The Dream Thieves

The Mitsubishi pulled up alongside the Camaro. The passenger window rolled down. Kavinsky wore his white-rimmed sunglasses.

“Lynch, you bastard,” he said, by way of greeting. He didn’t acknowledge Noah; he probably couldn’t see him. Ronan rolled his wrist to flip his middle finger at Kavinsky. Muscle memory.

Kavinsky appraised the Pig. “I’m impressed.”

I dreamt this. Ronan wanted to shout it.

But instead he jerked his chin at the Mitsubishi. It was hard to believe that it was real. He had just seen the last one burning from the inside out. Kavinsky must’ve run out and replaced it the very next morning. And the graphic? Maybe he’d done it himself, though it was hard to imagine Kavinsky really devoting time to anything that wasn’t powdered.

Ronan said, “That makes one of us.”

“Oh, this one’s got a bit more going on. You don’t like it?”

On the gearshift, Ronan’s hand shivered a little. More headlights glittered across the mirrors — Kavinsky’s pack of dogs. Their faces were anonymous behind dark-tinted windows, but Ronan knew the cars: Jiang’s Supra, Skov’s RX-7, Swan’s and Prokopenko’s matching Golfs. He’d beaten them all before.

“Brought the whole family,” Ronan observed. In a few minutes, they’d all disperse to look out for cops. First glimpse of a radar and Kavinsky would be warned off, gone before the asphalt had cooled.

“You know me,” Kavinsky said warmly. “I just hate to be alone. So, are you gonna fuck that old lady you’re in, or are you just gonna hold her hand?”

Ronan raised his eyebrow.

Noah said, “Ronan, don’t. Gansey’ll kill you. Ronan —”

Through the open window, Ronan asked evenly, “You gonna race with those shades on, you Bulgarian mobster Jersey trash piece of shit?”

Kavinsky nodded slowly through the question as if he agreed, scratching his wrist on the top of his steering wheel. He looked very tired or very bored as he replied, “What I can never figure out —” the traffic light flicked to red, turning his tinted lenses crimson “— is if you or Gansey is on top.”

Something black simmered inside Ronan, slow and ugly. His voice was cyanide and kerosene as he said, “What’s going to happen is I’m going to beat that car and then I’m going to get out of this car and then I’m going to beat the shit out of you.”

“Three-hundred-twenty horses say you’re wrong, man.” Kavinsky scratched his neck. He wore a white tank, and his exposed shoulder was raw and beautiful as a corpse. “But keep dreaming.”

His window slid back up. Barely visible through the asphaltblack tint, Kavinsky tossed his sunglasses onto the passenger seat.

The whole world was now the traffic lights above the two cars.

“Ronan,” Noah said, “I have a super bad feeling.”

“It’s called being dead,” Ronan replied.

“That’s the sort of joke that’s only funny if you’re alive.”

“Good thing I am.”

“For now.”

Wait for the green. Ronan’s eyes were not on the traffic light overhead but on the light on the opposing street. When it turned yellow, he had two seconds to get off the line.

Ronan eased his foot off the clutch, pressed down on the gas, held the car in check. The tach quivered just below the red line. The engine was alive, snarling, rattling. The sound replaced Ronan’s pulse. Smoke from the rear tires crept from beneath the car and into the still-open windows. Kavinsky’s Mitsubishi was barely audible over the howl of the Pig.

For a single second, Ronan allowed himself to think of his father and the Barns and his dreams stretching out before him full of impossible things. He allowed himself to think of the part of himself that was a bomb, the wick burning fast and destructive, nearly gone.

The opposing light was still solid green. The traffic light overhead was red as a warning.

Want was eating him alive.

The opposing traffic light went yellow. One second. He slid his foot farther off the clutch. One second. The gearshift knob sweated beneath his palm.

Green.

The cars burst from the line. It was growl, growl, growl, and this, strangely audible: Kavinsky’s primal laugh.

Shift.

Immediately, the Mitsubishi was nearly a length ahead. On either side of the street, the streetlights flickered and flared, measuring out life in epileptic bursts of light:

flash

cracked asphalt

flash

Aglionby sticker on the dashboard

flash

Noah’s widened eyes

They were bodies electric.

The Camaro caught the Mitsubishi in the second half, just as Ronan had expected. The engine raged at the top of second gear, and there it was. Crouched somewhere between second and third gear, somewhere between four thousand and five thousand RPMs, there was pure joy. Screaming along with the thousands of tiny explosions beneath the hood was a place where Ronan felt nothing but uncomplicated happiness, a dead and empty place in his heart where he needed nothing else.

Beside them, the Mitsubishi sagged. Kavinsky had buggered the shift from third to fourth. Like he always did.

Ronan did not.

Shift.

The engine roared anew. The car was Gansey’s religion, and Ronan found it a worthy god. Its slender hood nosed ahead of the Mitsubishi. Put a length between them. Another half. It was nothing but up from here.

There was nothing inside Ronan. Glorious nothing, and behind that, more nothing.

But —

Something was wrong.

