A/N: Thank you so much for the kind comments. I'm planning to continue this for around ten chapters. Maybe more, possibly less. I'm having such a great time getting to know this fandom. I haven't seen every episode of the third or fourth season yet, but I'm working on it. :)
Somebody needed to invest in a weed eater about eight Christmases ago.
The steep incline between the parking lots was beyond overgrown. Michael marched through the tangled brush, lifting his knees high to free his feet from the snarls only to get knotted up all over again in the next step. The bag he was carrying collided with his leg on the upswing. The Life Savers clinked against the soda, and perspiration from the bottle soaked into the brown paper surrounding it, darkening a corner on the bottom.
If that car wasn't there when he reached the top of the hill, he was returning it. It could go back to the mad scientists' headquarters and have its switches flipped around by an entourage of crackpots in construction helmets forever, for all he cared. There was nothing Michael would enjoy more at the moment than calling in to tell Devon the whole experiment was a bust, nothing that would simplify his life quicker than opting out for another set of wheels. Any old rust bucket would do, just as long as it was nice and normal and didn't complain.
Before Michael could get too invested in fond memories of the '56 Chevy he drove in high school, he set foot on the burger joint's parking lot and all his hopes dried up in a cloud of dust. The car was still there. It was sitting in the back of the lot, exactly where he left it. He chose the spot because no one was parked around that area, and he thought keeping the car in isolation would remove the temptation for it to chitchat with the blissfully ignorant. Now he saw that, while he was gone, the owner of a station wagon had elected to nestle his vehicle in beside it for no apparent reason.
"Terrific." Michael went around the front of the car on his way to the driver's side. Movement caught his eye, and he stopped short. "That's just great."
The strip of red lights embedded in the hood was on and almost definitely had been leeching off the battery this entire time. The glare of the sun disguised it at first, but, up close, there was no doubt it was active. Each illuminated bulb lit the next in gradual sweeps back and forth and forth and back again. Every trip was accompanied by a soft woo-wooing that sounded like it would be more at home in the throat of a contented Sasquatch than between hefty pieces of machinery. The lights seemed to work faster as he watched, as if mocking him.
What were they for, anyway? Intimidation? He had to admit they made for an eerie first impression in the dark.
In a hurry now, Michael yanked on the door handle, and it gave way. Did he forget to lock the thing too? He exhaled through gritted teeth and plopped down in the seat. "C'mon, start."
"Certainly." The car fired up its engine, no problem at all. "Can I ask what is so wonderful about my front end?"
Michael's hand froze midway to the controls. The motor was humming away before he could touch anything. He skimmed over the glowing monitors and gauges on display but couldn't find an on/off button labeled Shimmying Red Hood Lights. Oh, well. They must not be that taxing on the battery, or maybe the car had some godlike kind of battery, or, actually, it was probably something a lot more complicated than that. He didn't know and would never want to understand it.
He reached into his bag, seizing the soda by the neck. "No, you cannot. Now, hush up."
It took three swigs for Michael to decide he didn't like the drink. It tasted just enough like a Pepsi to make him crave the real thing, and every sip after the first could only offer disappointment. He held the chilly bottle up to his forehead, taking some of its sweat for himself. It was stuffy in the car. The interior felt about as ventilated as a ballistic vest.
Well, no wonder. When he looked, he saw the place where the vents should be was plastered over with futuristic garbage, buried with all the other typical, useful, reasonable things that actually belonged in a car. That would be just his luck—doomed to crisscross the country in the world's most expensive slow cooker. Although, thinking back on it, he never felt bothered by heat in the car before. Even driving with the windows—
A high-pitched siren sliced through the stillness of the parking lot, demanding and razor-sharp. It didn't sound like the cry of an ambulance or a police cruiser. There wasn't an emergency vehicle in sight. It went off three times, and then the tone deepened, switching to another head-turning sequence of descending beeps.
It was a car alarm.
Michael's stomach dropped.
"I'm detecting a disturbance in the lot below us," the car said. "There appears to be—"
"Think the Mercedes beat you to the punch." Michael already knew everything there was to know about the passenger window and the purse on the seat and the guy with the crooked mustache and the likely story. He could have prevented this. "So much for those super advanced sensors."
He could still stop the guy. He threw open the door. Unthinking, just needing to free his hands, he put the bottle of soda down on the car floor and left it resting upright against the center console. The red square above the different cruise mode settings started flashing immediately.
