Driven

One Bailey O’Keefe took the corner of Third Street and Flower at exactly forty-two miles per hour, rubber burning, smoke billowing from the tires of the Porsche 911 she was driving. A quick glance in the rearview mirror told her that the djinn currently in hot pursuit was about thirty yards behind her, and fading fast. Good. As soon as she hit the straightaway, Bailey mashed her foot down on the accelerator, and the car leapt forward, leaving the djinn who’d been following her even farther behind in her dust. However, she could still see him there, a grimly determined figure in fluttering dark blue robes, shooting like an arrow down Flower Street. At any other time in the world’s history, this might have been an incongruous sight at best, since in general you didn’t see someone in vaguely Middle Eastern clothing flying through downtown Los Angeles — unless a film crew happened to be shooting a movie nearby. By this point, however, more than six months after the Heat wiped out humanity and the djinn had taken over, those airborne elementals were almost commonplace. The intersection with Sixth Street was coming up. Bailey took a hard left, still staying above forty miles an hour, and risked another glance in the rearview mirror. No sign of the djinn, and a grim smile touched her lips. Time to go to ground. The high-rise coming up on her left concealed one of her numerous hiding places. She turned down the steeply sloped driveway, slowing so she wouldn’t scrape the car’s ground effects on the cement, and disappeared into the parking garage. During the months she’d been using downtown L.A. as her home base, she’d created a network of these hidey-holes, underground garages where she’d lifted the entrance gates or pulled the barriers out of the way so she could gain entry. Too bad the power was out, because it would’ve been a lot easier if she could have just gotten the remotes for these various gates from vehicles abandoned in the area and then let those gates shut behind her, offering another layer of protection. Unfortunately, life was rarely easy in this post-Heat world. So far, none of the djinn had tracked Bailey to any of her hideouts. She always made sure her supernatural pursuers were safely out of eyeshot before she pulled into a garage, and she’d meticulously gone around the downtown area and opened as many of these barriers as she could find in order to conceal which places she actually used on a regular basis. Each hideout contained a bug-out bag stocked with bottled water, freeze-dried trail food, a change of underwear, and a bedroll. The accommodations might not have been the most luxurious, but they’d kept her safe and alive during the past seven months, despite her otherworldly stalkers. This particular djinn, though — he was tenacious. Until he’d appeared on the scene, she’d noticed that all of the djinn who pursued her gave up after a few days. They were interested in an easy hunt, and she had determined that capturing her would be anything but easy for the bastards. But this one…he’d been stalking her for almost a week now and showed no signs of giving up. Good thing she knew this territory like the back of her hand. He could chase her all he wanted, but he’d never be able to actually catch her. Bailey parked the Porsche in a far corner of the lowest level of the garage, making sure it was mostly concealed behind a support pillar. There might have been faster cars in L.A., but the Porsche suited her just fine, since it sat on corners like nobody’s business and wasn’t too much of a gas hog. Its bright turquoise color wasn’t exactly discreet, but since the 911 was the only car currently operating in the downtown Los Angeles area — or probably anywhere else in the world — the color didn’t really matter. It attracted attention simply because of what it was. If she’d still been with the group of survivors who’d hidden in the steam tunnels underneath the Caltech campus right after the Heat struck, one of them might have pointed their finger at her and said, “I told you so,” since they’d been convinced that attempting to drive rather than going everywhere on foot was the fastest way to attract the djinns’ attention. But everyone in that group was now dead, or at least, Bailey assumed they were. No one else seemed to live and move in L.A., and although the group had done pretty well during those first terrible weeks after the Heat destroyed most of humanity, she had thought they were making a fatal error by stubbornly refusing to use any abandoned cars to shuttle them from hiding place to hiding place. True, cars could be loud, and the djinn would of course notice any kind of vehicle traffic when most of the world was dead. However, after observing a couple of djinn attacks, watching how they worked, she’d made a significant discovery. Even the djinn who could fly through the air — as opposed to blinking themselves from place to place — didn’t seem able to go any faster than forty miles an hour. She’d clocked them, marking how long it took them to move from intersection to intersection, a skill she’d picked up back in her old street racing days. At first she hadn’t wanted to believe, because it seemed like such an obvious weakness, but further observation proved her hypothesis to be true. And well, forty miles an hour was a pretty piddling number, especially with the kind of cars Bailey was used to driving. After she’d left the Caltech group, she hiked most of the way from Pasadena to downtown Los Angeles, mainly because the streets in