Free Hurricane Fever by Tobias S. Buckell Page A

ricocheted madly off down the yard as he fell over.
    “Go.” Roo grabbed Kit and pulled her along.
    The man rolled on the ground, screaming and trying to shake off the glowing magnesium that was scattered over his pants. Roo carefully reloaded the flare gun as he kept moving.
    He glanced back and saw the man ripping his shirt off to beat the flames out. Pale muscles rippled under intricate tattoo work.
    And then Roo didn’t have time to focus on it. Bullets kicked fragments of gravel up as someone else in the shadows of the boat hulls fired at them.
    “Faster,” Roo snapped. They were in the open, now. Running past the fence toward the parked cars. Metal twanged, the gate getting hit. More dirt hissed, but the worst of it was over. Hard to hit a moving target with a pistol at this range.
    He fired the flare gun back behind him, though, to dazzle and startle.
    They got to the Haier hatchback and yanked the doors open. Roo clicked into drive and stamped the accelerator as they both ducked low. Roo didn’t even close his door, no time for it, just let it slam closed as he took off.
    The back window cracked, safety plastic splintering as a bullet struck it, suddenly opaque with impact veins as Roo ripped them through the gravel and then onto the road.
    He swerved to avoid a sedan that almost hit them dead on and wobbled the hatchback onto the right side of the road, facing traffic for a second. Kit, for the first time, screamed. Her palms were shoved hard against the large sticker on the dashboard with an arrow that said REMEMBER : S TAY L EFT IN THE VI!
    Roo glanced up at the rearview mirror. “Shit.”
    “What?”
    “They’re following us.” A sleek, matte-black sports car accelerated out of the yard. The angry grill on the front seemed to sneer as it passed traffic to catch up to them.
    Kit turned around to look at their pursuers. “Mr. Jones?”
    One of the jackbooted men leaned out and started firing at them. “Prudence!” Kit shouted.
    Roo looked down at the flare gun he’d dropped on the floor. Just one round left in his pocket.
    That wasn’t going to do any good right now.
    “Don’t call me that,” he said to Kit. “Call me Roo.”
    He yanked the steering wheel and tore them off the coastal road, heading uphill.

 
    9
    The rickety hatchback tore up increasingly potholed roads as Roo used his shaky memory of the interior of the island to try to find higher ground.
    Somewhere up here, Roo thought, there was a road that would do the trick. For a moment they got stuck behind a dollar cab trying to chug up the inclined road ahead. Ten or so passengers sat facing one another on benches bolted into the back of the modified pickup truck, an open plastic roof over their heads, groceries and bags at their feet.
    “What are we going to do?” Kit asked, craning to look behind them again.
    The road straightened and Roo zipped around, glancing out of the car to the steep drop just a few feet from the car’s tires. And right behind them came the lean black sports car with its two gunmen.
    Roo almost spun the hatchback out taking another hard turn, down onto worse roads carved into the steep hill. Pocked holes jarred the car. He could see the lower-slung sports car behind them smack even harder against the rough road.
    “Almost there,” Roo said.
    The little Haier hatchback was light, designed specifically for islands or for countries where speeds never got much over thirty or forty miles an hour. And its high wheelbase was meant to handle potholes.
    “Here.” Roo grunted with satisfaction. They zipped through roads where concrete and plasticblock houses on stilts leaned into the hillsides.
    Kids who should have been at school, sitting on steps and liming around, scattered at the pop-pop sounds of gunshots. Roo accelerated the little hatchback as fast as the electric motors could scream.
    “Hold on.”
    The four wheels lost their grip on asphalt as the turn came. It was almost a switchback turn, with a