farm road toward the highway. The Suburban was still here, too, and it would be impossible to drive past it to the gate.
Her strategy would have to be dictated by what she couldn’t do. She rose to her feet and made her way between the tall cornstalks, following her own trail until she reached the Explorer. She had hoped the men would leave her some way of disabling their cars while they were hunting her on foot, but that was not possible. She had, however, gotten them out of their cars, and some of them had already moved off on foot. Her best strategy now was to try to outrun them.
She climbed into the Explorer, started the engine, and moved ahead. She kept her wheels in the ruts between the rows of corn, and mowed down the stalks as she drove. She couldn’t see far ahead, because the corn was too thick and she couldn’t turn on her headlights, but it didn’t matter. The ruts would keep her straight. She drove for a minute, then another minute, and another. Each time a stalk fell in front of her hood and went under the Explorer, she expected it to be the last. It had seemed to her that she would reach the end of the field by now, but it was much bigger than she had guessed.
She looked into the rearview mirror, and she could see that she had cut a swath through the field, but it only consisted of the two rows of stalks between her tires. The Explorer rode so high that even those stalks weren’t flattened, but tipped toward her at about a forty-degree angle. She could not see anyone following her yet, and she was beginning to be afraid that she wouldn’t be able to see them until they were right behind her.
She kept driving. Her best hope was to choose a course and follow it efficiently and deliberately, without the kind of haste that made noise and drew attention, but was quick enough to keep the men from thinking.
She thought she heard a dog barking in the distance. She rolled her window down, but either it had stopped or she had imagined it. She kept going, and now the swishing sound of the Explorer moving through the corn seemed loud. Suddenly she heard a loud metallic creaking, and the Explorer stopped moving and strained against an invisible resistance.
She got out and pushed her way through the cornstalks to the front of the Explorer. She had reached a fence. There were five thick wires stretched across the grille and bowed outward. She followed them with her eyes, and she could see the first fence post on her right. It was being tugged ahead by the five wires, already strained and tilted at an angle by the pressure. She stepped to it and pulled at the wires to see if she could disconnect them, but they were strung in continuous strands from pole to pole, held there by big staples hammered deep into the wood.
She climbed back into the Explorer and gunned the engine. She heard louder creaking, snapping sounds as the vehicle surged forward, but then the wheels began to spin and slip sideways. Jane put the transmission into neutral, then reverse, and tried to back up. She could tell that the tires had already dug into the soft, cultivated soil. She rocked forward, then back again, and felt the Explorer roll up and out. She kept backing up, until she was about fifty or sixty feet from the fence. She put the transmission into drive and gradually built up her speed. She hit the wires fast, heard a loud cracking noise, and the Explorer broke free. As she rolled on, there was a screeching of wires scraping against the front of the Explorer, and then a loud
This time the noise was louder, a
Jane rolled between the front seats and hauled herself into the back, then pushed the rear door open and dived into the weeds. As she crawled back toward the cornfield, she heard more rifle shots, but she knew they were not aimed at her. She could hear ringing sounds as pieces of glass and metal were punched off the Explorer and flew against the interior walls.
When she reached the safety of the tall corn, she tried to see the man firing the rifle, but she couldn’t. He had to be somewhere near the road. She took a last look at the Explorer. The shooter had adjusted his aim to the engine compartment. She saw the hood vibrate a little as the next shot punched through it, and the next. She slipped farther back into the cornfield, rose to her feet, and began to run.
Jane changed her course to head across the rows of cornstalks. She ran from row to row, then stopped for a moment to listen. She looked to her right in the direction of the farm road, trying to sight along the straight row and detect the approach of men on foot. Then she ran another hundred feet and stopped again. The stalks were tall enough to hide a man or a car, so it was impossible to see precisely where she was going, but she gave herself up to the features of the country. Her feet and legs could tell that she was going up a very gradual slope, and she knew that at the top of it would be the farm buildings.
She kept up her pace, using her ears and her sense of touch instead of her eyes. But slowly, gradually, she began to acknowledge that she heard noises. They seemed at first to be far behind her. They were engine noises, cars driving along, and she told herself that it was just the occasional vehicle moving along the now distant highway. They seemed to be going in both directions, because she would hear one start somewhere behind her right ear, get louder, and then diminish into the range of her left ear. Then, a few seconds later, she would hear the sound again, in reverse.
But then, one of them seemed much louder. She stopped and sighted along the corn row to her right, toward the farm road. She saw nothing. Then she turned around, and the fear gripped her chest so she breathed in quick, shallow gasps. She could see lights.
Only fifty yards behind her, the beams of headlights shone through the tall stalks of corn. They were moving from left to right across the field, the glow of the lights ahead of the engine noises. Then the lights swung around and came back. The three cars were driving back and forth along the rows as she had, flattening the cornstalks so she could not hide. She moved her head, then sidestepped to get a better view. They were halfway up the slope. It was already impossible for her to go back to the highway without being seen.
The headlights were moving quickly. The men had discovered, as she had, that the ruts and mounds of the cornfield were perfectly regular, and that the only obstruction was visual—the tall, frail cornstalks. They seemed to be driving back and forth at twenty or thirty miles an hour. They would reach her in a minute or two.
Jane whirled and began to run. She had to try to make it to the cluster of farm buildings. There would be shelter there, of some sort. There would be a telephone. There might even be a gun. This was a huge farm, after all, in the middle of agricultural country. You could fire a rifle in any direction without much fear of hitting anybody by accident, and there was no neighbor to annoy with the sound of it. There had to be a gun. Please, she thought. Let there be a gun.
The sounds of the cars seemed to her to grow louder. She lengthened her strides and dug into the soft earth to gain speed. She gave up pausing to look along the corn rows. Nothing she could possibly see there would be worse news than what was already behind her, and pausing would just give somebody a chance to aim.
She could tell she was still a long way from the buildings. They had seemed tiny from the highway, like a little village in some remote, forgotten place. But there had been a building shaped like a barn, and she knew that anything as tall as a barn would be visible above the stalks ahead long before she reached it. She ran on, hearing her own breaths now, her mouth open to bring in more air.
But the first thing that Jane saw was a tree. It was a high, old chestnut, and its dark cloud of leaves blocked out the stars. Jane slowed her pace and moved forward between the rows, then stopped at the last line of vertical stalks that stood like a palisade between her and the buildings.
She looked between them. She could see a barn, and it was as big as she had imagined. It had a wide white door that was closed, and she could see that a branch of the farm road ran right into it. This wasn’t the kind of farm that raised animals, she decided. The barn must be just a huge garage for all the machinery.
She leaned forward a little and looked at the house. It was a two-story white clapboard structure with a long, roofed-over porch that had several chairs and a table on it, and a wicker love seat. There were no lights glowing behind any of the windows. She looked farther to the left and saw a high, broad shape that she couldn’t interpret at first, but then it came into focus. It was an above-ground swimming pool.
Jane waited a few more seconds, trying to interpret each variation in the darkness, attempting to pick out anything that might be a man. She thought she had heard a dog some time ago, but it could not have been here, or it would already have sensed her presence and come to investigate. The place seemed to be deserted. Then the