between — and the curving 110 Freeway — were filled with vehicles abandoned wherever they’d been when their drivers succumbed to the deadly fever that took out most of the world’s population. When she’d gotten to the outskirts of downtown, though, she saw that most of the cars had been moved out of the way, that they were either gone entirely, or had been carefully set alongside the curb so the streets were clear. The djinn had to have emptied the streets. Why, she had no idea, but she wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth. She’d taken a brand-new Camaro, wiped the dust of its former owner off the driver’s seat, and headed for the maze of streets at the city’s center, figuring that would be the best place to hide out, with all the myriad hidey holes downtown offered. Bailey hadn’t been there for more than twenty minutes before the first djinn appeared, forcing her to put her hypothesis to the test. Sure enough, he couldn’t keep up with her, although she realized soon enough that the Camaro, while flashy, didn’t hunker down enough on the turns to satisfy her requirements. A few days of searching through downtown L.A.’s parking garages had turned up the Porsche, which was so new, it still had paper dealer plates and less than a hundred miles on the odometer. No need to hot-wire it, because the key fob had been safely stowed at the valet station at the Biltmore Hotel. God, she loved that car. Sometimes she wondered whether it was wrong to get so much enjoyment out of driving the 911 and evading her djinn pursuers when so many people had died. Then again, nothing she did now was going to bring any of those people back. Maybe one day one of those djinn would catch up with her, and then she’d be just as dead as everyone else. In the meantime, she might as well indulge herself by giving them the middle finger whenever she could. She got a camping lantern out of the Porsche’s trunk and brought it over to where her bug-out bag was located, then spread the bedroll on the ground and sat down. It was very dark in here, except for the small circle of light the lantern provided, but Bailey refused to be spooked by the darkness, the way it seemed to press in on her. There was nothing to be afraid of in these underground shelters, except maybe some rats. Even they hadn’t seemed too interested in her the few times she’d come across them. They’d been fat and sassy, glossy and healthy, and she wondered where they were getting food to eat. After all, this wasn’t the sort of messy apocalypse that left a lot of corpses around for the rats to feed on. No, all the dead had disappeared into nice, neat piles of dust, no clean-up required. Kind of handy, actually. As Bailey got a protein bar out of her bag, she thought about the djinn who’d once again pursued her today. Even though she’d managed to give him the slip this afternoon, his persistence worried her a bit. He’d first come on the scene about a week ago, had scared the s**t out of her when he popped into existence out of nowhere while she was plundering the contents of a bodega down near some fancy lofts over by downtown’s Arts District. Instinct had taken over, and she’d run to the Porsche, flung her swag onto the passenger seat, and zoomed out of there at almost a hundred miles an hour. He’d given pursuit, but there was no way he could fly fast enough to keep up, and she’d lost him soon enough. But he hadn’t given up. It seemed as though almost every time she came up from one of her underground lairs, he was waiting for her, although never close enough to make her worry that he actually knew where she’d been hiding. No, he was just one lucky son of a b***h. Not lucky enough, though, considering she’d just given him the slip again. She chewed on her protein bar, considering her nameless pursuer. Unlike the other djinn who’d given chase over the last six months, who all seemed dark and somewhat Mediterranean in appearance, this djinn had sandy hair and fair skin tanned to a light golden brown. He’d never gotten close enough for her to see what color his eyes were — thank God — but she got the feeling they were probably blue. Like all djinn, he seemed physically perfect in appearance, with the kind of abs a gym rat would kill for and bulging biceps revealed by the sleeveless, open robe he wore. If she’d seen him at a club or at street race, she probably would have gone up and flirted with him. Problem was, this djinn wasn’t looking for a hook-up. No, he only wanted to make sure she was dead, just like every other human being on the face of the planet. Too bad. If he was going to be successful, he would have to do a lot better than he had today. And that didn’t seem very likely, considering she had the laws of physics on her side. Smiling, she reached for the bottle of water, took a swig, and began mentally planning for another day of pursuit. Nasim al-Jibril lowered himself to the pavement and stood in the middle of the street, arms crossed, a scowl creasing his brow. There hadn’t been any real reason for him to believe that he would best the woman today, not when she had already defeated him five times this week, but hope, it seemed, sprang eternal. That vehicle she drove was so damnably fast. Still frowning, he walked a few paces and then paused so he could look around at the buildings that towered above him. Many of those structures had underground parking facilities; he assumed that was where she managed to keep hiding herself. Perhaps he should undertake an organized inspection of them to see if he could