"Excuse me, I know you're not intending to leave that open container leaning so precariously close to my—"
Michael sprinted across the pavement. He reached the hill dividing the lots and leapt from stride to stride to the bottom, catching himself in a low crouch. Weeds pricked his palms. He pushed off the ground and kept running.
The Mercedes was ahead, a glistening beacon. He squinted. There was a ghost-white elderly lady by the red car—no guy. He stopped. His boots crunched and skidded over pieces of shattered glass.
The lady looked at him without seeing him, face blank. "Someone, someone broke the… He took m-my..."
"I know." Michael's pulse was roaring in his ears. He grasped the lady's shoulders as gently as he could, trying to steady his voice through heavy breaths. "Listen to me. Did you see which way he went?"
The lady turned her head.
Michael followed her gaze. Around the corner of the Italian restaurant, he caught a glimpse of peppery hair.
He made to dart after him, but he was blocked in. All the commotion was attracting some attention now. The alarm was still wailing, cycling through four or five different tones. Interested onlookers were beginning to gather around the Mercedes as they caught on to the trouble.
Someone who had been listening over Michael's shoulder spoke up. "Which way did she say?"
Someone else waved their arms, standing in the brown brick doorway. "Cops say they're coming."
The guy could be gone by the time they showed up. The officers wouldn't know who they were looking for. Michael weaved inbetween a couple teenagers and hurried around the building. He went to the side opposite of where he saw the guy in an effort to intercept him.
It paid off. The guy plowed into Michael. Michael's elbow jabbed into his ribs. The guy winced, grunted, and tried to do an about-face.
"Hey!" Michael nabbed him by the shirt, disgusted. "What do you think you're doing, man? You don't wanna be the piece of scum that steals from a little old lady."
"That what you think I did?" The guy reeled back.
Michael tensed, expecting a fist to rattle his skull and a black eye come morning.
The purse was tan leather with a shoulder strap. The guy had it looped a few times around his wrist, and he swung it into Michael's gut.
It hit like a wrecking ball. The world got real shady, as if Michael was looking into a gray plume of smoke shot through with white hot explosives. He fell. His abdomen felt crushed in. There was searing pain, and paralyzing tightness, and he couldn't get any air. He was pretty sure his lungs must be lying outside him somewhere, shriveled up beside the dumpsters. The suffocating sensation insisted that he panic, but he forced himself up on his knees, putting his hands on his head.
What the hell was in that bag?
Finally his chest came loose, and he sucked in the wind in long, desperate gulps. He looked around while he readjusted to the rhythm of breathing. The world was all in Technicolor again. No sign of the thief, of course. He staggered to his feet.
Michael attempted to run back the way he came and barely managed an irregular jog. He wished he could get a message to the car. Beam me up, Scotty, and you can yack my ear off.
Out front, the atmosphere was already simmering down. The teens were walking away, going to find a nice quiet spot to make out, probably. Michael trailed after them, searching the parking lot from end to end, on the lookout for anybody who was leaving in too much of a hurry. The victim of the theft seemed to be doing better. A couple people were escorting her to a wooden bench, encouraging her to have a seat. One woman had her arm wrapped around the older lady's shoulders.
Everyone was acting like it was over, but Michael felt too responsible to accept that. That lady did not deserve to foot the bill for his dumb mistake. Unless the guy strapped on a pair of angel wings, he couldn't have gotten far. He had to be skulking around here someplace.
The Mercedes's alarm cut off. The abrupt quiet seemed louder than all the previous siren cries put together. It made Michael hyperaware of his own footsteps, and he heard the scuffle of a pebble he unintentionally kicked across the blacktop. The rock dinged against something. He turned to see what it hit, facing the rear end of a van. It looked fine, and Michael would have kept going, but the guy was evidently hunkered down close by and thought he'd been spotted. He jumped up from behind the other side of the vehicle, gawking at Michael like a deer caught in rush hour traffic, and bolted.
Michael chased him, but the guy was unexpectedly fast (or Michael was uncharacteristically slow), and the gap between them widened.
The guy cleared the last of the parked cars. He was a little ways away from the hill that would lead up to the other restaurant's parking lot when he stopped. His back straightened, confidence increasing in light of some kind of good news. He held out the purse as if it was a victory flag.
