She cringed with the ache in her chest, but managed a sigh when they safely completed what should have been a suicidal turn. When she looked up again, she saw lights twinkling through the trees ahead—other cars—and in seconds, they emerged from the back road and shot down an entrance ramp onto Highway 55.
“Where are we going?” Lisa asked, once again igniting an explosion of questions from the back seat.
Wailing pleas of who, what, where, when, and why assaulted Mallory’s ears in combination with the roaring engine, screaming tires, and blaring car horns of other motorists. But above the discord, from behind them, she detected the wavering scream of a siren, only then recalling the others mentioning something about a police car.
“The police are behind us?” She turned to look over her shoulder and stiffened in pain.
Tim glanced to the rearview mirror for a moment, then nodded. “There are three vehicles following us. There was a Blazer behind us earlier, but now it looks like they’ve let the cop pull ahead to clear traffic. I think the third car is your dad’s.”
“My dad?” she repeated. Once again she tried for a look, twisting around far enough to make herself shout.
Tim looked to her and began to ask if she was okay when a blinding flash exploded throughout the Mercedes’s interior. A white bolt of energy blasted away from them with the speed of a comet, soaring forward, straight into oncoming traffic. The next thing Mallory knew, Tim was battling with the steering wheel, trying to pull them out of a deafening skid. He cursed between clenched teeth with the world screaming in circles around them.
Jimmy “Dirty Dog” Gibbs had a spectacular view of the oncoming police chase from the lofty cab of his International 9900
“Hope you eat a tree, asshole!” Jimmy shouted out his window, simultaneously blasting the rig’s horn once the car neared.
He followed the fugitive auto with his gaze when it raced past in the opposite direction, hoping to catch a glimpse of the driver. Instead, a fiery, white ripple of light sprung off the Mercedes’s hood, exploded across the median and rammed into his windshield.
“Holy—”
Jimmy braced for impact, crossing one arm over his face. But nothing happened. No crash, no shattered glass. When he looked, he discovered the windshield undamaged.
“Jesus,” he breathed.
Before he had a chance to digest what happened and formulate an explanation, the big truck roared with increased power. It bound forward, acquiring speed free of his command.
The steering wheel slid through his hands like an enlivened serpent, angling the rig left, directing it into the shallow ditch divider.
“
Jimmy heaved back and forth in his seat as the truck drove off the road and plunged into the weedy channel separating the lanes. Grass and dirt blasted upward where the front bumper bottomed out and gouged into the earth, spraying soil to each side like a boat bursting through a wave. But it didn’t stop there. The truck surged onto the opposite roadway just as violently, and no matter how hard he struggled to correct its course, the machine wouldn’t respond.
Flashing lights whipped across the windshield glass. A siren whined.
Jimmy looked ahead and saw the speeding police cruiser fall in line with the truck’s chrome hood ornament.
“Aw, hell!”
The officer slammed on his brakes, and his vehicle slanted to the right. Blue-white plumes of smoke screamed off the tires.
But Jimmy knew it was already too late.
The two vehicles came together and the patrol car disappeared in a cloud of destruction. Jimmy jolted with the collision, but his seatbelt held him in place. He gaped in surrealistic wonder at the sight of fractured pieces of colored plastic from the cruiser’s flasher coverings tumbling across the cab’s hood in slow motion.
Despite the force of the crash, the semi didn’t slow.
Its Herculean 600 horsepower Detroit Diesel engine roared onward, pushing through the cruiser’s wreckage, growling like a wild beast charging toward its next kill.
Rebecca couldn’t believe her eyes when she first saw the huge semi lunge into the wrong lane of traffic, but the explosion of sound when it collided with Sam’s squad car confirmed its deadly presence.
A scream escalated in her throat. Before she could voice it, the police cruiser’s forward end vanished into the big rig, its rear tires lifting off the pavement. The patrol car spun into the ditch amid a cloud of debris.
Transfixed on the accident, imagining poor Sam behind the wheel, Rebecca flinched in surprise when Paul slammed on the brakes and swerved toward the shoulder.
Then she registered the grating noise of a second collision.
Ahead of them, the truck had swerved to ram Frank Atkins’ Blazer. The big rig’s front bumper clipped the Chevy’s rear end as Frank tried to veer around it. The SUV leapt away from the crash like a cat with a broken tail, its rear bumper torn askew. Its wheels skipped off the asphalt, and the whole vehicle almost rolled before skidding onto the grassy divider.
Now nothing stood between Paul’s sport utility and the massive truck except a scant portion of open road that all but vanished in a second. Rebecca’s cry finally escaped her when Paul swung around the truck’s mangled front bumper, aware they were still too close to escape from danger. Less than halfway past the rig’s cab, the two vehicles scraped together with a squawk of colliding metal. The unmovable mechanical monster edged into them on the left, forcing the Expedition to rise up on its two right tires, off the highway’s shoulder.
The SUV toppled and rolled into the ditch.
The airbags activated.
Rebecca screamed and the night spun around them, the sky once again afire with bolts of lightning.
Then all went silent, vanishing into the darkness of unconsciousness.
CHAPTER 50
Tim didn’t even possess a driver’s license, let alone have the skill to manage a car in an out-of-control, high- speed slide. He had no idea how much brake pressure to apply, or which way he should turn the wheel in order to stop them from going into a spin. Adding to his predicament, the car had lost all power: no lights, no power steering, no anti-lock brakes. But against all odds, the Mercedes stayed on the road and slid to a halt about two hundred feet from where its unwavering route had first began to falter, its front end now facing the way they had come.
At first, no one spoke. Everybody seemed too focused on the fact that they’d survived, or on the pileup of vehicles they’d left in their wake. Cars in the eastbound lane screeched to a stop adjacent the accident scene, their taillights burning red. Tim gaped at the sight, finding the semi truck they’d passed only a moment earlier now angled diagonally across the road.
Thunder trembled in the air.
The sound brought to Tim’s mind the image of multiple lightning bolts that had striped the sky just seconds ago. And that memory sparked the recollection of intense light that had flown from the Mercedes at the exact moment it lost control.
