Vengeance Drives For Uber Chapter 1: Be your own boss and earn extra cash!, a ghost rider fanfic

Warnings: graphic depictions of violence, offscreen noncon/rape, drug references. Hard R.

When last we saw Robbie Reyes:

Last year, Robbie Reyes was murdered. The ghost of his serial-killing Satanist hitman uncle, "Eli Morrow," brought him back to life as a Ghost Rider, hoping to use Robbie for his own purposes. He tried to tempt him to kill, under the guise of "revenge" or "burning up human rubbish."
Robbie resisted him, until a Russian mobster put a gun to his little brother's head. This exchange followed:
"By killing Yegor Ivanov, you've avenged me...and bonded our souls eternally. You may have saved Gabe's soul, but you've thrown any hopes of getting rid of me right out the window."I will curse you. I will plague your body and soul until you rot from within. I will consume you with anger, hatred, and the urge to kill. Your will may be strong, kid, but not strong enough to withstand a satanic serial killer's eternal lust for murder.
"It will consume you...and you will murder again."
"I'll make you a deal. Find me the worst scum on the planet-find me those who torture, kill and rape-find me the foulest darkest degenerate souls to walk the earth-people like YOU, Eli Morrow-and I'll gladly destroy them. But I will kill no one else."
Six months later and Robbie still hasn't fulfilled his deal.

Notes: Please check out the awesome moodboard art by MistressKat on ArchiveOfOurOwn!
Thanks to IRL writing buddy CB for beta work! *waves*
I started writing this last summer. This has consumed my life. Headcanons established here have underpinned all the Ghost Rider fics you've seen from me.
Is there a plot? Plot is over-rated. There are many sub-plots! There is an arc!
Uber stories were stolen from Uber driver subreddits. Major OCs were inspired by Ann Rule's true crime books. Ghost Rider characters are drawn from All-New Ghost Rider (2014) and Ghost Rider (2016), with a guest from Ghost Rider (1990) and cameos from Leverage (TV).
There is a plot thread in this fic where Robbie is studying for his GED. He thinks of himself as having dropped out of high-school, but really he is finishing early, and he will finish with high marks.
A major inaccuracy I have introduced, which I will not apologize for, is that I've given the Charger a manual transmission, when it says right there in the comic book that it is a 3-speed automatic. I don't like automatic transmissions, I don't understand automatic transmissions, and I don't know how to write them in a way that sounds badass. Also, Tradd Moore's art depicts a manual transmission. So. Do read the tags and the warnings in chapter notes. I cannot guarantee that I have sufficiently warned for each individual chapter, but I have tried.

Just after dawn on a Thursday in September, not even one week into the new school year, Robbie Reyes woke from an exhausted sleep to the tap, shuffle, thump of his brother Gabe's crutches down the hall in the kitchen.

His body was already sitting up, his used laptop warm and humming on his lap.

Not good.

He'd stayed up half the night worrying about money, searching message boards for local street races, re-jiggering his budget on a spreadsheet. Wages too low, hours and shifts too few, sitters' rates too high and the interest on the Care Credit ticking ever upward. He needed big cash, he needed to win races. Or some side-job, a hustle, something morally tolerable if not legal, high-paying, work-from-home or short hours for big paychecks. Something. Anything. He was slipping back into debt and Gabe needed him.

He should have just slept.

"Sleeping beauty's awake," his body purred, an unfamiliar sardonic smile pulling at his lips. His finger mashed the nubbin in the middle of the keyboard, switching between unfamiliar tabs: a Tor browser, open to what looked very much like Craigslist ads, but weren't.

Locked out of his own motor cortex, Robbie gathered himself, taking stock as best he could while unable to move his eyes.Eli! You fucker. What'd you do? Did you talk to Gabe? You're not allowed to talk to Gabe!

Eli snorted. "Exactly whaddya think I'd want with the runt when I got you? Gabe woke up on his own some time after six. Heard him brushin' his own teeth and everything. I've been here the whole time, helping you. Ever since your street-racing gig fell through—"

No thanks to you.

"It was inevitable. The Hell Charger is too obvious even when we're not on fire, and we were cheating. Of fuckin' course you're blacklisted. Only a half-wit would race us for money. But here," Eli stabbed Robbie's finger at the screen. "Lookit this. Just lookit this walking rubbish-heap. Clark Anthony Crawford." Eli switched to a new tab, this one showing the man's arrest record. "Rape, statutory rape, first and second-degree rape, child rape. It's like he collects badges. Assault and battery, larceny, grand larceny. Passing counterfeit bills. Oh, and rape, rape, rapitty-rape." He switched back to Not-Craigslist. "Twenty coin to smoke him before his testimony on October third. That's, what, fifty grand in 1999 dollars. Buy a lotta pills. Shiny new pair of crutches for your ball and chain out there."

Robbie's consciousness tightened under his skin. Fifty grand was what got him saddled with Eli last year. Fifty grand, the dream of moving himself and Gabe to a new home in a safe neighborhood, with a clean reliable bus system and good schools, where a kid like Gabe could drive his wheelchair home from the Development Center without getting robbed, where the playgrounds didn't have used needles hiding in the sand, where the loud pops and bangs in the night were really just fireworks instead of gunfire. Racing for fifty grand had landed him dead in an alley next to a stolen car, and now, possessed by the evil ghost of his long-lost uncle, Eli Morrow.

I'm not shutting up a witness for the Irish Mob, Robbie said. He tested the limits of his body, feeling the boards under his bare feet, the whirr of the laptop fan against his thigh. He tried to make his presence relaxed, easy, don't-worry-about-me. Eli used his eyes to focus on the picture on the ad, a schlubby-looking middle-aged man with acne scars and retreating red hair.

"The Feebs are gonna nail a couple bit players on his testimony, call it a day, then roll this guy in cotton wool and ship him to Iowa for witness protection," Eli said.

Like you care. I'm not killing people for money. Stop using Gabe against me.

"Listen, you ungrateful shit. I have skills and know-how to pull down six figures a year, and with my powers, we'd be uncatchable. You sit around whining about your precious brother and your morals and your feelings, but I try one time to help you out and you shove it in my face. Remember our deal: sooner or later, preferably sooner, you're gonna kill someone. Might as well make it mutually beneficial."

Not like this.

"You know, when I first found you, I thought, this here's a kid with spunk. This here's a kid with fire. Drag-racing my car you stole out of your own auto shop. Trash-talking gangsters. Holes in your earlobes I could stick a pencil through. But instead you are the most boring, responsible young man I ever had the displeasure to meet."

Gabe's crutches approached from the hallway, stopping at the closed door. A knock, enthusiastic. "Robbie-Robbie! Breakfast's ready! Time to wake up!"

Eli rolled Robbie's eyes, annoyed at the interruption, and in his distraction, Robbie tackled him from behind and stuffed himself back into his body. "Just a minute, Gabe!" Robbie called. He coughed. Checked his browser history—automatically deleted, dammit Eli. But the arrest records website appeared to have a paywall. "Did you spend my money on this?" he hissed.

Our money. Hey, let's see what El Bobo did to the kitchen.

Rage flared. Robbie'd fingers tensed and the slanting scars on his scalp burned. He shoved it own, even as he felt Eli making a grab for control again. "Gabe knows how to be safe," Robbie growled, rather than admit that he was a little worried himself.

Gabe had changed and grown in the past year and a half, mostly for the better. From the chaotic and tense environment of the foster system, Robbie had moved him back to their childhood apartment in Hillrock Heights, an affordable neighborhood in East LA. Now, at least within their four rented walls, there was no yelling, no one to steal or destroy Gabe's action figures or comics, and no one to tell him to be quiet unless he could talk normal. Robbie enrolled Gabe at the Patrick Wellman Development Center and scraped together a couple hundred bucks a month for meetings with Dr. Dacosta, who helped get Gabe learning and talking more, and had switched him to new, modern anti-seizure drugs and muscle relaxants—medications that worked better and didn't sedate Gabe so damn much.

With less stress and sedation, and with Robbie around to listen and play with him every night he wasn't working at Canelo's, Gabe was a different kid. Social, curious, kind, empathetic. He could learn anything he thought was cool—so he knew a lot about cars and comics mythology, not so much math and social studies. Speech therapy was coming along, so now instead of blank stares he got to have conversations with strangers. Choking was no longer a daily terror. His tremor was less on the new meds, and he could follow along with his How To Draw Superheroes book, given a full sheet of paper and a big pen. Dr. Dacosta was so pleased with his physical and social progress over the summer that she'd arranged for him to join integrated classes at the middle school three days a week this fall.

But not all his recent changes were good.

Gabe pushed himself hard, especially with mobility: so hard Robbie was afraid his little brother would hurt himself. He'd gotten up on crutches that spring, then over the summer had a growth spurt that left him too lanky and uncoordinated. Robbie and the physiotherapists had helped him get back out of his power chair and onto the forearm crutches again, but now Gabe was overtaxing himself with them. He was just fourteen. He was still growing. Even healthy fourteen-year-olds had a hard time putting on muscle. Every time Gabe came for a physio appointment, the therapists told Robbie to let him take breaks, but Robbie wasn't discouraging him from using the power chair, far from it—but what was he supposed to do, take away an accomplishment that was so important to him?

More worrisome than the strain on Gabe's shoulders were the anxious looks Gabe now cast at Robbie every time they'd been separated, even for five minutes. The insistent, even desperate way he demanded to do things on his own, and the constant glances back: I can do it, see? Am I doing it right? I can help. I can be useful.

"Robbie-Robbie! You okay?" Across the door, Gabe sounded nervous, but more than that, like he was pretending not to be nervous. He'd never used to hide anything from anyone, especially not Robbie. Maybe it was good. Like Dr. Dacosta said, maybe he was just starting to act his age.

"I'm okay, buddy! Thank-you for checking on me!" Robbie hollered, and threw on fresh underwear and a band t-shirt and yesterday's jeans. He opened the door slowly. Gabe had propped himself up against the wall by the doorjam, noodly arms occupied with his forearm crutches, gazing up at Robbie with his huge green eyes. No hug, apparently. A tentative smile that broke Robbie's heart. "You made breakfast for me, this time?"

"Yes," Gabe said with a swinging nod of his head. He looked up at him and stared, steadying himself against the wall. "Robbie?"

"Yeah, buddy."

"Robbie-Robbie." He grinned suddenly, like his old self, and crutched into the kitchen.

"Wow, you're getting strong on those," Robbie said, following. On the kitchen table sat two bowls of frosted Wheaties, with spoons, empty cups, and paper towels folded into little pyramids for napkins. A pile of other paper towels, failed pyramids, sat on the edge of the table between them. There was a pot on the stove; Robbie hurried over to look. The burner was off, the pot was cool. Inside was a pile of dry macaroni and an unopened foil packet of cheesy powder. Fine, fine. Just add water. The Wheaties box had been closed and replaced on the counter. A gallon of milk, mostly full, sat on the floor beside the refrigerator. Gabe's power chair sat against the counter, near the microwave.

