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back, I couldn’t get up. He got on top of me and started throwing punches. Landed a couple of good shots to my jaw before the PT staff managed to pull him off me. I was wearing one of those catcher’s mask things, too. He was bare-fisted, and he still did more damage to my face than my mask did to his hand.”
    “Wow.”
    “Yeah, he’s a nut.”
    “Still, I can’t believe he laid
you
out.”
    “Well, it ain’t the size of the dog in the fight.”
    “It’s the size of the fight in the dog,” I said. “Yeah, I know. But still…”
    It was getting dark beyond our headlights. We took Bandera Road south to Culebra, then Culebra over to 24th Street, where we entered some rough neighborhoods. Most of the houses and businesses we passed looked deserted, though I could see candlelight in a few windows. Power shortages had made it necessary to black out the power grid to most parts of the city after dark.
    All through that August, when Chunk and I drove through town, we saw more and more people in the streets. The expressions on their faces were unsettling. Desperation, frustration, and the terrible, aimless need to smash something all rolled into one. It made me afraid, even with my Glock on my hip.
    “Is that smoke?” Chunk said.
    He was looking off to our right, past a stand of pecan trees, where wisps of curling smoke coiled through the trees and drifted between the houses.
    It smelled like burning rubber, foul and noxious.
    “Can you tell where it’s coming from?” I asked.
    “No,” he said.
    But we didn’t have far to go before we found the source. We turned the corner onto Dartmouth and I skidded the car to a stop.
    There, in front of us, blocking the street, was a wall of burning tires.
    “What the…”
    I looked where Chunk was looking and saw a group of men in their early twenties dancing like Indians on the far side of the bonfire.
    “What are they doing?” he asked.
    “Beats me. Looks like—”
    There was an explosion of breaking glass in my left ear as a rock hit my window. The window shattered, but the tint kept it from exploding all over me. I was stunned for a moment, the explosion echoing in my head. I looked at the busted window, but couldn’t see anything. It was an opaque spider web of cracks.
    I glanced out the windshield and saw a huge group of men running at us. They were shouting, waving their fists in the air. Some carried sticks, others rocks.
    More rocks beat against the car.
    “Go!” Chunk shouted. “Go, go, go!”
    I put the car in reverse and mashed down on the gas. The tires barked against the pavement, stuttering as they tried to grab the road.
    We glanced off a parked car with a sickening grind of warping metal but didn’t slow down. Chunk wouldn’t let me stop. He was hollering the whole time, “Go, go, go!” and somewhere in the confusion of it all my training kicked in.
    Without letting up on the gas I spun the wheel hard one half turn with my left hand while with my right I dropped the gear selector into Drive. No brakes, all gas.
    The car spun one hundred and eighty degrees, rocking violently over to the passenger side as it landed facing back the way we’d come. The back tires fishtailed, but held the road under constant acceleration, and then we were speeding down the road.
    I looked over at Chunk. He was breathing hard. He turned and looked over his shoulder at a group of at least fifty men chasing after us on foot, some of them still launching rocks.
    “Don’t slow down,” he said.
    I didn’t.
    A moment later Chunk slid down into the seat and let out a long breath. “That was some good driving, Lily.”
    “Thanks,” I said, but I was still holding the wheel so tightly my knuckles had turned bone white.
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Chapter 6
    “Okay,” I said to Chunk. “How about this? A hang glider. It’s quiet, and it can travel a long distance. You could get over the wall and well beyond it without drawing any attention from the ground troops.”
    “Maybe,” he