Kavinsky’s window rolled down. He craned his head to meet Ronan’s gaze in the rearview mirror, and he shouted something. The words were lost in the noise, but their meaning was visible. Teeth bared for a —k and then lips pursed —ou. Spat in a joyful curse.

The Mitsubishi exploded away from the Camaro. The streetlights snaked over the black windows, winking off and on across the widened gap.

It wasn’t possible.

Ronan grabbed another gear — the only one left. The gas pedal crouched against the floor. Everything in the vehicle was shaking itself apart.

The Mitsubishi was still pulling away. Kavinsky’s hand extended, middle finger waving.

Noah shouted, “Impossible!”

Ronan knew the numbers. He’d ridden in the Camaro. He knew Kavinsky’s car. He’d beaten Kavinsky’s car. Feeling was coming back to him like blood into a numb limb, stabbing him in fits and starts.

White as a fang, the Mitsubishi careened into the darkness in front of them. It was the sort of fast that didn’t belong to cars. It was the sort of fast that wasn’t a speed, it was a distance. Like a plane was here, and then it was there, in a moment. A comet was on this side of the sky, and then the other. The Mitsubishi was beside the Camaro, and then it wasn’t.

It was so far gone into victory that the only engine note left was the Camaro’s. Sparks rained down from the streetlights, searing tears dissipating on the pavement.

Only one month ago, Ronan had smoked the Mitsubishi in a far lesser car than the Camaro. There wasn’t a reality that permitted Kavinsky’s car to possess that sort of performance.

The streetlights flickered above them and went out. The Camaro smelled like a furnace. The keys dangled in the ignition, chinking metal against metal. It was slowly dawning on Ronan that he had been badly beaten.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to end. He’d dreamt the keys, he’d gotten the Camaro, he’d made all the shifts and Kavinsky had not.

I dreamt this.

“Now you’re done, right?” Noah asked. “Now you stop?”

But the dream was fading away. Like they all do, he thought. His joy was dissolving, plastic in acid.

“Stop,” Noah repeated.

There was nothing left to do but stop.

But that was when one of the night horrors landed on the roof of the Camaro.

Ronan’s first thought was the paint — the Pig was a piece of shit, but the paint was beyond reproach. And then one of the claws punched neatly through the windshield.

Whether or not it was in a dream or in reality, the night horror wanted the same thing: to kill Ronan.

35

Ronan!” Noah yelled.

The road spread out in front of them, black and empty. Ronan stepped on the accelerator. The Camaro responded with a churlish and enthusiastic growl.

Noah craned his neck. “Not working!”

A long splinter was forming in the glass of the windshield with the point of the night horror’s claw as its epicenter. Ronan jerked the wheel back and forth. The Camaro skidded violently sideways, the body rolling back and forth.

“Goddamn it,” Ronan muttered, fighting for control. This was not the BMW. Steering was an imaginary creature.

“Still there!” Noah reported.

The Camaro shuddered, the rear fish-tailing.

Ronan’s eyes darted to the rearview mirror. A second bird creature clung to the trunk.

This was bad.

Ronan snapped, “You could help!”

Noah fluttered his hands, pressing them on the window crank and then the back of the seat and finally the dash. He clearly didn’t want to do whatever he was considering.

A squeal raked through the air. It was difficult to tell if it was a nail on metal or the sound of the birdman crying out. It clawed the hair up Ronan’s arms.

“Noah, man, come on!”

Noah vanished.

Ronan craned his neck, looking.

With a tremendous crack, the bottom right corner of the windshield collapsed onto the dash. A claw snaked in.

Noah shouted, “Brake!”

Ronan slammed on the brakes. He had too much speed, too much brakes, too little steering. The Camaro swept from side to side as it hurtled to a stop. The steering wheel did nothing.

Noah and a flash of black tumbled over the left side of the hood, leaving the windshield suddenly clear. The car kicked up as one of the tires ran over the bundle.

There was no time to see where the two of them went, because the jolt had unsettled the car — Noah’s already dead, he’s all right, Ronan thought frantically — and the Camaro was running out of road fast.

The smell of rubber and brake filled the car. It was an accident without a collision. The road went left but the car kept going straight.

No.

In agonizing detail, Ronan saw the telephone pole just as the passenger door made contact.

There was nothing gentle about this sound. It was not at all like the cars colliding at Kavinsky’s substance party. This was metal rending. Glass shrieking. It was a five-finger metallic punch in Ronan’s side.

Then it was over.

The car was utterly silent. Ronan didn’t know if it had stalled or if he had killed it. The passenger-side door was buckled in halfway to the gearshift. The glove-box door had burst off entirely and the contents, including Gansey’s EpiPen, had exploded throughout the front seat.

The realization was slowly dawning that everything had gone to shit.

Tck-tck-tck-tck.

The second night horror looked at Ronan, upside down. It was on the roof, staring through the windshield at him. Close enough for Ronan to see each individual scale around its sullen red pupil. With an experimental shove, the creature drummed nails on the windshield. What remained of the glass groaned where it met the car. With just a bit more weight it would collapse.