faster.
He slams his foot down on the brake pedal, but before he can pull the wheel to the left to get out of the way, the motor home crashes into him with a horrendous sound, and it's like hitting a rock wall. His head snaps back, and then he pitches forward against the steering wheel so hard that all the breath is knocked out of him, while a dizzying darkness swirls at the edges of his vision.
The hood buckles and pops open, and he can't see a damn thing through the windshield. But he hears his tires spinning and smells burning rubber. The patrol car is being pushed backward, and though the collision dramatically slowed the motor home for a moment, it's picking up speed again.
He tries to shift the black-and-white into reverse, figuring that he can back away from the motor home even as it's pushing at him, but the stick first stutters stubbornly in his hand, clunks into neutral, and then freezes. The transmission is shot.
As bad: He suspects that the smashed front end of the car is hung up on the back of the motor home.
She's going to push him off the highway. In some places the drop-off from the shoulder is eight or ten feet and steep enough virtually to ensure that the patrol car will tumble ass-over-teakettle if it goes over the edge. Worse, if they
Hell, maybe that's what she's
She's a damn singularity, all right, in her own way just like him. He admires her for it.
He smells gasoline. This is not a good place to be.
To the right of the center console and the police radio (which he switched off when he first saw the motor home and realized that it was his own), a pump-action 20-gauge shotgun is mounted barrel-up in spring clips attached to the dashboard. It has a five-shell magazine, which Sheriff Vess always keeps loaded.
He grabs the shotgun, wrenches it out of the clips, holds it in both hands, and slides left from behind the steering wheel. He bails out through the missing door.
They're reversing at twenty or twenty-five miles an hour, rapidly gaining speed because the car is in neutral and no longer resisting the backward rush. The pavement comes up to meet him as though he's a parachutist with huge holes in his silks. He hits and rolls, keeping his arms tucked in against his body in the hope that he won't break any bones, fiercely clutching the shotgun, tumbling diagonally across the blacktop to the shoulder beyond the northbound lane. He tries to keep his head up, but he takes a bad knock, and another. He welcomes the pain, shouting with delight, reveling in the incredible
Chyna was watching the side mirror when Edgler Vess sprang out of the patrol car, slammed into the blacktop, and rolled across the highway.
'Shit.'
By the time that Chyna braked to a full stop, crying out at the flash of pain in her bitten foot, Vess was sprawled facedown on the far shoulder of the roadway, three hundred feet to the south. He lay perfectly still. Though she didn't believe that the tumble had killed him, she was sure that he must be unconscious or at least dazed.
She wasn't capable of running over him while he lay insensate. But she wasn't going to wait around to give him a sporting chance either.
She buckled into the combination shoulder and lap belt. She suspected that she was going to need it.
As she shifted into drive and started forward, she became aware of a sharp stinging along the right side of her head, and when she put a hand to her scalp, she discovered that she was bleeding. The passing bumblebee buzz had been a grazing bullet, which had burned a shallow furrow about three inches long and a sixteenth of an inch deep. Any closer, it would have taken off the side of her skull. This also explained the faint smell of burning that she'd briefly detected: hot lead, a few singed hairs.
Ariel was sitting up in a sparkling mantilla and shawl of gummy glass. She gazed out through the missing windshield toward Vess, but she was blank-eyed.
The girl's hands were bleeding. Chyna's heart leaped at the sight of the wet blood, but she realized that the wounds were only tiny cuts, nothing serious. The safety glass couldn't cause mortal injury, but it was prickly enough to nick the skin.
When Chyna looked at Vess again, he was on his hands and knees, two hundred feet away. Beside him lay a shotgun.
She tramped on the accelerator.
A hard
Glancing at the side mirror, she saw showers of sparks as ragged steel scraped across blacktop.
The damaged patrol car was behind her, rumbling along in her wake. She was dragging it.
Sheriff Vess's right ear is badly abraded, torn, and the smell of his blood is like January wind rushing across snowfields high on a mountain slope. A brassy ringing in
As he gets to his feet, all bones intact, choking down the interestingly sour insistence of vomit, he picks up the shotgun. He's happy to see that it seems to have come through in fine shape.
The motor home is angling toward him across the two-lane, about a hundred fifty feet away but closing fast, a juggernaut.
Instead of running off the road into the woods and away from the oncoming vehicle, he sprints toward it in a rightward-leading loop that will bring him alongside as it races past. He's limping-not because he has injured his leg but simply because he is missing the heel on his right boot.
Even with one boot heel too few, Vess is more agile than the lumbering vehicle, and the woman sees that she's not going to be able to run him down. She also sees the shotgun, no doubt, and she pulls the steering wheel to her right, away from him, ready to settle for escape instead of vengeance.
He has no intention of trying to blast her head off through the already shattered windshield or through the side window, partly because he's beginning to be spooked by her resilience and doesn't think he'll be able to do enough damage to stop her as she sails past like a skeet disk. Also, it's far easier to halt and shoot from the hip than to raise the gun and aim, and shooting from the hip means shooting low.
The recoil from the first three rounds, fired as quickly as he can work the pump action, nearly pounds the sheriff off his feet, but he takes out the front tire on the driver's side.
Hardly six feet from him, the motor home starts to slide. Snakes of rubber uncoil into the air from the ruined tire. As the behemoth streaks past, Vess uses his last two rounds to blow out the rear tire on the driver's side.
Now Ms. Chyna Shepherd, untouched and alive, has big trouble.
The steering wheel spun back and forth in Chyna's hands, burning her palms as she tried determinedly to hold on to it.
She tapped the brakes, and that seemed to be the absolute wrong thing to do because the vehicle yawed dangerously to the left, but when she let up on the brakes, that also seemed to be wrong because it yawed even more wildly to the right. The trailing black-and-white stuttered against the back bumper, and the motor home shuddered even as it swayed more violently side to side, and Chyna knew that they were going to tip over.
Half drunk on the deliciously complex smell of his own blood and the pure-sex stink of the shotgun fire, Sheriff Vess tosses the 20-gauge aside when the magazine is empty. With shining-eyed glee, he watches as the aged motor home rises inevitably off its starboard tires, tilting along the night highway on its port-side wheel rims. Virtually all of the rubber has shredded away; strips and chunks of it litter both lanes. The steel rims carve into the blacktop with a grinding sound that reminds him of the texture of crinoline crisp with dried blood, which brings to mind the taste of a certain young lady's mouth in the very moment that she died. Then the vehicle crashes onto its side hard enough for Vess to feel vibrations in the pavement beneath his feet. The flat boom echoes back and forth between the road-flanking trees, like the devil's own shotgun fire.
Hung up on the back of the motor home, the black-and-white is hauled onto its side by the larger vehicle.
