“Here we go,” Cricket said, her eyes on the lights.
Yellow. Yellow. Green.
Cricket slammed her foot down on the gas the same moment she released the clutch, throwing them both backward in their seats as the Mustang shot forward. Almost immediately, the ground fell away in the middle of the track. Her instinct was to go left but when Radley grunted, “right,” she followed his direction, just in time to realize there’d been another trap on the side she’d wanted to go down. They swerved around the sinkhole without incident.
They’d only been able to do certain traps, most of them where the ground opened up or something came out of the ground. It was difficult to put any sort of creatures on the track, so they’d stuck with the basics. Walls, spikes, a swinging log, sinkholes, Danny had rigged the course with as much as he could.
“Trap,” Radley said, pointing out the icon just as steel poles rose from the left side of the road. “Stay close to the end. There’s more rivets in the road.”
Just as Radley claimed, the moment she swerved around the left poles, the right ones slammed up. If she hadn’t listened and gone wide, the right ones would have taken her out. His eyesight had picked out something hers hadn’t. The metal poles kept rising until she was swerving back and forth gently in the middle, avoiding each steel pole until she made it through without touching a single one.
Cricket shot a grin at Radley before focusing back on the road. The swinging log came in from the left, missing them by a mile as Cricket maneuvered around it without incident. They passed the halfway mark and her heart started to beat. They’d only made it this far a few times without arguing and crashing.
The sinkhole came out of nowhere, spreading out from the middle of the road. Cricket jerked the wheel right, but Radley slammed his hand against the buttons on the dash. “We aren’t going to make that.”
The sinkhole was fast, moving faster than any of the others, but just when Cricket realized Radley was right, she grit her jaw and floored the car faster. In the Ferrari, it would have been easy. They would have glided around the edge without touching it. In the Mustang, with the limited power, the back wheel danced along the expanding edge of it, fighting between going in the hole and climbing out of it.
The sound that came from Cricket’s lips was primal as she fought the pull and swerved around the sinkhole. The back tire slipped inside just before the wheels caught and jerked them out of it in a motion that nearly gave her whiplash. The sinkhole stopped spreading completely and Cricket breathed a sigh of relief before laughing. Radley looked at her like she was insane.
“We made it!” she said excitedly. They’d completed three quarters of the track without wrecking the car. The finish line was in sight. “We’ve got this.”
“We do,” Radley nodded.
Cricket dropped the gear and shot forward harder, her eyes focused on that finish line. When the spike popped up in the road, Radley grabbed his handle again.
“Left,” he said. “And speed.”
The spikes were designed to cut your tires the slower you went. The faster you went, the better chances of them not cutting into them was.
Following his directions, Cricket swung left and gunned the car. The speedometer climbed and when the spikes grew closer, she held her breath as they jumped them. The tires held and they flew right passed them before crossing the temporary finish line.
Cricket rolled to a stop and blinked. “We did it,” she said softly, before smiling brightly and taking off her helmet. “We did it!”
“We did.” Radley was smiling, too. They’d finally managed to do it, not only complete the practice course, but listen to each other. Not once had either of them argued. Not once had the other insulted them or claimed they were doing it wrong. They’d trusted each other’s instincts and it had paid off. They’d made it to the finish line without a scratch on the car.
Now they just had to keep doing it so they could bring out the Ferrari.