The Sapphire Express (24 page)

I felt a hot wave of relief thawing my rigid body when the cursed town disappeared from the mirror, and I loosened my white-knuckle grip of the wheel and looked around. The road was eerily quiet, and only a handful of vehicles were traveling on that daunting gateway to guaranteed heartbreak and pain. I seemed to be one of the rare souls who wanted to experience the landfall of a nuclear storm, and that made me feel a little dejected, even inferior. I just didn’t know why my decision wasn’t good enough for the others.

After traveling about ten miles on the silent freeway, I glanced to my right and noticed a secondhand luxury car dealership that still had some vehicles in the showroom. I pulled the Econoline into the shoulder and looked at the expanding spider web in the windshield. It was clear that the mean baby’s temper tantrum had triggered a chain reaction that was going to make the glass break sooner or later. The only sensible thing to do, therefore, was to say good-bye to the mighty Econoline and replace it with something better, something faster—something unbelievable. I was going to ride the freeway to hell in style.

I drove to the dealership’s parking lot and rammed the Econoline through a feeble gate that didn’t stand a slightest chance against my powerful friend. Then I increased my speed to twenty miles per hour and crashed through the showroom window under a glorious glow of madness and guaranteed impunity. The thick glass shattered like a used car salesman’s dream, and I was soon granted unrestricted access to a motor enthusiast’s heaven.

The immaculate showroom was packed with truly extraordinary rides, and most of them had been custom-made for customers with a keen eye for detail. I didn’t know much about expensive cars, but they all looked fantastic, and I decided to find the meanest and fastest of them all.

I walked past a golden Lamborghini and a couple of aggressive-looking Ferraris and peeked into a Rolls Royce coupe that most likely was worth more than my old house. They were all very nice vehicles, but there was something in the corner of the showroom that got my full attention. It was a machine that looked like it belonged in a cage.

I approached the beast cautiously and read what was written on the price tag. The pitch-black predator had a name: Mercedes-Benz Brabus CLS Rocket V12 S Biturbo. The price for the car was $600,000 dollars, and the window sticker listed the following specifications: Speed: 225 mph; 0–60 mph: 3.9 seconds; Max. Power: 730 hp.

I thought that the numbers looked good, and I walked to a little black box that was attached to the showroom wall and got the keys to the car. I had just become the owner of my first Mercedes-Benz.

I stepped into the car enthusiastically and turned the key. The monster started breathing hard, and I pushed the gas pedal gently. A vicious roar filled the showroom like an Oklahoma thunderstorm, and it sounded like the Brabus was upset that it had been left all alone in the dusty corner and not allowed to do what it did best: devour asphalt and dirt like an immortal creature of darkness and make its master quiver with illicit excitement. That master was now me, and I was going to feed the beast—feed it good.

I drove the Brabus through the hole that the valiant Econoline had made and stopped outside the showroom. Then I walked back inside and jumped into the mighty van for the last time and got all my belongings, including the Remington shotguns that had been unemployed for way too long. As I closed the van’s humble door for the last time, I stopped and looked at the only friend that had stood loyally next to me through the insanity of the past weeks. The poor thing looked sad and defeated. Its glass eyes were broken, and a grimy sleeve from a brown leather jacket hung from its shattered grille like a plastic bag in a leafless autumn tree. I felt sorry for my partner in crime, whom I had forced to commit a suicide. The Econoline had never complained or judged me. It didn’t point a blaming finger at me when I kidnapped the father of two young children and burned his bones under the midnight sky. It didn’t tell me to stop when I sent a shiny bullet to remove the brains from the garbageman’s skull and delivered him to hell a little early. It never questioned me or scolded me. It was the most reliable and trusted friend in the whole world, and if I just gave it some gasoline and oil to drink, it did whatever I wanted it to do. It murdered, and it mauled, and it crushed the thighbones of a madman like they were funny little candy canes. It delivered money to orphans and gave a working girl a well-deserved break. It was the devil, and it was the angel from the kindest of heavens. It was the mighty Econoline—the best goddamn van in the world—and it stood ready to serve the best man in the world or the worst man in the world. It didn’t care. It was just a fucking piece of metal with a damn good engine stuffed under its shiny hood.

