Page 17 of Evolved
“Should I fire back?” I ask.
“No, windows up, heads down.”
We race down the row of parking spaces, iron and concrete, and hedge row walls behind those, blasting toward the exit.
More gunfire.
“Why are they shooting at us?” I ask for no real reason other than that I’m thinking about it. “Who are they?”
“And why do they care if we leave?” Gran asks in the backseat. “And why come in the night and the rain?”
A bullet slams into the car, ricochets off with a terrible sound.
I turn around, frantic she might have been hurt, but I can’tmake out anything but darkness.
“Were you hit?” I ask frantically as Knox barrels us through the final gate and takes a hard left onto Pennsylvania Avenue, where he slams the gas, and we pick up speed, still dark, so dark, heading toward the river at first, following his preplanned route.
“No,” she says, turning away from peering out the back window and facing front again. “You?”
I shake my head. “Knox?”
“No.” He slows, and the sloshing sound outside says we’ve hit standing water. “Road’s flooded.”
He shifts the car into reverse, and the rearview camera blinks on, but it’s useless in the dark and splattered with rain. His hand settles on the back of my seat, and he rotates to look over his shoulder as he does a quick right turn, jaw clenched in the dim light coming off the darkened screen in the dashboard.
And now we’re heading uphill, which means, given the turns we’ve made, we must be heading toward Georgetown, one of the two escape locations we’ve discussed.
In the relative calm, I notice how cold the inside of the car is and turn on the heat, my hands wet with rain, my hair sticking to my cheeks.
“We’ve lost them,” Knox says a few minutes later as we’re driving through the dark and rain on yet another side street.
“We can’t risk headlights, can we?” I ask.
“I think the risk of drawing attention right now is higher than the risk of driving in the dark.”
We plug along,
I help the best I can, find a few street names, reflective white names on jungle green signs rendered nearly invisible by the dark as we make out the shadows of townhouses and row homes that I think are Foggy Bottom, then the glassy storefronts tell me we’re in Georgetown, M Street just for a minute, and then we’redriving a clear uphill on Wisconsin Avenue, past restaurants I’ve been to and stores I haven’t, all of them dark shadows beyond the rain, the roofs barely visible against the darkened clouds.
He turns right into the neighborhood of massive townhomes, over bumpy cobblestones, moving slowly.
And we’re doing fine. It feels like the coast is clear, the end right in sight, with only a couple blocks to go.
Full of hope and certainty, already shifting gears toward how angry Gran will be, how we just fled instead of staked our claim.
One second, we’re moving along at fifteen or so miles per hour in the driving rain, and the next …
We’re not.
The car slams into a dead stop.
5|Rum raisin
OTTILIE
IBLAST FORWARDwith tooth-rattling force, then back against the seat as the car rocks in place under its own truncated momentum.
I’m vaguely aware of Knox’s arm, spread across my middle, like his first instinct as he slammed on the brake was to attempt to single-handedly stop me from flying through the windshield. He pulls it away. I try to call for Gran but discover my voice box won’t function.