by Abbott, Jeff
Luke felt the quiet scholar in him easing backward, something new and primal emerging.
‘Mouser, he’s out here. Still in chains. Looks like he’s auditioning for A Christmas Carol.’ She laughed, a glassy sick giggle. ‘He looks like Jacob Marley. C’m’ere, schoolboy.’
Luke jumped at her, hammering into her before she could lift the gun, shoving the flashlight so it smacked her in the face. He fell to the grass with her and lassoed a length of the chain around her neck. She swung the gun at him, nailing him in the head, but he was tall and strong and desperate. He got her in front of him, the chain a choker across her throat. He knocked her down, pried the gun from her fingers as he yanked her back to her feet.
The man - Mouser - rushed into the doorway. He aimed his gun at Luke’s head. ‘Let her go.’
‘No. She comes with me.’ His voice broke, like a teenage boy’s. Luke put the gun on her head. The chain was a twisted braid in his left fist, the gun in his right hand. Don’t think, just do.
Mouser lowered the gun and Luke saw the gesture for what the woman’s laughter was - a sign of contempt. This couple weren’t remotely afraid of him, not even with him having a gun.
‘So you stay there,’ Luke said to him. ‘All right?’
‘Luke Dantry,’ Mouser said. ‘We’re here from your stepdad. Here to help you, find out who took you.’
‘You’re not the police,’ Luke said.
‘No, we’re better. Don’t be a stupid kid. Let her go and we’ll call him.’
But they were talking about bombing casinos and resorts. ‘I just want the keys to these shackles,’ Luke said.
‘You don’t know what a can of kick-ass you just opened up on yourself.’ Mouser sat on the porch step, with a sign of anticipation. Ready for the show to begin.
It was not what Luke expected. ‘Where are the keys?’ he yelled. The woman began to choke and he realized how tight the chain was across her throat. He eased his grip. But barely.
‘I’m going to … obliterate … you,’ the woman said.
‘Snow means what she says,’ Mouser added.
‘Where are the keys?’ Luke yelled again at Mouser. He tightened the chain again.
The woman pointed at Mouser. ‘His pocket.’
‘Toss the keys to her,’ Luke said.
Mouser didn’t stand. ‘Snow? How you want to go here?’
‘Give him the keys,’ Snow said.
‘Whatever you say,’ Mouser lumbered to his feet, dug in his pockets and tossed the keys. Snow caught them deftly.
‘Unlock me. The feet first.’
‘You think you’re smart because you escaped from a bed?’ She unlocked the chains binding his feet. Her skin was cool against his ankles. He pulled her back straight to him; she didn’t resist. He kicked the shackles free.
‘Be still and I’ll unlock your hands,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll play for real, schoolboy.’
If he lowered the chain from her throat she could fight him, even with the gun. Their confidence was daunting. He tightened the chain around her throat again, just enough to pull her close. ‘Not quite yet,’ Luke said. ‘Let’s walk to your car.’
‘Mouser has the car keys.’
‘Car keys,’ he called.
‘No,’ Mouser said. ‘Come on, Snow, enough. Let’s get going before the sky opens up again.’
Snow stayed still. ‘I just wanted to see what he’d try. What he’d do. It’s like watching a hamster work a maze.’
‘I’m going to shoot you is what I’ll do,’ Luke said.
‘Then shoot,’ she said. Her calm was maddening.
‘I … I need you alive for now. You come with me to the car.’
‘And we’ll be hot-wiring it?’ she asked. ‘You saw that in a movie, right, schoolboy?’
‘Come on.’ He gave the chains a harder pull than he meant to and she gagged.
‘For every second of pain you cause me, I will give you an hour of it.’ The icy tone of her promise chilled his skin. He shouldn’t be afraid of her but he was.
‘Maybe he doesn’t have the keys to toss me. Maybe you do,’ he said in a harsh whisper in her ear. ‘You. Mouse!’
‘Mouser.’
‘Whatever. You stay on the porch. I see you come off, I shoot her.’
‘How you want to play it, Snow?’ he asked again. The rain started again, hissing in the pines, thunder booming in the distance.
‘Do as he says,’ Snow said.
They hurried backward down the long path toward where he and Eric had come through the gate. The rain boomed out of the clouds, thick again. Mud sucked at their shoes, darkness drank them up except when the lightning flashed in the wet heavens.