The kitchen smelled like eggs.

"I made Wheaties for breakfast! I made mac'n'cheese for dinner! But it's not dinner now so you don't cook it yet!"

"You got it all figured out," Robbie said, picking up the milk. Still cold. A bit too heavy for Gabe to comfortably lift. "You left the milk for me to pour so the Wheaties don't get soggy? Good idea."

Gabe gave him another too-shy smile, and backed himself up against one of the kitchen chairs. He scooted onto the seat, slipped his hands out of his crutches. He was a good two feet away from the table. Robbie stepped around to push his chair in.

"I can do it," Gabe said, suddenly firm.

Robbie hated to undermine him, but he was reasonably sure he could not scoot his own chair up to the table. "I like helping you."

"What if you stop?" Gabe demanded. Robbie froze.

Eli, you fucker, you did this, bastard, you broke us—

Don't blame me, Eli said.

"I'll never stop caring about you, buddy," Robbie said. Gabe wouldn't meet his eyes. "I'll always be here for you. I'm not going anywhere." He wasn't even sure he could die anymore. "Do you want to push the chair in together?" Gabe shook his head. He rocked back and forth on the chair, scooted a tiny bit. "That looks like it'll take a long time. Do you want to eat in your wheelchair?"

Gabe shot a long, opaque look at the power chair. "Yeah," he said at last. He slipped his right forearm into one crutch, but knocked the other crutch to the floor with his elbow. "Oh," he said softly.

"I got it, I got it," Robbie said, and scurried around the table to help him get up. Gabe got his crutches arranged, tipped forward onto them, and backed himself into the power chair and drove to the table while Robbie moved the kitchen chair out of the way and poured milk and orange juice. He left for the bathroom to get Gabe's meds for him, put them in Gabe's special cup. When he got back, Gabe stared at him. He'd spilled milk on the table; his tremor was worse when he was anxious. "You okay, buddy?" Robbie asked, meeting his eyes as Gabe scanned his outline over and over again.

"I'm okay, Robbie," Gabe said at last. He mopped surreptitiously at the drips of milk with his pyramid napkin. Must have been something they'd showed him at school: origami to practice hand-eye coordination.

Robbie picked up one of the paper towels from the pile on the table and reached over to help.

"No," Gabe stopped him.

"Okay, you got it." Robbie sat back.

"No. That—that's a bad napkin," Gabe said, waving at the pile. "Sorry."

"They're good if they're still clean," Robbie reassured him. He choked down the rest of his cereal. Watched Gabe take his pills. Stood. Washed and dried his bowl.

The egg smell was coming from the microwave. Robbie opened the door and found half-cooked egg and shell fragments misted over the whole interior. "Buddy," he sighed.

Gabe squeaked.

Robbie turned.

Gabe stared up at him, eyes very wide, his spoon in his right fist, dripping. "Sorry."

"It's okay," Robbie said quickly. Gabe started rocking subtly and he began to sniffle. Robbie felt himself choke up, too. He was helpless. He couldn't fix this. "Hey, now we both know what happens when you heat an egg in the microwave, right?" He swallowed hard. "I never knew that."

"Sorry. Robbie?"

"Yeah. I'm not mad. Promise."

"Robbie?"

"Yeah, Gabe?" You did this, Eli. You made him afraid of me. His eyes burned: tears, then steam. He took a long slow, breath, tried to think of something else.

Gabe grabbed his wrist suddenly. "Robbie's not mad. Promise?"

Robbie wiped his nose on one of the half-folded napkins. "I promise I'm not mad at you, Gabe. I love you."

You need therapy.

Rich, coming from you.

If you took contract kills, you could afford your own therapist.

Fuck off.

Last year, after Eli and the Hell Charger had attached themselves to Robbie's life, Robbie had pole-vaulted out of debt with stacks of cash he'd won racing a supernaturally-enhanced car in underground street races. He'd stopped taking night shifts at the auto shop. Suddenly he'd had all the time and money he'd needed to take care of Gabe properly. But you couldn't win every race, every time, and never stay for a chat or a smoke, without the secretive but gossipy underground street racing community taking notice. You couldn't find the big races with the thousand dollar purses without an invite, and over the summer the invites had dried up. Now it was fall again. Senior year. But like hell was Robbie working late shift at Canelo's and leaving his brother to a sitter every night again. He thanked his teachers and checked out a pile of GED prep books from the school library.

He asked Canelo to put him on day shift full-time. But cash flow was low at the moment, and in Canelo's words, "You're great with a wrench, Reyes. People, not so much. I'm not paying you to give Ramón Cordova murder-eyes eight hours a day." So he got day shift three times a week, and some nights, and a few odd hours—nowhere near enough.

In desperation, Robbie checked the pawn shops to see how much cash he could get for the TV in case they needed it for Gabe's next medication refill. He could hardly give the thing away.

Now he was panicking.

Maybe the Rider can rob cash off drug dealers, Robbie thought, collapsing into bed after reading a third of a vocabulary prep book in one sitting.

Yes. Perfect use of our powers.

Fuck off. Robbie willed himself to go to sleep faster. He couldn't afford to let Eli take over again like he had that morning. I don't need to steal. I...I got good grades. I'm a great mechanic—no formal training. I...have a car...with a fudged title...that can win races, if I can find any ever again.

You're highly qualified for prostitution, and, let me repeat, contract killing.Think about it.

I could be an Uber driver.

Eli was silent for a blessed minute. Robbie wondered if he even knew what Uber was. You know, kid. That may be your dumbest idea yet. But I need a laugh. Let's drive some Ubers.

As it turned out, to drive for Uber you had to be at least twenty-one years old with three years of licensed driving experience, and your car had to have four doors and be no older than ten years.

Piece o'cake, Eli cackled. There's a card in my treasure chest. Go get it.

Robbie retrieved his uncle's lock-box, which Eli had hidden in the floorboards in Gabe's room before his death. Gabe freaked out whenever he saw the box, so Robbie stored it out of sight high on a closet shelf. In the lockbox were six expired passports and driver's licenses in different names all bearing Eli's picture, a few photographs of Eli with Robbie's parents, ten thousand dollars in cash dated from the 1990's (now gone to pay Gabe's medical bills) and at least two dozen business cards and cocktail napkins with names and phone numbers.

Princeton. That's the one.

"That his name, Princeton?" Robbie muttered, squinting at the smudged and water-stained napkin.

Spooks don't get names, kid. Call 'em. But let me do the talking.

"Can't he trace the call to my phone?"

Takes time to triangulate off the cell towers; we'll be done in under a minute.

"They can just pull the GPS data," Robbie growled. "Everyone knows that."

Fuck future fuckery what the fuck. First I need a special 'browser,' now I can't use my fucking phone? And of fucking course there's no more fucking payphones anymore. You can shove your fucking future up your ass, boy. Fucking hell.

"What makes you think this number's even still good?" Robbie demanded.

Eli sputtered a bit in the back of his head. Well, not trying it won't get us nowhere.

The next day Robbie found a functioning pay phone and called Princeton, relaxing his clenched-jawed grip on his body enough that Eli could borrow his voice and hands.

The phone rang, and rang, and rang. They listened, nervous and tense, to fifteen rings. Then Eli hung up and called again. Three rings. Then, feeding in more quarters, he called a third time, and this time the phone picked up on the second ring.

"Who the hell has this number?" a hoarse voice demanded. Robbie couldn't tell if Princeton was a man, or a woman who smoked heavily.

"Daaaaaaarlin," Eli drawled. "It's your old pal. You taught me wire fraud, I taught you how to kill a man with a pencil."

Silence.

"Tulsa. Ninety-two."

A tapping sound over the line, like someone clicking fingernails against the handset.

"It's me," he snapped. "Eli Morrow."

"Morrow's dead."

"Yeah, mostly. Say, you read the news over in L.A.? Fella named Ivanov met a fiery end?"

"What's that got to do with Eli Morrow?"

"Well, I'm mostly dead now. That changes a man's M. O."

A heavy sigh, the snick of a doorlatch, a rustle of clothing. "Eli. Tell me what you want."

"Thank-you. I want you to bring Eliot Miller back to life."

"That's a handful." What? Robbie asked. Code. Means five grand.

"You caught me a little short-handed, but if you look close at that news out of L.A., you'll find it worth your while if I owe you a favor."

Another sigh. Then, "This is your way of pretending you're not blackmailing me."

"I'm a great guy like that."

"Fine. Eliot Miller. How old is the bastard now, sixty? Sixty-seven. Damn. You're pretty spry for a retiree, Eli."

"Well, I did get both hips replaced."

Eliot Miller was a law-abiding citizen. Eliot Miller was a retired accountant from New Mexico, with a new AARP membership and no criminal history aside from a few parking tickets thrown in for color. Mr. Miller's background check breezed through Uber's registration system.

The Charger was another matter. It wasn't that Uber intended to ban performance-modified 1969 Dodge Chargers with giant chrome blowers emerging from the hood. It was that Uber aimed to provide a comfortable, safe, convenient, and interchangeable driving experience, and the Charger was none of these things. Comfort and safety weren't standard in 1969, and the Charger was basically what you got when Max Rockatansky's Police Interceptor had a baby with the Dukes of Hazard's Jumping General Lee and that baby was chosen to be the Antichrist. No Uber inspector would pass the Hell Charger.

Eliot Miller drove a standard black four-door 2010 Dodge Charger. Robbie thought this was too specific, that they should borrow a customer's car after a tune-up and bring that to the Uber hub as a stand-in. Eli disagreed. What they needed for their registration was not an actual inspection, but signed paperwork , and for that, all they had to do was steal a blank inspection sheet, forge the inspection notes and signatures, smuggle it into the Uber Hub, and dump it in the hopper on the busiest day of the week. Any time you want me to step in, just say the word, Eli remarked as Robbie paced in the lobby of the Hub like a tweaker, working up the nerve to blunder into the inspector's office while pretending to look for a bathroom.

You just want an excuse to murder somebody, Robbie snarled inwardly.

A bribe was my other idea. But you were all, Oh, Gabe! Gabbie's meds! Pinch those pennies! Murder wouldbe cheap, but I can take a hint, boy.

After all that, Robbie Reyes was the proud owner of an Uber registration code that authorized Eliot Miller to drive people around the city in a 2010 Charger, and a sticker to affix to the right rear passenger window.

Putting on the sticker was the hardest part. Robbie got out a ruler, a level, and a chip of soap to draw with so the sticker would be perfectly straight, but it still took six tries to bring himself to roll it on. The sticker left everyone—Robbie, Eli, and the car—with an itchy, used feeling. Circling the car, seeing that bold squared-off U in the window where before had been a glossy tinted void, gave Robbie a touch of nausea.

The next morning, at eight AM after seeing Gabe off at the bus that took him to the Development Center for the day, Robbie turned on the app and waited for a ping.

