Note: I'm reposting this story from my AO3 account. It was originally written for gala_apples as part of a gift exchange and posted on 12-25-2017.

Devil's Highway Detour

Race Day 5

The day started with an unexpected early wakeup call at way-too-soon-to-get-up-after-all-the-shit-we-went-through-last-night-o'clock in the morning and an announcement that all racers had twenty minutes to be ready at the starting line if they didn't want to be left behind in their competitors' dust.

At first, as Grace felt her ankle twinge in protest every time she adjusted the amount of pressure she put on the accelerator, she thought that Slink was making everyone start racing for their lives hours ahead of schedule just to be an asshole and minimize the amount of time that she and Arthur had to recover after sneaking out the previous night, failing to find her sister, getting attacked by candy-crazed nutjobs, and then almost getting blown up. If so, then the joke was on Slink, because the day's race route was short and easy enough that there should be plenty of time for resting up at the other end before they cornered him and forced him to cough up Karma's actual location. Or so Grace thought, anyway.

"In one mile," the voice of the Camaro's GPS announced a suspiciously short amount of time after they had gotten onto the interstate, "exit right."

"What the hell?" Grace demanded, but the GPS did not repeat itself.

"What do you mean 'what the hell'?" Arthur said, sitting up straighter in the passenger seat and scanning their surroundings for possible threats. There wasn't much of anything to see aside from a few cars ahead of them, a few more trailing behind them, and the flat ground stretching out on either side without enough vegetation to hide anything larger than a jackrabbit between the highway and the distant hills.

"We were supposed to be on a straight shot down I-70 all the way to Denver," Grace said, "and in case you haven't noticed, Barbie, we aren't even close to getting out of Utah yet." She eased up ever so slightly on the gas, but they were still going over eighty, so the rest of the distance passed all too quickly.

A few tenths of a mile ahead of them, the two cars at the front of the pack blew past the exit without slowing. Grace had just enough time to wonder if maybe those cars hadn't been given the same instructions, if maybe Slink had somehow, impossibly, gotten wind of what she and Arthur had planned for him and was preemptively diverting them away from the rest of the racers to give himself an excuse to blow up their heads before they got the chance to act, and a glance at Arthur's frowning face showed that he was probably thinking something similar, but then the two cars' brake lights lit up in quick succession and the lead car suddenly disappeared from view. The second car came to a screeching halt a few feet too late to save itself. Time seemed to slow as Grace watched the vehicle's rear end lift into the air and its nose dip down out of sight. It teetered precariously for a fraction of a second before it too disappeared.

"Exit now," the GPS announced as dispassionately as always.

"Oh shit, the overpass is out!" Arthur shouted as Grace came to the same conclusion just in time to obey the GPS's instructions and swerve onto the exit ramp at the last possible moment.

The driver of the car immediately ahead of them, a white Acura Integra which was now technically in first place, was a little slower to react and didn't try to exit until the ramp had already split from the road. They pulled hard to the right just beyond the exit sign, throwing up a plume of dirt, gravel, and crushed weeds, as they briefly went off-road to cut back in front of the Camaro.

Grace had to slam on the brakes just to keep from plowing into them. She also leaned on the horn and shouted, "Son of a bitch!" just on principle, but the driver of the Acura gave no indication that they noticed any of that and was already accelerating away again. Grace hit the gas again to follow and immediately barely avoided a collision for the second time in as many seconds as Abby the Nun sped past them on the right in her Corvette. Arthur yelped in surprise, but Grace ignored him, muttered, "Mother fucking nuns," and kept going.

At the foot of the exit ramp, the Acura continued driving straight, heading up the ramp back onto I-70, while Abby veered right. Grace slowed as she approached where the ramp split, unsure of which car to follow.

The GPS unit gave the discordant beep which announced that a course route violation had been committed. On the screen, one of the green dots became an orange exclamation point. On the road ahead of them, the Acura's brake lights lit up, but before it could stop, the orange exclamation point became a red X. Grace couldn't hear the driver's brain bomb detonate, but she could see the inside of the car's windows go opaque red. The dead driver's foot must have slipped off of the brake, because the brake lights went out, and the car continued slowly up the ramp.

"Well, that answers that question," Grace grumbled as both Robotard 9000's Crown Vic and Domi and Cliff's Prius sped past, curving away to the right without any hesitation to indicate they didn't know where they were supposed to be going.

