I looked. “I don’t see anything wrong.”
Frank made a sound like a man trying to push a mule uphill, and he shoved me into the seat. “Put your hands on the wheel.”
I did as I was told, but I was also trying to see if I could scoot over to the other door and get out before he could grab me again. “No no no. Look where your hands are. Put ‘em at two o’clock and ten. Now, see where the pattern stops to either sides of your hands? Those are your channels, and if your hand’s not
“Zeke’s hands are bigger,” I said defensively.
“Nobody races with channels that big. Don’t you understand, boy? It’s a two way street.
“But Zeke says with bigger channels you get more speed, more fuel out of the Engine…”
“Boy, speed’s not everything.”
Suddenly a big bandaged hand reached in and hauled Frank out of the door. Zeke held him by the shirt collar and shouted at him. “What are doing here, old man? What are you doing here!” Zeke pushed Frank away from him. Frank stumbled backwards and fell to the ground.
Zeke stalked off to the other side of the car. I was left looking at Frank. He wasn’t getting up. After half a minute I got out of the car and went to see if he was all right.
His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing me. It was like he was caught up in a memory, or a dream that he couldn’t shake.
“Can I give you a hand?” I asked. His eyes focused on me. He shook his head and slowly levered himself up into a sitting position. After a while he eased himself up and walked stiff-leggedly out of the alley.
“That was kind of rough, don’t you think?” I told Zeke.
He didn’t answer, or even look at me. He was flipping through one of his books again. And if I hadn’t known Zeke as well as I did, I would have sworn he looked like a boy about to cry. He slammed the book shut, picked up a brush, and began filling in the breaks in the lines of the pattern with quick, angry strokes. He left the channels on the steering wheel untouched.
An hour or so later Zeke began to talk again as he worked, but it was only about the Circuit, and how fast this car was going to be, and taking on Brujo Mendez in Mexicana.
“What’s the big deal with Mendez?” I asked.
“He’s the best,” Zeke said, “no one’s ever beaten him.”
By eleven, Zeke was almost finished.
If the car was a cage, the Gateway pattern was the carrot to lure the Engine in. Zeke had drawn three blue circles on the ground, lined up in a row, each circle edge touching the edge of another circle. The biggest circle was around the car. The middle circle was smaller and laced with intersecting diagonal lines. The last circle was the smallest. Zeke was sitting in the center of that circle and painting in a complex double row of shapes and lines around the inside of the border.
“I don’t get it,” I said.
Zeke smiled. “I sit here,” he said, “and the demon pops up there.” The middle circle. “Then it becomes a test. Can I push it into the car or not.”
“What if you can’t?”
“Then either of two things is going to happen. It’s going to force its way into my circle, or it’s going to go back where it came from.”
“And if it gets in?”
“Then you’d better run like hell, Joey. I’ll already be gone.”
“Shit.”
Zeke laughed. “I never heard you swear before! You’re hanging out with the wrong guy, Joseph.”
“I know it. When do you start?”
“Midnight.”
We waited out the hour (Zeke inside his circle, me outside the whole pattern) listening to the silence of Dead City. I still feared the City, but it was a familiar fear.
I tried to imagine thousands of people living in these buildings, but I couldn’t do it. Where would all the food come from? What did they do for a living, besides drive cars?
Zeke said, “All right. It’s time.” Zeke told me to douse the lanterns around the alley. Before the last of the light went out, though, I saw Zeke take off his bandages. The scabs on his palms that looked like black holes in his skin. I turned away and doused the last lamp.
Moonlight glinted off something metallic in Zeke’s hands. I heard him gasp, and then I saw blotches of phosphorescent blood appear in the middle circle. Then the entire pattern flared into blue fire.
After a minute the fire subsided to a glow that lit up the alley. Zeke sat in the center of his circle, hugging his knees, staring at the middle circle. The blotches were burning brighter now. I gazed from Zeke to the middle circle to the car. For the longest time nothing happened at all.
I can’t tell you how the thing appeared, because I was looking at Zeke’s face when I heard it. It sounded like a huge downpour, or the center of a waterfall. Zeke gritted his teeth and grunted like he’d been stabbed in the gut, and I flicked my eyes to the middle circle again. It was already there…
…the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. It swirled like a dust-devil, but a dust-devil made of light. It was not green, or red, or any other color, really. It simply
It spun toward Zeke, moaning like a tornado, and as it moved I saw the bright blotches rise up and become part of the whirlwind. It battered at Zeke’s circle, sparks flying as flakes of paint chipped off the ground and joined the spinning air. Zeke clenched his fist. Blood poured down his arms. The thing spun backwards; then Zeke was on his feet, shouting at the top of his lungs. I couldn’t make out the words over the roar.
After that it was over almost instantly. The whirlwind broke through the circle surrounding the car, then vanished. The circles and rectangles on the Chevy flared a moment and went dark. The blue circles on the ground faded.
We were in darkness.
That’s when I realized Zeke was calling for help. I ran to him, picked the bandages off the ground, and began to wrap up his hands. There was so much blood I couldn’t tell where the wound was: but I cinched both bandages tight. Zeke’s hair was matted to his head with sweat. A smile was playing around his face. He stood up, holding me. Then he looked at the car and whooped for joy.
When Zeke got in and started her up, I whooped too.
August was race season. Any kid who could escape his family snuck off at night to the white highways.
The highways have always been here. They are cracked, and full of holes, and some whole sections of bridges have collapsed, You can still ride the white highways from one ocean to another, from Canuck to Mexicana. And if you’re a driver, you can race on them.
The pro driver that first Saturday in August was a blond-haired guy from Appalachia who called himself the Bobcat and drove a blue and gold Ford. The local girls who’d ditched their folks were pooling in the glow of his headlights like moths, jockeying to get closer to him. The boys were standing around in tight bunches outside the light, looking at the car. Everyone was very careful not to lean on the Bobcat’s car.
We watched him from a ridge above the highways. Zeke had said he wanted to size up the competition. He snorted. “I’m gonna bury this guy.”
I wasn’t so sure. The Bobcat wasn’t famous on the circuit, but he was still a pro driver, and Zeke had never raced before. But Zeke was Zeke. And he was confident as hell. “Let’s go,” he said. I climbed in from the passenger side and Zeke slid in the other door. He planted his big hands on the steering wheel—completely covering the channels, I saw—and his face contorted into an angry sneer like he was wrestling the Engine for control. Finally he smiled.
We shot down the ridge, the Engine growling like a caged bear, and popped through a hole in the railing. Zeke slid to a stop just behind Bobcat, his lights focusing on the blue Ford. The blond-haired driver looked at us for