There we are. Eliot Miller, five stars. All spanking shiny.

"What's got you in such a good mood," Robbie muttered, staring down at his Android.

Oh...I just think it'll be good for you, to be exposed to a complete cross-section of society every day.

Robbie ground his teeth. Drummed his fingers on the table. He'd just left the phone on the kitchen table to retrieve one of his GED books when the app chimed. There was a ride request, "Brandon," a rider with 4.8 stars waiting across the freeway at a Best Western.

Take it! Take it! Take it! I bet he tips in twenties and his farts smell like gardenias!

Robbie accepted the ping. Then he threw on his leather jacket, dashed out the door, and drove away in a screech of rubber.

They made it through the underpass and into the parking lot of the Best Western in about five minutes because Robbie drove like every outing was practice for his next street race, and cars had a tendency to duck into the slow lane when they saw that giant blower looming in their rear-view mirror. He pulled up to the lobby, but there was no one in sight. He called the rider.

"Hi. Uhh...Brandon?"

"Dude! Lucky you're here, I was just about to call another ride!"

"Well, I made it. I'm at the lobby, where are you?"

"Oh, just gimme a minute." It sounded like the passenger's mouth was full. Robbie got out and waited, standing beside the car and watching the lobby through the big glass doors. A tall chubby white guy in a navy suit emerged, towing a roller bag and a briefcase. He stopped to drop a napkin in a nearby trash can, then turned and spotted the Charger. His entire face stretched in glee. "Holy shit, is this a prank?"

"No, sir."

Robbie opened the trunk and looked down at the pile of chains and jumper cables that sat over the spare tire. Probably should have put those somewhere else. The car didn't even need a spare tire or jumper cables anymore. He sparked up the car, just enough that he could feel the life in it, and ported everything away to his bedroom floor, a little pool of fire and darkness swallowing it up. By the time Brandon got there with his bags, there was nothing but a faint smoke, like firecrackers.

"This really isn't a prank?" Brandon demanded, gazing at the car with wide eyes.

Robbie hefted the bags in and laid them neatly in the spotless trunk. "No, sir. Be a shame to let this classic waste away in some garage. " Fuck off. Why are you doing this?

"You're not gonna film me and put me on Youtube?"

"No, sir. Where to?"

"LAX." Brandon pulled out his phone and showed Robbie the address. Robbie entered it into his map and looked at the new route, then swung himself back into the driver's seat. Brandon yanked fruitlessly on the passenger door. "Dude? Locks?"

Shit. Robbie twitched up the passenger lock with a thought. Brandon didn't notice, just heaved the door open and crashed in, his bulk making the car tilt on its shocks in a way that gave Robbie and Eli the heebie-jeebies. He's gonna slam my door. Clunk. He slammed my fuckin' door!

"Jesus, it's hot in here. How are you not dead?"

"You can roll the windows down."

"Don't mind if I do. You don't have air-con?"

"Just a heater."

They peeled out through the parking lot and merged onto the arterial, heading toward the freeway. As soon as they got up the westbound onramp, Robbie poured on the gas and started weaving through traffic. The whistling scream of the blower and the growl of the engine drowned out anything Brandon might have had to say, aside from periodic hoots and squeals. Every time they accelerated, the front end rose up on its shocks. Brandon braced himself on the dash and the window. The Charger didn't have any interior handles to grip.

LA traffic was what it was, however, and without doing anything obviously supernatural they were inevitably forced to stop. The V-8 rumbled discontentedly, entrapped by cars on all sides on a bridge over a spill-way.

"You got any water?" Brandon asked, sweating.

"No, sir."

Brandon loosened his tie and undid his shirt collar. "So where're you from?"

"Hillrock Heights. It's a, a spot in East LA. Little neighborhood."

"No, I mean. Where're you from?"

"LA."

"I mean, where're your parents from?"

"LA. I think."

"You think?"

Hhrmmm. Robbie got a mental flash of pounding the pointy end of a body hammer through Brandon's temple.

"Where're you from?" Robbie snapped, his eyes heating.

"Kansas City." Brandon fiddled with the latch of the glove box, where the salvage title Canelo had finagled for him under his real name sat, and also one of Gabe's action figures. Robbie panicked. The latch sparked up. Brandon jerked his hand away and sucked on his fingers. "Ow, fuck!"

"Sorry, all this horsepower throws a lotta heat. Heh-heh."

"No kidding. I got a new respect for guys who actually drive these old things around."

Eli revved the engine and popped the clutch while applying the hand-brake, a maneuver that was physically painful to the car but shot them forward six inches, laying down two smears of rubber and jolting Brandon violently in his seat. Then he handed Robbie his body back as suddenly as he'd shoved him out. Robbie stared ahead at the frozen line of cars, dry-mouthed.

"Jesus. Sor-ry," Brandon said.

You gotta get him on the back foot. Project dominance! You're driving this car, if you don't like him you can crash him right into a retaining wall!

Robbie shook his head hard. "So what do you do in Kansas City, Brandon?"

"Insurance adjuster."

"Yeah?" He's the asshole in charge of cheating people out of their insurance payouts!

"Yeah. I investigate claims. Make sure everything's by the book. Pretty dull, but, you know. It's a living. Company sent me here for a conference."

"Cool."

Robbie ground his teeth and gripped the wheel so hard his driving gloves creaked while Brandon rambled about his office drama and how subrogation worked. The traffic in front of them slowly, slowly unraveled, and they reached LAX in half an hour. They got lost getting to the pick-up area, because Eli insisted he knew every terminal at the airport but he'd died before 9-11 and was blind-sided by the security-related changes to vehicle traffic. At last they reached one of the new pickup/drop off areas. Robbie found himself in a long line of newer, legitimate Uber vehicles.

"Hey, I didn't tell you my joke," Brandon said as they pulled up to the concrete pad.

Robbie thumped the steering wheel with his thumbs.

"Why did the almost-blind guy fall into the well?"

"Huh?"

"The almost-blind guy. Why did the almost-blind guy fall into the well. C'mon."

Robbie stared at him. Brandon was loud. He wore an obnoxious cologne. He could feel the sweat of Brandon's ass on the leather where Gabe usually sat, and he'd left fingerprints on his window. Brandon's mouth hung half-open in a little grin as he waited for Robbie to answer.

Because he couldn't see that well. Heh-hah-haaah! Okay, that's worth half of this ride.

Robbie groaned. He yanked the hand-break, stomped out of the car, and hauled Brandon's bags out.

"Thanks for the ride, dude," Brandon said, and tipped him a buck.

"No problem. Have a safe trip home," Robbie muttered. He collapsed back into the driver's seat.

The phone chimed, prompting him to give Brandon a star rating.

Ooh, lessee, lessee, Eli chuckled. Minus three stars for slamming my door. Minus two for whining. Minus FIVE for butting up in your business, and minus one for bad tipping. Plus two for the joke, makes NEGATIVE NINE STARS. Put that in.

Robbie gave Brandon three stars, then changed his mind and made it four. He looked at the sweaty imprint Brandon had left in his seat, and bumped it down to three again. Hit enter. Waited for another ping.

A car behind him trying to get to the drop-off pad honked impatiently, and Robbie's tailpipe spat fire as he sped away.

Robbie carried Linda from a Holiday Inn to LAX. He carried Miguel from an office building to another office building. He carried Hank, Sara, and five-year-old Meaghen from LAX to a Red Lion Inn. He carried Trisha from the Red Lion Inn to a Hyatt Regency. He carried Pete from a run-down house in the suburbs to a slightly nicer house in another suburb, then a boarded-up motor home in a trailer park, and then a generically grandiose house in a hilltop gated community, and then a street corner in the warehouse district, and then back to the boarded-up motor home, and then to another generically grandiose hill-top house. Pete was the politest of his riders, and tipped Robbie twenty bucks. Robbie gave him five stars when he dropped him off back in the suburbs.

Finally it was time to pick up a short shift at Canelo's. Robbie shut the app down, screeched into the parking lot, slammed his locker shut on his leather jacket, threw on his cover-alls, and spent the rest of the day flat on his back on a creeper, churning through oil-lube-and-filters and not talking to anyone. Eli was quiet, too, if smug. Robbie took what he could get.

He wished Canelo had more hours for him, but his boss seemed to be arranging things so that Robbie and the new mechanic, Ramón "El Perro Rabioso" Cordova, shared as few shifts as possible. Ramón, while in prison for multiple axe-murders, had somehow as good as earned ASE certification in electrical systems and automatic transmission servicing. Whatever. If Canelo wanted to give Robbie's hours to Ramón, Ramón could keep them. Canelo didn't even pay on time.

But today when he left for home, Robbie had two hundred dollars in the bank already. Nothing like driving home from a two minute race with five grand in his pocket, but it beat the alternatives. And the Hell Charger didn't even need gas.

He met Gabe when the bus pulled up. Mrs. Valenzuela helped him down the steps; he was still soldiering on with his crutches, but his head drooped and he moved much slower than he had this morning.

"Whoa, buddy," Robbie said, hustling over to steady him.

"I can do it," Gabe snapped.

Robbie backed off a step, startled.

"He used his crutches all day," Mrs. Valenzuela said. "You worked very hard and I'm very proud of you. Your brother is also very proud of you."

"Yeah, Gabe, I'm so proud."

Gabe's head was low, and his arms shook in the cuffs of his crutches.

"But you're home now, Gabriel. You don't have to work so hard."

"I'm not tired," Gabe insisted. He looked like he had low blood sugar. He looked gray. He looked like he was coming off a seizure, back before they'd found a combination of seizure meds that worked for him.

Robbie knelt. "Let me give you a ride to the house." Gabe lifted his head with obvious effort. "I missed you, buddy. C'mon. I'll be Optimus Prime."

"Robbie?" That frantic, searching look.

"Yeah. Or I can be a shark and you can be Aquaman."

"Can you be Robbie?"

"Yeah, I can be just Robbie."

Gabe stumbled at him and collapsed against his shoulder with a huff. Robbie helped him out of his crutches and helped Gabe wrap his arms around his neck and his legs around his waist, stood, and headed off to the house. "Bye, Mrs. Valenzuela!" Gabe hollered, suddenly his old self, as the bus drove off.

"So how was school?" Robbie asked, steady under the familiar warmth of Gabe on his back as they sauntered back to the Reyes house.

"Good. How was Robbie's school?"

"I, uh, I'm finishing school early. All I do is read books now. I have a new job instead."

Gabe gripped him tighter. "Job?"

"It's a different job. I can stop whenever I want to, so I can spend more time with you. Whenever you're not in school, we can read books, or play ninjas-and-autobots, or cook, or clean the house, or whatever we want. Sounds good, right?"

"Can I come with to your job?"

I wish. Robbie let them into the house. "I'll put you in your chair, okay?"

"What's your job like?"

He carried Gabe down the hall to his room, where the power chair was. "I drive people around in our car when they need rides."