"In two hundred feet, turn right," the GPS said belatedly.

Just as Grace touched the accelerator, there was a Doppler-ing blare of a horn as the Gentleman's Mercedes Benz (or maybe it was the Scholar's? Grace wouldn't put it past a smug asshole like the Gentleman to let everyone assume the car was his while he treated the real owner like dirt) sped past, and then Grace was finally free to follow.

Grace heard Arthur mutter something unintelligible quietly under his breath as she accelerated around the curve. She spared a glance at him and saw that rather than glowering after the departing Benz or the still slowly moving Acura, he was staring further back, past Grace's left shoulder. Oh, yeah, after watching that guy's head explode, she had almost managed to forget about those other two drivers who had driven off the edge of the ruined overpass.

She prepared to have another fight with Arthur over not wanting to stop and help anyone, but when she turned to follow his gaze she saw why he had not already started arguing. Nobody was getting out of those crumpled wrecks alive. No one would even be able to salvage the bodies for fuel without a lot of time and some serious cutting tools. Better to just keep going. Grace followed the road south and did not look back again until well after she had caught up to and passed Domi and Cliff again and was sure that the interchange had faded into the distance behind them.

They drove in silence for a while.

"Here, take this," Grace said a few minutes later. She pulled her battered old roadmap down from her sun visor and handed it to Arthur. "We're going south on U.S. route 191 now. Try to figure out where we might be headed, because this stupid thing," she reached down and tapped a fingernail against the GPS's screen without bothering to take her eyes off the road, "is useless when all it's showing is a single mostly straight line."

She said it as much because she knew that Arthur probably needed a distraction as because she wanted an answer, but she really did want an answer. At the rate they were burning through what was left of the Glimmer blood in their tank, they should have been able to get to that day's finish line without needing to do much worrying about balancing fuel economy versus speed, but those estimates were based on the original route as it had been mapped out at the beginning of the race. If this detour added too many miles (and knowing how few interconnected, passable roads there were in this part of the country, how could it not?), then there was no telling when or where they were going to find themselves with an empty tank and no one to put in it.

"This map is almost as useless as the GPS right now," Arthur said after a few minutes of crinkling paper noises and frustrated muttering. "What's the point of a map that only shows a few cities, the interstate routes, and not much else?"

"Well, sorry, Barbie, but unless you have a Thomas Guide to the Southwest Bumblefuck Territories
hidden somewhere on you, it's the best thing we have right now aside from whatever geography we've personally memorized. The best I ever managed in that subject was a B, and even that was a struggle. How about you?"

"I got an A plus on a geography test once," Arthur said, "but it was only because I could fill in the names of all the counties in California on a map." He sounded weirdly sad about that.

"I guess we're stuck relying on the shitty map then," Grace said.

"Yeah, I guess so," Arthur said. He sighed and stared out the window with a faint look of both wonder and horror, just like he had been doing for most of previous four days.

Grace was reminded that he claimed he'd never been outside of SoCal prior to being forced onto the Blood Drive with her. Maybe Grace would have been okay with the idea of trying to stay in one place forever like Arthur seemed to have been if she had grown up someplace like Los Angeles instead of small town Kansas, but she doubted it. It was just more proof that she would probably never understand the man sitting next to her, not really, not the way that she understood Karma.

"I think Moab is supposed to be somewhere around here," Arthur added, breaking Grace out of her reverie. "Christopher said his parents used to take him out there on vacation sometimes when he was young."

Despite herself, Grace was curious. "What's in Moab that makes it a place worth going on vacation?" This looked like the kind of place where, back in the old days of family road trips, she would have started a screaming match with Karma in the hopes that their parents would make good on their threats to turn the car around and take them home even if they hadn't gotten to see anywhere fun yet. Things had gotten a little bit more interesting for her once she had gotten old enough to help with the driving on those trips, but not enough for her to think that seeing the Grand Canyon had really been worth the time and trouble of getting there and back.

"Mountain biking and rock climbing."

"Somehow I doubt that Julian Slink or anyone else connected to setting our race routes has any interest in Moab's mountain biking or rock climbing opportunities," Grace said.

It didn't really matter anyway. They didn't have any choice but to keep driving or to pull over and wait to die. Grace chose to keep driving, and Arthur didn't argue. As it turned out, the only thing of interest in Moab to whoever set the route was a road that went in the north end of town and kept going out the south end. They didn't get a real inkling of why they might have been sent on this detour until another forty-five miles further down the road.

