There was a gang of them. The first thing I noticed was the two big snarling dogs on long leads, steam rising off their wet coats, their handler fighting to keep control. The good thing was that they were German Shepherds;
they weren't tracker dogs, but 'hard' dogs--there to bridge the gap between us and the pursuers if we were spotted. The other good thing was that they didn't look quite so big with their coats wet against their skin.
The pursuit consisted of a six-man police team. One of them had a
springer spaniel on a lead, its nose to the ground, loving the whole business.
Apart from the tracker-dog handler, none of them was dressed for the hunt; they were wearing just their normal brown waterproof jackets, and two of them were even in shoes, with mud splattered up their pressed brown and yellow-striped trousers.
They passed us in a haze of dog noise and steam as our tracks took them half left, away from us and toward the stream. The moment they were in dead ground I turned to Sarah.
'Now we go.'
I squeezed under the trunk and immediately broke into a run in a line directly away from the river. Maybe my hide-until-dark plan hadn't been such a good idea after all. The only option now was to outrun the team. It was unlikely the dogs would tire, but they could go only as fast as their handlers, so I would just have to get them exhausted. The police had looked wet and hassled, and were breathing hard. Even in our shit state we should be fitter than they were.
I pushed on, looking for a point where we could hide a change in direction.
It might not stop them, but it would slow them down. After close to thirty minutes of hard running through thick woodland I had to stop and wait for Sarah to catch up; she was panting deeply, clouds of her breath fusing with the steam coming off her head. When we moved off again I checked my watch. It was ten thirty-nine.
We went for it for another solid hour. Sarah was lagging farther and farther behind, but I pushed the pace. I knew she would keep going. When we used to train together in Pakistan she would never give up, even on a silly fun run. And then it was only her pride at stake; now it was a bit more than that.
We were in low ground and I could see sky about 200 meters in front of us, through the tree trunks. I heard the sound of a car, and then splashing on tarmac.
I crawled up to the tree line. It wasn't a major road, just a single carriage way in each direction, and not particularly well kept, probably because it wasn't used that much the sort of backwoods road that looked as if the tarmac had just been poured from the back of a slowly moving truck and left to get on with it. It might even be the same road as the last one, there was no way of telling. The rain wasn't firing down like a power shower anymore, just a constant drizzle.
I still didn't have a clue where we were, but that didn't matter. You're never lost, you're only in a different place from the one you wanted, and at a different time. Sarah had crawled up next to me and was lying on her back. Her hair had clumped together, so I could see the white skin of her skull. We looked as if we both had our personal steam machines strapped to us.
I decided to turn right it could have been left or right, it didn't really matter and just follow the road; at some stage we'd find a vehicle, or at least discover where we were, then work out what we were going to do.
'Ready?'
She looked up and gave a nod and a sniff, and we crawled backward, deeper into the tree line. I got to my feet and she accepted my outstretched hand. I hauled her upright and we started running again, paralleling the road. After only a minute or two I heard a car; I got down and watched as it splashed through the potholes, lights on dipped, side windows misted up and the wipers on overtime. As soon as it had disappeared from view we were up and running.
The next vehicle was a truck loaded with logs; its wheels sank into an enormous pothole and threw up a wall of water that fell just short of us.
There seemed to be a vehicle of some description every five minutes or so. Most were going in our direction, which was a good sign. I didn't know why, but it felt that way.
After another two kilometers or so I began to see lights forward of us and on the opposite side of the road. As we got closer, I could see that it was a gas station-cum-small general store with a tall neon sign saying, 'Drive Thru Open' in orange letters. It was a one-story, flat-roofed, concrete building with three pumps on the forecourt, protected by a high tin canopy on a pair of steel pillars. The place had probably been state of the art when it was built in the Sixties or early Seventies, but now the white paint was gray and peeling, and the whole fabric of the building was falling apart. I knew how it felt.
There were windows on the three sides of the shop that I could see;
above the ones at the front were large, red, raised letters telling me the place was called Happy Beverage & Grocery. Faded posters advertised coffee and corn dogs, Marlboro and Miller Lite. They were all the same, these sorts of places, family-run as opposed to franchised mini-markets, and I knew exactly what this one would smell like inside a mixture of stale cardboard and cona coffee, fighting with the aroma of the corn dogs as they rotated in their glass oven. All rounded off, of course, with a good layer of cigarette smoke. The main sound effect would be the hum of fridges working overtime.
Even the pumps outside were early Seventies. This place was in decline;
maybe years ago, when the road was first built, it was a major hot spot, but once the freeways had been laid to move the growing population of North Carolina, the traffic went elsewhere. Happy Beverage & Grocery looked like it was already history.
I stopped just short of the Drive Thru sign on the other side of the road and got down. Sarah joined me, and I told her to wait where she was. I crawled forward. I'd been right; now that I could see through the windows my eyes hit on packets of everything from Oreos to Cheerios, and a line of glass-doored fridges which were less than a quarter full of milk cartons and Coke cans. A large glass pot of coffee was stewing away on a hob, alongside a whole range of polystyrene cups, from two pints down to half a pint, depending on how awake you wanted to be. If you wanted cream, it would be powdered, without a doubt.
On her own, as far as I could see, and sitting down behind the counter, was a large woman in her mid- thirties. I could see only her top half; she had peroxide-blond 'big hair,' which was probably kept that way with a can of lacquer a day; she must have been one of those Southern women the radio program had been talking about. The T-shirt was probably her daughter's, going by its tightness. I couldn't see her bottom half, but no doubt she'd be wearing leggings that were about four sizes too small. She was eating a corn dog and reading a magazine, and somehow managing to smoke at the same time.
I crawled back to Sarah.
'Can we take a vehicle?' she said.
'Not yet. It doesn't look as if she has one.'
Beyond the shop was another tarmac road that met this one at a T-junction. The only thing that interested me was that where you have junctions, you nearly always have signposts.
We headed for the junction. The neon light was reflecting off the rainswept road and the hard standing of the pump area. I had to remind myself that it was still daytime. The sign said, 'Drive Thru,' and I'd do just that, given half a chance.
I started to envy the woman with big hair. She was sitting in there with a TV or radio on, and the heaters would be blasting away to keep the condensation off the windows; in fact, she was probably keeping so hot that she might need to knock back a Coke after the corn dog. I wondered how she'd keep the cigarette in her mouth.
We passed the shop and carried on to the junction. I motioned for Sarah to wait, but she'd got her breath back, and with it some of her old habits.
She'd never liked being ordered around and not being part of the show.
She came with me.
I moved forward the last ten meters and spotted a signpost, green tin on a tin stake. To my left, the way we had come, wasn't signed; to my right was a place called Creedmore, which was no good to me I didn't know it from a hole in the ground. But I knew where Durham was. It was just west of the airport; lots of people and traffic, somewhere we could get lost. The sign said that the road facing me was going that way.
It passed the gas station at the junction on the left, went uphill for about half a mile, with muddy drainage ditches on each side, then disappeared to the right behind a line of tall firs. That was where I wanted to go once I'd
