Germ

ignore the knocks that would start in about five seconds? If the strangers needed help, he'd want to help them. If they meant harm, wouldn't they find a way in anyway?

He opened the door, flipping on the bright porch light as he did. Two men looked up at him, startled. Stephen grinned at them. One of the men stood at an angle in front of the car. He had short red hair and a zillion freckles. Something in the man's eyes caused Stephen to pause. He looked at the other man, older than Freckles, maybe forty. He sported a bushy mustache and black, black eyes.

Stephen heard the bathroom door open behind him.

'Did you say—?' Allen started.

Stephen looked over his shoulder at his brother. In the bathroom door, a towel around his waist, Allen was hunching over to gaze past Stephen. His mouth dropped, and his eyes grew wide.

'Stephen! No!' he yelled. 'Shut the door! Don't—'

Stephen turned back to the men. Freckles was swinging a shotgun from around his side. He raised it, leveling it at Allen. One eye closed as he took aim.

The gun roared.

thirty

The car barreled down Brainerd Road, swerving

slightly through pools of halogen streetlights and traffic signals— green, yellow, red.

Julia gasped for breath, one weak hand touching the gauntlet. The attacker's fist closed, pinching her trachea like a straw. Fat dots of purple and red began to crowd her vision. In a mad effort to get free, she yanked the wheel sharply right, smashing into the door of a parked car. Sparks and headlamp glass pelted the windshield; metal screamed because Julia could not. The assailant in the backseat merely swayed . . . and loosened his grip. She gulped in huge breaths, her lungs on fire, her throat raw.

They were traveling now at more than sixty miles per hour along one of Chattanooga's busiest streets, a feat impossible to duplicate in daytime traffic. Now, at a quarter after one, Julia took advantage of the absence of commuters.

'Slow down,' the assailant hissed, punctuating his words with light squeezes. Each one sent a bolt of pain up her neck and into the back of her right eye. Panic stirred within her, ready to free her mind of all restraints. He squeezed again, this time holding the pressure.

'I mean it,' he said. 'If you draw attention to us, I'll break your neck without a second thought.'

She eased up on the accelerator; he eased up on her neck. The speed dropped to fifty, then forty-five.

'Good girl.'

The car sailed through a red light, eliciting a loud honk from a car Julia didn't see.

'I understand,' her captor whispered. 'We've got something like a Mexican standoff here, don't we?'

The speedometer needle hovered around forty.

'You must be trying to guess my next move,' he said. 'Let me help you: right now, I'm considering my choices. I can kill you now and take my chances in a crash. Of course, I'd try to grab the wheel and steer to safety. That might work. Or I can wait until you have to stop—for traffic, an empty fuel tank, whatever. It has to happen sooner or later.'

He let her ponder those options.

'Or you can pull over, I'll give you the message I was asked to convey, and be on my way.'

Julia continued driving. A bead of perspiration broke off her brow and slid into her eye, stinging it. She tried to blink it out. Coppery blood on her tongue: she had reopened the cut in her lip. She didn't believe for a moment that he had a 'message' to deliver—at least not one that involved leaving her alive. He wanted to instill doubt, to give her a flicker of hope. Hope would keep her from acting drastically and could possibly get her to pull off onto a darkened side street, where murder was much more comfortable.

'You know?' he said, his voice growing deep with menace. It sounded to Julia that he said the next sentence through clenched teeth. 'I like the one where I kill you and take my chances.'

Abruptly, he dropped his head lower. A police cruiser was approaching from the opposite direction a half block away.

'Don't—don't flash your brights,' he said, every word as firm as the grip he had on her neck. 'Don't make a face or twitch a finger. If you signal them in any way, I'll keep you alive long enough to choke on their blood.'

She'd never believed anybody more.

The cruiser drew closer. Streetlamps illuminated the faces inside. Two patrolmen. Probably frustrated by orders to carry on as usual, while a cop-killing investigation was unfolding farther away. The officer in the passenger seat said something sharp. The driver agreed with a frown. They could be talking about their wives, for all Julia knew.

They were no more than twenty feet apart when Julia cranked the wheel into the police cruiser's lane.

The freckle-faced assailant had tried to take a step toward

him while firing the shotgun. As he was closing his eye to aim, his foot came down on the rotted step that Stephen had meant to repair. It splintered under his weight, sucking his foot into its maw. The gun boomed, taking out a head-sized chunk of the cabin's siding directly above the door, showering Stephen with splinters and dust.

Stephen stormed out the door, raising his elbow in the jaw-splitting fashion he hadn't postured since his days as a college linebacker. As Freckles was arching forward and down from his crash through the step, Stephen's elbow caught him squarely in the forehead. The impact sent him reeling back in the other direction. Stephen grabbed the shotgun by its barrel; it slipped easily from Freckle's unconscious hands.

He spun the gun around, raising it toward the other assailant, who was bringing a pistol around from behind his back.

'Freeze!' Stephen screamed.

The man didn't even pause. His pistol just kept coming, two seconds from fatal effectiveness. Stephen grasped the man's intention to go down fighting.

'Ahhhhh . . .' Stephen bellowed, the sound rising like a furnace under extreme pressure. He hurled the shotgun at the man, who raised an arm to parry the blow. By the time he swatted it away, Stephen was within striking distance. He planted a massive fist into the man's head, striking the temple. The man crumpled under the impact.

Stephen stood over him, startled by his own abilities. He bent and picked up the pistol and shotgun. Freckles had landed flat on his back on the car's hood, one leg stretching into the hole in the steps. His sport coat had flopped open, revealing an underarm holster. Stephen took that pistol as well. He saw the outline of a billfold in the coat's inner pocket and tugged it out. It flopped open, revealing a badge. Hamilton County Sheriff's Department. He slipped it into his back pocket. He took a few paces toward the woods and threw each weapon into the darkness. He checked the other man for ID and didn't find any. Then he strode into the cabin, calling for Allen. He found the bathroom door shut and locked. He shouldered it open. Allen's bare feet were slipping out a small window over the old-fashioned tub.

'Allen!' Stephen leaned over the tub to look out. Allen was scampering away on all fours, gripping clothes in one hand, a pair of shoes in the other. 'Allen!'

He stopped and cranked his head around.

'Come around front, man,' Stephen said.

He walked through the house and stood on the porch. Neither assailant showed signs of revival. He stepped off the porch and leaned into the Vette's open window. He came out with keys and a device that was larger than a cell phone and had a foot-long cylinder jutting from it. Stephen recognized it from Blue Planet, one of his favorite shows: it was a satellite phone, good almost anywhere in the world, not reliant on local networks or relay towers. The phone was tethered to a box that looked like a modem with a keypad. He had no idea what it was—he must have missed that episode. He turned around to see Allen coming out of the breezeway where he'd parked the Vega.

'Oh, wow,' Allen said. 'Oh, wow. You did this? Wow!'