Page 42 of The Triangle

His workshop-cum-apartment is in the middle of nowhere-industrial-no-place. You could park half an army on the street outside and virtually nobody would know or care.

I reckon we’ll find out shortly who else is waiting for us.

“Do you have a car, man?” I holler to be heard.

Danny points at a poor-looking example of what was once likely a very handsome Jeep, now undermaintained and, to coin a phrase, beat to all fokken Christ. My gaze passes over several beautiful custom-built motorcycles, each one worth probably almost a hundred thousand U.S. dollars, and I shake my head ever so slightly at the irony. Danny, Danny, Danny. You are the only one of you on the planet.

I make my way to the car and through the window see the keys sitting on the driver’s seat. I swing the door open, grab them, and hop inside. Danny comes flying to me, putting his hand on the door before I can pull it shut.

“Fuck do you think you’re doing?” he shouts.

“I’m fokken out of here, man!”

“Get out of my fuckin’ Jeep!”

“Fok jou, man! You think this is a fine place to stay at the moment?”

“Get out of my fuckin’ Jeep!”

I hear him scream extra loud. Both because he screams extra loud, and because Christine, it seems, has managed to turn off the alarm. She marches over to where we are, comes around the side of the car, and hops into the passenger seat.

“What are you doing?” Danny asks.

“We can’t stay here. Clearly.”

“Where do you wanna go? What do you think we’ll do?”

“I have a place, bru. Get in the car,” I say.

“Fuck you.”

I turn the key in the ignition and he levels one of the pistols he’s still carrying at my head. I smile, turn to look at him, and say, “Fine. Kill me then.”

There’s a hint of a beat where I think he just might do it. But then, as quickly as the murder flashed into his eyes, it skitters away.

“Fuck!” he shouts. Then he moves around to the passenger side, pushes Christine over to sit between us, and slams the door.

I smile again. To myself. I don’t dare let it alight on my lips, but inside, I’m beaming.

Danny says, “We don’t know what the fuck is waiting for us out there.”

I look over at him. He stares out the window ahead. Christine looks over at me and shivers, either because she’s only wearing a t-shirt or because of something else. Regardless, the shiver goes direct to my heart and I reach up and stroke her cheek. The sound of Danny breathing heavily through his nose is the only noise now. It’s strange how loud it seems, especially compared to the cacophony of before. But it does. It sounds like the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.

I stroke her cheek, listen to him breathe, watch the rising and falling of his bare chest under his leather jacket, and then put the car into drive and head out of the garage to discover what the fuck is, indeed, waiting for us out there.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - CHRISTINE

Streams of bullets are waiting for us. And I register that. I understand it. But my head is a swirling cloud of… something that is not fear. Because as the bullets cut across the windshield in an eerily straight-line about eye-level—blat-blat-blat-blat-blat—the shots don’t blow our brains out. They’re captured by some pretty kick-ass, military-grade bullet-resistant glass. Which of course immediately becomes a sheet of white as the rounds embed inside it.

So none of us die. We’re not even injured. Maybe a cut or a scrape from some hot shrapnel, but that’s it.

Alec’s hand is between my legs, shifting into the next gear. We don’t even stop. We don’t even look back. Just take the corners of the maze-like alleyways inside the industrial complex and leave the whole mess behind us with three turns.

No one even tries to follow.

And a moment later, when the Jeep jerks our bodies so hard as Alec jumps a curb and gets us onto something that resembles a main road, jostling us together back and forth, I have to wonder with equal parts fascination and sickness why the only thing I really cared about in the five-second firefight was Alec’s hand shifting gears between my legs and Danny’s hand on my thigh, trying to keep me from hitting my head on the roll bar directly above us.

Alec rolls down the window and leans his head out, no longer able to see through the windshield. Miraculously, the side windows never even got hit. They are clear as day. Well, with a blue-green tint that reminds me of shallow waters in the Mediterranean Sea near Greece.