and was toppling into the water. There were men around it, some beginning to struggle up the bank to get out of the way, but one of them was lying in the water.
Two men stepped toward the road and fired guns, so Walker put the pistol into his left hand and aimed a couple of shots in their direction. The men only went to their knees and fired more shots. A round hit the rear window, and glass exploded into the car, stinging Walker’s face. He turned to the front and saw that the shot had left the car through the upper part of the windshield between his head and Stillman’s. Stillman switched off the flashing lights and kept driving on into the dark.
Stillman found a silver handle beside him, manipulated it, and a spotlight went on. “Here. See if you can aim this at the road.”
Walker reached across Stillman, took the handle, then pushed and pulled it until the beam threw a faint glow on the road ahead. Stillman accelerated into it. “You can let go now.” The car sounded as though the engine was laboring, and there was a scraping noise that seemed to rise in pitch as the car went faster.
Mary’s voice came from a space just behind Walker’s shoulder. “Do you think there’s any chance they haven’t blocked the other bridge—the one with the roof on it?”
“None,” said Stillman. “I’m just trying to make it to the woods.” He looked into the rearview mirror. “Shit.”
Walker looked back. The scene at the bridge was still chaotic, but the four police cars from the Old Mill parking lot were pulling onto the road now, following.
“Got any ammunition left?” asked Stillman.
“I don’t know,” said Walker. “How do I tell?”
“Let’s forget it and hope you do. This long straight stretch is where they’ll try to catch us. I’ll keep the ride as smooth as I can for the next ten seconds. If you could put a bullet anywhere on the front car, it would dampen their enthusiasm a bit.”
Walker said, “Wait until I’m in the back seat. I can’t hit anything with my left hand.” He unfastened his belt and slipped over the seat, then turned and pulled his legs over after him. Mary crouched in the corner of the seat to give him room. He rolled down the side window behind Stillman, but it only went down halfway. He stuck his arm out over it and said, “Ready.”
Stillman steered the car, keeping it as steady as he could. Walker detected the sensation that it was not going as fast as it had been, but the wind blew at him from the back, pushing his hair forward and making it flutter at his forehead. He aimed the gun carefully between the two headlights and squeezed.
The headlights swerved suddenly, then swerved back and forth a couple of times as though the driver were struggling for control, then straightened. Walker could tell that the car was farther behind now. He leveled the pistol again, but when he pulled the trigger, the gun gave a feeble click.
“Good enough,” said Stillman. “That should do it. Sit back and hold on.” He switched off the spotlight, and the road ahead disappeared. He drove on for ten seconds, twenty seconds, then wrenched the steering wheel to the right. They went across the shoulder, bumped hard over a ditch, the car losing its reassuring contact with the earth, then came down and bounced violently.
Stillman drove across the grassy field, bumping and bouncing as they hit small rises and ruts, but after a moment he was accelerating again. Walker raised his head to stare forward over Stillman’s shoulder, and saw that the fields weren’t quite invisible. Ahead he recognized the deeper darkness of one of the old barns, and beyond it, the black line of trees at the edge of the woods.
Stillman drove around the barn, then turned to glide into the dark enclosure. He stopped. “Time to put this car out of our misery.”
Mary tried to open her door, but couldn’t. “I forgot it was a police car.” She crawled over the seat to the front, and got out. Mary stretched, then bent to test her back for injury.
As Walker emerged from the car, he said, “Are you all right?”
“It’s all going as I’d planned,” she said. “Except that I always hoped I’d get to die in my prom dress.”
“You still might,” said Stillman. “But first we have to get through the hard part.” He walked toward the front of the barn, looked out at the road, flung the car keys into the field, and began to run.
42
They ran across a broad field that afforded no cover, not even variation. The ground had been tilled and plowed and leveled two centuries ago, and now it was covered with clover and grass that could not have been taller than four inches. Directly ahead of them the sky ended in a dark smear of thick foliage, and below it, the shadowy trunks of trees began to emerge from the darkness.
Stillman was a generation older than the others, but as he ran, Walker watched the broad back straighten, the thick, heavily muscled arms pumping, the legs pounding the ground like pistons. It was hard to imagine him moving any faster. Mary ran with her teeth clenched in a hot, ferocious determination, as though she were not merely straining to use the little time that was left to get herself out of the sight of enemies but trampling them, trying to get each foot to hit as many times as she could. Walker gradually built his speed as he ran with her, trying to keep himself a half step ahead to make her run faster. The strategy seemed to nettle her, and she responded as he had hoped, stretching her strides to make her small, light frame come abreast of him, her feet seeming barely to touch the ground until she and Walker caught up with Stillman, then split apart on either side of him, dashing into the woods.
They did not stop until they reached a low thicket that impeded their forward motion and made them pause to search for an opening. In a moment, Mary had found a way around it, and Walker and Stillman followed her into a small, weedy clearing. They crouched to keep their heads below the top of the thicket and looked back through the upper branches.
Walker had expected to see the headlights of police cars bouncing along across the field toward them, or at least spotlights like the one mounted on the car they’d stolen, sweeping back and forth to light up the three running figures for the rifles. There was nothing. The cars had vanished. “Where are they?”
Stillman said, “Looks like they went ahead to wait for us. What do you suppose we ought to know that we don’t?”
Mary said, “Everything. They’ve been living here for two hundred years. They probably know what we’re going to do before we think of it.”
“I think we have to assume that’s close enough to the truth,” said Stillman. “Let’s try to do something irrational, that doesn’t fit.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. . . . They must know we turned off on this side of the road. Maybe we could get on the other side of it and swim the river on the upstream side of the bridge.”
Walker said, “That’s irrational, all right. We just went to a lot of trouble to make it to the woods, where they couldn’t see us. That would put us in plain sight for forty feet.”
“Only if they’re looking at the road. They’re all in the woods, and probably on the downstream side of the bridge, watching for us to try to cross here.”
Stillman stared into Walker’s eyes for a moment, his face close in the darkness as though he were trying to read something behind them. “What do you think, Serena?”
“I think . . . I think it will kill me to go across that open road.”
Walker said, “Well, then—”
“But,” she added quickly, “I think they’ll know that. They’ll take one look, and think no sane person would do anything but get into the deepest part of the woods and crawl until he reached the river. I think we should do it.”
Stillman subjected her face to the same scrutiny he had turned on Walker. Then his eyes squinted. “You know, this could be the last time the three of us get to talk like this—maybe the last time any of us gets to talk to anybody—so we’d better agree on how this is going to work.”
“Okay,” said Walker.
“I go first, then Serena, then you, single file along the edge of the woods”—he pointed—“that way. I’ll stop for a bit to be sure my theory doesn’t have any obvious holes in it, then cross. If no guns go off when I do, you
