"If I stop, I'm going to lose him, Anthony," Ian warned, not slowing down as they approached the intersection.
"He'll be there. I know you don't want to wait, but he'll be there."
"Why do you even think that?" Ian asked, not challenging Anthony as much as expressing his curiosity. He started to press the brake as they came up on the corner of the sidewalk. "You don't even really know him."
"No, but I still trust he'll be there," Anthony answered without a real explanation.
Ian slowed the car to a stop, watching the bumper of the red Cadillac in front of them grow smaller as it continued, exceeding the speed limit, down the lonely road.
Ian glanced around outside the car, searching for the passenger they were supposed to pick up right here. There were only two buildings at the intersection—they were at the very edge of a tiny nowheresville town—that could block his view, so clearly he wasn't here.
"He's not here, Anthony. We need to go."
Anthony shrugged, sighing. "Fine. But we could stand backup."
Ian shifted the car back to first gear and started to drive again as a blue sedan pulled up next to him across the double yellow. He frowned without thinking much of it, expecting it to be an idiot trying to illegally pass him.
But the car honked and stayed next to him, its passenger side window rolling down. Ian slowed down and rolled his own window down, glowering. He heard Anthony shift next to him and a click as he turned the safety off his gun. Not a bad idea, since the car next to them could probably only mean trouble.
"Sorry I'm a bit late," the deep-voiced man said from across the empty passenger seat. "Once I realized you'd be pursuing them in a vehicle, I thought I'd be most useful if I had one of my own."
Ian raised his eyebrows. "Well, you're probably not wrong. Nice to see you showed up, by the way, Mark. But let's not fall behind. The bastard's already speeding."
"Lead the way," Mark said, letting his car drift behind Ian's.
Ian rolled the window back up and gunned his Subaru, keeping track of the Cadillac in the distance. Fortunately, the road was long and straight without many turnoffs, so it would be hard to miss if the red coupe left the road.
"Told you he'd come," Anthony said, clicking the safety back on his pistol.
Ian cast him an insincerely annoyed look. "I never said he wouldn't."
Anthony frowned. "Actually, you did say something to that effect."
Ian didn't grace that with an answer.
As he approached the rear of the Cadillac, the luxury car's driver must have noticed his proximity. It started to speed up, and as Ian followed, his speedometer pushed eighty mph.
Not good for a highway whose speed limit was fifty, but Ian just had to hope no cops were around.
He switched lanes across the double yellow and went to pull up next to the red coupe.
"Ian, don't you think that's a bad idea?" Anthony said, sounding slightly worried. "What if someone came from this direction?"
"Shut up, I know it's stupid," Ian said, anxiety twisting his gut as he imagined getting trapped by the Cadillac and Mark Fischbach's car as a semi-truck came from the opposite direction….
He shook his head fiercely and returned to focus on the task at hand. With any luck, Mark would pick up on what he was doing here and help him. Hopefully, this would be fast.
Ian edged his car closer to the Cadillac. The coupe started to slow down, trying to fall behind Ian, but Mark's blue sedan didn't allow it to. Thankfully, their comrade seemed to have pick up on at least some idea of what Ian was doing.
"Ian, there's a tunnel up ahead. The lanes split."
"Oh, shit," Ian responded, taking his eyes off the Cadillac and looking to the road in front of them. Surely enough, the lane Ian was in went off slightly to the left, avoiding the tunnel, and the right lane proceeded straight into the dimly lit cave in the hill.
"Just leave it, Ian," Anthony said, and Ian could see his serious gaze in his peripheral vision. "Get behind Mark or in front of this bastard. You can't stay right here."
Ian gave him no reply. Instead, he started to crowd the Cadillac further, until it was riding the rumble strip.
"Please don't run him off the road," Anthony said stiffly. "That would be a—"
"Shut up," Ian said, trying not to snap at him. "Let me concentrate." He was working over his plan in his head and realizing it wasn't going to work like this. And he had to think fast, because they were approaching the tunnel at seventy-five miles an hour.
He started to slow down, hoping Mark would get the idea and slow down with him. It took a few seconds of Ian vacillating his speed for Mark to pick up on it, but eventually the three cars started to slow. The Cadillac was too trapped between Ian and the edge of the road to keep up its own speed, so it was forced to go with them.
"Anthony, you could just try firing from here," Ian muttered, downshifting as he dropped his speed from sixty to fifty.
"No," his friend said immediately with a glance at the darkly tinted coupe windows. "If I accidentally kill him, his car could fall back and hit Mark's. Or hell, even swerve and hit ours."
"True. We're going to have to do this the hard way."
