The screams of the duo were drowned out only by the roar of the car's engines as they rocketed uncontrolled through the air, swirling and diving at rapidly increasing speeds. Alice found herself pushed back further and further into the plush chair she’d only a few moments ago been relaxedly lazing about in, now gripping onto it for dear life as her body was subjected to speeds it was utterly unprepared for. Jake meanwhile sat hunched forward over the front of the car, gripped tight to the steering wheel desperately trying to regain some control over their flight.

  When he’d first grabbed the steering wheel, before starting the car, it had remained locked in place similar to the cars he’d been used to driving back home. This had given him a false sense of confidence as to the ease of piloting the flying vehicle and inflated his ego a bit as he started the car. As soon as the car lurched forward, rapidly gaining speed with every passing second, the steering wheel came loose in his hands. It fell forward attached to a metallic arm, and with every jerk or thrust of the arm the car would react in kind pitching and yawing and rolling as Jake desperately tried to figure out how to steer the out-of-control vehicle.

  Along with the unwieldy steering wheel, Jake found himself helpless to control the aircraft's speed. Rather that wasn’t true, he had one method of control: he could increase its speed exponentially. When the car had first started Jake had felt two pedals by his feet, so naturally, when shot forward uncontrollably like a bullet, he desperately tried to slam the down on the breaks. Unfortunately, the pedal proved not to be a break but rather an accelerator, so rather than slowing down the out-of-control car simply sped up.

  Hurriedly, Jake had tried switching to the other pedal, yet this also proved unable to slow the car down. Rather, the car seemed to be gaining speed at an even faster pace. Once the car had broken through the garage wall entering into a barely controlled freefall all bets were off. Panicked, Jake slammed one of the two accelerators, ending the freefall but sending the car barreling forward through the sky leaving the two in their current predicament, trapped in a metallic coffin and rapidly gaining more and more speed.

  “THIS WAS A TERRIBLE IDEA!!!” Alice screamed as she sank further back into the chair, slammed into the side of the car by a particularly aggressive roll from Jake as he swerved blindly, barely managing to avoid slamming into a pileup of cars that now scattered through the sky in a panic, desperate to avoid being hit by their out-of-control crash. Jake wanted to glare at her but found himself distracted by the sudden appearance of a skyscraper. The skyscraper itself hadn’t suddenly appeared, rather a sharp turn and glide downward to the left forced the metal and glass obelisk suddenly into the pair's path.

  Pulling back desperately on the steering wheel, Jake felt the car violently pitch upward, rising into a sharp vertical climb as the belly of the car crashed into the skyscraper, scratching all along the front of the building as the car climbed higher and higher into the sky. The two could hear the sound of twisting metal and falling glass as the undercarriage of the car became dented and crippled, sending a rain of glass shards down to the ground below.

  They found they couldn’t worry about that at the moment however, neither had bothered to put a seatbelt on only expecting the flight to last a minute at the most, and so now they were struggling to stay in their seat amidst the sudden vertical climb. Alice quickly lost the struggle, tumbling backward over the passenger seat and crashing into the backs with a scream as she hit the car’s dented frame. Jake also felt himself falling backward, only managing to stay in his seat thanks to the death grip he held on the steering wheel. Unfortunately, this death grip also pulled the arm of the wheel back as far as it could go.

  The car pulled away from the side of the building, spiraling downward uncontrollably as it turned end over end tumbling toward the ground below. Neither Jake nor Alice could do anything as they bounced around the car’s cabin. Jake tried desperately to regain control of the car, trying to do anything to stop their final crash but it was too late. Nothing he did worked. The car plummeted, carrying its screaming, panicked, passengers ever closer to the ground.

  The car had reached its terminal velocity now, falling from the sky and growing closer and closer to the ground. As the two screamed, turning end over end, adrenaline all that fueled their heads as they searched desperately for some escape. A flashing red light began to break out from somewhere in the car. Where exactly became impossible for the two to tell, but as it flashed alarms began to blare louder and louder till all at once they ceased all together. Then suddenly, from seemingly every direction something sticky and thick shot out of the car's paneling, coating its passengers and silencing their screams as they fell trapped from the sky.

  Dr. Lewis sat mouth agape, watching a live broadcast of the chaotic car crash unfold. He’d never seen anything like it, even the worse drivers in the world had at least the basic sense to ease the accelerator, slowly fall downward when they were spinning out. This was…

  He watched the carcass of the car slam into the roof of some random building, metal denting into mass chunks of ddebris The hull of the car was destroyed in an instant, splintering off in all directions leaving only a white viscous foam, hardened in nanoseconds upon its deployment. It was installed in nearly all cars, designed to prevent even the worst of crashes from being fatal, but even it couldn’t protect against this level of destruction.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The normally indestructible foam lay cracked, slightly splintered, with mass gaps falling from its shell. Through those gaps both Dr. Lewis and Simon could see the mysterious duo they desperately needed laying still, unmoving, collapsed in a heap amidst their luggage. Dr. Lewis found his breath catching in his throat as he watched the drop ships close in from above, watched the armed troopers drop down and surround the cracked foam as they closed in on the pair. He saw one of the thug's hands move forward, testing the pulses of the two collapsed strangers. This was it, all of his work could have ended before it even had a chance to start halfway across the planet in a car crash.

