she pivoted and powered him into the mud. The hand holding the gun slid deep into the muck. She wrenched free of the chains, nearly breaking his arm. She aimed a brutal kick at his head but he rolled and caught it on the upper back. He raised the mudglopped gun but she knocked it free from his hand, with a savage and precise kick. The gun was gone.
No gun. She was screaming for Mouser.
He lashed the chains at her face, she ducked back and fell, and he turned and ran. Away from the gate, from the glow of the automatic light. Into the rain-drenched blackness.
The grass rolled down a slight incline toward a dense grove of pines. He dodged around the trees; the faint glimmer from the gate lights receded.
He had no light for his path except the inconstant slash of lightning. He stumbled and fell, ran ten more feet into a pine, the bark scraping his cheek. Lightning again showed him an opening in the growth and he ran toward it. He spotted the silvery barbs of a wire fence. He eased below the bottom strand, sliding in the mud, slicking him from head to foot.
Luke stumbled past the fence and back into a stretch of unpaved road. Roads led, eventually, to people. He tried to get his bearings. To his right, the road bent into the darkness where he’d run from. To his left the road went straight. Toward civilization.
He ran hard to the left, grateful for the clean, smooth unobstructed line. He was tired of dodging pines.
He ran. Aware of nothing but the bright pain in his legs and the pounding in his chest and the chains weighing his arms down.
Suddenly headlights exploded into life behind him, a loud growl of tires speeding. Engine revving. The lights, low to the ground, cut across him, pushing him to run faster, as if the light had weight. The car accelerated toward him. He powered hard to the right. A gully cut down along the side of the road, topped by another wire fence. The car couldn’t go across the gully.
He slid down into the mossy-wet ditch, hauled himself up the side and skidded under another wire fence. The pine growth was heavy here. The rain strengthened, the wind rose. He bounced off the trees, trying to run as fast as he could. He roped the chains around his arms to silence their clinking.
He could hear the sound of pursuit behind him, moving past the trees, running. Suddenly a flashlight sparked on, caught his shoulders in its glow as he ran up to a jumble of fallen pines. He slid under the brush and where his leg had just been he heard a pop like a bullet. But it couldn’t fly straight, not in this rain.
A scream gelled in his throat and he moaned it away. He scrabbled into the earth and slid under the pyramid of tumbled, fallen pine trunks – there was a narrow passageway, formed by nature. Hoping to God he wasn’t sliding into a dead end, or a rattler’s nest. He saw an opening, slithered through it, staggered to his feet.
He ran, for several more minutes, before he collapsed against a heavy trunk.
Gasping, nearly drunk with exhaustion, he heard an engine ahead of him.
Soaked to the skin, he followed the fading roar. A minute later he stumbled out into another road. Paved. A painted line gleamed on the center, under a heavy cover of incessant rain. A highway or farm-to-market road. In the far distance he saw red taillights, a car. Inching into another lane because of a dark shape huddled on the road’s shoulder.
Someone pulled over because of the torrential rain. He ran toward the shape.
A semi tractor-trailer. He was twenty feet away when the truck’s blinkers flashed and the truck inched forward.
Heading back onto the road.
No, he thought. He had to get out of here now or they would kill him.
The back of the truck read WINGED FEET TRANSPORTATION Houston/Beaumont/Tyler.
The truck’s left wheels turned onto the asphalt.
Luke ran, every muscle in his body screaming. The truck’s back was now ten feet away from him; the pavement slick. He stumbled, nearly fell, stayed on his feet. He grabbed the back door of the semi and hauled himself onto the heavy metal bumper. He stood on it and looked for a way to open the truck’s doors. He found the handle but it was locked.
It didn’t matter – as long as he was getting away from his pursuers. He pressed his face close to the wet metal of the truck’s doors, steadied his feet on the wide metal bumper that served as a step into the vehicle.
He looped the chains around the door’s handle, an improvised safety belt. His arms felt like jelly. He considered signaling the truck – but then the driver would stop, and if they stopped, Mouser and Snow might catch them. Better simply to get away.
The truck eased its speed slowly up to a cautious forty – Luke guessed – and the wind and the rain plucked at him. His own breathing boomed in his ears. He shivered against the metal doors.
He heard a whoosh, then another, and the truck rocked in the wake of sudden hard surge of air. Two other trucks, passing in the opposite direction.
How many minutes had he piggybacked? Ten? Twenty? His legs ached, crouched on the bumper, lashed to the handle, trying to keep his balance. If he fell he’d break his neck.
Maybe his pursuers were still hunting him in the woods, blissfully ignorant that he was gone, speeding away on winged feet. His arms screamed in pain. He couldn’t keep this up forever; maybe it was time to signal the trucker…
He sensed the approaching lights behind him. He looked behind him and saw headlights – low to the ground, not a truck, a sedan. The lights were racing toward him, with the awful certain intensity of a snake slithering close, its unbroken gaze a hypnosis.
It couldn’t be them, Luke told himself. At the worst the car’s driver would signal the trucker and end Luke’s free ride.
The sedan veered up close to the truck’s rear, as though inspecting the odd big bug clutching the truck’s door. A Mercedes.
The Mercedes swung up closer.
The pulse of the truck’s brakes jostled him, the hiss of tires slowing on pavement. The trucker gave a warning tap on his brakes.
The sedan slowed a fraction, cut around the truck’s corner and sped up the side.
Through the curtain of rain as the car passed, Luke saw Snow staring at him. Smiling. Then the Mercedes was gone, out of sight, revving toward the truck’s cab, veering into the opposite lane to pass.
They’re going to cut him off, force him to pull over, Luke realized. But the truck was speeding far too fast for him to jump.
He inched along the bumper, trying to get a view around the truck’s corner. The Mercedes winged close to the truck’s cabin, Snow’s window down, her hand waving at the trucker to slow.
The truck slowed, rocked, then picked up its speed.
Maybe the trucker didn’t like what he saw. Snow looked crazy as hell with that sickening grin. Maybe he had valuable cargo and he just wasn’t inclined to pull over in the middle of nowhere because another driver gestured at him.
He glanced around the corner again. The Mercedes swung out onto the opposite shoulder as another truck traveling the opposite direction barreled past, horns blaring over the growl of the storm.
Luke’s arms seized in bone-deep cramps, his muscles knotted in pain. He eased the chains out of the door handles, held onto the handles themselves and tested the locked doors again in blind desperation. If only he could have gotten inside the doors, squeezed inside, Mouser and Snow would have never found him…
He heard the crack of a shot. The truck lurched, convulsed, and nearly threw Luke to the pavement. He gripped the handles and braced his feet hard against the bumper.
The truck veered off the road. It rocked and surged as pines and oaks snapped in its path. A thick trunk splintered, flying past Luke in a cloud of pulverized wood and pine needles.
The truck rocketed down an incline and to his left he saw the beginning of a bridge rising past him.
The truck plummeted, smashing down through the trees as the speed slowed. Luke put his face to the metal as spears of mud flew past him.
The jackknifing came with a wrench and if he’d kept the chains looped in the door handle the force would have torn his arms from their sockets. He tried to time the jump in a flash of pure instinct but the crash was chaos.