It was the GPS which brought it to her attention, with another announcement of, "In one mile, turn left," and when Grace figured it out, she felt like she should kick herself for not guessing sooner.

"Of course Slink couldn't resist sending his own personal death race down the Devil's Highway," she laughed.

"The what?"

"The Devil's Highway," Grace repeated. She pointed to a sign they were passing which announced that they were approaching the junction of U.S. Route 191 and U.S. Route 666, because clearly Arthur either hadn't noticed it or hadn't bothered to read it. "You know, the number of the beast? People argue over whether it's cursed, or haunted, or both." She laughed again, because the look on Arthur's face was just too funny. "All that supernatural stuff's bullshit, of course," she added, and reached over to pat him reassuringly on the shoulder, just like she used to do for Karma back when the two of them would watch those ridiculous ghost hunter shows because Karma had wanted more shows like the X-Files and because Grace had thought the husband and wife team who sometimes acted as hosts were both hot. "Statistically, though, stretches of the road are supposed to have some kind of record fatality rates, so maybe we'll get lucky and find some free fuel lying around."

"Great," Arthur said with a complete lack of enthusiasm as Grace slowed and made the turn. Clearly he still had not fully embraced the 'damned if you do, and damned if you don't, so might as well not cry while you're doing it' mentality necessary to survive in the Blood Drive.

"C'mon, Barbie," Grace said, "let's get out kicks on Route Six-Sixty-Six." She stepped on the gas pedal again and noticed that at some point her ankle had stopped hurting every time she did that. Now that she thought about it, most of her other bumps and bruises acquired at Kane Hill finally felt like they were fading into the background as well. Grace grinned as the car's speed hit sixty and kept climbing. Every mile took them closer to the end of the day's race, and closer to the opportunity to beat some answers out of Julian Slink. She felt ready for anything, even whatever weird shit or conventionally dangerous shit the Devil's Highway might try to throw at them.

By the time they cut down through the corner of Colorado, continued south through the eastern edge of the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation, and reached the outskirts of Gallup two hours later, they had yet to see any ghosts, devils, bigfoots, mothmen, dudes in obviously fake rubber alien costumes, or anything else where the footage of it from any of the Camaro's cameras would have been interesting enough to make the final cut of an episode for broadcast, not for Karma's old ghost hunting shows and probably not for Julian Slink's mysterious private audience of corporate assholes either. There hadn't been any adventures unless you counted the unspoken mounting tension of watching the level of green sludge in Sexy Susy's gas gage creep ever lower. They hadn't gotten any kicks unless you counted laughing at Robotard 9000 sitting on the hood of his car by the side of the road and redoing his silver face paint while he waited for some unsuspecting good Samaritan to come along and fill his car's empty tank.

Grace might have felt almost disappointed if she weren't too busy feeling furious at the fact that Abby the Nun had just passed them going in the opposite direction, which meant that soon they were going to have to start retracing their steps too. Sure enough, a few minutes later, the Scholar and the Gentleman passed them, going in the other direction. Then Grace and Arthur were into Gallup proper, cruising down a stretch of road that had once been part of Route 66, past old motels that had started their slide into decrepitude long before the Scar or gas prices going to hell. Soon after that, they completed their loop through the old part of town and started heading north again.

Grace wished they could have stopped and grabbed someone to throw in their tank on their way through, but she knew that Arthur wouldn't stand for it until it was too late and they were stranded by the side of the road like Robotard 9000. Speaking of Robotard, they were coming up on where they had passed him before, and yup, he was still stuck right where they had left him. Grace waved as they passed him again. He shook his fist at them and yelled some kind of honking noise at them, his silver face paint glinting in the sun, and then his image was shrinking away to nothing in the Camaro's rearview mirror.

They only ended up retracing their journey about fifty miles before the GPS had them turn off of Route 666 and onto a new eastbound road, which was just as well. If they had been forced to go all the way back up to that interchange where they had first split off from I-70, then Grace might have been annoyed enough to not be able to hold back the next time that she saw Slink and might have risked killing him before she remembered to make him answer her questions.

The day wore on as the Camaro ate up the miles without seeming to make much progress on the map.