"That's so nice, Robbie!" Gabe peeled off and settled into the chair. There were red rub marks on his forearms from the cuffs of the crutches. "You're super nice."

Robbie scratched the back of his neck. "They pay me money. And they—they ask for help. See, it's okay to ask for help. Everybody needs help sometimes."

Wake up, boy.

Two A.M. on a Tuesday. Robbie lay curled on his side, drooling into his pillow. It was becoming autumn and the house had cooled sometime around midnight; the blankets, oppressive earlier in the night, now lay uselessly over his shins as he shivered in his sleep.

Up.

Robbie reached down and yanked up the blankets. Now his feet were bare. He rolled into a ball.

There you are. Get up.

Fuck off.

On the street, the Charger's engine revved on its own. Robbie jerked like he'd been burned. The blankets went flying.

Heh-heh. What'd you expect?

Robbie panted, heart racing uncontrollably, his skull hot beneath his skin.What'dya want?

Our deal.

He swallowed. Our deal?

You and me, we gotta whack somebody. Rub 'em out. Shove 'em off this mortal coil. Gank. Terminate. I'm a satanic serial killer and my bloodlust must be appeased.

I hate you. Robbie rolled himself back into the blankets.

Boy, I am completely serious. You gave me your word that you would help me kill people as long as they fit your exacting criteria. Like Mr. Raper T. Raperson. I've left your defective brother completely alone, but you have not held up your end of the deal. Scumbags you insist on, you won't bump into randomly on the street. You have to track them down. And since you refuse to help me with the research, you are going to sit in the car and listen to police chatter.

The engine revved again, outside; Eli's spirit both within Robbie's head and welded into two tons of Detroit steel, teasing the gas pedal, dragging at him, stirring him up. Robbie snarled into his pillow. His breath steamed. Saliva boiled and crackled under his tongue.

Fine.

He rolled out of bed, threw on some clothes, and stomped out to the car. The door opened.

You ever notice that little lever that sticks out under the radio?

Robbie hadn't. Flush with the center console sat a little chrome switch. He had to dig under it with his fingernails to grip it. It turned stiffly. Probably hadn't been used since Eli had died. The car sparked up a little and the radio turned on, but instead of the hip-hop station it played static, long soft static. Then a woman's voice, bored, quick, sharply enunciated. A series of numerical codes. A location, by mile marker, on highway 110.

Traffic stop. Try another channel, there should be at least five.

Robbie adjusted the tuner. More codes, which turned out to be another traffic stop. A noise complaint—no detail. Could have been a party blasting the sound system or a screaming match in the street. He wondered what he would do if he happened to overhear the cops in pursuit of a suspect. He could catch up with them in the Charger—Eli knew how to open portals wherever they wanted when they were the Ghost Rider—and they could beat the cops to the suspect, vanish him away, and then...what? Wrap him in chains and send him to Hell? Let Eli carve him up and make pentagrams with his intestines? Who deserved for that to happen to them?

Well, Eli, for one. Robbie knew for a fact that people who deserved to be murdered and tortured existed, because one of them lived in his head, too deep for him to reach in and tear out. But he remembered the night he'd, well, died. The moment a helicopter's searchlight stabbed down through his windshield, whiting out the road and blinding him. The terror of facing prison and leaving Gabe to face the foster system alone. And then, after he'd bolted like a rabbit through the grid of blocks and back alleys and found himself cornered, his pursuers closing in on him, he remembered the betrayal he'd felt when they proved themselves to be something worse than the law. When they'd opened fire on him and the car, left him shattered and drowning in his own blood.

That was what Eli wanted him to do to someone else.

Robbie reclined in the driver's seat while Eli listened to the radio. His phone dug into his hip, so he pulled it out. Woke it up. He thumbed on the Uber app and immediately got a ping. It was just four blocks away, and there was even a note, "Surge: 2x." That meant double fares. The passenger was "Ramón," 4.5 stars, Hillrock Heights near the I-5 on-ramp.

"Gotta go," Robbie announced, answering the ping. He flicked the switch back to civilian radio, started up the car for real, and screeched off.

As he gunned the motor and drifted through empty street corners and shifted gears up and down to optimize his torque at all speeds, he noticed some of the neatly-kept ranch houses and boxwood hedges and tilting power poles looked familiar. He remembered when he'd last come this way when he almost drove the Charger down a twelve-foot wide crater in the asphalt. A giant purple alien goo monster had dug that crater when it popped up to terrorize the neighborhood; the only reason he'd even been around for the goo monster was that Robbie had happened to come here to confront his new ex-con coworker, Ramón Cordova.

This same Ramón, El Rabioso himself, waited politely at the sidewalk a dozen yards away from the crater.

Imagine Half-Dome Butte stuffed into a collared shirt. A coyote riding in a handbag. A fully-armed tank waiting its turn to merge onto a packed-frozen freeway. Ramón stood six foot two and bulged with muscle. He kept his head shaved almost to the crown, had a tattoo that read RABIOSO in swirling Gothic capitals around the back of his skull, a smaller tattoo of a dagger under one eye, and a long winding scar just missing the other. He wore the kind of reading glasses you picked up for ten bucks at the drug store, and he buttoned his neatly pressed shirts all the way to the throat.

Robbie slowed to a crawl. Ramón had spotted him as soon as he'd rounded the corner; he saw him raise one eyebrow as he spotted the Uber sticker in the window. He saw him shrug, pocket his phone, and lean down to the front passenger window.

Robbie leaned across and cranked the window down.

"'Eliot?'" Ramón asked, monotone.

"Y-yeah," Robbie said. He cleared his throat. "Ramón, right?"

Ramón snorted dismissively. "I have one other rider in the house. I'll get him. Okay?"

"Yeah, fine."

Robbie drummed his thumbs on the wheel while Ramón stalked, straight-backed, to a nearby house. He was gone inside for at least two minutes. At last he emerged, trailed by a shorter, stockier man, with gray stubble, a stained T-shirt, and a sagging, loaded black back-pack.

Robbie stepped out of the car so he could fold down the passenger bucket seat and the second man could get in with his bag. Ramón sat stiffly in the front, hands on his knees. "All set?" Robbie asked.

Ramón nodded and jerked his chin forward. Robbie checked his phone. The address on the app was twenty miles away in L.A. proper, not one of the famous parts. Robbie started the meter and drove off, while Eli rambled in the back of his head.

That Ramón. Such a hypocritical stickler. Who's he to say you can't bring your brother to work with you? Little guy coulda been like mechanic Rain Man. The other guys loved having him visit the shop. Now, pfizzzzh! That future's up in smoke. Who's he to meddle in your business? Turn Canelo against you?

"Pedro. Buckle up," Ramón told the man in the back. Pedro had a sharp smell of sweat, and he was trembling against the back seat. He fumbled to find the lap belt, expand it, and snap it shut, and as soon as he finished, he clutched his bag back to his chest.

Guilty, Eli purred. Robbie cut a glance into the rear-view mirror. In the passing streetlights, he saw beads of sweat on Pedro's balding forehead. What's he doing running with the mad dog here? What's he let Rabioso rope him into?

How about we take a detour up into the hills and light them on fire, that's what you're getting at. Right?

It's like you know me.

Stop.

I don't see you coming up with any better ideas.

They approached the onramp and Robbie downshifted and stomped on the gas, the supercharger squealing and the motor propelling them violently from twenty to eighty miles per hour. For a second, as they merged onto the near-empty freeway, he felt like he was flying. Pedro made a strangled cry.

Pedro is the guiltiest-looking bitch I ever saw, Eli continued, undeterred, as they roared toward the interchange onto Highway 60. El Rabioso, now, he's got two expressions, bored and angry. Pedro's more your average fresh-meat. No poker face. He's just made the worst mistake of his life tonight and he's expecting Rabioso to fix it.

Robbie eyed him in the mirror again as he dodged around a semi-truck. That bulging back-pack.

Guns, maybe, Eli mused. Or severed hands, feet, and head. Cut those off and hide them good, and unless there's previously documented tattoos, they'll never identify the rest of the body.

Okay.

Okay! Let's unleash hellfire on their asses! The car warmed and the dials began to flare orange as Eli woke their sleeping power. Robbie clamped down against it.

Okay you convinced me they're probably up to no good and we need to figure out what that is! Robbie snarled in his head, teeth grinding.

Neither of his passengers spoke a word the entire trip, leaving Robbie completely in the dark as they left the freeway and jigged and jagged through sinister industrial blocks until they reached a lurid LED sign bright enough to light the street for a quarter mile. REBIRTH, it read, beneath an animation of a bright yellow butterfly morphing into a yellow flower. Electronica buzzed and pounded, a baseline thrumming through the Charger's tires as they rolled over the asphalt. People in short, sparkly clothes trickled out the doors in pairs and clusters, laughing and stumbling.

"We're here," Ramón announced. Pedro made no sign he'd heard. "Pedro. Vamanos."

Pedro sucked down air, jolting in his seat as though attempting to stand. He unbuckled his seat-belt and shoved at the back of Ramón's seat, even though Robbie was still cruising, looking for a spot to park.

"Pedro," Ramón said again, twisting around. "Get a grip. Don't panic in front of Anita."

Robbie gave up on parking and stopped the car in the street. "Leave the meter running," Ramón told him, and he got out and folded down the passenger seat to let Pedro out. He and Pedro quick-marched into REBIRTH. Robbie waited, staring indecisively up at the cinderblock monolith. He listened for anything: screams, gunshots. Wondered if Ghost Rider needed to come blazing through the wall, chains and hooks swinging.

Time's wasting! Stop them!

Who's Anita?

Their boss? Their target? Who cares!

One thumping, buzzing dance beat blended into another. Minutes passed by and Robbie's 2x surge fare ticked upward, until four figures emerged from the club: Ramón, Pedro, a bouncer in a black shirt that said Security on it, and a smaller person completely muffled in a fuzzy blanket. Ramón shook hands with the bouncer, while Pedro and the blanket shuffled toward Robbie's car. The blanket stumbled, and Pedro gripped it by the shoulders. It screamed shrilly. "Don't touch me!"

"Mija!" Pedro cried, hands spread. "Anita! It's papá!"

Anita threw off the blanket. She was tiny, just a kid, maybe younger than Robbie. Smeared makeup made her eyes black pits. Her hair drooped in snarled clumps from where she'd once piled it on top of her head. A rose-gold sequined miniskirt blazed in the light of the club's front sign. Slender gunmetal chains were sewn into her green tank top as a fringe; some of them, torn loose, dangled free below her waist. She stared blankly into the dark. Looked back at the sign, then covered her eyes. "Papá?"

"Mija!"

She bolted toward Pedro and tripped over the blanket in her bare feet. "What's happening to me?"

Ramón returned to Pedro's shoulder as he steadied Anita. "You're at a nightclub downtown. You took something. Your father's here to take you home."

Anita shoved herself away from them. "I don't know you."

