The Paladin Prophecy

#23: WHEN THERE’S TROUBLE, THINK FAST AND ACT DECISIVELY.

Will pulled up behind a church and peeked around. Two blocks away he saw the team, six guys in sweats outside the diner, RANGERS stitched across their backs. They were gathered around something at the curb he couldn’t see.

He checked the time, and his jaw dropped. No way that could be right: He’d just covered the 1.4 miles from home, steeplechasing through backyards and fences … in five minutes?

Behind him, the snarling engine roared to life. He turned and saw the black car charging straight at him down the alley. Will broke for the diner. The sedan cornered hard behind him, swung around, and skidded to a halt.

Will was already two blocks away. He flipped up his hood, stuck his hands in his sweatshirt, and casually jogged up to the team.

“Whaddup,” he mumbled, trying to keep panic out of his voice.

The team mostly ignored him, as usual. He blended in, keeping his back to the street. They parted enough for him to see what they were looking at.

“Check it out, dude,” said Rick Schaeffer.

A badass tricked-out hot rod sat at the curb. It was like nothing Will had ever seen before, a matte black Prowler slung long and low on a custom chassis, with a slanted front grille and wheels gleaming with chrome. Bumpers jammed out in front like Popeye’s forearms. The manifolds of a monster V-8 burst out of the hood, oozing latent power. Baroque, steam-punk lines, crafted with sharp, finely etched venting, lined the body. The car looked both vintage and pristine, weirdly ageless, as if there were countless miles on this clean machine. A stranger’s ride for sure: No local could have kept these hellacious wheels under wraps. It might have come from anywhere. It might have come from the nineteenth century by way of the future.

Will felt eyes find him from behind the diner window. They landed hard, like somebody poking him in the chest with two stiff fingers. He looked up but couldn’t see inside; the sun had just crested the hills behind him, glaring off the glass.

“Don’t touch my ride.”

Will heard the voice in his head and knew it came from whoever was watching. Low, gravelly, spiked with a sharp accent, bristling with menace.

“Don’t touch it!” snapped Will.

Startled, Schaeffer jerked his hand away.

The bald man driving the sedan didn’t see the Prowler until the kids shifted away. He thought he might be hallucinating. He clicked the necro-wave filter onto the lens of their onboard scanner. The pictures of the family on-screen—father, mother, teenage boy—shrank to thumbnails. He focused on the hot rod until it filled the screen, pulsating with blinding white light.

No doubt about it: This was a Wayfarer’s “flier.” The first field sighting in decades.

Hands shaking, the bald man lifted his wrist mic and tabbed in. He tried to contain his excitement as he described what they’d found. Contact immediately approved a revised action.

No one had ever tagged a Wayfarer. It was a historic opportunity. The boy could wait.

The bald man ejected a black carbon-fiber canister the size of a large thermos from the nitrogen chamber. His partner picked it up and eased his window down. He raised the canister, chambered the Ride Along into the tracker bug’s payload slot, then broke the vacuum seal. The open window helped dissipate the sulfurous smell as he prepared to fire, but it couldn’t eliminate it.

Nothing could.

Will watched the black sedan ease forward, drawing even with them. He chanced a sidelong glance as it slid past. He saw a man holding a black canister up to the passenger window. Something skipped out of the canister, bounced onto the pavement, and came to rest. A wad of gum?

Will waited until the sedan moved out of sight. He reached for his phone, ready to fire off an urgent text to Dad. Then the coffee shop door swung open. A massive pair of buckled, battered black military boots etched with faded licks of flame stepped into view below the door.

That settles that. I don’t want any part of this guy, either. Will took off toward school in an all-out breakaway. Barking about his head start, the rest of the team scrambled after him as Will turned the corner.

Behind them, the “wad of gum” in the street flipped over and sprouted twelve spidery legs supporting a needle-shaped head and liver-colored trunk. It skittered to the curb, sprang into the air, and attached to the Prowler’s left rear fender with an elastic thwap, just as the engine rumbled to life.

As the hot rod drove off, the tracker bug crawled up and around the fender, then snickered forward along the Prowler’s side, heading toward the driver. Before he reached the corner, the driver extended his left arm to signal a turn. The bug sprouted an inch-long spike from its snout and launched into the air toward the back of the driver’s neck, ready to deliver its invisible payload.

The driver swung the Prowler around in a controlled skid, and what looked like a small derringer appeared in his left hand. He tracked the airborne bug into his sights and pulled the trigger, and a silent beam of white light pulsed from the barrel. The tracker bug—and the invisible Ride Along it carried—puckered, fried, and dropped to the ground, a burnt black cinder on the road.

The derringer disappeared back up the driver’s sleeve as he completed his turn—a full, smooth 360-degree spin—and kept going.

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