“Incoming,” the pilot said.
“Bastards,” Rob muttered.
A vibration started. “Sir, I took rotor damage off that rifle fire,” the pilot said into the intercom.
“Keep it in the air.”
“Sir, I need to return to base immediately.”
“Keep it in the air!”
“I’ll go down, sir!”
“Even if you end up crashing this thing, you have to get me where I’m going.”
“This is my bird sir, and I’ve got to return to base!”
“Captain, our lives are not as important as this mission. None of us.”
“Sir—”
“This is the single most important thing this Air Force has
“Yes, sir! Losing altitude, sir!”
“Down there,” Lauren shouted over the roar of the chopper.
He saw it, an elderly blue car smashed into a fence by the roadside, and the trenches of runners leading off toward the woods. Three trenches, the one in the middle smaller. From another direction there came a fourth trench.
“I don’t like the look of that,” Rob said.
“The family’s being stalked.”
“Exactly. One—no four. Four other tracks.” He pointed, and Lauren saw them, too, four distinct lines in the snow, all coming from the direction of a station wagon parked about a quarter of a mile behind the Callaghans’ vehicle.
“Sir, I am losing control of this bird!”
FIGHTING HIS OWN CONTROLS, MIKE Wilkes managed to move the TR over Wilton Road. At this point, it was the only route to Oak Road, because County Road Four forked off from here. If the Callaghans made it out of the maelstrom in town, he was going to have to take the boy out personally, and damn the consequences. The problem was the TR. It was leaking gas, losing lift. At some point, the computer would conclude that it was going to crash. It had a self-destruct mode that would vaporize it in seconds, and anybody inside as well. In the operational models, there was an elaborate escape mechanism that could fly the pilot hundreds of miles to safety, but it was not present in this stolen prototype.
Then he had seen two cars coming. The one in the rear was the Keltons’ wagon. Ahead of it had been the Callaghans.
When the Keltons had fired on them, he had experienced a surge of relief. This might yet work, and work well… or so he had thought.
Now, he wasn’t so sure. He slid slowly over the woods, looking down, unable to determine the exact situation.
There was a distant roar as the last of the elevator tanks collapsed like great, drunken giants, leaving a pall of white dust on the golden western horizon.
So the transmitter was done, now. How much longer would his assassins last? Maybe as much as an hour, some of them, but most would revert to normal almost immediately. The nice ones.
He unbuttoned his holster and dropped the ship to ground level. He moved slowly past the Callaghans’ car, making certain that it was absolutely disabled. As he was ascending again, he noticed that the Keltons’ wagon was occupied. Their dog was in the back, barking to be let out. The animal would not revert. Unlike a human being, it would remain savage for the rest of its life.
He climbed down onto the road and opened the wagon’s rear door. He didn’t need to break the glass, nobody had thought to lock this car.
The animal snarled at him, then began to come forward. Quickly, he returned to the TR, and turned toward the forest. Alarms were tinkling in the cockpit.
He would stalk Conner and watch, and if the Keltons failed, he’d go in for the kill.
CONNER, DARTING THROUGH THE WOODS, heard a helicopter. Then a shot clipped a tree beside his head. He threw himself down as another three bullets hit all around him. Jimbo, about a hundred yards away roared, “Way to go Dad, I’ve got him now!”
Very suddenly he was swooped down on and arms went around him. “Mom!”
As Katelyn’s arms closed around him from behind, she cried out with joy.
“Mom, no! Mom, we have to keep on!”
“Honey, it’s the Keltons, it’s our friends, honey.”
Then Dad was there and he was not confused at all. He scooped Conner up and ran like hell.
But a shot crackled and Conner felt his dad’s whole body lurch. With a gasp, Dad went down. Conner disentangled himself, but not before Jimbo arrived, his face purple, the axe flashing. Light the color of pus flowed out of his eyes.
“Get back in the woods,” Dad said.
Jimbo hurled the axe, which slammed into a tree, its handle ringing from the vibration of the blow. Then Conner heard the helicopter again, this time very loud. He looked up.
INSIDE THE CHOPPER, LAUREN REALIZED that it was counterrotating. She knew that this was the worst possible thing it could do short of losing its blades and falling like a rock. The forest whirled, then she was thrown against the window and almost out the open door. The world was racing now and she could hear Rob howling in rage as the pilot made the engine shriek, and the trees came closer and closer. She watched, mesmerized, until finally they were sweeping past twenty feet below, all immaculate with snow.
In herself she became quiet. She was not afraid. She thought,
“Go! Go! GO!”
“What?”
“Jump, woman! Jump or burn!”
There was fire all over the place. Where had that come from? Then she knew that the chopper had hit the trees and she’d been stunned. The pilot cried out and began to struggle, and was enveloped in flames.
She leaped out into a frigid cacophony of snapping pine boughs and sighing snow, snow that took her into itself like a freezing womb. In summer, the fall would have killed her, but she went down now in a curtain of snow, and struck the ground almost silently.
She got to her feet, looked around. “Rob?”
Then she saw him. He was bleeding from his back and both arms and his hair was burned off, but he went charging off anyway. She started to follow him—and then saw out of the corner of her eye a blue flicker as small as the flutter of a bird’s wing. It was not spring, there were no birds.
It was a child’s blue car coat, over there through the trees. “Rob, this way!”
Lauren ran out into a small clearing, and there before her was a tableau, for the instant frozen as if by the cold: a boy kneeling in the snow, his face flushed, pleading silently toward a much larger boy, who stood with froth on his mouth like a mad dog. In his hand was an axe.
A man lay in the snow, the red of blood around him. Dan.
Lauren ran toward them.
THE AXE CAME DOWN, CAME with blinding speed, like the striking head of a snake.
Katelyn saw Dan grab the handle of the axe in both hands, and in doing so give Conner time to get to his feet and stagger toward the deeper woods. Jimbo roared with frustration as he took off after him.
She ran to Dan, knelt over him. His eyes met hers. “Help him,” he said, “help our son.”
She looked toward the woods, got up, and ran on.