"Anita, that's my friend Ramón, remember? I just introduced you. He helped me find you."

"Papá?"

"Yes, cariña." He opened the backpack he still carried over one shoulder. It was smaller now: the blanket must have taken up most of it. He opened a bottle of Gatorade and handed it to her. "It's the blue kind. Your favorite."

Anita leaned away. "There's a worm around it."

"No, no. There's no worm." Pedro took a sip from the bottle and passed it back to her. Anita dumped it on the ground.

"You got germs on it."

Pedro got out another Gatorade.

"We're wasting time. Let's move," Ramón said.

They approached the car, abandoning the blanket on the tarmac. Robbie hurried to lay the passenger seat down. Pedro and Anita didn't look much alike, but their slightly prominent ears, the set of their eyes, the subtle arc of their noses marked them undeniably related.

"I can't go in that car," Anita announced when Pedro started to guide her into the back seat.

"We have to get you home, cariña."

"I don't want that car! It's dark!"

"It's okay," Pedro said, climbing in. Anita covered her eyes, moaning. "See, I'm okay. Get in, Nita. Papá's here."

Ramón scooped Anita up and swung her, carefully but not gently, into the back. Then he unfolded the front seat, trapping her in the car. Anita shrieked.

"Está biÃ©n, está biÃ©n. Papá's here."

She settled, squinting at him in the dark. "Papa?"

"Anita. Let me help you with your seatbelt."

"I can do it."

Anita could not do it. It took nearly five minutes for Pedro to get her seatbelt on for her, because she kept looking for the belt at her shoulder instead of her lap, and pushing his hands away. Finally Anita was secure. Ramón got in. Robbie started the car back up and Anita started screaming.

Ramón rolled his window down to let some of the noise out.

"What is it? What's wrong?" Pedro demanded.

"Monster! There's a monster!"

"It's just the engine. A really big engine," Pedro shushed her. "There's no monster here."

Anita made a long, keening cry, clutching her ears. "What is happening to me?! "

Robbie waited, frozen, right hand on the shifter. Eli, whatever you're doing, stop.

That's not me, that's chemistry.

"Drive," said Ramón.

Robbie put the car in gear and roared off. Anita started that deafening wail again, and, following Ramón's idea, Robbie rolled down his own window. Anita was right behind him, and she kicked and struck at the back of his seat as they moved. When they hit the freeway, Robbie rolled his window most of the way up, and the noise of the wind drowned out some of the engine sound. Anita abruptly stopped flailing.

"Papa, I don't feel good," she said.

"I know, darling."

Robbie glanced back in the rear-view mirror, saw that she had slumped into Pedro's shoulder and he was stroking her snarled hair.

"I think I'm dehydrated."

"Drink."

She pushed the Gatorade away, sloshing it on Robbie's seats. "There's something wrong with me. Why am I in this car?"

"It's a friend's car. We're going back to the house." Pedro pressed a kiss to her forehead. Frowned. "You're so warm."

"I feel dehydrated."

"Ramón, she's burning up."

Ramón turned around suddenly in his seat and pulled a pen-light out of his breast pocket. He reached back. "Give me your arm."

"I don't know you," Anita snapped.

"I'm a friend of your father's. Give me your arm."

Anita reached out for him, and Ramón wrapped his big, crooked fingers around her slender forearm and wrist. Shined the pen-light in her eyes. He grunted. "Reyes. Take the next exit."

Robbie nodded, changed lanes. He wasn't sure where that would put them; he wasn't familiar with this part of the city.

"What's wrong?" Pedro asked, still fruitlessly trying to get Anita to sip Gatorade.

"She's shaking. Pulse is weak. Whatever she took, it wasn't just acid. She needs to go to the hospital."

Robbie skidded around the curve of the next off-ramp, stopped in the center turn lane, and located the nearest emergency room on his phone. With the new route set, he swung and reversed through a T-turn and sped off.

They made it to the ER ten minutes later. Ramón and Robbie got out so that Pedro and Anita could get out. As Pedro shepherded Anita through the doors, Ramón paused. "You like pork or lengua?"

"Huh?" Robbie clicked the passenger seat back into place.

"In your tamales. I got pork and I got tongue."

"Oh, uh." He hadn't had tongue since his mom...since Mom. "Pork, I guess."

"I'll bring some to the shop. Thursday." Ramón took out his phone and ended the trip; Robbie's phone chimed seconds later. "For your tip. I'm sorry, but I can't pay rent in tamales."

"No, no, that sounds...great," Robbie said, wrong-footed. "You don't want a ride home? I mean, I live so close..."

"No, I'll stay with Pedro and his kid."

"You have a morning shift."

Ramón gave him a look. Robbie threw up his hands, slid into the car. "Hey. Reyes."

Robbie paused, one hand on the keyes. Ramón leaned down and peered into the open passenger window.

"About your brother."

Robbie's nostrils flared and he started the car.

"Some of the guys came to me about him. I'll tell you what I told them."

"Nnn."

"I was too harsh with him and I lost my temper. I'm sorry for that."

Robbie's eyes heated, stung. His vision blurred, not with tears, but with steam. "Okay."

"I once saw a man decapitated by a scissor lift," Ramón continued. "Our job is hazardous and it's no place for a child."

Robbie didn't trust himself to open his mouth. His own saliva crackled under his tongue and his lungs filled with fumes and steam.

"I'll make enough tamales for you to take home, how's that," Ramón said, and headed off into the hospital.

Robbie slammed the car into gear and left streaks of melting rubber at the ER entryway. In the lot, he had to stop abruptly as a limousine pulled a wide turn into the driveway, and his chest heaved, breath smoking, drooling sparks. Eli, help, I can't transform until we get away from the cameras, he thought, as the engine growled through the frame and through his throat.

No, not the cameras, Eli said sarcastically. But the fires slowed, leaving Robbie hovering on the edge of living and dead, his tongue and sinuses all charred and hollowed away, sparking coals for eyes, the steering wheel hot as agony under his gloved hands. The limousine passed by, and Robbie snorted a breath full of fire, screeched back into gear, and tore away into traffic. He let the change blast through him, his whole body flaring with pain until the flesh boiled away, and then it was just them and the car, a single creature of bone and fire and leather and steel, and rage. Ghost Rider roared incoherently as the car streaked through the dark streets, the hot wind of their passage rocking streetlights, buffeting the people who crept through the city on secret errands in the dark, making glass windows and razor-wire fences sing.

The city stifled them.

Get us out of here, Robbie demanded, and under their blazing headlights a great black fire-ringed hole opened in the road before them. Ghost Rider charged through the portal, dropping into the void. They emerged into moonlight, and their tires skidded for traction in the coarse sand of the Sierra Nevada foothills.

They burned against the mountainside like wildfire, great tongues and streaks of flame and molten iron streaming from every light, from the blower that sucked air like a devouring wind, from the gaps between the Ghost's teeth and the vents in their face-plate. They down-shifted and carved through the sand, drifting until they pointed straight to the nearest hill-top, and then they roared upward.

Rocks and dips jerked the front tires from side to side; a light hand on the wheel let them weave their way up the steep grade, leaving streaks of ghost-fire for a thousand yards. Taller obstacles, the front bumper destroyed: boulders shattered, manzanita shrubs vaporized into spirals of flame. They climbed higher, steeper, thirty degrees, forty, sixty. Their momentum was all that kept their tires in contact with the rocky slope. Suddenly they ran out of hill and soared, weightless, into the air, the engine and blower still snarling, Ghost Rider roaring their frustration.

Robbie let himself melt into the seat, dissolve into the steel and fire of the car. He needed the cool night air on his skin. The moment stretched, infinite: each turn of their free-spinning tires was like a breath, each turn of the crankshaft like a heartbeat. He could see, in the front-and-back way the car saw, a pueblo-styled house with a high fence on the hilltop beneath them, and a man with a rifle staring up at them in astonishment. Their fires cast harsh shadows on his puffy face, and the rifle looked slender, toy-like.

Ghost Rider flowed out of the roof of the car, like standing up out of shallow water. The full moon shone cool and perfect down on them, and the fire that streamed from the car's every opening punched up to meet it, brighter than search-lights. There was a chain in the Rider's hands, and they whirled it in great arcs as they surfed through their descent, lashing the air with glowing steel, heat waves stretching and spiraling in their path, as though they could pour out all their rage and drown the whole mountain. They spat sparks and molten steel as they roared.

Robbie half-hoped the man with the gun would fire on them as the car rolled end-over-end. But he never did. Their wheels struck the slope on the opposite end of the hill and they streaked off, higher into the mountains, chasing the moon.

Ramón kept his word Thursday and brought to the auto shop a plastic shopping bag loaded with six tamales tightly rolled in cling wrap and chilled with a frozen water bottle, along with instructions to reheat them.

Poison.

Fuck off.

They had each, for some reason, given each-other a five star Uber review the other day. Today Ramón nodded politely at Robbie whenever they crossed paths. They didn't have to keep it up for long; Ramón's shift ended a couple hours after Robbie's began. Until Ramón went home, Canelo kept darting out of his office as though they were about to start swinging wrenches at any moment.

Robbie was busy from the minute he put on his coveralls, with a collision repair on a '99 Oldsmobile that ended up taking all day. He was assisting Alejo, which usually ensured an interesting day's work.

Alejo was the oldest mechanic at the shop, and the best welder and body-worker by a wide margin. His welds were invisible, but you could jump up and down on them. By the time he finished hammering out dents, you'd swear the sheet metal was ready for primer—but then he'd apply a whisper of fiberglass filler, so thin it was translucent, and start sanding. He was fast, efficient, precise. Robbie had attached himself to Alejo years ago when he'd first started working at the shop, because auto body repair was one field that didn't just boil down to "read the manual before starting." And Alejo, to his credit, treated Robbie more like a fellow mechanic and parent than like a kid or a moveable bench clamp. He talked as he worked, which made it easier for Robbie to pick up on what he was doing, and didn't make Robbie feel patronized.

The Olds needed an alignment job after the collision, which at Canelo's was handled the old-fashioned way, with steel rods clamped to the tires and levels and measuring tape, because the wheel alignment machine didn't turn on anymore. The front wheels were toed in nearly an inch after the crash, while according to the manual, the proper toe-in was closer to 1/16 th inch. The hardest part was getting the bolts loosened. The undercarriage had the most horrifying case of corrosion Robbie had ever seen, and he had to get out the hammer and chisel twice because the bolts shrugged off the torque of a four-foot breaker-bar and laughed at him.

"This car's come from way up north," Alejo remarked, peeking down. "I guarantee it. It's the road salt, does this to them. Moving to L.A.'s the best thing that ever happened to her."

When Robbie finally got the tie-rods loosened and started adjusting, he looked up to watch Alejo pounding on the Olds' crumpled front quarter panel, one hand pressing out from inside the wheel well with the heavy dolly wrapped in a shop cloth as an anvil, the other hammering, now sharp and now soft, with the fat end of a body hammer. Now and then he reversed the hammer, giving a laser-focused pick right on the crest of a fold with the pointy end.