I put the garbage bag, the food and the water in the Brabus’s trunk and tossed the hunting bag on the passenger seat. Then I shifted the gear back into drive and got ready to go, but before I could hit the gas, a private security guard appeared behind the corner in a white pickup truck like a blabbering mother-in-law on Super Bowl Sunday. He was driving fast toward me, and the little amber emergency light on his roof was flashing feverishly. I shrugged and slammed the gas pedal all the way to the floor and clenched the steering wheel hard with both hands. The Brabus went absolutely ballistic, and thick smoke from the burning rubber filled the air. The beast started rushing toward the pickup at an ungodly speed, and I had to grasp the steering wheel with all my strength to keep the raging maniac on the road. I saw the terrified look on the security guard’s face when he realized that the charging German bull wasn’t going to stop, and he swerved into a small ditch and started banging the steering wheel furiously. I waved at him as the Brabus flew past him like a .223 Winchester Super Short Magnum and laughed out loud. It was absolutely guaranteed that no man had any chance of catching me. I was driving the fastest car in the whole state, and it was full of powerful guns and nasty knives. I was invincible, the shining star on the freeway to hell. The era of the suburban Antichrist had reached its peak.

For the first time since my daughter had died, I felt the minnows of life frolicking in my clogged arteries. The layer of color that had disappeared from my world with Annalise had come back, and the trees looked their normal green again. The sun was bright yellow, almost too bright, and my vision was sharp and focused. I felt a little guilty that a stupid car had made me feel alive again, but I figured that it was more complicated than that. It was about knowing that I was going to be successful and able to turn my escape plan into reality. The Brabus was the key to my salvation and the last missing element that would unlock the gates of eternity and offer me a chance to see my precious daughter again. It was a fast and powerful monster devoid of any fear, and it was there to help me.

I was flying like the wind on the quiet freeway, and the scenery was changing fast. The speedometer stayed at a steady 120 miles per hour, and it seemed like a nice cruising speed for an inexperienced driver like me. It felt pretty much the same as driving 40 miles per hour in a regular car, and there was no shaking or excessive noise inside the vehicle. The Brabus was capable of reaching almost double that speed, but I didn’t have any desire to share Phaethon’s fate and embarrass myself like some nouveau riche asshole who didn’t understand that a 700-horsepower car behaved a little differently than his daddy’s Volvo—even if it the damn thing was turbocharged and advertised as sporty.

The eastbound side of the freeway was clear, and I was lucky that I wasn’t following the stampeding herds. All the westbound lanes were completely blocked by stranded vehicles, and the whole place looked like a scene from a disaster movie. The freeway was jam-packed with fleeing people who were trying to save their families and the few belongings they had managed to tie hastily to their roofs. The traffic had come to a permanent standstill, and three lanes had turned into five. The impatient souls were using the shoulder and the grass to get past the stopped vehicles, but that approach was totally futile and just caused more accidents and formed more and more chokepoints on the freeway. It was a human soup made with frustration and fear, and the lid was about to blow off. The smell of murder was starting to blend with the crisp air that was soon going to turn into radioactive poison and kill them all.

The situation was truly a devil’s horror show, and I felt extremely sorry for the families who were so desperately trying to get to safety. I could see the old me, Eden, and Annalise crying in one of those cars, and that terrifying vision made me swallow hard. I just couldn’t understand why the world had to be such a cruel place, and why the innocent were tormented so, the children of God who didn’t even understand the reason for their pain. They suffered, but they still tried to smile. They cried, but they didn’t know why. They tried to understand so hard, but there was nothing to be understood. Madness couldn’t be explained, and the vile acts of man were something that made the word humanity seem like a poor and selfish choice—a choice of a man. I couldn’t understand why kindness was associated with a creature that was so nasty and sordid that it tolerated the torture of the innocent and treated them like they were unimportant, worthless. It was beyond me why women and children didn’t turn their backs to that faulty creation that was, after all, the source of all the evil and misery in the world and tell him to piss off or start behaving. Why were men such bloody idiots that they still believed that physical strength was the source of their foolish might? Why were they so goddamn defective?