At one point, Arthur offered to take a turn at the wheel for a while, but Grace suspected that she would go stir-crazy if she had to sit and do nothing in the passenger seat for too long, just like the old days, so she declined. Maybe Arthur was facing the same problem, but he was better at keeping that kind of restlessness under wraps. At another point, sometime in the early afternoon, Arthur proved that he must have taken her Boy Scouts comment to heart in the best way possible and decided to start trying to be prepared, because he produced a pile of granola bars, opened a couple, and passed them to Grace before opening a few for himself. For a while, the only sounds in the car were the perpetual growl of the engine and a lot of grateful chewing.

Mostly they rode in silence.

Eventually, when the light began to fade along the roadway but Grace could still glimpse patches of bright sun against the mountaintops, which had grown taller, sharper, and closer together since they had gotten back into Colorado and continued north, Arthur asked to see the map again. Grace handed it over without comment. He unfolded the part he needed, and Grace watched out of the corner of her eye as he checked and rechecked the scale that the map was drawn to and measured out distances against the length of one of his finger bones, his frown growing deeper and deeper as he did so. Then he spent a while simply staring at the map as if trying to change the lines marked on it by force of will.

At last, he said, "How many miles worth of blood do you think we have left?"

"Not nearly enough to get us anywhere close to Denver and definitely not beyond," Grace said, "not even if we could magically do it in a straight line without any mountains in between, downhill all the way." She had been driving slower and slower to try to conserve what little blood they had left, giving up their lead as more and more racers caught up to and passed them as the hours went by, but she knew it was no use. Even if she had left the starting line at a crawl and kept at that pace all day, they still would not have had enough fuel to reach their destination after the detour had more than doubled the original distance.

"Yeah, that's what I was afraid of," Arthur said. He let his hands, still holding the map, fall into his lap as he closed his eyes and tipped his head back against his seat's headrest. Grace left him to his thoughts as she navigated a few more turns in the road. Their surroundings were, as they had been for most of the day, bleak. What rare signs of human habitation they had passed in the last few hours all looked abandoned. Nothing hammered home just how much the country had changed since the Scar like driving past modern ghost town after modern ghost town. Neither of them needed to say it, but they both knew that they had long ago passed the point where by some miracle they might be able to get to their destination without killing anyone today and entered into part where it would be a miracle if they even found anyone to kill before Sexy Susy's tank ran dry and left them stranded somewhere on a cold mountain road.

Or had they?

The stink hit them two turns in the road before they could see what was causing it. It was so bad that Grace guessed they might have been able to smell it miles earlier if they had had the windows rolled down.

"Oh, god," Arthur choked out, almost gagging.

Then, by the last bit of daylight left in the sky, they saw it. The thing lying in the road up ahead was huge. Grace might have thought it was an elephant that Slink had arranged to have wandering around just to fuck with the racers, if it hadn't been so furry and if elephants hadn't gone extinct years ago, even the ones in zoos. Whatever it was, its body was blocking most of the road, with just enough room on the left-hand shoulder for Grace to edge Sexy Suzy around the thing's ass end.

As they drew closer, Grace could see that it was definitely not an elephant, not with a long scaly tail like, but its feet, if it had any, were underneath it, and its head was out of sight, hanging down over the embankment which dropped away from the right-hand side of the road, so any further attempts at identification would have to be limited to wild guesses unless they wanted to get out and get up close and personal with it, which wouldn't be a good idea considering how bad the thing smelled.

Grace tightened her grip on the steering wheel, held her breath and tried not to let her watering eyes obscure her vision too much as more of the stink seeped in through the car's vents. Once they were past it, Grace was just about to hit the gas again and leave the thing behind when Arthur suddenly said, "Wait! Stop the car!"

"Why?" Grace asked, as she brought the car to a full stop. She leaned forward and scanned the steep, rocky ground on either side of the road for the potential attack or other problem that Arthur must have spotted.

"Do you think that thing's blood could power the engine?" Arthur said, craning around to stare over his shoulder at the monstrosity.

Grace turned to look through the rear window and considered both the question and the huge grey lump behind them. "I don't know," she said. "I've never tried to run it on animal blood, because I could never get my hands on any animals to try. I can't even remember when the last time was that I saw so much as a photo of a cow or a horse, never mind seeing one in real life. "

"The car has been running on Glimmer blood since the day before yesterday," Arthur said.

"Yeah, but Mercedes said Glimmers used to be human."

They both considered the animal for a while longer.

"I guess there's only one way to find out," Arthur said at last.