Robbie remembered driving the pointy end of his own hammer through a man's ankle, while he and Eli were the Ghost Rider. It had been last month. The last human-trafficking operation they'd found.

"You read the dents," Alejo yelled over the noise of the shop. "You've got to see the folds in your mind, run them back and forth through time, until you're pretty sure which fold came first. Then you got to flatten them, in reverse order. Otherwise you'll make more of a mess, the metal won't want to follow because you'll be stretching it, see? You have to work with the damage. Don't start with the deepest fold and work out." Between the hammer and dolly, the quarter panel gradually relaxed, regained its globoid, nineties curve. "Everything I can push-hammer, I'll do. Then I'll get the stud-welder, bring out the pull-hammer. You can do that, my elbow's giving me trouble. How far out is that alignment?"

"Ten minutes, maybe," Robbie said.

"I'll work-up an estimate for repairing the rust-through in the mean time." He jerked the hammer at the rear wheel-well. "You notice paint bubbling anywhere else?"

"Opposite wheel-well. Driver's door. And the entire undercarriage is rusted."

"Well, the client's insurance signed off on the collision repair, but the rust, God only knows. Ay-yi-yi," Alejo sighed, scratching his head.

Once Robbie got the wheels aligned and the bolts replaced where he'd chiseled them off, Alejo had him grab the stud-welder. This tool used an electric charge to fuse a stud, a bit of steel that resembled a large thumb-tack, directly onto the crumpled quarter-panel. He carefully seated each stud in the exact lowest point of each dent before activating the arc and releasing, leaving a steel disk fused to the panel with a half-inch stud sticking out. He lifted his welding helmet after every few studs, and Alejo waved for him to continue until the entire crumpled area looked like a pincusion. Then he refilled and put away the stud welder, got the pull hammer, and went to work pulling the dents. Again, in reverse order.

The pull-hammer was a long bar with a weighted hand-grip that slid up and down, coming to a sharp stop at the end, and a vice at the tip that bit onto the studs. Slam the hand-grip backward, and the pull-hammer delivered a powerful tug against the welded stud, raising the dent. Robbie was surprised Alejo had let him install the studs this time. Their proper position was absolutely critical—he couldn't just pound wherever he wanted. He slid the hammer, first tentative as he warmed up to it, then more sharply, being careful not to break the studs off the disks, switching from point to point as the quarter panel slowly rose and unfolded toward him. Always took him about three times as long as Alejo did to get it smooth, but he was improving with practice. Alejo was busy feeling and tapping and prodding, mapping out rusted panels to be patched or replaced another day.

"This good?" Robbie hollered, when he started to get diminishing returns.

Alejo returned and squinted at the panel. "Pull these three a few more times, then come back to the middle. Then clip the studs, grind the disks, start mixing your filler."

With Alejo's advice, the last of the depressions rose smoothly from the panel. Robbie got a pair of wire cutters and an angle grinder, put on his headphones and safety glasses. Blasted bootlegged punk rock from a band that did shows in the parking lot behind the laundromat on Saturdays. He nodded along to the banging and screaming as he worked.

After getting the Olds filled out and sanded and replacing the windshield and re-aligning the passenger door hinges, Robbie made it home to Gabe and got to work reheating Ramón's tamales. Lacking a cookie sheet, he lined the upper rack of the rarely-used oven with tinfoil, and put a saucepan full of water in the lower rack to make steam. Once the oven had preheated, gushing a gout of steam that might have killed a normal person stupid enough to stick their face in it as they opened the door, Robbie lined up the clammy corn-husk bundles on the tinfoil and baked them for ten minutes.

"What are you doing, Robbie?" Gabe asked, watching from across the table in his power chair.

"I'm getting tamales ready. Like Doña Rosa makes."

"Yay! Robbie made tamales!"

"Not me. A...friend from work gave them to me. I'm making peas."

"Aw."

"I know, but we gotta have peas. Can't be the Ice Cream Monster if you don't eat your peas."

"Butter sauce?"

"Of course, little bro." On the stove-top, Robbie stirred butter and the contents of three Parmesan cheese packets lifted from the local pizza parlor into a pan of formerly-frozen peas. "Can't have peas without butter sauce."

Gabe whirled his power chair in a circle. Where he'd once had red marks on his forearms where his crutches rubbed, now he had darker bands of skin with a scale of dander. Robbie wished he'd take his chair to school. Gabe's muscle relaxants helped him get his legs under him, but he inevitably got tired, put too much strain on his arms. He worried. He wasn't about to force Gabe to take the chair; after all, the school had regular wheelchairs and Gabe could wheel himself around just fine on level ground.

The tamales had just started to produce an unsettlingly nostalgic aroma of corn and chiles when someone knocked at the door.

Robbie shut off the stove and the oven. "Gabe, it's time to wash your hands for dinner," he said.

"Somebody at the door!" Gabe crowed. "Robbie, somebody at the door!"

"Thanks, buddy. I'm going to see who it is. Can you wash your hands so you're ready to eat?"

Gabe buzzed around the table to the sink. "Yeah! I have soap! I have a water faucet! I can wash my hands!"

Robbie patted him on the shoulder and stalked to the door, one hand twitching. He uncovered the peephole.

Lisa was outside. Robbie and Eli were so stir-crazy they'd been half-hoping for a dozen gun-toting thugs at the door. Instead it was Robbie's old classmate Lisa, her make-up crisp, delicate dangly earrings flashing, strawberry hair set off by a stylishly slouchy knit cap.

He hadn't seen Lisa since he'd dropped out of school. She was—almost? Technically? Aspirationally?—his first girlfriend. Robbie had had little interest in girls compared to other kids his age, because he was too preoccupied about money. Lisa should have been way out of his league—gorgeous, nice family, good grades, nice clothes, never in trouble—except she seemed to prefer a man who was hard to get. She'd invited herself into his house by asking his help with calculus, and then informed him, gently but firmly, that they should date. Robbie never got the chance to form much of an opinion about this because at the time Eli was doing the best he could to destroy every last pillar of Robbie's sanity starting with Gabe, and Lisa understandably freaked out and hadn't come back since.

Robbie opened the door. She had a plate of cookies in her hands, a warm buttery smell escaping the plastic wrap.

"Hi," Robbie said cautiously.

"Hi, Robbie," Lisa replied. She had a nice smile that she wore for nearly all occasions, and she was wearing it now. Though sincere, it was practiced and deliberate. Robbie fought the urge to check the state of the house behind him. The house was clean. Had to be, with a wheelchair user. He heard Gabe shut the water off in the sink, and yell, "Towel!" narrating his actions the way he did when he was in a good mood.

"So, Robbie," said Lisa, in her deliberately cheerful fashion. "I haven't seen you for a while, and I thought I'd come by to see how you guys were doing. I hope that's okay?"

Lisa was one of the most positive people Robbie had ever met. Not that she was in denial about Hillrock Heights and its social and economic disadvantages, but more that she had decided long ago to treat everyone she met with all the kindness that their unrealized best self deserved. It made Robbie's gut churn that he detected a note of concern in her tone today.

She's checking up on you, boy.

Robbie scratched the back of his neck. "Yeah, of course. We've been...great. Better. Gabe's in the kitchen, if you want to see him, we were just sitting down for dinner. There's chairs. Are those cookies?" he asked, pointing at the cookies.

"You haven't had dinner yet? I'm sorry, I would've brought something—"

"It's fine, we've got plenty—"

"I just ate—"

"One of the guys from work tipped me in tamales."

"They smell really good. I thought maybe I could bring a movie?"

Gabe buzzed out of the kitchen, waving one arm. "Clean hands!" He saw Lisa in the door and stopped abruptly. The last time they'd seen each-other he hadn't really been himself and it hadn't gone well. Robbie wasn't sure how well Gabe remembered those days, back when Eli had been test driving his other nephew to be his murderous meat puppet. Surly had been a weird look on Gabe.

"Thanks for washing up, buddy. You remember Lisa?"

"Yeah," Gabe said, subdued.

"Hi, Gabe!" Lisa called, waving. She squatted down on her heels, which was unnecessary but at least less irritating than bending down with her hands on her knees. "I brought cookies and a movie for you guys. Do you like cookies?"

"Not raisins," Gabe said.

"No raisins. They have white chocolate and cranberries."

"What's cranberries?"

"Cranberries are a berry that grows in the water. People make them into a jelly that you eat with turkey, or they add lots and lots of sugar so they're sweet. These have lots and lots of sugar."

"Like strawberries?"

"They're red like strawberries. But they're shaped like blueberries."

"Okay," Gabe said, not drawing any closer to the front door. But he relaxed a bit.

Robbie turned back to Lisa, who was still crouched just inside the door. "Uh. Would you like to stay for dinner?"

"I, uh, I just ate," Lisa said, flustered. Robbie had seen her panicked, but never flustered. It was enchanting. She sniffed the air as she stood.

"Robbie-Robbie makes tasty food!" Gabe cut in. "The tastiest!"

Lisa took another step in. "Maybe just one."

Lisa's "just one" was indeed just one, but as Robbie and Gabe shared the remaining five tamales, she kept throwing longing looks across the table. She scraped the cornhusk clean with her fork and licked that. "This was so delicious," she sighed, as she pushed Robbie's buttered peas around her plate.

"Dee-licious," Gabe tried out. He was definitely warming to Lisa, and the tamales. It was hard for Robbie to resent Ramón Cordova while he watched Gabe whirl his arms in joy as he demolished three tamales. He caught himself wondering if Ramón might teach him how to make them.

Pathetic.

Conversation was stilted. Lisa asked if he'd entered any races lately, and Robbie was unwilling to either admit he'd been cheating at underground street races for money, or explain to Lisa how that was possible (on turns, sink two tires half-way into the ground to make the car lean into the direction of travel and preserve maximum traction, on straights, boost the engine higher than the laws of combustion allowed to stay just ahead of the rest of the pack, optimize the engine timing with the back of his mind on each phase of acceleration, and when no one was looking, phase the car right through anything in his way), so he gave the terrible excuse that he hadn't had time. Lisa kept glancing surreptitiously at Gabe's exposed skin. She had too much tact to ask if Robbie had finally had a nervous breakdown and started beating and strangling his disabled brother. Robbie explained his progress toward getting his GED, and Lisa talked about her coursework—AP Calculus and AP English, and also working as reporter/photographer/editor for the nascent school paper.

The only other student working on the paper was, bizarrely, Guero Valdez.

Gabe grew bored with this verbal mine-clearing. After he and Robbie put his dishes away, he buzzed into his bedroom and returned cradling two of his action figures in his lap: the big plastic Ninja Wolf with the articulated joints, and an ancient and scuffed Terminator figurine that Robbie had picked up at a yard sale years ago, back when they lived in the group home. Last Robbie knew, Terminator lived at the bottom of Gabe's toybox.

