. Numbers move faster."
"Okay," she says, knuckles bone-white on the hammer. She reads green. "Two exits in a mile—Forty-One and Forty-Five. Forty-One is closer."
"Forty-One," Gavin says. He keeps engine and brake in a handshake that says we are going to be smooth even if the world isn't. On his left, a man in a suit kicks at his own windshield from the inside. On his right, a minivan with all its doors open spills groceries and clothes; a woman sits on the shoulder with a toddler in her lap, staring like the picture is now an old photograph and she's inside it.
"Don't look," Gavin tells himself. He looks anyway. He hates himself for a blink and then returns to the work. A concrete barrier runs stiff on the right; beyond it: drop, scrub, the sort of slope you can't bet a van on.
The body from the food truck stirs where they left it. A collection of other someones fall on it without hierarchy. One looks up as they pass—eyes blown like a night animal—and then sprints after them, fingers skimming the barrier like a sprinter's start. The speed is obscene.
"Clinger!" Rick barks. The shape leaps, catches the side mirror with both hands, and swings feet-first into the passenger window. Glass bursts inward in glitter. Madison throws her forearms up and takes fragments like sand. The clinger hangs by one hand and hunts purchase with the other, head butting through the ragged window line until its teeth catch rubber.
Rick punches the pry bar point-first into its face through the hole. The point goes in under the cheekbone with a crack. The clinger doesn't emote; it just keeps making its problem smaller, hooking its elbow through the window gap and yanking itself tight.
"Keep it there," Gavin says. He drifts right until a low-clearance sign looms—12'6" printed in black on yellow on the crossbeam of a gantry that braces the ramp split. The clinger snakes a foot inside, heel against Madison's thigh.
"Now," Gavin says, breathing out. He kisses the gantry with the clinger's skull. Metal rings. The head hits the beam, pops back, hits again. The pry bar keeps it in the kill zone. It makes a noise like wet cloth escaping a jar. The elbow slips. It drops. The mirror goes with it, smacking the door, and skitters to the shoulder. Rick hauls the pry bar back in and stares at grey meat on the tip like he doesn't own it.
"You okay?" Gavin asks, eyes on the road.
"Working definition," Rick says. Madison laughs once—the brittle kind that keeps the throat from closing. She shakes glass off her sleeves. Her hair catches light in sugar.
"Forty-One is a half-mile," she says. "And there's… oh."
"Say it," Gavin says.
"A tanker," she says. "Across lanes. It's leaking."
The tanker sprawls like a gut. Its cab has folded into an offramp barrier at an angle that suggests the driver left the conversation before he could apologize. A shimmer runs along the asphalt, looking like water pretending. A box truck slides through the shimmer, throws sparks from a naked rim. The sparks hop. A heat gust lifts the hair on Gavin's forearms.
"Speed is life," Rick says flat, a man who knows clichés can be right once.
Gavin makes a decision and says it out loud so his hands get the memo. "We take Forty-Five instead. Forty-One is a stove."
"Forty-Five's farther," Madison says.
"Distance is life," he says, and the words taste like a dare. He threads between stalled cars, bumper noses like tusks, a bicycle pinned under a bumper blinking its tiny red light with brave persistence. Ahead, an ambulance sits cockeyed with its rear doors open. One door swings to a rhythm that isn't wind. A paramedic's hand hangs from the sill, ring glinting. A head rises between the doors and lowers with the patience of a craftsman.
"Eyes front," Rick says. He means it kindly.
They clear the ambulance. The tanker's shimmering river thickens. Far lanes. The spark-trail from the box truck finds it like a tongue finds a cracked tooth and licks.
Heat smacks the van. The shimmer takes color at the edge. A first flame crawls—a school science demonstration scaled up to history. It's small and sure. It will walk.
"Forty-Five," Madison says, breath pitched. "Sign after the overpass."
"Copy." The overpass wall looms on their left. Dust falls, a brown curtain. Something thumps onto the roof—smaller than the first, rat-fast. Nails drag. Madison flinches hard. "Another—"
"Hold it," Gavin says, already moving the van toward the right lane to buy an angle on the off-ramp. Metal squeals above them as the new clinger tears the headliner and gets fingers into the fiberglass seam. The dome light dies permanently.
A sedan spins out up ahead, nose to wall, rear kicks into their lane. Its driver leans on the horn with his face. The car slews and stops broadside across the ramp's mouth.
"Choice," Rick says. "We thread or we hit."
"We move it," Gavin says. "Low and hard." He plants his right foot and his hands together. The van shoulders the sedan at the A-pillar with a thud that shivers teeth. Metal buckles and gives them a car-width. The clinger scrabbles, trying to keep purchase as the roof flexes and groans.
Above them the second thing drops past the shattered passenger window, slapping the pillar, catching a seam by luck. Its face is young, maybe seventeen. The mouth gapes in a way that knows nothing about asking. Madison hits it twice with the hammer, each blow a small rebellion. It holds anyway, eyes not blinking, teeth clicking like a puppet's. Rick wedges the pry bar in its armpit and levers. The joint pops. It screams, not with pain but with release, as if the noise is the rest of the movement.
"Off-ramp—right!" Madison shouts.
