Saviors 101

Chapter 19

Chapter 19

The GTO dropped so hard that it mashed Jeremy’s head into the roof despite the seatbelt and his death grip on the upholstery.

The 8-track, jarred to a new track by the landing, roared out a lazy pop ballad about a lovely green-eyed lady.

Jeremy was just glad to be alive.

And had to check to be sure that he hadn’t, after all, s**t his pants.

Then he looked out the window.

The sun burned its way into the car. Outside the window, rather than the dirty yellow-tile wall of the Denny tunnel all prepared to squash them flat, an endless beach stretched ahead. Waves as tall as houses crashed down, but with a roar little bigger than a mouse. It was as if the ocean had been smeared with a bit of morphing software. Palm trees and blooming orange trees shuddered in the wind vortices left by the passing vehicle.

He checked over Virgil’s shoulder, the speedometer definitely still read 150.

Virgil jerked the handbrake and spun the wheel hard, barely managing not to flip the car as he spun it through a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn.

He killed the engine as they slewed to a stop.

When the sand settled, Jeremy could see a long, low, weather-worn bungalow with potted plants dangling from the eave of the wide front porch. Virgil had spun the car so that his own door was nearest the steps to the porch.

Virgil swung open the door as if he were coming home from the grocery store.

He hopped up the steps. Cassandra made no move to exit, which was fine with Jeremy as his legs were still little stronger than a glass of water, without the glass. They waited and watched the poet.

Virgil rapped sharply on the side of the house near the screen door.

“You know she hates unexpected guests.” Cassandra shouted out the open driver’s door.

“Yeah. But the kid’s cool. She’ll wanna meet him. Someone he needs to meet. Besides, it’s the nearest terminal I can get access to. You said their meeting was urgent and I do believe you.”

That seemed to placate Cassandra, but it worried Jeremy all the more. Earlier, he’d asked how urgent. The prophetess of doom had been either unwilling or unable to say.

They waited.

Virgil seemed reluctant to knock again despite his initial bravado.

They waited a bit longer while Virgil cooled his heels on the porch.

He leaned forward and whispered to Cassandra.

“Uh, who is ‘she’ and why doesn’t she like guests?”

He watched Virgil pace for a moment and then looked out his window at the impossible waves rising dozens of stories above them then crashing down with the splash smaller than a ski boat wake on Lake Washington. Weird! He could make bigger splashes in the bathtub with a decent fart.

“And where the hell are we, anyway?”

Cassandra hitched herself around to look at him around the headrest.

“You’ve already answered your second question.”

“What the hell—”

“Precisely.”

Okay. Maybe his legs weren’t the only things having problems. Either his hearing had gone bad and his stomach was going to just resign from the organization, or there was some heavy s**t going down around him.

“And Michelle has always been a sort of recluse, unless she’s the one throwing the party.”

Okay, he could get into that. And he hadn’t been to a party in such a long time, that sounded halfway tempting.

“So, your friend, Michelle, what’s she like?”

“She’s the flaming b***h who runs this place. She makes me almost as crazy as that thrice-demented, narcissistic, Roman poet strutting in front of her door right now. She has an exceptional skill for pissing me off.”

Well, if Cassandra, who could foretell the future, hated the woman, who was he to argue.

“Then, let’s get outta here.”

While Cassandra shouted at Virgil again to get them out of there, he sat back.

“Flaming b***h who runs this place?” he said it softly to himself testing out the sounds.

Beach bungalow facing waves that followed no laws of physics he’d ever seen. And if his hearing was good, they were in hell.

No, not quite right.

They were in Hell. With the capital “H” and everything.

Literally. The one that was a proper noun.

He squeezed his eyes shut and tried not to hear Virgil’s cursing as he tromped back down the bungalow’s worn wooden steps in his kick-ass alligator-hide cowboy boots.

As he walked away from the bungalow that belonged to the flaming b***h who ran this place.

A woman.

The Devil was a woman.

The baddest Trans Am ever built was parked in front of the Devil’s bungalow.

In Hell.

The Hell.

If he hadn’t s**t his pants before, it was certainly time to do so.

And he might have, if he wasn’t afraid of what the poet might do to him if he soiled the Trans Am’s upholstery.