turn up any trace of her, but the problem was, there were so very many, she would most likely have moved on to the next by the time he caught up with her. As far as he could tell, she had no plan of action when she drove, except to evade him, and so her erratic movements made it doubly difficult to determine where she might have gone to ground. It had taken a while for the rumors about this ghost of a woman who haunted the streets of downtown Los Angeles to reach Nasim’s ears. The lands he had been given for his own were far north of here, in a place men had once called Napa, and so many months had passed before he heard of her, in tales traded by those who had made it their duty to rid the world of mankind’s last remnants, those miserable survivors who had somehow been immune to the fever the djinn had created. But as soon as he learned of her, the flaxen-haired woman in a car the color of the sky, he’d determined to come to L.A. and see if he would have any better luck than those who’d pursued her in the past. Not that he had any true stomach for killing. He had not been among the reavers, the ones who took joy in eradicating humanity from this world. However, this woman presented a challenge, and Nasim felt he could sorely use a challenge. The place he had settled was very beautiful, true, but there was not a great deal to occupy him there, especially since the grapevines had been just past harvest when he arrived to inspect his new home. Before he had been given his lands, he had only thought of wine in terms of how much he enjoyed drinking it, but now he realized he would need to care for the vines if they were to survive. He had read books on the subject and pruned here and there as needed, had kept away the frost and made sure no harmful insects would attack the fragile plants, but there was not much else to do until the fruit appeared on the vines. It seemed the perfect time to travel here and see if he could catch this woman who had escaped so many others of his kind. What he hadn’t expected was her beauty. She appeared quite young, no more than twenty-five human years at the most. Nasim couldn’t understand why no one of his kind had taken her as their Chosen, for she was certainly lovely enough. Perhaps her spirit was so fierce that the djinn who’d decided to save a human for their eternal partner had determined it would be safer to claim someone a bit more biddable. Whatever the reason, she certainly appeared to be on her own. The rumor was that she had been with a group of survivors on the run not too far from here, but that the rest of them had been caught and killed. Whether that was true or not made no real difference to him. It only mattered that she had given him a purpose, something to occupy his time. Sooner or later this game would have to end, he supposed, but in the meantime, he might as well enjoy himself. However, it seemed he would have to change his tactics. With an impatient gesture, he blinked himself back to the loft he had taken for his use while hunting his quarry. Downtown Los Angeles was a no man’s land in terms of the djinn population; no one lived here permanently, for all the djinn who’d been given lands in Southern California were farther inland, in less developed areas. There was a community of djinn and their Chosen not too far away in a place called Bel-Air, but again, they had no reason to come to L.A.’s dead city center. The loft was certainly not the largest or the most luxurious in the area, but it was comfortable, and offered breathtaking views of the city. There was also a rooftop deck and swimming pool. Although he had yet to bother with the pool, he had to admit that it was quite pleasant to sit up on the deck and drink wine and watch the city, eyes always scanning the streets below for any sign of movement. Several times he’d spied the woman’s bright blue car from this vantage point, but it had never been close enough that he’d been able to catch up with her before she disappeared again. His inborn talent for blinking himself from place to place was of no real use here, for she was wily enough that he hadn’t yet been able to anticipate her movements and place himself where he expected her to be. Clearly, she knew the streets and alleys of the downtown area far better than he. Still wearing a frown, Nasim snapped his fingers and called a glass of white wine to himself. It appeared, a cool glass of Viognier, perfect for quenching his thirst after yet another fruitless pursuit on a warm day. The thought that the woman was so adept at evading capture annoyed him. What irritated him even more was that he, a djinn, should have easily been able to catch her. Did he not command the power of the air? Could he not fly faster than the swiftest bird? Well, it did not seem to matter much, because her car was much, much faster. Her car was so much faster…. Of course. Nasim took a large swallow of wine and wanted to shake his head at himself. Why on earth had he not thought of it before this? The solution was really so simple, it should have occurred to him the very first time he saw that sleek, sky-hued vehicle disappear around a corner and leave him in the proverbial dust. If he wanted the situation to change, then he must change it. And that meant forgetting what he knew, and learning something he did not. He smiled as he thought of the surprise that would touch her face, the shock as she realized he had brought the fight to her. As he drank his wine, he wondered how long it would take him to learn to drive a car….