Michael turned to see who the guy was signaling to. Of all the getaway cars in existence, the last thing he expected to witness was a stately white limousine gliding around the corner. He pushed his legs faster, hopping into and then out of an empty truck bed to avoid having to go around it. It looked like he would get to the guy before the guy got to the limo, but, just as he was closing in, a family pulled out right in front of him.
There were kids in the backseat. They didn't even notice when one of their windows almost sideswiped his much-abused face. The adult behind the wheel, on the other hand, slammed on the brakes, pounded on the horn, and started cussing him out through the windshield.
"Sorry. I'm sorry." Michael kept moving, but he knew he had to be more careful and those couple seconds had cost him a lot. The guy was moments away from disappearing into the limo. It would take too long for Michael to reach him now.
Behind the guy's broad shoulders, on the crest of the hill, Michael could just make out the T-top of his new ride. It was lightning quick. It could go by itself. He had no way of knowing if it would hear him from this distance, but it was the only shot he had, and he took it.
"Stop that guy!"
A blast of cool air stung his face. The breeze was too loud, rolling out thick swaths of white noise to muffle his voice, all but guaranteeing his yell was lost in the rustle. The silhouette of the car shrank. It was backing up. Michael's first thought was that it was leaving.
The black Trans Am charged forward and launched off the hilltop. It went airborne, its nose piercing the wind at a sharp, deadly angle. He expected the front end to be obliterated on impact, even as the memory of a hammer rendered powerless against its hood told him that was impossible.
It sounded like a plane passing overhead, or, maybe, how a plane passing overhead would sound if you stood underneath one seconds from landing. A groan born of some combination of speed and mechanics ripped through the stillness, starting loud and ramping up to deafening. There was a shadow ghosting over the weeds on the incline, traveling on a certain trajectory for an unoccupied stretch of land that framed the pavement.
The tires struck ground. The car jolted against the earth, spitting up dirt. It bounced twice, thundering ahead on wild, jarring momentum, and carved fat parallel tracks into the patchy plant life. Then it fishtailed to the side, whipped itself into a hard turn, and hurtled inbetween the thief and the limo, obstructing any chance of escape.
The guy froze, his shock reflected in one of the glossy black doors now standing in his way. The clear windows in front of him did nothing to disguise the fact that there was no one inside the vehicle. As soon as that phenomenon sank in, he made a warbling choking sound and booked it in the opposite direction.
The limo took off without him.
Michael was almost to him now, head spinning in a little awe and a whole lot of triumph as he neared the Trans Am.
It went around the guy, cutting him off a second time. The guy tried to turn around again and wound up tripping over his own feet, tumbling to the ground with his legs all twisted together. Once he was down, the car went into reverse, swung its front end around, and—and started to…
Michael couldn't see the guy anymore. There was just the car in the place where he had been. It rolled overtop of him. It ran him over. It must have. It—
Michael stormed up to the car. All he could see were images of the guy mutilated under the it, broken beneath the tires, smashed like a bug.
His car killed someone.
"Hasn't anybody around here ever seen a movie?"
The voice was calm, unfeeling. "Come again?"
"Look, all I'm saying," he swallowed, "is they should've seen it coming."
"Who should have seen what coming, Michael?"
"Sure, give the invincible machine a mind of its own. What's the worst that could happen? What kind of sick monkey brains cooked up a plan like that?"
"I've no idea what you're talking about, but the implications are insulting."
"What am I talking about," Michael echoed, words low and cynical. "I'm talking about the guy—the dead guy—the one you're sitting on top of right now!"
"Michael—"
"Should've known better. This whole thing's just beggin' for trouble."
"Michael."
"That's what you get for messing around in Frankenstein's laboratory, what I get for relying on anything but myself."
"Michael."
He came at the car, aching to knock out a mirror or a fog light, but sense got through at the last instant. All that would crack was his bones. "What?"
"If you care to shift three inches to your left, you will see the delinquent in question is unharmed. I've merely restrained him for you."
He wasn't sure he heard that right. It sounded like the car was speaking through a radio station with a flimsy signal, a little fuzzy. Might have been the hiss of the breeze.
Michael did like it said. The guy was pinned between the car and the hillside. He looked shaken up but otherwise fine. The only part of him still in motion was his mustache, quivering in time with the nerves of his upper lip. His hands were empty.
The purse wound up a couple feet away. It was lying on its side, and the clasp holding it closed had busted. Micheal eyed it, frowning, still throbbing where it struck him. He came closer and knelt to peer inside.
A cruiser pulled up beside him, flashing red and blue. The police had arrived.