Luke blinked, trying to keep sight of Mouser, looking back over his shoulder toward the gate. The metal chains grew slick in his grasp, from sweat or rain.
‘Empty your pockets.’
‘I don’t …’
‘Shut up! Prove to me you don’t have the keys. Pull out your pockets.’
Snow made a little grunt of anger and jammed her hand into her pocket. She stumbled against the gun and he pulled the gun away from her head. Suddenly she lashed her head back to catch him in the face. He tottered and 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, f
or 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.
You’ll be crushed under the rig, he thought and then the rig broke free and threw him; he cartwheeled past the edge of the crumpling trailer.
Air. He opened his eyes, falling, and saw the swelling river beneath him, rushing toward him.
Water. Cold beyond reason and dark.
Earth. His shoulder scraped the river’s stony bottom.
He kicked toward the surface, broke into air. Just long enough for a gulp.
Then the chains weighed him down.
Fire. Heat, surging through the river like a pulse. The current yanked him forward, the force of a blast pushed him into sweet oxygen again and he saw gray sky, dawn fighting to pierce the clouds.
Then the maddened river took him.
10
Luke kicked to the surface as the river swept him downstream, sinking again, fighting to rise. He rode the river’s raging current for what seemed an eternity. It was a constant ordeal to keep head above water, to breathe. He gathered the chains close around him, terrified they would snag on rock or sunken tree and yank him downward to death. The weight of the chains was like hands pulling him down to the sleeping depths. A sudden bend in the river twisted ahead of him and the current battered him into the shallows, cypress and pine lining the banks. Then he spun away. He struggled, tried to swim. The river hurried him close to shore again, and he spotted a black shape, toppled into the water. A rotting tree. Branches stuck out like spikes.
Luke gathered the last of his strength and tossed the chain over one of the trunk’s branches.
He stopped. He could breathe. He lay in the water, head above the surge, greedy for air. Slowly he pulled himself close to the tree. He used the chains to loop onto branches closer to shore and he collapsed onto the cold mud.
He became aware of a fresh onslaught of rain. The pain in his arms, in his chest, brought him back to his senses. He got to his feet slowly and staggered into the heavy growth along the bank. Arches of cypress and pine spread above him, sheltering him from the worst of the downpour. Behind him the river was sick with rain, beige with muddy runoff. Chunks of white floated in the brown water; packages of shrimp and fish, fresh from the Gulf.
The truck’s cargo.
They’ll be looking for you.
He hurried up the rolling incline that led from the river and staggered into the deep cover of the pines.
Please, God, he thought, let the trucker have gotten out alive.
Luke headed away from both river and road and deeper into the woods. As he walked he took an inventory of himself. Pants caked with mud. Shirt torn open, buttons gone, ripped by the force of the river. He glanced down: the silver of the Saint Michael medal gli
nted on his chest. Thank God, he thought, he hadn’t lost it. He’d lost one shoe and sock but the mud felt soothing against his foot. His wallet and money were back in the cabin. His wrists were bloodied and scored raw from the shackles.
He walked. Listened for the sounds of pursuit but heard only the soft hammering of the rain.
Mouser and Snow were from the Night Road. It existed, as a vicious force beyond his database of potential malcontents. It was real. He was convinced of it. Their talk of casinos being bombed. His mind spun. They said they were from his stepfather. It didn’t make any sense. They couldn’t be from Henry and also from the Night Road.
The realization hit him like a stone dropped from the clouds. Could Henry be involved with the Night Road? It didn’t seem possible. But Henry refusing to ransom him didn’t seem possible, either.
Who is your client for this project? he’d asked Henry. What are you doing with this research? Henry had smiled and dodged and maybe bribed him with a lucrative job offer to stop him from asking questions.
Luke had given him the discussion-group postings and the names, and a way to contact hundreds of people who might be extremists. He’d handed them to Henry on a plate. God only knew who his client really was.
He had to find a phone. Call the police.
Suddenly he stumbled into a clearing in the pines. A tidy little cottage stood in the glooming rain. White paint, a back porch that faced the river, a swing and wicker chairs, empty of cushions. A small fishing pier jutted into the river.
He ran to the cottage’s back door and knocked, but there was no answer. The curtains were drawn on all the windows. He listened at the glass; no sound came from within. He walked around the porch; on the other side was a small one-car garage, a dirt road driveway leading down to it from a paved road, and a tool shed.