The staccato burst of gunfire from the van’s door galvanized me into action at last. I could hear the singing of the bullets bouncing off the metal sides of the SUV. There was almost no paint left on them, the outside surface of the car’s exterior a crumpled, shredded mess. Steel girders from the inside structure of the doors were exposed, and from my bird’s eye view I could see Li and Kat huddled inside the car. Li’s suit was a darker shade at the shoulder than the rest of his ensemble.
He was bleeding.
I flew forward and down, turning in a slow arc so that I could get in front of the van below me. I spun and threw my legs out in front of me and then halted my motion and just hung there. I waited for less than a second, legs extended like I was about to toothpick into water below, arms crossed over my chest, pistol clenched in hand.
When I hit the van’s windshield, feet first, it exploded inward like a rain of glass falling sideways. I used my newfound powers of flight to halt me in midair, canceling the fifty plus mile per hour impact of my body against the moving van.
But not before I kicked the living hell out of the first guy to get in my way.
He’d been standing in the middle of the van, probably shooting out at my friends, when I hit him with both feet. I felt all my momentum transfer down my legs and into him as I forced him into motion and halted my own at the same time.
He hit the back doors with his body and sheared one of them off as he spun limply out the back of the van and hit the ground below. He went ragdoll and bounced twice before I lost track of him.
My feet hit the floor of the van and I swept out with a hand, hitting the man nearest me in the neck with a quick chop. His hands went to his throat instinctively and he failed to keep my blow from costing him his balance.
He was nearly under the tires of the van before he even tried to reach out and grab something in the vain hope of hanging on.
Too late. The impact of his body under the rear tire caused the whole van to jump and shake, skidding slightly as it tried to regain traction.
I realized that there was another man in the back with me, one last shooter. His reactions were quicker than the others, and as I sent a kick in his direction, he dodged to the right without losing his footing.
Meta.
Shit.
He had a hand still on his submachine gun, a lovely HK MP5. I’d used one myself from time to time and I knew how much lead they could spray in a short amount of time. They were beyond deadly at close range, and he and I were at point blank.
He made a move to swing the barrel toward me and I slapped it away, toward the back of the van. The gun belched involuntarily but he kept it perfectly level and it cut off after three shots.
If I hadn’t already suspected he was a meta, his strength and control of his weapon confirmed it. He went for something on his tactical vest and I would have slapped his hand away, but I had something in my right hand that didn’t make it possible.
My gun.
I tried to line up a shot instead, and he jerked his hand away from whatever he was grabbing to slap mine back. He caught me on the wrist with a stinging blow that wrecked my aim a second before I had it pointed at his head.
This guy was good. He was a meta and a fighter. He’d had training, he had experience, and he wasn’t some weak-fisted slap fighter, either.
Apparently, as Zollers had tried to warn me, Century had been saving the best for last.
I whirled my gun hand ’round again, trying to go low, but he blocked me again. I knocked aside his submachine gun again. No accidental discharge this time (I know how it sounds—but this was potentially much messier) unfortunately, because I’d been hoping to make him fire off stray rounds until he ran out of bullets.
He was fast. Fast enough to keep up with Wolfe-speed, which I was channeling with a vengeance. Most metas can’t claim that level of power, and it worried me that I was facing someone of that level in a white-knuckle freeway assassination attempt. It suggested that there might be more trouble waiting for me in the last van.
If I even made it to the last van.
There was a sharp sound of gunfire from out on the freeway, and I realized it was coming from the last van, the one that had boxed us in from behind. They were firing full out, straight into the back of the SUV that had my friends in it. I could barely see Reed’s back as he hunkered down, and J.J. was just gone, as if he’d vanished into the floorboard. He had to have been down so low I couldn’t see him.
A fist came roaring at me, and I barely dodged it, falling backward and lashing out with my foot at the same time in a bizarre contortion. I managed to knock aside my assailant’s submachine gun again as I caught myself with my palms. I arched my back in order to throw myself to my feet, and made it just in time to see my opponent draw a short-bladed knife from his tactical vest. He must have been going for it a moment before when I came at him, and my fall had finally allowed him to get it drawn.