Helltown by Jeremy Bates Read Free Book Online

buckled it. He wanted to tell Jeff to stop, but the girls were already shouting at him to do exactly that, and he wasn’t listening.
    As soon as they shot past the end of the bridge the canopy knitted together and blotted out the sky once more, creating the sensation that they were bulleting down the bore of a pistol.
    Jeff stared intensely ahead at the road, his mouth twisted into a bitter grimace, his hands gripping the steering wheel in the ten and two positions tight enough to squeeze the blood from his knuckles.
    He was a man who’d just gone all in on the pot of a lifetime, and right then Steve knew that he wasn’t going to yield the road.
    Steve was suddenly furious. He couldn’t believe Jeff was risking a potentially fatal head-on collision, risking all of their futures, to prove he wasn’t a chicken.
    Mandy and Jenny gave up yelling and buckled their belts. A fear-soaked silence followed, magnifying the purr of the engine and the hum of the tires.
    Only a handful of seconds had passed since Jeff gunned the gas, but it felt like much longer. Steve’s fear had warped his perception of time, slowed it down, and for a crazy moment some mordant part of his brain contemplated jumping out of the speeding vehicle. But it was traveling too fast. He would break his back or neck—and likely get run over by the oncoming hearse. Besides, he was frozen stiff. All he could move were his eyeballs, which he strained to the left so he could read the speedometer. The needle wavered just below seventy miles per hour.
    He looked back at the road. The hearse was sixty yards away, the headlights bleeding together to form a blinding wall of shimmering white.
    Fifty yards.
    We’re going to die , Steve thought.
    Forty.
    He braced his hands against the dash.
    Thirty.
    “Jeff!” Mandy shrieked.
    Twenty.
    “ Jeff! ”
    Jeff swerved to the left. The hearse screamed past. Jeff yanked the wheel to the right but overcompensated. The car knifed across the dotted line toward the opposite shoulder. He yanked the wheel left again. Right, left, right, left, trying to regain control of the now fishtailing vehicle.
    They careened off the road and plowed through a small tree, shattering bark and branches. They hit something that launched the BMW into an airborne somersault. For a moment Steve floated in zero gravity, and he was thinking this was it, this was how he was going to die, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it—
    The car struck the ground nose first. The impact accordioned the engine block and slammed Steve with the force of a sledgehammer to the chest. The seatbelt strap bit into his flesh and held him suspended above the dash, which was no longer in front of him but below him. The handstanding vehicle crunched forward onto the roof, where it rocked back and forth before coming to rest in the still, silent forest.
     

     
    Noah had been seconds away from getting out of the Jeep and going to talk to Jeff about the assholes in the hearse when the BMW’s rear tires squealed and literally burned rubber. Through wafts of smoke, he watched the car shoot away down the road.
    “He’s playing chicken!” Austin exclaimed from beside him.
    Noah didn’t know what to do, but he knew he couldn’t sit there doing nothing. He shoved the Jeep into gear and accelerated.
    “He’s not going to give!” Austin said. “Jeff’s not going to give. The motherfucker’s going to get them all killed.”
    “The hearse will give,” Noah said automatically.
    “Don’t get too close,” Cherry said from the backseat in a borderline terrified voice. “Stay to the shoulder. Do you hear me? Stay to the shoulder .”
    “I’m straddling the goddamn shoulder!” Noah said. In fact, he could hear loose gravel spraying the Jeep’s undercarriage.
    Then, ahead, Jeff arced sharply to the left. For a moment it appeared as though the hearse had plowed straight through the BMW, but Noah knew that had to be a trick of the fog and the glare of the