"Yeah, I guess you're right," Grace agreed. Before she could change her mind, she popped the trunk and said, "You can use my ax, but clean it off before you put it back." Arthur nodded and got out of the car. The stink that rolled in through the open door was even worse than Grace had imagined it would be. "And for fuck's sake," she called after him, "don't you dare step in any of it and track it back into my car!"

Arthur gave her a thumbs-up by the light of the brake lights as he picked up the ax and headed for the behemoth. Grace didn't blame him for not saying anything. If he opened his mouth to talk, he would probably be able to not only taste the stink in the air but also bite off a chunk and chew it like gum if it didn't make his throat swell closed first. As Arthur approached the carcass and took an experimental poke at it with the head of the ax, Grace executed a three point turn to position the Camaro so that it would be easier to get the thing's blood into the engine if it hadn't already coagulated beyond the point of usability.

Apparently satisfied with what he had felt with his test poke, Arthur pulled back the ax and swung it around as hard as he could. It was an ax swing that probably would have made Paul Bunyan proud, but it bounced off the thing's thick hide like a penny thrown at a brick wall. Before Arthur could try again, the carcass proved that it was not actually a carcass by shuddering and then raising its huge, ugly head into view, hinging its mouth open impossibly wide, and roaring at Arthur.

"Oh shit!" Grace and Arthur shouted in unison as what was apparently a gigantic opossum hoisted itself to its feet. Arthur scrambled backwards and threw himself back into the car, still clutching the ax, as Grace threw the car into reverse and peeled out backwards.

The twisting mountain road which hadn't seemed so difficult to navigate while going forwards in the daylight demanded a whole level of skill to navigate while going backwards lit only by fading twilight and dim red taillights, but fortunately the opossum cornered worse than the Camaro did, so Grace managed to stay ahead of the angry monster without crashing into any rocks or backing over any cliffs. It was a close thing in a couple of spots, though. The chase went on for more than a mile of twists and turns until they reached a straight stretch of road long enough, and more importantly wide enough to, get going as fast as possible and pull a handbrake turn to get the car pointed in the correct direction again once they'd gained some distance from those oversized snapping jaws. Finally moving forward again, Grace was able to leave the monster behind at long last, though she went as fast as she could without risking sending them off the road for another ten miles just to be sure that if it persisted in chasing them then it would need a long time to catch up to them again.

It was just as well that Grace slowed down when she did, because the turns were getting tighter and the edge of the road was lined with little white wooden crosses to mark where people had wrecked and died, almost seeming to form a second miniature guardrail along some spots.

"Holy fuck," Grace laughed, glancing behind her yet again and feeling the fear-induced surge of adrenaline begin to fade. Then she looked at the gas gage and said, "Fuck," again, much less happily this time. The tank was almost completely empty. Running on ordinary human blood, the car would have had less than a mile left. Judging by the Glimmer super blood's performance so far, Grace figured they could maybe get twenty miles if they were lucky, but even that would leave them way more than a hundred miles short of their destination.

"It's not over until it's over," Arthur said and then paused as if replaying his own words in his head made a face. "I sound like one of those Steel City corporate cultists, don't I?"

"Only a little bit," Grace said. She took them around another curve marked with clusters of white crosses. Some were decorated with fake flowers or names and dates. Some were blank, completely anonymous.

She went around another curve and onto another short straight stretch, and suddenly there was a guy in the middle of the road, right in front of them. Grace had only a split second to perceive a brief flash of tattered dark clothing, messy hair, and too pale skin stretched across a thin body with one arm raised and thumb stuck out as if hitchhiking. He had not been standing there, waiting for them, and he had not stepped out into their path from the edge of the road. He had just suddenly appeared in their path, far too close to the nose of the car for Grace to have any hope stopping or swerving in time to avoid hitting him.

She barely got her foot off of the gas and onto the brake before they plowed into him. She physically and mentally braced for impact, for the crunch of metal and bone as he and the Corvette's front end destroyed each other before he tumbled up and over the hood to smash the windshield.

But none of that happened.

Instead, there was only the sound of screeching brakes and Arthur yelling wordlessly beside her, and maybe Grace was yelling too, she really couldn't tell just then, as the car's bumper and radiator met less resistance than fog and went right through the guy like he wasn't there. Then he reached the engine, or rather the engine reached him, and Grace saw a look of pained confusion cross his face as he vanished as quickly as he had appeared and the engine shrieked and revved up to 5000rpm even though Grace still had the brake pressed down as far as it would go.

