The Bad Place Read Free

that window didn’t spray over him; instead, most of it fell out of the frame, onto the pavement.
    Yanking the door shut, he glanced through the gap where the glass had been, toward the gloom-enfolded apartments, saw no one.
    Frank threw the Ford in gear, popped the brake, and tramped hard on the accelerator. Swinging away from the curb, he clipped the rear bumper of the car parked in front of him. A brief peal of tortured metal rang sharply across the night.
    But he was still under attack: A scintillant blue light, at most one second in duration, lit up the car; over its entire breadth the windshield crazed with thousands of jagged lines, though it had been struck by nothing he could see. Frank averted his face and squeezed his eyes shut just in time to avoid being blinded by flying fragments. For a moment he could not see where he was going, but he didn’t let up on the accelerator, preferring the danger of collision to the greater risk of braking and giving his unseen enemy time to reach him. Glass rained over him, spattered across the top of his bent head; luckily, it was safety glass, and none of the fragments cut him.
    He opened his eyes, squinting into the gale that rushed through the now empty windshield frame. He saw that he’d gone half a block and had reached the intersection. He whipped the wheel to the right, tapping the brake pedal only lightly, and turned onto a more brightly lighted thoroughfare.
    Like Saint Elmo’s fire, sapphire-blue light glimmered on the chrome, and when the Ford was halfway around the corner, one of the rear tires blew. He had heard no gunfire. A fraction of a second later, the other rear tire blew.
    The car rocked, slewed to the left, began to fishtail.
    Frank fought the steering wheel.
    Both front tires ruptured simultaneously.
    The car rocked again, even as it glided sideways, and the sudden collapse of the front tires compensated for the leftward slide of the rear end, giving Frank a chance to grapple the spinning steering wheel into submission.
    Again, he had heard no gunfire. He didn’t know why all of this was happening—yet he did.
    That was the truly frightening part: On some deep subconscious level he did know what was happening, what strange force was swiftly destroying the car around him, and he also knew that his chances of escaping were poor.
    A flicker of twilight blue ...
    The rear window imploded. Gummy yet prickly wads of safety glass flew past him. Some smacked the back of his head, stuck in his hair.
    Frank made the corner and kept going on four flats. The sound of flapping rubber, already shredded, and the grinding of metal wheel rims could be heard even above the roar of the wind that buffeted his face.
    He glanced at the rearview mirror. The night was a great black ocean behind him, relieved only by widely spaced streetlamps that dwindled into the gloom like the lights of a double convoy of ships.
    According to the speedometer, he was doing thirty miles an hour just after coming out of the turn. He tried to push it up to forty in spite of the ruined tires, but something clanged and clinked under the hood, rattled and whined, and the engine coughed, and he could not coax any more speed out of it.
    When he was halfway to the next intersection, the headlights either burst or winked out. Frank couldn’t tell which. Even though the streetlamps were widely spaced, he could see well enough to drive.
    The engine coughed, then again, and the Ford began to lose speed. He didn’t brake for the stop sign at the next intersection. Instead he pumped the accelerator but to no avail.
    Finally the steering failed too. The wheel spun uselessly in his sweaty hands.
    Evidently the tires had been completely torn apart. The contact of the steel wheel rims with the pavement flung up gold and turquoise sparks.
    Fireflies in a windstorm....
    He still didn’t know what that meant.
    Now moving about twenty miles an hour, the car headed straight toward the right-hand curb. Frank