Brilliant men somewhere in North-Rhine Westphalia had, however, built the Brabus, and I applauded them for their fine accomplishment. The car was a true marvel of engineering and also a quite effective weapon against the increasing flow of maniacs who were driving on the wrong side of the freeway and forcing me to play a fun game of chicken with them. When they saw the angry Brabus closing in like a devil’s bullet, they yielded immediately and started to frantically steer away from me with panic burning in their terrified eyes. It was quite a unique experience for all the parties involved, especially because I was driving twice as fast as the approaching vehicles. They appeared so fast and suddenly that I had to seriously concentrate to avoid a fatal accident. The Brabus, however, handled the challenge like a champion, and it reacted to my every move like it had become one with my body. I really loved that car, and I felt sorry for the future generations who would have to sit in the backseat with their darling smartphones and watch a boring autopilot do all the driving.

I slowed down a little when I saw two police officers trying to desperately fix a hole that someone had cut in the cable barrier separating the two freeways. They both carried shotguns to help to get a point across, but the poor servants of justice seemed to be fighting a losing battle. A nuclear storm was evidently way scarier than a cop with a gun, and manic people just kept pushing through the hole with their SUVs and minivans, almost running over the brave officers. I shrugged and slammed the accelerator to the floor, and the men in blue were soon just two uniformed dots in the rearview mirror.

The freeway was clear of suicidal maniacs again, and I figured that there were no more holes in the barrier. It was time to allow myself to enjoy the raw power of my new friend a little and do something crazy.

The Brabus was in its element at high speeds, and it didn’t even flinch when I steered it into the debris-filled shoulder and flew past three military utility trucks that had hogged the lanes like greedy steel pigs in fatigues. The powerful driving machine was tearing through the piles of freeway trash like a late-summer cyclone in a Manila landfill, and I closed my eyes instinctively when the monster reached 195 miles per hour.

The whole stunt only took a second or two to pull off, and I ticked one more box on my list of supper-happy-fun-things that were only possible when there was a fatal nuclear storm coming to a town near you. It was a hell of an adrenaline rush, no question about that, but I had to slow down because the speed was so intense that I simply didn’t have the required strength to manage it for more than a couple of minutes at a time. The speedometer settled at 130 miles per hour, and I took a deep breath.

After about forty miles of leisurely driving, the unmistakable shape of a police car appeared on the horizon. Doomsday’s finest was cruising approximately at 100 miles per hour, and I caught up with it quickly. It was time to play a little game with the fine officer.

I decreased my speed until I was side by side with the cop and glanced at his car gleefully. It was a black Dodge Charger pursuit vehicle with a Hemi V-8 engine under its sleek hood. It was a cool little thing, and its main purpose was to catch speeding maniacs in fast cars. The shiny iron officer tried to look tough in its muscular body, and I couldn’t help but think that the car looked almost adorable next to the angry Brabus. It was like a tiny mountain bunny next to a big ferocious wolf that breathed gasoline and exhaled fire. The poor Dodge was simply outmatched.

I pulled a little closer to the Charger and waved happily to the officer. He looked at me sternly, and I smiled at him like he was my best friend. The serious man wasn’t amused, and I figured that he didn’t have time to play games with idiots like me on the day before the Last Judgment. Well, that was too bad because I wanted to play regardless of his wishes, and I stepped on the gas gently. The Brabus started snarling viciously and the speedometer quickly climbed to 180. The Charger tried to stay with me the best it could, but it had no chance. It was trying to catch a beast with almost unearthly power.

I slowed down and waited for the cop to catch up with me. Then I waved at him again and lifted my thumb. He still wasn’t amused and was frantically mouthing and gesturing me to pull over. I just smiled at him and slammed the accelerator all the way to the floor. The Brabus followed my command like a good soldier, and it charged forward with the speed of a pissed-off ballistic missile. The adorable Charger vanished from the rearview mirror in a couple of seconds, and I watched the speedometer climb to 210. The cop knew that it had no chance of catching me, and I figured that he just gave up, or simply didn’t give a damn. On a normal day, he would have probably called reinforcements to greet me with a spike mat, but not on a busy, busy day like that—not when the whole world was about to ignite and burn to ashes.