She had to fight the steering wheel too keep Sexy Susy from careening through the guardrail at the next curve, but then the engine slowed back to normal and the car drifted to a stop. Grace turned offthe engine and pulled the key from the ignition, just to be sure that the car wasn't going to move again until one of them told it to. For a few seconds, all Grace and Arthur could do was stare at each other.

"Did we just run over a fucking ghost?" Grace asked and mentally cringed at how panicked her voice sounded due to the adrenaline flooding her system all over again. It was a good thing that she hadn't planned on going to sleep anytime soon, because between the giant mutant opossum and now this, she was pretty sure that sleep was going to be impossible for hours with the way her heart was hammering.

"You did say the Devil's Highway was supposed to be cursed, or haunted, or both," Arthur said cautiously.

"We left that road hours ago, Arthur," Grace said. She felt like she should have tacked 'dipshit' onto the end of that statement but couldn't quite work up the energy to do so.

"Maybe," Arthur said, "but I think that you're right and we ran over a ghost."

"Karma's never gonna believe this," Grace said. "I don't know if she's going to be jealous or accuse me of lying to try to scare her." She laughed shakily, because laughing was the least embarrassing stress reaction she could manage at that point. Then she added, "Hey, Barbie, does your offer from a few hours back to take over driving still stand? Because I think I might be ready to let you take the wheel for a little while."

"Yeah, sure," Arthur said, though he sounded nearly as shaky as she did. He opened his door and getting out so they could swap places.

"Thanks," Grace said as she settled into the passenger seat. "I think I'm going to sit here and watch the scenery for a while."

Arthur looked around them. "But it's dark out now," he said.

"Exactly."

With a shrug, Arthur put the key back into the ignition, started the engine, and continued on their way.

As he drove, he kept surreptitiously glancing at the gas gage. Grace did too. However, it was another forty miles before either of them was willing to admit they had noticed that the tank appeared to have refilled itself with green goo.

They managed to regain a little bit of ground against some of the other racers once the GPS finally sent them back onto I-70, and then they regained a little more on the short run up I-25 to Meadeville. They arrived by a comfortable margin the middle of the pack, which left them with nothing much to do for a while but kill time until they were free to put their plans for Slink into action.

Arthur took himself off to find some food before the big event, because apparently all that muscle of his burned a lot of calories even when it was just sitting in a car and doing nothing for most of the day. He promised he would bring her back some of whatever he could find that didn't look like it had been made out of people and as much booze as he could get his hands on to help them take the jagged edges off their memories of the day. Grace preferred to stay behind and take care of the Camaro, especially after whatever it was that had happened with the ghost back on that mountain road. Grace did not want to think about the implications of that incident too hard, at least not yet. She was sure she would need to think about it long and hard someday soon, but tonight she just needed a little bit of the Zen and relaxing predictability of running basic maintenance on her machine and fixing anything she found wrong with it.

Once that was out of the way, Grace chose to hang around and finish her preparations for what she considered the real fun of the evening while she pretend to watch from the outskirts as the Mayhem Party worked itself into full swing. Most of the partiers seemed like they were trying to make up for the later than usual start to the end of race day festivities by working themselves into a greater frenzy than usual. Grace couldn't help but think that she might have genuinely enjoyed something like this back in her rowdy teenage years, but these days not so much, especially not when it was such a fight to get to each night's party alive. Things could still be worse, though. She certainly intended to make things worse for Slink in the very near future, especially if he didn't cough up the information she wanted about Karma as fast as possible once they got their hands on him.

She had just finished with the final adjustments to the Camaro for the night and was in the process of swapping out her mechanic tools for the other tools of her trade when she happened to glance up and see the unmistakable figure of the Scholar heading her way. She set down the club whose heft she had been testing, slid her homemade wrench-head knuckledusters into her back pocket, and greeted him with empty hands, because he seemed to be an okay kind of guy for all that he was partnered with a major asshole.

"Hey," he said once he had stopped in front of her, hands behind his back and shuffling his feet awkwardly, almost like he was embarrassed or shy, as if any of them had anything left to be proud of after participating in this race.

"Hey, yourself," she answered, giving him a nod of acknowledgement. "Good to see you made it through another day."

"Yeah, I wanted to thank you for that green stuff you gave me," the Scholar said. "It was a real life saver today. Without it, we'd still be stuck back in the mountains, waiting for our heads to explode."

