Free Napier's Bones by Derryl Murphy

new
passports to the woman on duty. She entered information into her computer,
asked a couple of perfunctory questions, then waved them through. As Dom pulled
out he heard a distant, high-pitched squeal coming from behind, and he and
Jenna turned their heads in time to see a sequence of numbers, rock-solid and
built like a meteorite followed by a scorching-hot tail, plummet from the sky
to the south and plough into the red Volvo three back from the truck now at the
border station. The Volvo flipped violently into the air, its trunk buckled
under the weight of the numbers’ punch, and landed on its side, but already the
numbers had bounced to the next car, a white Taurus, crashing through its back
windshield and rebounding up through the roof, scribing a path with a smaller
angle to the silver pickup at the head of the line and smashing this time
through the hood, pinning it to the road, its box and rear wheels raised a foot
or more off the pavement. People everywhere were scrambling from their cars,
and border guards from both the Canadian and American sides were running to the
scene. Sirens were screaming somewhere in the distance. Dom pushed the
accelerator pedal to the floor and at the same time watched through the
rearview mirror as the numbers, now a compact ball with no tail, leapt up high
into the sky, leaving the truck to drop its rear with a crash to the road. An
RCMP cruiser whipped by them on the way to the border, lights flashing and
siren dopplering, numbers from the sound shift splattering up against the
windshield like bugs, briefly occluding his vision before fading away.
    “I thought you
said we were protected!” yelled Jenna.
    “We were!” He
shook his head and corrected himself. “We are. Maybe these new passports were
too
new, maybe that’s what signalled them. Looking for something never used
before.”
    “More numbers,”
said Billy, pointing to the sky ahead of them.
    “Oh, shit.”
    Two dark and
ominous tornadoes were descending from a sunny, cloudless sky; as they watched,
the twisters wound their way down and touched the ground, two fidgeting stains
smearing across an otherwise perfect expanse, kicking up soil and garbage and
rocks and all sorts of other detritus in their paths. Rather than wind and
cloud, though, these tornadoes were comprised of immense quantities of numbers,
patterns, strings and formulae. Both tornadoes danced and gyrated across a
landscape of golden wheat, getting into position to catch Dom and Billy and
Jenna as they drove through.
    “What do we do?”
asked Jenna.
    “Here!” yelled
Billy, taking the wheel from Dom’s control and turning right onto a paved
secondary highway. For a second Dom tried to wrestle back control of the wheel,
and the car swung across the lane into the path of an oncoming combine, but
they managed to get their act together and the car back into the right lane. A
sheepish Dom watched the farmer in the combine as he leaned out the window to
give them the finger.
    “Give me more
warning next time,” said Dom. He wiped sweat off his forehead and glared at
himself in the mirror.
    “Sorry,” replied
Billy. “But you were so busy looking at the numbers I didn’t think you’d seen
the road.”
    Jenna leaned
across the back seat and looked out the rear window. “They’re still following
us!” Her voice was panicked.
    A sign flicked
by, naming towns and distances. “I have an idea,” said Dom. “We get there in
time, I think we can shake this freak one last time.” He gunned the engine and
the car’s speed climbed to 100.
    “What if a cop
catches you?” asked Jenna. “If we get stopped there’s no way we’ll beat those
things.”
    Dom spit on his
hand, leaned forward and smeared the saliva across the inside top of the
windshield. “There’s enough numbers in there from what the wire put into my
body that it should mess up any radar gun,” he replied. “If not . . .” He paused
for a second, then shrugged. “Well, we’ll deal