Page 59 of Psycho Obsession
We’re hitting the bridge now, the massive suspension cables looking like the ribs of a giant beast. Below us, the water is a black abyss, waiting for more secrets to sink into the silt.
“I’m on him, Jex,” she whispers, and the hunger in her voice is so fucking loud it drowns out the wind. “I can smell the hospital soap and the cowardice from here.”
The speedometer is screaming at a hundred and ten, the wind trying to rip the helmet off my head as I pull the Ducati into the slipstream of the white box. The ambulance is weaving, the driver panicked, trying to shake the two black shadows that have been haunting his mirrors since the marshes.
“Hallow, take the lead!” I roar into the comms, my voice cracking with the sheer adrenaline of the kill. “Box him in! Don’t let him swerve!”
I see her bike surge, a streak of matte-black lightning that cuts across the ambulance’s front bumper, forcing the driver to slam on the brakes. The massive vehicle fishtails, the tires shrieking against the bridge’s expansion joints, sending a smell of scorched rubber into the night air.
This is it. The moment where physics and fury meet.
I stand up on the pegs, the wind catching my chest, threatening to blow me off the back of the bike like apiece of roadkill. I’m balanced on a knife’s edge, the engine of the Ducati thrumming between my thighs like a living heart. I lock the throttle, the bike holding its line by some miracle of engineering and spite.
“Jex! Now!” Hallow’s voice is a sharp, jagged spike in my ear.
I leap.
For a heartbeat, I’m weightless—a ghost suspended over a hundred-foot drop into the black abyss of the harbour. The cold air hits me, the roar of the wind deafening, and then—SLAM.
My boots hit the reinforced roof of the ambulance with a bone-jarring thud. I scramble for purchase, my fingers digging into the rain gutters, the metal groaning under my weight as the driver swerves violently to throw me off. I’m a tick on a dog’s back, and I’m not letting go until I’ve drawn blood.
“I’m on!” I growl, crawling forward toward the cab.
Behind us, the second security SUV is closing the gap, the headlights blinding as it prepares to ram the ambulance from behind. I can see the muzzle flashes from the passenger window—bullets punching holes through the rear doors where my father is currently bleeding out on a gurney.
“Keep ‘em off me, Hallow!”
I see her tilt her bike, her hand dropping to the small of her back. She pulls a heavy, serrated combat knife—the one I gave her for her sixteenth birthday—and she doesn’t go for the driver. She leans over, the bike screaming at the redline, and she jams the blade into the SUV’s front tire.
The tire disintegrates. The SUV veers sharply to theleft, the rim sparking against the concrete barrier like a goddamn firework, before it flips, a rolling wreck of steel and glass that disappears in my rearview.
I reach the front of the ambulance roof. I don’t use the door. I swing my body down over the windshield, hanging by one hand from the light bar, and I use my heavy, steel-toed boot to shatter the driver’s side window.
The glass explodes inward. The driver screams, but I’ve already got a handful of his collar, jerking his head toward the jagged remains of the frame.
“My turn to drive, asshole,” I hiss, the wind whipping my hair across my eyes.
I kick the door open, shoving the driver out into the night at seventy miles per hour. I slide into the seat, grabbing the wheel just as the ambulance starts to clip the suspension cables. I wrestle the beast back into the centre of the lane, the sirens still wailing a frantic, rhythmic funeral march.
I look in the rearview mirror. Through the small, reinforced glass window to the back, I see a pair of wide, terrified eyes.
“Hello, Dad,” I whisper, a slow, dark grin spreading across my face. “Did you miss us?”
Hallow pulls up alongside the passenger window, her visor up, her eyes reflecting the cold, pale moonlight. She looks like a beautiful, vengeful nightmare.
“Pull it over, Jex,” she commands through the comms. “The bridge is empty. And I want to hear him beg before we reach the end of it.”
I don’t slam the brakes. I don’t even slow down.
I keep the pedal pinned, the massive engine of the ambulance roaring a discordant, mechanical scream as we hit the apex of the suspension bridge. The wind is howling through the shattered driver’s side window, whipping my hair into a frenzy, but I’ve never felt more in control.
I reach over and flick a switch on the dash, cutting the sirens. The sudden silence is heavier than the noise—a thick, suffocating blanket of dread that fills the cab.
“Hallow,” I rasp into the comms, my eyes fixed on the black ribbon of road ahead. “He’s awake. I saw his eyes in the mirror. He’s watching the back of my head like he’s waiting for the monster to turn around.”
“Don’t turn around yet,” her voice crackles back, dark and dripping with a cold, predatory hunger. She’s riding alongside the passenger door now, her bike a matte-black ghost in the moonlight. “Let him simmer in the smell of his own fear. I want him to taste the hospital soap and the gasoline we brought with us.”
I reach back and slide the small, reinforced partition window open. Just an inch.