"Well, a deal is a deal, and you earned it," Grace said. She wanted to ask him if he believed in ghosts and, if so, whether he had any idea how running a ghost through a blood engine could apparently fill it with the same super fuel as the blood out of an exploding people-eating mutant. She also wanted to never have to talk about any of that stuff ever again. It could wait, she told herself. It could wait at least a couple of days, assuming they both survived.

As if sensing Grace's thoughts on the subject on survival, the Scholar spoke up again. "I also wanted to say thanks for saving me back at the diner," he said. "I already got to thank your partner for that one, but I never got the chance to thank you." He glanced around them nervously then leaned a little closer and whispered, "It's small payment for a life, but it's the best I can manage right now. If anyone asks, you didn't get this from me, okay?"

Before Grace could say anything in reply, he stumbled forward against her in a move too blatant to look accidental to any but the most disinterested of casual observers, but calling him out on it would have just drawn more attention. Most guys would have used such an action to cop a feel or try to pick her pocket, but the Scholar merely slipped something small and rectangular into her hand. Then he hurried away without another word and disappeared into the crowd as if he had never been there.

Grace went back to her tools and weapons, using her open trunk as cover from prying eyes as she examined whatever it was that the Scholar had just given her. It was a flat cardboard box about as long as her hand and half as wide, for a fancy high-end chocolate bar: 65% cocoa, single origin, Kenyan grown Belgian chocolate if the label was to be believed. She wondered what kind of note or small tool he could have given her that needed hiding like that instead of simply handing it to her outright. However, when she opened it up to see, there was no note or tool to be found, just a sealed inner wrapper around a slightly smaller rectangle.

Holy shit, it really was chocolate. Where had he even gotten it? Well, obviously he had stolen it from the Gentleman, but where had the Gentleman gotten it? Chocolate, especially good chocolate, was ounce for ounce ten times more expensive than gasoline and a hundred times more difficult to find anywhere selling it in the first place. Grace hadn't had so much as a taste of it in years. Smaxx and the 99% synthetic junk that had replaced it in most of the world's candy bars and was more like plastic than food didn't count. Manufacturers could only get away with calling that stuff 'chocolate' due their lobbyists convincing the government to relax the country's food labeling laws.

Grace split open the wrapper and took an appreciative sniff of the contents. Sweet fuck, it really was the good stuff. She bit off a small corner and almost went weak in the knees as it melted on her tongue. She hadn't even realized until now just how much she had missed that velvety smooth texture and bittersweet taste, and it tasted all the better coming at the tail end of the shitty day she had just had. She wasn't one of those people who would say that chocolate was better than sex, but right now it was getting really close to a tie. Grace went to take another bite, but stopped herself long enough to duck into the car and check the GPS display of where the last few racers were.

There were still five cars left on the day's route, including a closely bunched group of three which still had more than fifteen miles of twisting mountain roads to get through before they got back the interstate and all the miles left to travel after that. Unless all three trailing racers managed to crash and die before reaching the finish line, it would be at least another hour before the loser for that day of the race was announced and executed. Slink wouldn't put the remote control for the brain bombs away for the night until after then, and Grace and Arthur couldn't put their plan into action without immediate reprisal while he still had it within easy reach.

That meant Grace had plenty of time before then to savor her gift from the Scholar. She picked up the chocolate bar, bit off another small piece, leaned back in her seat, closed her eyes, and let herself get lost in the taste and in her plans for the future. First she was going to take the time to indulge in this unexpected luxury, and then she was going to indulge in introducing Slink's face to her knuckledusters until he told her where Karma was. All in all, despite everything that had come before, it added up to the recipe for a perfect evening, and she intended to enjoy every minute of it.

Grace took a third tiny bite of the chocolate bar and sighed happily. Somewhere beyond the crowd, another car screamed across the finish line, bringing the remaining number of stragglers down to four. The Mayhem Party cheered the car's arrival and the impending death of someone further back along the race route, which was callous but none of Grace's concern right now. She and Arthur were finished with death and danger for the day aside from possibly acting as sources of them for Julian Slink. The worst that the Blood Drive could throw at them was over for another night, and things were looking up. If Arthur turned up again before she finished eating the Scholar's gift, she might even be willing to let him talk her into sharing some with him. Nothing was going to ruin her good mood tonight.

The End
(Sorry, Grace, but we all know how it goes from there...)