"Best friends!" Gabe announced, slamming the plastic monsters down on the table across from Lisa. "This is Ninja Wolf. He runs fast. Like the wind on Mount Fuji. He chases bad guys, and he can smell them, and he is alert for danger. He eats chili dogs!"

"And who's this one?" Lisa asked, smiling, pointing at Terminator's black leather jacket and leering metal skull.

"This is Ninja Wolf's best friend. He makes the bad guys go away. He's smart and nice. He's really, really nice."

"He takes care of Ninja Wolf?" She asked.

"Yeah! And Ninja Wolf takes care of him, too! Ninja Wolf has a preternaturally acute sense of smell. That's really, really good."

"That's a big word," Lisa said.

"I know," said Gabe proudly. "You can be Ninja Wolf and I can be Ninja Wolf's best friend."

"Oh, I," Lisa protested, as Gabe slid Ninja Wolf across the table at her, tail-first. "Okay, I'll do my best." She bounced Ninja Wolf across the table on all fours. "Ooooh! Owwoooooh!"

Gabe laughed his bright sharp laugh. "Ninja Wolf can talk! He can speak English and Japanese and Kyotosian." He whirled the Terminator figure around through the air. "Ninja Wolf's best friend goes Ryaaaaah! Hyaaaaaarrrh! Wrrrrrrooooomm! But sometimes he talks."

"What are Ninja Wolf and his friend doing?" Lisa asked.

"They're eating mac'n'cheese," Gabe announced. He made Terminator stir an invisible pot. "Arm, yarm, yarm, mac'n'cheese! Ninja Wolf, time for dinner!"

Holy fuck, Pinball Wizard's been holding out on us, Eli cut in, and Robbie had to dart out of the room and splash water on his steaming face.

You haven't been paying attention, Robbie snarled in his head, though he knew, below thoughts, that he hadn't been paying attention either. On some level, apparently, Gabe knew about the Ghost Rider. Maybe it was subconscious. Maybe he just remembered being rescued from an overturned schoolbus and projected his affection for his brother onto "Ninja Wolf's best friend." Or maybe he still remembered the day Eli had tried to use him, and Robbie had had to fight him. The worst day of Robbie's life so far.

Robbie felt sick to imagine his brother burdened by that kind of secret. Unable to articulate what he'd experienced, and certain to never be believed if he managed to explain it.

Robbie screamed into a bath towel.

Eli surged behind his eyes. What the fuck he wanted to do now, with Lisa and Gabe making friends in the kitchen before they moved to the living room to eat cookies and watch a movie, Robbie couldn't begin to imagine. He shoved Eli back and did some deep breathing exercises he'd looked up online.

When he finally put the towel down, he found he'd burned a hole in it and smeared ash all over his face. The weird scar on his forehead that had showed up after Eli hijacked his life stood out sharp and bright, like a chrome V-emblem. The room stank like the inside of a muffler.

What do you want? He demanded his reflection.

Do you have any idea how painful it is to be this bored? Eli replied.

Cry me a river. He washed up, trashed the towel, and crept back out.

While Robbie was otherwise occupied, Gabe had gone back to his room and retrieved his favorite Grouper Toad comic book (every comic Gabe read more than twice was a favorite) and was reading it to Lisa, acting out bits with Ninja Wolf and Terminator. The current page was actually an advertisement, disguised as a two-page comic borrowing other superheroes. As far as Gabe was concerned, those ads were a bonus.

"Hammerhead wants Fruit Roll-Ups!" Gabe crowed, gesticulating with Ninja Wolf, apparently cast in the role of Hammerhead. "He wants Fruit Roll-Ups so much he forgot to steal the diamond!" He laughed his bright sharp laugh. Lisa watched him, lost, surprised, smiling all the way to her eyes.

Robbie resolved, right then, that he would never allow Eli to scare Lisa away. Not when she looked at Gabe like that.

Lisa spotted him, then, where he stood in the hallway watching them with bloodshot eyes like a creep. "Oh, Gabe, your brother's back. Robbie, do you want to help pick out the movie?"

Gabe's smile shuttered. He tucked Ninja Wolf and Terminator close to his chest. "Robbie?" he asked, quiet.

Robbie lurched into the kitchen. "Yeah, what's wrong?"

"Robbie-Robbie?"

"What do you need, buddy?" He looked Gabe over from head to toe. Did he have a muscle cramp, did he need to go to the bathroom, did he drop something, was he about to have a seizure?

Gabe pressed Ninja Wolf into his hands. Robbie looked Ninja Wolf over, then, finding nothing wrong, straightened the figure's arms and legs so he could stand upright on the table, arms up-raised in a proper Ninja Wolf gesture. "Do you want me to be Ninja Wolf?"

"No," said Gabe. He stared at Robbie solemnly for a good ten seconds, while Robbie stared back, and Lisa watched them both, baffled. In a flash, Gabe brightened again. "Movie!" he exclaimed. "Then cookies!"

"Yeah, cookies," Robbie agreed. Lisa shot him a questioning look, and he shrugged.

"I wasn't sure what you guys watch, so I brought a few." She pulled three slightly battered DVDs out from her clean white vinyl purse. Winnie the Pooh, Bambi, and Pacific Rim.

Robbie pointed at Bambi. "Not that one," he said, a little sharply. "I mean—sorry."

"Omigod." Lisa put Bambi away. " I'm sorry. I didn't—"

"It's not—I mean—"

"I didn't think—"

"It's fine—"

"Robots!" Gabe interrupted, pointing at Pacific Rim.

Robbie grabbed the DVD case, blushing furiously. It looked a little violent, but Gabe's comics could get pretty dark, and he handled those storylines just fine. The rating was PG-13, and Gabe was, in fact, fourteen. Besides, Robbie would be right there for "parental" guidance. "Okay, buddy, let's watch the robots."

Fuck Pacific Rim , Robbie decided, thirty minutes into the movie.

To say that Robbie Reyes was indifferent to pop culture was a comical understatement. He had called ahead and reserved the wheelchair seat to catch one movie in theaters in the past three years, and that was Coco . If he couldn't see it with Gabe, he couldn't spare the money. If he couldn't listen to it on his phone while hunting down a customer's oil leak at Canelo's, it might as well not exist. Even previews passed him by; TV for the house wasn't in the budget. He hadn't the foggiest idea what Pacific Rim was going to be about.

Eli was, for once, quiet. Holy shit, how are they doing that? Is this all CGI? was his sole contribution before shutting up to enjoy the film. Gabe loved the robots, and the monsters, and Stacker Pentacost. "But they shouldn't fight, they should make friends instead," he insisted at every fight scene, and Robbie would reply, "I know, buddy. They're just not as smart as you." Lisa loved the film, or she wouldn't have brought it.

But Robbie was becoming rapidly traumatized. He hadn't built up a normal nineteen-year-old's tolerance to onscreen violence, and the plot seemed designed to accelerate his inevitable nervous breakdown. Crack Jaeger pilot Riley watched his brother die in front of him, while they were mentally linked in order to pilot their giant monster-fighting mecha. The heroine's father was dying. The monsters themselves were being manipulated. Cannon fodder, even more than the pilots of the mecha who fought them. And the whole conceit of the film, the damned centerpiece: the million-ton machines that defended the Pacific Rim could not be controlled by a single pilot, but needed two or three pilots acting in perfect synchrony, sharing a single mind-space— the drift. Each Jeager was therefore a gestalt being of two souls, one will, and one unstoppable steel frame. Never had Robbie seen anything so like, and so exactly opposite, what it was to be the Ghost Rider.

He felt cheated.

Robbie was in a constant state of drift with Eli Morrow. Gabe, of course he would jump at the chance to pilot a Jeager with Gabe. He might hook himself into the drift with Lisa. Hell, even Alejo or Marty from the shop, or his old English teacher Mr. Wakeford. Instead, Robbie had Evil Uncle Eli, bound up with him so deep that he found himself forgetting the devil worship and mob hits and that time he'd tried to kill Robbie's mom while she was pregnant with Gabe, and instead blazing up with rage when his uncle broke out a bad pun. In a way, Eli was sitting on the couch, one arm around Gabe's shoulders and the other holding hands with Lisa.

And when they were the Ghost Rider it was more, and worse. Robbie couldn't kid himself to think he was the only one in control. He was a scrapper, but the Ghost Rider could fight. Eli had combat training from somewhere, but he couldn't sculpt a tornado out of a hundred feet of chain surging with hellfire. They both had anger issues, but the Ghost Rider was an overclocked engine fueled by rage. The Ghost Rider was more than the sum of its parts, born of some unconscious potential deep within Robbie, Eli, and the car, and there were times when none of them knew who was driving. It scared Robbie to know their souls were bound so tight. Sometimes Eli's mannerisms bled into him while they were in his human body. One day they might twist together so tight they'd become one single person, Robert Morrow, steady and responsible and trustworthy until the day he bashed your brains out with a claw hammer.

At least it wasn't Gabe with a ghost in his head, Robbie reminded himself, hugging his brother a hair tighter against his side. At least Eli was leaving Gabe alone.

After the climactic battle, the world was saved. Most of the Jaeger pilots had died, but the hero and heroine hugged on a life raft under a brilliant sky swarming with rescue helicopters. Some films would have faded out there, but Pacific Rim spooled on, watching humanity lick its wounds, pick itself up, and fall in love with the monsters it had vanquished and the heroes it had lost. It was...sweet.

It was a good movie.

Then it was time for Gabe to brush his teeth and get ready for bed. Gabe leaned across the couch to where his power chair sat nearby, unhooked his crutches that hung from the back, and shimmied down and thunked into his bedroom. Monstrous growls and roars echoed down the hall as Gabe, presumably, put on his pajamas.

"Do you need a ride home?" Robbie asked Lisa as she packed up the DVD and the empty cookie plate.

Lisa hummed. "Gabe seems happy."

"Yeah. This is, uh, normal, for him. Last spring he was—" possessed— "I don't know."

"How about you?" She gave him a searching look.

Still possessed. "I've been working through some stuff." He fiddled with his phone. Thumbed on the Uber app, figured he might pick up a fare or two while Gabe was asleep.

"Thanks for the offer, Robbie," Lisa said, fiddling with her own phone. "Maybe I'll take you up on it later."

Robbie's Uber app pinged. He accepted it. Then he looked up. "Oh. Uh. I could cancel? If you want another ride?"

Lisa looked down at her phone and snorted. She covered her mouth and shook with giggles. "No, no, it's fine. 'Eliot.' I'll be happy to ride in your '2010 Dodge Charger.' What are you doing, why are you a 4.5?"

"I don't know, I guess people like classic cars?" Robbie offered.

"No," Lisa said, still with a laugh in her voice. "That's bad. That's really bad. I've never seen a driver with a rating below 4.6."

"Oh," Robbie said.

Bullshit. That's bullshit! What kind of jackass makes a system where the lowest rating is an A-minus?