"Ian, don't try this. I don't want to hit the side of that tunnel."
"Just trust me, Anthony. I'll figure it out."
The tunnel was getting disturbingly close, and the cars were still at highway speed, approaching the split of the lanes at a rate that made Ian's heart jump to his throat. But he could still do this, he swore on it.
He turned his head slightly toward Anthony to talk to him. "As soon as he hits the side and stops his car, get out and shoot. I don't want to give him the chance to start—"
"What do you mean, 'hits the side?'"
"—to start up again and leave. You'll know what I mean when it happens." Ian cast a glance over at Anthony and saw his slightly sickened expression. He wasn't at all comfortable with Ian not telling him what exactly was going on.
But Ian didn't have time.
As the tunnel drew closer, Ian's brain worked overtime making sure nothing would go really, really wrong. He needed to time this perfectly.
At the last second, he twitched the steering wheel to the right and his car scraped against the red Cadillac. Ian pulled away immediately as the other car jerked, seemingly involuntarily, to the very edge of the road. Ian hit the brake hard as the Cadillac slid against the side of the tunnel, entering it with a shower of sparks.
Ian's Subaru still had a considerable amount of momentum heading toward and across the median, which was right at the front of the concrete tunnel. Ian saw, from the corner of his eye, Anthony throw his arms up to protect his face. Ian turned the steering wheel hard to the left and half a second later, they had come to a sudden stop with a sickening crunch. It jolted everything inside the vehicle and Ian felt a sharp pain in the back of his neck as he was jerked forward.
Everything was silent for about ten seconds before Ian started to move. He shook his head, trying to get a weird ringing out of his right ear, and looked over to check on Anthony.
It was Anthony's side of the car that had hit the concrete, but to Ian's relief, the inside of the vehicle was unharmed and so was Anthony.
"You okay, dude?" he asked.
Anthony took a deep breath and nodded. Then, without warning, he opened the car door and got out, taking his pistol with him.
Oh shit, we still have to stop that guy, Ian realized. He grabbed his own pistol from the door compartment and left his damaged vehicle behind.
_v_
Mark didn't have much time to react when Ian hit the Cadillac at the mouth of the tunnel. The coupe's speed jolted from about forty-five to thirty in just a few seconds as it collided with the side of the tunnel. Mark stepped on the brake to avoid hitting it as sparks flew across the road and onto his sedan's hood. As his surroundings went dim in the faint orange lighting of the tunnel, the blinding shower of sparks blocked his vision. Mark tried to twist his steering wheel in the hopes of going around the wrecked Cadillac, but he didn't have enough time. His car was still coming to a full stop as he heard his bumper screech against the rear of the Cadillac.
When both vehicles were no longer in motion, Mark realized he had his eyes squeezed shut. He opened them in time to see a vague flash of gunfire and hear the accompanying crack of the bullet coming out of what must have been Anthony Padilla's pistol. Some sort of a threat shot to the person in the Cadillac.
Those two are merciless, aren't they?
Mark took a moment to relax enough to move. His whole body had been tense and he realized his foot was still pressed down hard on the brake pedal. He shakenly put the sedan in park and twisted around to grab three items from the backseat. Two were his silver-and-black pistols; the other, a black leather mask.
Mark didn't really enjoy covering his face every time he had to go out and do something like this—which he hadn't had to do in many months—but it was justified. With a YouTube channel that had almost 15 million subscribers, the last thing he wanted to do was be recognized by someone while he was on a mission helping these two near-criminals.
He looped the mask's strap around the back of his head and settled it into place around his nose and down around his chin. He shoved a magazine into his pistol and slowly opened his car door, not wanting to idiotically get out into Anthony's line of fire. Anthony didn't seem to be shooting anymore, though, and as Mark got out of the car he noticed that Ian had joined Anthony and they were both headed toward the wreckage of the Cadillac coupe.
"Is the driver still in there?" Mark asked, and his voice, though not loud, echoed down the empty tunnel. He turned his gaze to the smashed, smoking car, then back as Ian spoke.
Ian must have been able to see through the broken windshield into the car, since the windows were too darkly tinted—and now cracked—to make anything out. "She's still alive."
Mark couldn't help but be slightly more repulsed by Ian's actions knowing that it had been a woman in the car the whole time.
Mark and Anthony kept their guns at the ready—not that they believed any real threat could come from inside the vehicle now—as Ian went up and opened the car door. Mark grit his teeth at the sight of the woman inside, who had shards of glass spread across her lap and a bloody gash in her forehead. He was immediately reconsidering if Ian and Anthony's cause was worth fighting for.