Gavin dives them onto Forty-Five. The ramp drops under an overpass like a chute. Concrete shoulders compress into a throat; the low-clearance beam at the mouth is scarred where trucks have guessed wrong. The clinger rides the gutter of the roof, feet hunting, hands scrabbling for an edge.
"Gantry," Gavin says, and kisses the low beam hard enough to boom the cabin. Roof skin peels, the clinger's back scrapes metal, and the world throws sparks. The thing peels away into the side-wall like wet laundry. It slides down the concrete in a smear and tumbles under the van with a drumroll of bumps. Madison sucks air through her teeth and doesn't let it out for three beats.
"Clear?" Rick asks, looking up as if the ceiling will answer.
"For now." Gavin cradles the van through the kink of the ramp, hands light on the wheel the way you hold a skittish horse. Behind them the flame on the freeway finds friends, splits into fingers, then hands.
The ramp is not free. A compact pile of cars sits accordion-folded where the off-ramp tees into surface street. People have left in the direction that smelled like safety and found something else. Between the cars: a man on his back making the kind of sound you don't record. A woman kneels over him, working. She looks up at the van, sees three faces, and makes no claim. She returns to the work.
"Left is blocked," Madison says, voice even because the facts demand it. "Right drops under the overpass again—steep dirt shoulder, chain-link at the bottom, then street."
"Dirt's a roll if we slide," Rick says. "We roll, it's a cage."
"We're a box on wheels," Gavin says. "Boxes topple."
A flare of heat pops over the ramp mouth behind them. The flame line has found the main river. It moves with purpose now, not a crawl but a run. Heat licks the back of Gavin's neck like breath.
"Decision," Rick says, because naming the knife sometimes moves the cut.
Gavin edges the van forward until the bumper presses the back of a compact, its rear window already gone. The compact shifts on locked wheels. Another nudge. It clears them a foot. The chain-link downhill right glares with a light-polluted shine. Below it, a two-lane with a median and—he prays—distance.
"Numbers," Madison whispers, a little wild now. "Pick one."
"Two choices," Gavin says. "We ram through left, slow and center, or we take the slope."
"Fire has an opinion," Rick says. "It says slope."
Gavin looks in the mirror. The glow has become a color you can feel. The line of flame hits something—maybe the box truck's spilled oil—and leaps. It runs along the shoulder like a game played with gasoline as a child and forgotten. The sound comes a second later: whoof, then a metal scream as something surrenders.
"Seatbacks," Gavin says. "Heads down. If we roll, count to three before unbuckling."
"I hate the number three," Madison says, voice shaking now.
"Me too," Gavin says, and turns the wheel toward the steep dirt.
The van tips. Tires bite dust and shed it. The right side drops; the left lifts. Gravity rotates to a new place, makes the blood find corners. The bumper noses the chain-link and buries there with a rubbery groan. Metal yields; the fence posts do their math and bend. The van slithers down and pops onto the street in a bounce that smacks teeth.
They land steep and straighten with suspension that feels eager to please, for once. The engine coughs, then pulls like a dog on a lead. Above them the ramp mouth glows with a fire barrette; muscles in the flame flex like something alive.
A sedan fishtails across their new lane, blocking. A man runs in front of the van, then runs back, then chooses the wrong third thing and runs at the driver's door. His hands clap the glass and stick.
"Move it!" Rick yells.
Gavin bumps the sedan's rear, shoves it; the bumper clatters off; the car crabs aside, enough. He threads the gap. On his left the chain-link they bent scrapes the van, protesting their sentence.
Two blocks ahead, an intersection chokes with more cars and a bus sideways. To the right, a strip of industry: roll-up doors, loading docks, a water tower black against dirty sky. To the left, a line of trees, a park that will not help them at night.
Behind, the fire's edge leaps the ramp's lip and licks down the slope toward the chain-link he just bullied. The fuel on the freeway feeds it like a spine. The wind makes a choice and blows wrong.
"Call it," Rick says.
Gavin sees the gap between two parked flatbeds down the industrial strip—angle tight, curb big, but maybe. He sees the bus jam at the intersection—no way. He sees the park—grass and benches and open space for speed that isn't theirs.
"Industrial," he says. "Left beyond the bus is suicide."
He drives for the flatbeds and feels the van lean. The alley between them is narrower than it looked at speed.
"Too tight," Madison says.
"Not yet," Gavin says.
The mirrors kiss steel. Paint gives. The van threads, metal squealing a private song. They're through into a lot pocked with potholes big enough to name. A corrugated roll-up door halfway down sits unlocked on the bottom—padlock missing, chain slack.
"Inside?" Rick asks.
"Not yet," Gavin says, because inside is a box that can keep you or trap you.
Behind them, flame hits the chain-link they'd bent and steps through with the confidence of someone who knows property laws are a story.
The lot dead-ends at a line of stacked pallets. To the right, a dirt cut that looks like delivery trucks pretend it's a road. It arcs along a drainage swale. The van could make it if the soil holds.
"Dirt again," Madison says, a laugh in the word now, not entirely sane.
"Better mine than the universe's," Gavin says. He angles for the cut.
The heat snaps behind them, closer. A soft thump rolls the air like a drum head—a tire or a tank or a thought exploding.
"Pick," Rick says. "Ram the pallets—or take the cut and bet the soil."
Gavin feels the engine ready; he feels the tires speak through the wheel about what they like and what they fear. He hears the flame deciding to be faster.
He must choose now.