"I don't have air conditioning," he guessed.

"Do you drive like you think you're Vin Diesel?" "Uhhh." Robbie wasn't sure which muscular bald guy Vin Diesel was. "Maybe?"

"Alright. You know, what, fine. Take me home. Maybe I can help you troubleshoot."

Robbie hollered down the hall. "Gabe! I'm heading out to take Lisa home. Call me if you need anything!"

"Okay, Robbie!" Gabe yelled back.

Robbie swung on his leather jacket and waited by the door. "Ready to go?"

"I guess so," Lisa said, with a thoughtful look toward Gabe's bedroom.

Robbie drove more sedately than usual, until Lisa told him to just treat her like any other fare. Then he had to ask himself, did he strictly need to precision-drift through every corner that let him pick up enough speed to do so? How fast did he really need to accelerate after each stop? Was it a wasted drive if he never saw the needle on the blower's boost gauge move past a pound or two?

"What do you think?" Robbie asked, when he stopped at Lisa's street.

"You definitely drive like you're auditioning for Furious Nine, " Lisa informed him. "It's fun, but not when you just want to get from point A to point B. The engine's really loud. I mean, it sounds nice, but it's definitely loud. The temperature's pretty comfortable right now, but I don't know how you manage to drive around at all in the daytime without air con. It's a two-door, so it must be inconvenient driving more than one passenger anywhere. And there's this—I mean, this is the cleanest car I've ever seen in my life, but there's this weird burning smell. It's a little off-putting."

Well, fuck you too, you prissy bitch, Eli snarled.

"It's hard to get Ubers to pick up in this neighborhood, though," Lisa continued. "Maybe they'll cut you some slack."

Robbie squeezed the steering wheel. He needed money. Once he got his GED, there had to be other, legitimate jobs he could get. Right?

"Thanks," he said.

Lisa tipped him five dollars. He tried to hand it back. "No, keep it," she insisted. "This is your job. Right?"

"Yeah, I guess," he said. "Thanks."

He was heading back home when he got another ping. It was just two miles uptown, and he'd only been gone twenty minutes. "Nora," 4.6 stars. He accepted the ping and headed off.

Nora was waiting on the sidewalk by a shabby motel in a slumping commercial district east of Hillrock Heights, a tall woman with flowing black hair and a heavy bust, shifting from foot to foot in tall boots and a red miniskirt. She watched the Charger approach warily. Robbie saw her eyes widen when she spotted the Uber sticker. He pulled up to the curb and cranked down the window. "Nora?"

"Eliot?"

"Yeah. Nora?" He opened the door and Nora studied the car for a long moment before getting in. She hugged her purse to her chest. Robbie started the meter; destination was the Shut-Eye Motel in Lynwood.

"Good to go?"

"Yeah."

Robbie put the car in gear and started off at a moderate pace. The blower whined, rather than screaming.

Let's take a detour.

Why?

'Cause. Take her to Turnbull Canyon.

No.

Eli piped down for a minute as they cruised off through the waning eight o'clock traffic. Then, Lisa was a real bitch to you, kid. That wasn't helping, that was putting you in your place. I know you like her. You're basically a single parent, right, anyone who puts up with the kid is automatic wife material. But that kind of treatment hurts you, inside. You can't bottle that up. You gotta let it out, safely, away from Gabbie.

Robbie saw a sign for a highway onramp going North, and he had to fight not to steer the car onto it. What? What the fuck are you talking about?

No one would ever know.

Eli, what the fuck?

Kill the hooker! Take her to Turnbull Canyon and rip her heart out!

What—

Turn the car around! Go to Turnbull Canyon, it'll be empty after dark, get your wrench out of the trunk. Let her run! Chase her down, hit her in the head—

Robbie turned on the radio and randomly cranked on the dial. Landed on a tractor-rap station. Eli sparked up the car and turned it off. Robbie started counting as loud as he could in his head. Tried to block out the image of Nora running from him in the moonlight, tripping on stony ground, her red skirt riding up. Wrapping her hair around his fist.

"One-fifty-four, one-fifty-five, one-fifty-six," he whispered desperately.

"You okay?" Nora asked, cautious.

"Yes!"

"What's with the counting?"

"Mindfulness meditation."

"Sorry. I guess that's your business."

"It's okay." One-fifty-seven, one-fifty-eight, one-fifty-nine.

He got Nora to the Shut-Eye Motel with no detours. Before getting out, she fished a mirror, a tissue, and a few cosmetics out of her bag and touched up her lipstick and eyeliner. "How'd you like to make some extra money?"

"Doing what?"

She looked him in the eye, straight on. "You're not a creep," she said, flat. "You took me right where I wanted to go, didn't make any stupid comments. It's worth some extra money to get a driver who minds his own business. And I don't know if you know this, but this car? Used to belong to a local carnál, called himself Grumpy. People might think twice about messing with a girl who shows up in Grumpy's old race-car."

My car. Mine. I built it!

She pulled a twenty dollar bill out of her purse. "There's another one for you if you wait around 'till I finish up here. Won't be more than half an hour. I got a few more stops after this one."

"Just shut down the app and drive you?"

"Yeah. I mean, I'll pay the fares. I just don't feel like playing Uber Roulette tonight."

Robbie took the money. He always took the money. "Yeah. Yeah, sure, I can do that. I'll be right here. Yell if you need anything."

She quirked a smile and packed up her purse. "I'm a big girl, Eliot. See you in a bit."

Robbie watched as she strolled to a ground-floor motel room, checked her watch, and knocked. The door opened; whoever was inside didn't let himself be seen as he let her in.

He sparked up a little and passed his hand through the leather of the driver's seat, into the trunk where he'd stashed one of his math study books. The interior glowed in the light of his burning eyes, but his fingers, where he pawed around in the trunk, were flesh, not leather and fire. He found the book and pulled it out through the seat, shut his fires down. Wished he'd thought to bring a bottle of water. Maybe his whiny pax were onto something.

Never has anyone used so much power to accomplish so little, Eli sneered.

Robbie flung the text across the seats and seized the rear-view mirror in one burning fist. "Never do that again! " he snarled, eye to eye with his reflection. Both eyes were red, crackling like coals, and his breath steamed. "I have had it up to here with you! Don't put things in my head! Don't twist me around! Stop using Gabe to manipulate me! I will never be like you! "

I didn't do anything.

"Like hell you didn't! I saw things—"

Yeah, you. Yousaw them. I didn't have to draw it out for you.

Robbie scooped the fires back in and snuffed them before he completely lost it. He panted in the dark as his eyes went dim. "I don't believe you."

For such a responsible young man, you sure do enjoy your state of denial.

Robbie curled his legs up onto the seat.

You died, boy. You died when those mercenaries pumped you full of military-grade lead. The Roberto Reyes who was, is no more.

The best thing for you is to let go of your delusions of righteousness. You're just as dead as I am. Hell, the only one of us that could've survived that ambush is this car.

You're not real. Only we are real. You, me, and the car, we're one and the same. I've respected your needs, haven't I? But I have needs, too. You will kill someone. You can't not kill anyone anymore than I could make you—well. You will. It's a matter of time. All you get to choose is who. And I don't see you coming up with any suggestions of your own.

Robbie put the meat of his thumb in his mouth and bit down.

I don't say this to upset you, kid.

"Fuck you."

When Nora got back to the car, Robbie had been staring at the same page of conic sections for fifteen minutes. He turned his Uber app back on, accepted her ping, and drove her to the next motel. And the next, and the next. She paid him a hundred and fifty dollars in tips on top of all the fares by the time she told him to take her home, which wasn't far from Hillrock Heights.

"This is so much," Robbie said, as he tucked the bills protectively into his wallet.

Nora shrugged. "People want what they want."

They cruised home, Robbie trying out a different technique on the clutch, feathering it a bit, shifting smooth as silk while the great engine hummed.

"I'm not doing this forever, you know?" Nora said. "I have a normal job. I just landed myself in a financial clusterfuck and I gotta dig myself out."

"Good luck," Robbie said.

She drummed her fingers on her purse. "It's ironic, me getting driven around in Grumpy's car. You hear what happened to him? Got hooked on a bad batch of those super-pills that were floating around last year, got himself ripped in half by a supervillain from New York?"

"I heard." Before he'd died, Grumpy had stomped Ghost Rider into a crater in the asphalt. The pills had made him ten feet tall with four arms and an even crabbier disposition.

"He used to throw these parties. Lots of high-end liquor, E, make one of his guys DJ, stuff like that. And he liked to have a lot of girls around. Everybody knew, if you had it going on, you know, up front and in the back, you could show up, have some fun, get high, and Grumpy'd maybe give you a little cash, like, as a party favor.

"Now as best as I can figure, these morons, they find pills, I don't know, maybe they fell off a truck or something. Maybe they picked them up off the floor. So they've got these pills, and they figure, these are illegal, someone didn't want us to have them, therefore they must be some kinda downer.

"I mean, for all they knew they coulda been antibiotics or cancer drugs or something. Any fucking thing. So I'm getting buzzed, I look away from my drink for one second—my vision gets all blurry." She opened her purse, got out her mirror, tissues, and a little bottle, and started peeling off her false eyelashes and wiping away her makeup.

"Long story short, it wasn't roofies. Pendejo number one put his hand down my shirt, and I threw him through the wall. Through the brick wall, all the way through Grumpy's house and across the lawn. He died. I was just gone, I was pissed, I ran home. And none of this seemed at all weird to me, that I'd just smashed some guy's head like an egg or that I kept outrunning cars like I was Captain America or some shit. I just felt...like for the first time in my life, I didn't have to be afraid of anything.

"I got home. But I was gone. Totally out of my mind. I was always fighting with my roommate over doing the dishes; I was like, I'll show her doing the dishes. I was hungry as fuck, and I lost it because we were almost out of food. I just...completely trashed the place.

"I just need the extra cash so I can replace some appliances and repair the walls and windows, then I'll get another roommate and I'll be able to make rent again. See, this is just temporary. I got a good job, it's just this damn economy."

"I get it," Robbie said. "I hope things work out well."

"You, too," she said.

Robbie looked at her, surprised.

"Whatever situation you've got going on. Hope it works out."

"Thanks."

They pulled in to Nora's street. "You okay to do this again sometime?" she asked.

Drive Nora from motel to motel while Eli tried his level best to make Robbie murder her, but also earn over a hundred dollars in tips? "Okay."

"Gimme your number, I'll call you if I need a pickup."

Robbie gave her his cell number, and she entered it into her contacts list as "Driver 2".

She gave him another of her flat looks before she got out. Without the eye makeup, she looked worn-thin, pragmatic. "Stay good, Eliot," she said. "When you pick me up, you're a contractor, okay? You work for me. If you ever get any other ideas, well. I found another of those pink pills. You piss me off and they'll never find all the pieces."

Wanna bet?Robbie wasn't sure who'd thought it. "Understood," he said, instead.

He gave Nora five stars.