  Then, as he waited chest feeling like it could explode with nerves, the trooper made a motion with his hands and the surrounding police rushed in taking the pair into custody, dragging their unconscious forms free of the foam, cuffing them, and tossing them onto the dropship for processing back at the governmental capital.

  Both Dr. Lewis and Simon let out an uncontrolled cheer as they watched the sight of the duo being arrested. Not only were they alive, but they’d also been arrested! As a government-funded lab, lab 458 had a right to request government personnel, property, or equipment it deemed vital to its research. This included prisoners.

  “Simon!” Dr. Lewis shouted, to excited to control his volume, “Hurry to the capital, get ahead of this while we can! If people find out 458 wants these prisoners, they’ll stop us on principle. We need them fast, within the next few hours!”

  Simon was already moving, not even waiting for Dr. Lewis to finish his sentence, he understood just how important securing those prisoners was. After all, any chance he had at prestige hung in the balance here.

  “Morning sleepy head!” Alice said in an aggressively mock cheerful tone to the sluggish Jake, who was only just now beginning to wake up. Looking around, dazed and confused, he noted his hands were locked tight together, bound in metallic shackles. Trying to stand, he quickly fell forward and noted his legs were also bound together. “Yeah, I wouldn’t try that. They really don’t want us going anywhere.”

  Pushing himself up to a sitting position, Jake rolled over till he faced Alice’s voice. He found her leaning against a metallic wall clad in an orange boilersuit. Looking down toward his clad hands, he found himself wearing an identical one, noting a barcode stamped just above his left breast.

  “What happened?” Jake asked, wishing more than anything he could rub the back of his head to help alleviate some of his congregated pain, yet finding this motion impossible thanks to the manacles locked tight to his wrists.

  “What happened is we crashed, remember? I thought you said you could fly one of those things! What happened to ‘Just around the garage’?” Alice said, shouting at him, not bothering to hide her frustration.

  “I never said I could fly one of those things! I expressly said the opposite! I said I could drive a car, not fly… whatever that was! And how was I supposed to know it would take off at one hundred miles an hour?” Jake snapped back, leaning forward now as some of the fog leftover from his long sleep faded away.

  “Whatever!” Alice said, throwing her shackled hands up in the air in defeat, “Looks like we're stuck here now, just lucky to be alive I guess!”

  “Stuck for now…” Jack said as he tried to wiggle his arms free of the thick metal manacles locked tight to his flesh. Failing that he let his arms fall limp and said, “Well be out of here in the morning, remember?”

  “Oh yeah, that’s great, and then what? Chained up, no supplies, what then?” Alice said, frustration bleeding into hints of despair as her body slumped forward, head falling to rest against her knees.

  “I hadn’t thought about that…” Jake admitted, eyeing the bindings strapped to him more closely than before. They certainly looked like they’d be difficult to remove.

  “Why did we ever do this in the first place?” Alice asked, voice low and defeated.

  “Excuse me?” Jake shouted whirling to face her, “This was all your idea remember?”

  “Yeah, but you went along with it! You should have realized how terrible an idea it was to try and fly that thing, you said it yourself you don’t know how to fly! How could you let me let us do that!” Alice shouted before falling silent, seeming to realize how nonsensical her argument was. She hoped internally Jake would let that go, and simply move forward, but it looked like she wouldn’t be so lucky. She could already see him preparing another retort.

  “Aham…” They heard to their right. Whirling their heads to the side they noticed for the first time a man standing opposite them behind an opaque barrier that barred access to their cell.

  When he’d run out of the lab full of gusto to earn academic prestige and merit, full of dreams about finally being able to advance his career, he’d given little thought as to what it was he’d actually be doing. Now though, walking up to the holding cell tasked with containing the pair of breachers, he felt his heartbeat quicken as something akin to panic took hold of him.

  He knew nothing about these two, nothing save for the fact they were criminals. Criminals whose crimes consisted of at a minimum grand theft auto, larceny, and massive property damage. The true extent of their crimes was still being debated and calculated, these three crimes were what the council had pinned to their unconscious forms in order to lawfully arrest and detain them. Already they had a minimum prison sentence akin to life, and it was only going to rise as details about the incident became clearer. To have to meet with them, try and coerce them into helping the project…

  Standing in front of the entrance to their cell now, he waited for them to take notice of him. He thought it might be polite to let them start the conversation while also using it as a chance to gauge how they reacted to strangers. Instead, he was totally ignored as the two carried out an argument against themselves, voices rising higher and higher as the points they made became more and more childish.

  A small smile spread across Simon’s face as he cleared his throat, announcing his presence to the two utterly sure of at least one thing. The caged duo were idiots.