One of the boys looked at them blearily. “Hey, lookit. It’s Bethie. You okay, Bethie?”
They seemed to have forgotten the gauntlet of the night before, or at least weren’t willing to resume their teasing in front of Wickie. That was fine with Sam, and with Bethica as well.
“Where’s Kevin?” the other boy asked. “Ooooh, my head hurts!”
“He probably went home if he had any sense,” Al said.
“He went looking for you after a while, but he didn’t find you. I think he decided to leave when the booze ran out,” the first boy said. “He was going up the mountain to his parents’ cabin up by the run. I forget when.”
“Fine,” Sam muttered. He and Bethica both wanted to get home; Bethica was making noises about bathrooms, and Sam empathized. The two of them staggered on to the Polar Bar truck and got in.
It was a lot easier to find his way back to the road in the light of early morning. He managed to miss most of the potholes on the way back to the pavement. The roof of the cab was never going to be the same, though.
“Could you, um, kind of hurry?” Bethica asked, not look-ing at him.
“Could you kind of wrap this up?” Al said, sticking his head through the rear window to appear between them. “I’d suggest you get a move on. There’s somebody behind you, and I don’t think he’s friendly.”
They had just passed the place where, the previous Fri-day, Sam had gone all over the road in an effort not to hit the squirrel. He glanced in the rearview to confirm Al’s information; as he suspected, it was Kevin, in a fire engine red Ford truck.
“He must have been waiting for us,” Sam muttered.
“Who?” Bethica asked.
“See if you can get your seat belt on,” he said. “I wonder how he knew?”
Al tapped at the handlink. “Who knows? Maybe he went looking for you guys and saw you over the edge. I didn’t see him, though. Still, he must know this mountain like the back of his hand. He’d figure you’d climb out in the morning.” He studied the handlink. “I hope you’re a really good driver, Sam. Ziggy says it’s ninety-nine percent now that this is the accident Bethica gets hurt in.”
If Sam could have spared the attention, he might have asked what happened to Wickie. Al wasn’t mentioning Wickie. Sam decided he really didn’t want to know, and concentrated on his driving.
Kevin was pushing, just a little, tailgating them, nudging the truck’s back bumper. His vehicle was a heavy truck, massing less than the Polar Bar’s but more than enough to push them off the road. His driving was erratic, wobbling. He was drunk.
Sam hugged the side of the mountain, refusing to let Kevin push him into going too fast for the mountain road. He could remember too well the sickening feeling of lost control. “I hope he didn’t mess with the brakes,” he asked Al as directly as possible. He was wishing, too, that he’d replaced the seat belt as well as the burned-out headlight.
Al punched in the query. “Ziggy says no. Ziggy also says Verbeena’s working on Wickie. She thinks that has something to do with what has to be fixed.”
A flash of disjointed memory of arguments lost from long ago came to Sam. “Poor Wickie,” he muttered.
“What do you mean?” Bethica was still struggling with the seat belt, in between turning around to try to see behind them.
“Never mind,” he answered, his tone grim. Kevin was trying to get between them and the cliff, and on the last hairpin turn he had nearly succeeded. They were heading toward the last switchback before going into town now, and the dropoff was going to be on their side of the road.
“Ziggy says there’s a good chance you’re all going to buy the farm on this one,” Al advised.
“That’s so comforting,” Sam said between his teeth. He had one more idea, but it depended on flaws, just as every-thing else in this Leap had been flawed. He slowed down again, and Bethica yipped as the red truck jolted them.
“Do you have your seat belt fastened?” he asked her.
“Y-yes,” she said. Her fingers were digging into the cush-ion of the bench seat. “Wickie, you don’t have to marry me, or anything, if we get out of this.”
The handlink squealed. “Oh, that’s interesting. Verbeena has just told Wickie about high school equival”—Al whacked the handlink—“lency tests, and—” He fell silent.
Sam risked a glance at him. “Al?”
Al shook his head, stuck his cigar in his mouth at a jaunty angle and said, “Well, that’s the easiest divorce I’ve ever had.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam whispered.
“Easy come, easy go,” the Observer responded. “You still have to keep yourself from getting killed, Sam. Where’s your seat belt?”
“It got broken,” he said between his teeth. The truck jolted again, and Sam nearly lost it. He focused on his driving, wishing he picked Formula II driving as a hobby instead of karate—what did anybody need with more than one martial art anyway? In any event, he didn’t need to look at his friend to know the look in Al’s eyes.
The rising sun cast sharp shadows across the road, and they came up on the boulder in the road into the full glare of its rays. This was the place, Sam knew; this was it, win or lose, do or—No. They weren’t going to lose. He slowed down to take the turn wide, staying away from the dropoff to his right. He could hear the roar of the engine behind him, coming up one last time for the final push over the cliff.
Sam stomped on the brakes.
The Polar Bar truck screeched to the left, and Sam steered frantically, not into the skid this time but away from it, encouraging the heavy truck to swing around. The vehicle
behind them suddenly had nothing to hit—and not enough room to stop.
The Polar Bar truck slammed sideways into the solid rock face
