Darwin's Blade by Dan Simmons Page A

lap of the Daytona 500. Dar sighed. It was one of the drawbacks of owning a serious performance vehicle like his Acura NSX.
    The Mercedes pulled alongside and slowed, matching speeds. Dar glanced left and could see his own face, sunglasses and all, reflected in the dark window of the big German car.
    The instincts of two decades earlier took over and Dar ducked even as the black window rolled down. He glimpsed the barrel of something industrial and ugly and very full-automatic—an Uzi or a Mac-10—and then the firing began. His left window exploded glass onto his ear and hair, and bullets began tearing through the aluminum NSX.

3
“C Is for Careering”
    T he shooting seemed to go on interminably, but almost certainly lasted no more than five seconds. An eternity.
    Dar had thrown himself flat across the low center console, burrowing his head into the black leather of the passenger seat as glass shards filled the air like parade confetti, his left hand still on the bottom curve of the steering wheel, his right heel lifting to the brake and pressing hard. There had been no one but the Mercedes in sight behind him. His left foot hit the clutch as he used his left hand, which was higher than his head, to slam the little shift lever from fifth to third. The noise of the bullets slamming into the aluminum of the door and front end of the now rapidly decelerating NSX sounded like someone riveting in a huge barrel.
    The NSX slid to a stop on what Dar hoped and prayed was the highway’s shoulder—he had not lifted his head to check—and he kept his head down after the shooting stopped. He slithered across the glass-covered console and passenger seat, hearing and feeling other shards fall from his head and back, set the stick in neutral, and pulled up on the parking brake as he crawled over it and then he was out the passenger door, on his belly on the pavement and peering under the low-slung sports car, trying to see if the E 340 Mercedes had stopped alongside him. It would be bad news if it had; it was thirty yards to the fence that bordered the interstate, and no trees or other cover in sight beyond that.
    No wheels visible. He heard the roar of the Mercedes accelerating and he crawled on his elbows to the front right wheel of the NSX, catching a glimpse of the gray vehicle rocketing away.
    Dar stood up shakily, feeling the adrenaline surging, suppressing the urge to vomit, and only then wondered if he had been hit. He touched his left ear and his fingers came away bloody, but he realized in an instant that it was only a small glass cut. With the exception of a few other slices from the broken safety glass, he had not been touched. A Honda Civic drove by below the speed limit, the round-faced male at the wheel staring wide-eyed at Dar and his car.
    Dar inspected the NSX. They had shot high and they had used a lot of ammunition. The left and right windows were gone, the A-pillar had a bullet hole in it—the aluminum bright around the jagged indentation—and there were three holes in the driver’s-side door. One bullet would have hit Dar dead center in the ass if the steel side-impact strut had not deflected it, and two others had struck on the B-pillar part of the door where the handle was.
    The front of the car had also taken half a dozen hits as the NSX had decelerated, but a quick inspection showed that all of the bullets had missed the wheels—running scars across the low, sloping hood or entering between the wheel and the passenger compartment or between the wheel and the front bumper. If the Acura NSX had been a front-engined vehicle, the damage would have been quite dramatic, but the engine in the sports car was set amidships, just behind the driver, and it was still idling with its usual ready purr. This—and the fact that the wheels were untouched and there didn’t appear to be any suspension or structural damage—decided Dar.
    He ripped off his shirt, used it to brush